It’s okay for the little person to act cute. After all, he’s really cute.
You’re a system. What are you acting cute for? Think you won’t be called a trash game if you learn to act cute?
Li Shuoxing looked at the phone interface and stared for a long time.
Then, he tapped on the Love Bar app again, trying to force his way into the game.
Unfortunately, this time, the game didn’t even show the boot screen. It directly gave him a black screen plus a red countdown in the centre of the black screen.
Li Shuoxing: “…”
Wait.
I haven’t said goodbye to the cub yet.
What if he deducts favourability?!
He tapped on the screen, but the game still only gave him an unyielding black screen and countdown.
You’re cruel!
One hour, I’ll wait!
Li Shuoxing reluctantly put down his phone and sat back at his computer.
He had just started his novel. Although he had some stockpile, he still had to work hard to type without distraction and strive to stock up more and more stockpile.
He had opened the document and typed for five minutes when he suddenly remembered that the cub said he wanted to look at things related to the novel, so he couldn’t help but open the frontend and refresh the page to observe the data after the novel was published.
In terms of rewards, there were four alliance masters, and many sect masters and hall masters. After a fifty-fifty split, his backend income was three or four thousand.
In terms of clicks, there’d been more than ten thousand member clicks in two hours, which was very good.
Favourites… Hmm? Favourites weren’t rising slowly, already at four thousand.
It took only a minute or two to look at the data. Li Shuoxing closed the webpage and continued writing. After writing for three minutes, he remembered that the cub said he wanted to read the content of the novel. So, he went back to the beginning and admired his work for the nth time, correcting two typos in passing.
After that, Li Shuoxing started writing again. This time, just as he typed in some new words, he remembered again—the cub had also said he wanted to read the comments on the novel.
But my novel doesn’t get many comments every day. If I want more comments, I’ll have to post a promotional chapter to pull them.
As his thoughts turned here, Li Shuoxing’s fingers had already left the keyboard and moved to the mouse.
…
An hour later.
Li Shuoxing looked at the document word count, 300 words.
Li Shuoxing then looked at the novel webpage. The F5 key was all mashed up.
He propped his forehead on his hand.
I’ve finally experienced it.
It turns out that you can really refresh the backend until the author misses the update.
I thought only games, movies and novels could…
The writing mood brewing in his heart had been destroyed by the endless mechanical refreshing. It happened that an hour had passed. Li Shuoxing no longer forced himself. He closed the document and reopened the game.
He entered the game normally.
The familiar interface appeared on the screen again.
Li Shuoxing first looked at the favourability pool, ready to see how many favourability points the cub had dropped when he suddenly went offline.
But, surprisingly, the favourability was steady, not a single bit dropped.
This?
Li Shuoxing was slightly stunned. He searched the screen for the little person and found him in the kitchen, dawdling back and forth, looking a little strange.
Hmm…
Li Shuoxing thought about it and felt it was a bit strange, so he turned on the system narration to study.
System narration.
Today, 10:30am
[Su Mingqian is suddenly sleepy.]
[Su Mingqian falls into a deep sleep.]
Today, 11:30am
[Su Mingqian wakes up.]
Su Mingqian: “How did I fall asleep…”
[Su Mingqian enters the kitchen.]
[Su Mingqian checks the cupboard.]
[Su Mingqian takes two packets of pumpkin seeds.]
[Su Mingqian opens a packet, puts the seeds into his pocket, and accidentally drops a seed as he passes by the trash can.]
[He accidentally drops another seed.]
[He accidentally drops yet another seed.]
[…]
[He accidentally drops two entire packets of seeds.]
[Su Mingqian examines the last packet of seeds.]
[He doesn’t do anything to this packet of seeds.]
Li Shuoxing: “…………………”
My cub, you’re amazing, huh?
This is no joke.
Li Shuoxing really felt that the little person was kind of amazing!
When he didn’t know anything at first, the little person did things openly.
Once he knew there’s surveillance, he started to do things sneakily.
And now he’s automatically evolved. On top of doing things sneakily, he’s added another layer of camouflage to confuse me!
But I have God’s perspective.
Looking at the whole situation, there is no secret.
=w=
Li Shuoxing was happy for a while, and he didn’t reveal Su Mingqian’s little secret. Instead, he opened the input box to see what exactly the system had just updated.
When he tapped on the input box, the first thing that appeared wasn’t that but a system letter.
System letter:
“Dear Player,
“After an hour of simple patching, the system has completed its update. The picture sending function and skin function have been added to the chat system.
“Thank you for your patience. We hereby send you compensation for this update.”
[Contribution Point Ă— 100]
[Pumpkin Fragment Ă— 20]
[Chat Box Skin Coupon Ă— 1]
Oh!
Li Shuoxing was pleasantly surprised. “This crap game is finally being generous for once. So it’s true that getting rich depends on maintenance? But this pumpkin fragment…”
He remembered the little person’s performance he’d just seen in the system narration and felt torn.
He had originally felt that this was a spontaneous upgrade of the little person’s AI program and thought the little person was super smart.
But now it seemed…
“It can’t be that the system is bent on cheating my time, so it deliberately found the excuse of the little person throwing away seeds to compensate me, right? Although this is in line with the principle that the player’s property won’t randomly disappear, isn’t it just 6 yuan… I’m willing to give it to the cub to play with. There’s no need for you to bother. Give me back my smart cub.”
