Chapter 1 Everything as Usual

Everything on Xia Junqiang’s computer screen seemed normal, but as a player with extremely high perception, Tang Ruonuo's insight far surpassed ordinary people, allowing her to notice some details.

Characters—rows and rows of garbled characters, their color so faint they were almost imperceptible, streamed down from the top of the screen,

hidden within the normal webpage,

like a silky, light rain that no one could detect.

These garbled characters mixed together the letters, numbers, and symbols of various languages,

enough to make anyone dizzy, see illusions, and hear phantom sounds, even causing inexplicable itching on the skin, even from a distance.

Tang Ruonuo, with her heightened perception, was even more affected. She shivered violently, immediately turned her head, grabbed the trash can next to the desk, and began to retch into it.

"Ugh...uh, cough cough cough cough."

Her coughing and retching attracted the attention of many people.

Li Ang met the curious gazes of the onlookers head-on, slammed his large hand on the table, and said in a deep voice, "What are you looking at? Haven't you ever seen a premarital pregnancy?

Keep looking? I'll rip your hair out and slap your face."

His current appearance was quite intimidating, very much like a tough guy. Under his gaze, the surrounding people immediately shifted their eyes, not daring to meet his.

"Cough cough cough."

Tang Ruonuo raised her head, her eyes slightly red, not caring about Li Ang's nonsense, her face gloomy, and said nothing.

She was actually quite curious as to why Li Ang wasn't affected,

and had even deliberately enlarged the image, enticing her to take a closer look, as if trying to harm her.

She knew that the ways in which the cognitive bias curse worked were varied.

The caster could use a sentence, a picture, a piece of music, a video, an article, or even a scent to cast the curse.

As long as the target touched the relevant medium of the curse, their psychology would undergo a steady and imperceptible change.

Professional casters could even add a chaotic and disordered word to an article in a newspaper to carry out large-scale cognitive bias modification on the population.

According to the luntan, this curse first appeared in the Dark Middle Ages.

The Church claimed that some witches used cognitive bias curses to bewitch the populace, transforming them to lose their autonomy and become loyal dogs of the witches, serving them.

Powerful cognitive bias curses could even cause abnormalities in the function and structure of the cerebral cortex, causing the target to suffer permanent or semi-permanent cognitive impairment.

In short, it was the occult version of powerful hypnosis.

This thing sounded very powerful, and the stronger one’s perception, the easier it was to be affected,

but the higher the sanity value, the greater the chance of recovering from cognitive bias.

Tang Ruonuo had previously seen information about related props for sale on the black market exchange section of the luntan.

It was a one-time-use consumable scroll called A Day as a Pretend Raccoon, with a Fine grade,

its effect being to transform an ordinary person with all basic attributes below 6 into a raccoon on a cognitive level for 24 hours.

After releasing the scroll, the target themselves would not undergo any changes,

but in the eyes of others, they would become a 50-centimeter-long North American raccoon.

Everything they did would be considered the actions of a raccoon,

everything they said would be considered the monotonous cries of a raccoon,

even if they picked up a pen and wrote the sentence "I am a human" on paper, they would be considered a strange raccoon that could write.

Cognitive bias curses that directly affect the brain and consciousness are extremely terrifying, even for players.

After all, no one wants to wake up one day and find themselves transformed into a giant beetle that can speak human language in the eyes of others.

Li Ang looked at Tang Ruonuo's gloomy face and asked with a smile, "How do you feel?"

"..."

Tang Ruonuo didn't answer good or bad, but quickly took out a Western-style gold round makeup mirror from her small satchel, shone it on her face back and forth, and only put the mirror down after confirming that she was unharmed.

This makeup mirror came from a script mission she had previously performed with a spooky event in a secluded castle as the background.

Its effect was to detect the player's self-awareness, confirming that they had not been subjected to mental or soul interference, influence, or even replacement.

Li Ang saw Tang Ruonuo's actions and smiled ambiguously, "You weren't affected by the cognitive bias curse, were you?"

Although Tang Ruonuo didn't want to see his bloated, fleshy, and fierce face,

she still answered, "No," for the sake of the two needing to work together to carry out the mission.

She paused, glanced at the calm Li Ang, and didn't ask about his situation—in fact, Li Ang had also been subjected to the cognitive impact interference of those garbled characters just now,

but his sanity value had been greatly improved by the impact of the Biological Prototype,

and after a brief period of discomfort, he quickly recovered and could calmly scan those garbled characters with the ability to inflict cognitive bias curses.

"Now, we know that this curse is using the hidden garbled characters implanted in the anti-996Lise project page on the github platform to attack Xia Junqiang."

Li Ang tapped the metal spoon in the coffee cup lightly with his fingers, and said calmly and steadily, "We as players are able to escape unscathed, but Xia Junqiang, as a programmer, is just an ordinary person.

There is almost no possibility of fighting the curse.

The question now is whether the curse is targeting the entire project page or just Xia Junqiang alone."

Li Ang put down the spoon, picked up the tablet computer, entered the website on it, and jumped to the anti-996Lise project page on the github platform.

The so-called anti-996Lise is the full name of the "Anti-996 Open Source License."

Github is an open-source code database, most of the code inside is written and uploaded by programmers themselves, and is open and shared with other programmers around the world.

Programmers all over the world have to move code from it {writing it piece by piece is time-consuming and laborious, and prone to errors},

and the open-source license is a legally binding contract aimed at regulating the use or distribution of software protected by copyright,

That is to say, the programmer writes a piece of code and adds the relevant content of the open-source license behind the code,

then this piece of code is protected by law, and users must not violate the regulations on the license.

For anti-996Lise, that is, those companies that implement the 996 work system will never be able to use code labeled with anti-996Lise.

Once the project is spread and disseminated, companies that implement the 996 work system will find it difficult to move forward in the Internet software business—the company's Internet business will not be able to use existing code, and must let their coders write the code themselves.

The development cost and development cycle will be multiplied several times.

It is no exaggeration to call the anti-996Lise project a proletarian movement for programmers to fight against capitalist exploitation.