Chapter 11 November 13th, Morning

"Yo, you're up." When Feng Bujue returned from his morning run, Ruoyu was tidying up the living room.

Not long after Ruoyu moved in, the two had agreed to take turns doing housework. But the agreement was just that, Ruoyu actually did more of the work, after all, girls like to be clean, and she would often tidy up when she couldn't stand the mess anymore.

"Been up for a while." Hearing Jue-ge's words, Ruoyu continued what she was doing, replying without looking up, "Waiting for you to bring back breakfast."

"Hehe..." Feng Bujue smiled, "We're having tangbao (soup dumplings) today, be careful."

The reason he smiled so mischievously was naturally because everyone has one or two things they're not good at, just like Jue-ge wasn't good at tying knots, Xiao Tan wasn't good at lying; and Ruoyu... she wasn't very good at using chopsticks.

Of course, "not very good at using" didn't mean she couldn't pick up food, but because Ruoyu didn't learn the correct way to hold chopsticks when she was a child, her chopstick skills were slightly worse than ordinary people. There was no problem with normal use on weekdays, but... once she encountered slippery foods like tofu, fish balls, or foods that easily fall apart, and things like tangbao with thin skins and soup inside... she would often embarrass herself.

In fact... this wasn't a big problem, and in some ways, it was even a cute quirk. However, when you show a weakness to someone like Feng Bujue, malicious teasing and mockery are inevitable.

What kind of person is our Jue-ge? If there was a competition for grabbing food with chopsticks, he would at least be in the world's top ten. In his student days, if he wanted to, he could prevent the classmates who shared a table with him from eating a single piece of meat. Someone even used their hands to compete with him, and in the end, he used his chopsticks to snatch a chicken leg... With this kind of superiority, how could he not repeatedly mock her about it?

"Careful of what?" Ruoyu immediately glared at Jue-ge, "It's just tangbao... At worst, I'll break it and let the soup run out."

"That's such a waste, the best part of tangbao is the soup inside, isn't it?" Feng Bujue showed a sinister smile, "How about... I feed you..."

"You're overthinking it." Ruoyu interrupted him before he could finish, "I haven't been fed by anyone since I can remember."

"So you're twenty-two years old and still can't use chopsticks?" Jue-ge replied.

"Does a twenty-four-year-old man who can't even tie his shoelaces have the right to say that to me?" Ruoyu's ability to retort has improved, and she can now hold her own in mocking Jue-ge.

"Hehehe..." Feng Bujue smiled even more lewdly, "I wouldn't mind you tying them for me."

"Is that so..." Ruoyu then snorted coldly, "Hmph... How about we make a bet?"

"Oh? What kind of bet?" Jue-ge was also intrigued.

"One week, I'll practice using chopsticks, and you'll practice tying knots." Ruoyu continued, "After a week, I guarantee that I can pick up anything you can safely pick up, but you also have to guarantee that you can tie any knot I can tie."

"This..." At this moment, Feng Bujue... was actually a little scared.

"Are you afraid?" Ruoyu asked.

"Ha!" Jue-ge chuckled dryly, "I've almost forgotten how to write the word fear." He forced a confident look, "A bet is a bet, you say... What's the stake?" As soon as he finished speaking, he immediately added, "Oh, I'll state in advance that I have to consider requests like rolling in the sheets, I'm an upright person."

The next second, before Ruoyu could speak, Asathoth, who was lying on the sofa, complained, "In the years I spent in hell, meow~ I have heard and seen many shameless words and deeds, but in my knowledge... the only one who can perfectly mix shamelessness and cheapness together is you, meow."

Hearing this, Ruoyu looked at Asathoth expressionlessly: "I said... no matter what, he's still my boyfriend, if you make him sound so unbearable, doesn't it make me look like I have bad taste?"