Li Shuoxing muttered.
Of course, the system didn’t respond to him.
So, Li Shuoxing could only collect all the compensation.
The system letter disappeared and a mailbox button was added to the edge of the screen. Then, the input box popped up, and, along with it, the novice guide also appeared.
Novice guide: “Dear player, the input box has been updated. The game has added the picture sending function and skin function to the chat system. By tapping the picture button in the upper left corner of the input box, you will be able to choose a picture to insert into the input box and send it; by tapping the skin button in the upper left corner of the input box, you will be able to change the light screen to a more beautiful skin. Now, please tap on the skin button.”
It turned out the random skin chat box skin it mentioned was this.
Li Shuoxing tapped.
Novice guide: “Skins are divided into three categories: free, favourability points purchase and contribution points purchase.”
Li Shuoxing: “…”
He twitched his lips.
It’s just a chat box. Why make it so fancy?
The one-hour update just now wasn’t really to open up the picture sending function at all, but to open up new microtransactions, right?
But.
The system gave me a free coupon after all.
Li Shuoxing’s eyes focused on the assortment of new skins.
Free stuff… How about giving it a try?
It wasn’t too long since the Watcher left before the Watcher came back.
The light screen once again appeared in front of Su Mingqian.
It displayed a line of words:
“Cub, what style of chat box do you like?”
Before he could respond to this, the light screen in front of him suddenly changed.
It changed from blue to brown, from a rectangle to an irregular shape, looking like a piece of land. And at the edge of this land, a cherry blossom tree grew abruptly, its blossoms in full bloom, light red scattered everywhere in the wind.
Su Mingqian subconsciously reached for it.
There was nothing.
It was a projection.
The cherry blossom tree hadn’t existed for five seconds when the chat box in front of him changed again.
The irregular land turned into overlapping white clouds, which crowded together, with a couple small birds flying past occasionally.
This skin also lasted for five seconds. After five seconds, a third skin came out, a fourth skin came out, a fifth skin came out… These skin styles were varied, with gorgeous special effects, very beautiful. It was just… he got tired of seeing them.
Su Mingqian looked at the seemingly endless patterns and was a little at a loss. Finally, when a less fancy silvery-white metallic light screen appeared, he couldn’t care less about being polite and hurriedly chose. “This will do.”
Light screen: “This one? It’s not a contribution points skin…”
Su Mingqian didn’t quite understand, but he resolutely emphasised, “This one.”
Light screen: “Okay, then it’ll be this one. What’s most important is that you like it.”
Su Mingqian let out a sigh of relief.
The next second, a picture appeared in the silvery-white metal frame.
It was a webpage.
The webpage of the published Nine Crossings .
Su Mingqian’s attention suddenly focused.
His eyes first fell on the most striking information like the title, description and author.
This information was exactly the same as what he’d been told before. The Watcher was very honest.
He then looked at the rest of the content. The work discussion forum was the place he paid the most attention to, with dates and discussions about the work and even the author. The words could reveal a lot.
Then, he noticed that some of the discussions in the forum were pixelated. But, not whole sentences, just small parts of them had been erased. Guessing from the context, it seemed to be the author’s name.
Did Ximu blur out “Ximuzi”?
That was Su Mingqian’s first thought.
But, when he took a closer look, he found that they weren’t all like that. Some pixelations were significantly longer.
So…
Apart from Ximuzi, Ximu has another nickname.
He made a secret note of this, then skimmed over other places and saw the monthly votes and rewards. The names were quite unfamiliar, but he could more or less guess the meanings.
Then, he suddenly saw the author’s profile section in the corner of the page, with the information:
Author: Caramel Ximu
Grade: Platinum
Biography: Platinum writer of web literature, expert in a variety of topics, one of the influential figures of web literature.
Confession: Sweet fried chestnuts are really delicious.
Number of Works: 7
Word Count: 14.564 million
Writing Time: 3751 days
…This wasn’t right.
Su Mingqian suddenly realised.
Something wasn’t right.
He had guessed before that the Watcher wasn’t the one who had really imprisoned him here. Someone else had imprisoned him here.
But, after all this time, he’d only had contact with the Watcher. Moreover, the environment in which he was imprisoned was more advanced than any fantasy in science fiction novels…
So, there were two possibilities.
First, the Watcher had a high status, and he was a gift to the Watcher from others.
Second, the Watcher had a low status, and the Watcher was merely a gatekeeper for the people behind the scenes.
Before, he’d been leaning towards the first possibility because he hadn’t sensed any of those twisted and resentful mindsets from the Watcher during their conversations. She spoke calmly and easily, and it wasn’t tiring to talk to her, nor was it difficult to get close.
Until now, when he had discovered, to his surprise, that Caramel Ximu had been writing for ten years, with a word count of fourteen million. She was a serious novelist and fiction was her official profession. She seemed to be a pretty good writer loved by a crowd of people.
It’s certainly a good profession.
But it doesn’t fit either of my two guesses.
What is the truth?
Su Mingqian had a haze of uncertainty, a thick fog enveloping him as he stood in a place unable to see around him, unsure of exactly how to define truth and falsehood.
…Or perhaps.
After a moment of stupefaction, Su Mingqian dug out a new guess from all that he’d gotten from the last few days they’d spent together.
It was just an accident.
Not only an accident for me, but for the Watcher as well.