Yu Huaiting’s fuzzy head leaned in a bit more. He lowered his head and kept nuzzling Fu Songcheng, his voice muffled between their overlapping clothes, carrying a relentless insistence: “Gege, you never say you love me. Every time it’s me clinging to you.”
Fu Songcheng’s neck tickled from his hair. Suppressing his instinct to pull away, he sighed and humored him along, saying perfunctorily: “I love you. How could I not love you? Out of everyone in the whole world, I love you the most.”
Borrowing a half-joking, half-serious remark, Fu Songcheng finally let out his true heart.
Hearing this pretty line, Yu Huaiting still found it insufficient.
He jerked his head up, eyes startlingly bright in the dim light, like a beast that had locked onto its prey. “If someone else treated you well like I do, would you love them too?”
As he spoke, he pressed his mischief further, hands and feet wrapping around, deliberately tickling Fu Songcheng’s waist.
“Stop it—”
Fu Songcheng couldn’t hold it in and laughed low, reaching out to grab Yu Huaiting’s misbehaving wrists.
The two rolled into a tangled mess in the cramped bed. By the time Fu Songcheng went to Source Star to meet Shen Ning, it had already been midnight; now, after Yu Huaiting’s fussing, by the time they truly fell asleep in each other’s arms, it was already the small hours.
The next afternoon, Fu Songcheng was woken by hunger.
He rubbed his heavy forehead and sat up. Yu Huaiting beside him had long been awake, propped on one hand, lying on his side, staring at him without blinking—who knew for how long.
“Let’s go eat, gege. I’ve already heard your stomach growl three times.”
Yu Huaiting leaned in with a grin and quickly pecked him on the lips.
He earned a slap from Fu Songcheng.
After a simple wash-up, the two pushed the door open and headed to their usual restaurant.
Sitting down and ordering, Yu Huaiting asked casually, “Gege, when are we entering the next instance?”
Fu Songcheng’s chopsticks paused slightly mid-pick.
He thought of Shen Ning’s words in the Source Star control room last night. Version 5.0 was about to update; Source Star people would descend through bionic bodies as players to test the instances, experiencing them together.
If the purpose was making friends—
The instance would probably gather all the popular players.
Shen Ning telling him now was probably to have him arrange his timing, not to enter an instance early and miss the update window.
Just as he thought this, the system suddenly let out a buzz.
Not just him—all the players dining around them had their terminals light up red at the same time.
[System Server-Wide Announcement: Death Party 5.0 version will complete its update within three days.]
[This update’s contents: New identity system optimization pack, partial item function optimization, increased skill pool count, pain-feedback mechanism adjustments…]
[The system is performing data settlement and correction.]
[Correcting player count. Current players: 182,499,301.]
Fu Songcheng’s pupils contracted sharply.
Because the numbers on the light screen were updating in real time!
[Correcting player count. Current players: 182,499,240.]
[Correcting player count. Current players: 182,499,160.]
[Update progress: 1/100…]
In just one second, the number dropped by dozens.
While they ate, in countless running instances, people were being torn apart by monsters, crushed by traps, or betrayed by companions—forever losing their lives.
Fu Songcheng answered Yu Huaiting’s earlier question: “Let’s wait until the new system update finishes before entering an instance.”
Both of them couldn’t help staring at the player-count notification box. Almost every second, the number was mercilessly decreasing.
Those were living beings—the same kind who had once breathed the same air on Blue Star.
Unrelated to them, yet inextricably connected.
After a brief dead silence, the system’s world public screen thoroughly exploded, the messages refreshing so fast it was impossible to read them clearly.
[Chen Ming: Holy crap, we can actually see the player count now! From when I entered the game until now, this many people have died?!]
[Anonymous Player: What does this mean? We can actually see the numbers?]
[Zao Zhen: Recruiting high-level players to team up for instances—at least 5 instance survival experiences required!]
[Yun Chui: When will this ever end… Every single week we’re forced into an instance, and every time it’s a narrow escape from death. When does this finally end? I want to go home…]
[Bloody Romance: The one upstairs, stop dreaming. There’s no going back. We’re all going to die here—just a matter of sooner or later.]
The public screen was full of complaints, and the expressions of everyone in the restaurant were hardly pleasant either.
Fu Songcheng watched those bullet comments expressionlessly. He didn’t understand this move of Shen Ning’s.
Why suddenly announce the player count? This kind of intuitive death countdown would only completely destroy the psychological defenses of mid- and low-tier players.
People in extreme despair often choose to give up, to kill themselves, or to go mad like rabid dogs in instances, losing all rational judgment.
And with players inside the game full of complaints, wouldn’t that affect Source Star viewers’ impressions? What exactly was Shen Ning selling in her gourd?
Just as Fu Songcheng was puzzling over this, on Source Star, in a conference room, a board meeting was underway with tensions at a knife’s edge.
Shen Ning, in a crisp black suit, swept her sharp gaze over the board members and technical executives around her.
“Why was the real-time player survival count made public in version 5.0!”
Shen Ning’s voice echoed through the empty conference room. “Our core product is emotional fluctuation and ‘survival struggle.’ Publicizing death data is challenging the psychological limits of Child Star people. If it causes mass psychological collapse and players lose their will to survive, who’s going to take responsibility for the ratings crash?”
Actually, this had originally been a mistake—the staff responsible for update maintenance had accidentally made the data public.
But because of the time difference between Blue Star and Source Star, the patch could only be added after the system update.
The management personnel responsible for technical monitoring, drenched in sweat, did their best to find an excuse for themselves. “Ever since we leaked word that survival data would be made public, countless underground betting viewers on Source Star have been placing wagers—betting how many people die each day, betting which region has the highest survival rate, even betting when the number will fall below a hundred million.”
“At least for now, viewers are highly enthusiastic about these numbers.”
Shen Ning’s brows knitted tightly, and she countered coldly: “Killing the goose that lays the golden eggs! When the instance players’ psychological defenses collapse, when every one of them is downcast, what are you going to use to excite the viewers then? Open a betting pool on corpses?”
“President Shen, when there are no players left, we can switch to another Child Star. When President Quan was here, he prepared many Child Stars as backup plans.”
Shen Ning looked at those cold, cold numbers and, for the first time, felt a sense of absurdity.
Probably because she’d been communicating with Fu Songcheng so much, she’d gradually come to regard this person from a Child Star as her own kind.
In truth, all of them had always been the same kind—it was only the influence of technology and environment that had forcibly divided people from different star systems into hierarchies on Source Star.
There was a kind of magic about Fu Songcheng. After spending time with him, Shen Ning had slowly come to treat him as her rival.
Now, hearing the directors and executives speak like this, she remembered—these people were all consumables…
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