"No... this isn't a question of whether you have bad taste or not, meow." Asathoth replied, "If you only look at his face, it's fine... but you chose to date Feng Bujue after understanding his personality, I can only say that you're also a freak." She paused, scratching the back of her neck with her paw, "Speaking of which... you really are a freak, meow."

"Hmm..." Hearing this, Ruoyu pondered for a moment, "Then... the stake is..."

"Hey!" Jue-ge couldn't help but shout, "You suddenly and stiffly changed the subject!"

Ruoyu ignored him and continued, "This bet... if I win, unless I'm in a good mood and want to intervene... otherwise, you'll be responsible for all the housework from now on."

"Whoa~ What's the concept of 'from now on'?" Feng Bujue replied, "If we get married in the future, wouldn't I be pre-paying decades of labor?"

"If you don't dare to bet, just say so." Ruoyu replied.

"Tch..." Feng Bujue raised an eyebrow, "Then... what if you lose?"

"From now on, I'll tie your shoelaces." Ruoyu replied.

"Good! You said it." Feng Bujue said loudly.

"Yes, I said it." Ruoyu replied calmly.

After a second of pause, the two said in unison: "It's a deal!"

"Sigh..." Asathoth sighed, shaking her head, "You two are really freaks, meow~"

...

Several hours later, ten o'clock in the morning, Feng Bujue's login space.

"Hmph... saying she wants to organize things in the login space by herself, who would believe that..." As soon as Jue-ge entered the elevator, he began to complain, "She's probably secretly learning how to use chopsticks in the game world... She must be searching for related videos on the touchscreen right now!"

While muttering, he shamelessly opened a web page of a search engine through the touchscreen and entered the words "how to tie knots."

In the next hour, he studied knot-tying techniques with unprecedented concentration and enthusiasm. Although he told Ruoyu before going online that "I'm going online to collect competition information," what they were actually doing was about the same...

Unknowingly, an hour (game time) passed, and after watching a large number of pictures and video tutorials... Feng Bujue closed all the web pages, took two steps back, opened his arms, and looked up to the sky with a gesture from the protagonist of *The Shawshank Redemption* when he regained his freedom: "This is so hard—"

Again, everyone has one or two things they're not good at.

To make a long story short, after doing those incredibly painful actions, Jue-ge finally opened the Dream Company's official website and forum and began to watch information about the competition.

At this time, the top eight list of Peak Supremacy S2 had already been released, and the names of the eight teams were placed in the most conspicuous position on the official website's homepage.

And these eight teams are: [Order], [Deities], [Jianghu], [Red Cherry], [Warring States], [Hell's Frontline], [Trash Alliance], [Rivers and Mountains].

Since no two teams from the same studio entered the top eight together, and no "second team" entered the top eight, the list directly omitted teams whose names contained the word "First Team."

Overall... six of these eight teams are professional teams with a studio background, and the other two teams are made up of individual players.

This result can be said to have greatly exceeded the predictions of the vast majority of viewers and various intelligence analysis teams...

In team-based competitive games, professional teams have a very big advantage. Professional teams have the resources of the entire studio, and their personnel coordination, item collection, and pre-match intelligence are all much stronger than those of "wild" players.

Teams like [Trash Alliance], which are composed of four individual professional players, can't really be considered "professional" teams... The so-called "professional team" doesn't just mean finding a few players with professional skills to form a team; in addition to the players, a large number of people are contributing to the team's victory... it's just that these people's work is carried out outside of the competition, and ordinary viewers often overlook their existence.

However, this time in Peak Supremacy S2, under the team competition format, in a system where there is almost no luck involved... there are still two non-studio teams that have entered the top eight. This result has once again made the leadership of the major studios realize that... they can't look at Thriller Paradise with the mindset of an ordinary online game.

"Looking at it, none of these teams are easy to deal with..." Feng Bujue said to himself with narrowed eyes after seeing the list.

That's what he said, but he wasn't surprised at all when he saw this list, because as early as when he saw the round of sixteen matchup list, he had already predicted which eight teams would advance. The current problem is... how will these eight teams be matched up?

