Chapter 1 The Disrupted Clock

Feng Bujue opened his eyes to the dim, soft light inside the game pod. Thanks to the all-nighters of the previous day and a half, going to sleep early, waking up, and sleeping again, the biological clock he had painstakingly established—sleeping from four in the morning until naturally waking up at noon—was disrupted.

At two-thirty in the morning, he disconnected the neural link, exited the game pod, and suddenly felt the urge to write.

He opened the pod door, and as soon as he took a step out, he stepped on something gooey, sticky, and soft...

At this moment, the room was dark, and he wasn't wearing slippers, only socks. In that very brief instant, he came to a very correct conclusion: "This isn't cat shit..." He lowered his head, "What the hell else could it be!"

Twenty minutes later, he cleaned the floor, washed the sock, and sat in the computer chair, facing Asathoth, who was lying nonchalantly on the desk.

These days, people valued private space, so the building had good soundproofing. Otherwise, with Feng Bujue yelling in the middle of the night, running the washing machine, and mopping the floor, neighbors would have come knocking long ago.

Asathoth’s eyes glowed with a verdant light in the darkness; staring at them for too long was truly unsettling. Feng Bujue glared at it for a while, then sighed, "I'll deal with you tomorrow."

He shooed the cat off the table, turned on the computer, and started writing. The draft for this month's *Second-Rate Detective and Cat* was nowhere to be found. Now that he had inspiration, he would seize the opportunity to write as much as possible.

The matter of the Derivers caused Feng Bujue quite a bit of conflict. "If the very existence of a certain life is a mistake, then what is the meaning of its arrival in this world?" This question lingered in his mind.

When he couldn't find an answer, he would write the question into his works. Not to have the readers answer him—he knew that some things had no answer—but simply to make more people think about it.

Simply put, Feng Bujue's behavior was... when his own entanglement couldn't be resolved, he transformed one person's entanglement into a group of people's entanglement, ultimately achieving the effect of everyone being entangled. It was a rather high level of harming others without benefiting oneself.

Of course, Feng Bujue couldn't directly write down his own experiences and the game's settings. He had to re-imagine a plot, allowing the Derivers' story to be presented in another guise, becoming a story within *Second-Rate Detective and Cat*.

When focused on something, time always passed quickly. When he pulled himself away from the story, he found that it was already bright. This month's serial draft could be considered settled. In these five or six hours, Feng Bujue certainly couldn't finish writing the entire draft. He was just weaving a framework, which was the most brain-consuming step. Once this step was completed, the rest would be relatively simple. Filling in the framework with content would become a draft, and then revisions would be made. If all went well, one revision would be enough for the final draft. As for proofreading, it could be left to the magazine's editors. However, Feng Bujue's drafts generally didn't require much proofreading; he was a person who paid attention to quality and detail.

It was a Sunday, and the weather was pretty good. As far as Feng Bujue knew, every Sunday, Wang Tanzhi would go to the kindergarten to help out as a social worker. In Feng Bujue's words, "Playing with your peers for half a day."

Feng Bujue himself had a rather indifferent attitude towards public welfare activities. Compared to a good youth like Xiao Tan, if he were to participate in similar work… to put it euphemistically, it would be "a bit out of place"; to put it bluntly, it would scare (or corrupt) the children.

Speaking of Feng Bujue, the police officers at the local police station all knew him. Brother Jue was a legendary figure... like the missing corpse from the hospital morgue, the dog that gave birth to a cat, the kid who could suddenly blow out light bulbs with his mind, crop circles, meteorite fragments, and so on... If someone seriously reported similar situations, finding Feng Bujue was definitely the right thing to do. Anyway, either he did it, or it was related to him. If it really had nothing to do with him, it was fine to ask him to be a consultant.

Feng Bujue himself felt that there was nothing wrong with this. People like him, who didn't like asking for help, were often very willing to help others. Rather than saying he was helping others, it was better to say he was enjoying a feeling of "being needed." Simply put, he liked people coming to him for help. Moreover, this mentality of his had nothing to do with a sense of social mission; it was purely out of personal interest.

In any case, this Sunday was going to be another leisurely day for Feng Bujue. He only slept for two and a half hours last night, and it was spent in a "dreamlike" state in the game. Then he got up to write until dawn, so he was really tired at this moment. He yawned and went back to bed, falling into a dead sleep.

He woke up and glanced at the clock. It was exactly noon.

This time, Feng Bujue warily checked around the bed first for any new "landmines" buried by Asathoth. Fortunately, there weren't any, but when he came to the living room, he still saw a pile...

As someone who had experience raising cats, he naturally had a way to deal with it. First, he dragged Asathoth over to its masterpiece, squeezed its face with both hands and rubbed it a few times, then picked up the pile of stuff with a tissue, put it in the sandbox, and then dragged Asathoth to the sandbox again, patted its head, and made it recognize the place.

When Feng Bujue was a child, he had tried to train his pets to use the flush toilet in this way, but it ended in failure. The facts proved that the thing wasn't designed for cats; they would accidentally fall in, and the consequences were unimaginable...

After he cleaned up the mess, he went to cook himself some noodles. After buying breakfast yesterday, he didn't even have any change left. Feng Bujue was now truly "penniless." Fortunately, he had mooched two meals off Bao Daren and Xiao Tan, which could be considered as storing some fuel in his stomach. For the next nine days, until he received his manuscript fees in the middle of the month, if there were no opportunities to mooch, he would have to strictly follow the pre-calculated rations and eat plain noodles every meal.

"Meow..." Asathoth looked at Feng Bujue, who was cooking, as if it thought he was making something good and wanted to get some of the action.

Feng Bujue glanced down at it: "Your cat food tastes better than this."

Asathoth seemed to understand, turned and left the kitchen, going to the sofa to take a nap.

More than ten minutes later, Feng Bujue carried his homemade clear soup noodles to the computer, turned on the monitor, and logged into the *Thriller Paradise* game forum. He had developed a habit of needing to watch something or chat with someone while eating, otherwise he felt like he was wasting his life.

He had just sucked a mouthful of noodles into his mouth when his gaze shifted to the screen. The line of text at the top of the forum almost made him spit out the noodles.

"Due to the number of max-level players exceeding 10% of the total number of internal beta players, the server has been shut down. We will complete a full upgrade within forty-eight hours and open the official public beta version. Stay tuned."