"Win one more game... and we can enter the finals." Jue-ge said to himself while quickly browsing the webpage, "The finals are a four-team competition, so there will be many variables. Generally speaking... more variables mean that weaker teams will have more opportunities." His gaze shifted slightly, stopping on the words [Order], "Adopting this mechanism for the finals seems to be taking care of teams other than [Order]..." He paused, "Not only can they play one round less, but they also increase the chances of defeating the strongest team on the surface."

Thinking of this, Feng Bujue had already scanned every piece of information on the official website's homepage at an extremely fast speed - most of which were news that you could tell what they were about just by looking at the title. So, he quickly opened the game forum, wanting to see if he could gain anything from there.

"Whoa~" As soon as he opened the homepage of the competition discussion area, Jue-ge was attracted by a "hot topic of the day" that was pinned to the top.

The title of that post was: [Semi-final All Matching Possibilities and Prediction Analysis].

"Heh..." Feng Bujue clicked into the post, glanced at it briefly, and smiled, "So it's still very helpful to come to the forum, this post lists all the content that I need to calculate mentally, saving a lot of trouble... This way, I can easily store the list in my brain through graphic memory."

With that said, Feng Bujue completely ignored the prediction of victory or defeat, quickly memorized all the "matching possibilities" listed by the other party (including 28 single matchup combinations and 105 complete battle lists), and checked them again to make sure they were correct, before closing the post.

Then, he opened each discussion area one by one, filtering information at an extremely fast speed, flipping through the posts page by page.

Given the popularity of the Peak Supremacy event, the number of posts in the forum was imaginable. Even though it was a weekday morning, and even though the forum had various mechanisms to filter out garbage posts, the posts in each discussion sub-area were still increasing at a rate of at least one per minute.

"Oh? This seems a little interesting..." Suddenly, Jue-ge's gaze stopped on a post with a very eye-catching title - [Exposing the "Past and Present" of Trash Alliance].

To be honest, the team that Feng Bujue least wanted to encounter at this stage was [Trash Alliance], because out of the seven teams that could potentially be opponents, Jue-ge knew the least about this team's information.

Among them... naturally, there was also Honghu's arrangement. The wise general is worthy of being a wise general, in the preliminary stage, he adopted a strategy similar to [Hell's Frontline], and turned on all the privacy protection options. In addition, the people in their team also have very amazing strength, and they often achieve victory before the enemy can figure out what's going on, which makes their game recordings and the information revealed in the recordings very limited.

For a man like Feng Bujue who "has already calculated more than 70% of the factors that determine victory or defeat before the battle," a lack of information is a very bad thing. Especially when he "knows that the enemy is strong, but doesn't know how strong they are," it makes him feel like he has a lump in his throat, making him restless.

In comparison, he would be more comfortable encountering professional teams, even if he encountered [Order] or [Deities]... anyway, most of your information is already a public secret, as long as there is enough data, even if it's a god... Jue-ge can calculate them to death.

"Let me take a look..." Feng Bujue clicked on the post and found that it was a whole long paragraph, and the font color used a bright purple that could blind people, he immediately complained, "This person wants to take revenge on society, right... forcibly wanting to reduce the durability of the reader's dog eyes to zero..."

That's what he said, but he still looked at it...

Feng Bujue stared hard at the unbearable font, and with the mood of investigating information, he finished reading the entire article, and then...

"What a scam!" He really wanted to smash a cup or something, but he didn't have anything in his hand, "What is this? No wonder the title has a tabloid style, it's all gossip! What's the point of exposing that Trash Uncle participated in a male idol group in South Korea when he was young! Now he's still become an uncle whose main body is sunglasses!"

Just as Jue-ge was loudly and viciously complaining, suddenly, a small icon popped up in his social bar... this was the prompt that a "friend" had sent a message.

Seeing this, Feng Bujue opened it almost without thinking. Unexpectedly... the person who sent the message was actually...