Shen Ning watched Fu Songcheng and Yu Huaiting march toward the Bitter Couple ending on the projection, her brows tightly knitted.
On Death Party’s livestream popularity rankings, Yu Huaiting’s and Fu Songcheng’s channels had already climbed to third place.
Along with the surging popularity came screens full of furious bullet comments.
[What kind of hellish verdict is this? Am I blind? They clearly got the key letter AND won the fight—why are they the ‘Bitter Couple’?]
[Doesn’t anyone think them fighting each other is also delicious? Enemies during the ambiguous phase…]
[Rigged! Absolutely rigged! The CP I’ve watched grow up—love value zeroed just like that?]
[Official, stop playing dead! Why does winning get punished?]
[My heart aches for Yu the God.]
[My heart aches for Fish Dog.]
Shen Ning was restless. As an investor, she’d pushed the funds into Death Party despite enormous pressure from the board.
She wasn’t a mindless fanatic. Though she personally did admire Fu Songcheng, what had truly made her decide was the explosive popularity of the Fu Songcheng–Yu Huaiting CP video she’d personally pushed.
Shen Ning had won the opening bet—but after confirming her investment, she’d been stabbed in the back by the game’s planners.
Death Party currently lacked follow-up investment. Other investors were all waiting to see, believing the death game’s risk was too high—popular contestants could die at any time and lose their audience.
Entering now, Shen Ning was shouldering enormous risk.
If she profited, peers would envy her; if she lost, she’d become a laughingstock in the industry.
And now, this blatant judgment—one that even violated the game’s fairness principles—had set off every alarm bell in Shen Ning.
Shen Ning pulled up the communication interface and sent Quan Heng a direct message.
[What’s going on? Death Party’s rigged this blatantly ugly—regarding the number one on the Power Ranking and his lover, I need a reasonable explanation.]
Less than ten seconds after the text was sent, Quan Heng’s reply popped up.
[No misjudgment. Chen Yu exhausted all his strength for Lin Feng—even resorting to any means, regardless of consequences. That better fits the ‘Lifelong Partners’ setting.]
Shen Ning looked at that reply and sneered.
She was no easily fooled naive sweetheart—she was the client who’d put in real money.
Whoever pays is the real rule-maker.
She couldn’t be bothered to wrangle with Quan Heng over word games.
Shen Ning dialed her assistant’s internal line directly. “Tell Finance to immediately freeze all investment funds for Death Party’s second installment this season. Not a single cent goes out now.”
She’d like to see whether Quan Heng—cut off from funding—could give her a reasonable explanation.
She was waiting for Quan Heng to come beg her in person.
…
[System Notification: Player has logged out of instance “A Thought of Old Dreams.”]
Fu Songcheng and Yu Huaiting appeared in the rest area almost simultaneously.
The instant their feet touched the ground, the system notification sounded again:
[Detected players holding 2 unused story fragments.]
[Item form restructuring…]
The two story fragments, previously tainted with the instance’s aura, radiated a dim blue light in midair, then rapidly twisted and deformed, finally transforming into two pitch-black sports wristbands.
They fell respectively into Fu Songcheng’s and Yu Huaiting’s palms.
[Items bound. Current status: Function unlocked.]
[Note: Detailed functions will open after the Death Party 4.0 version update.]
Neither of them even glanced down at the wristbands that had appeared out of thin air.
Because they’d received the rest area’s update notice from a day ago.
[In three days, Death Party 4.0’s epic version update will arrive!]
[More functions will be unlocked then.]
[Please stay tuned.]
Yet neither the coming version update nor the unknown items on their wrists was what Fu Songcheng and Yu Huaiting cared about most.
All their senses, all their nerves, even every heartbeat, were forcibly dragged toward each other.
Love value zeroed.
The [Bitter Couple] contract had formally taken effect.
Yu Huaiting slowly lifted his head.
Those eyes that always carried flamboyance and defiance now held emotions impossible to distinguish.
He looked at Fu Songcheng standing three steps away.
Kill him.
Snap his neck, dig out his heart.
The thought howled madly.
His right hand spasmed uncontrollably, muscles tensed to the extreme, joints emitting a dangerous crack-crack—the body’s signal to attack.
Yet Fu Songcheng showed no abnormality.
He looked at Yu Huaiting, his face revealing nothing.
“Fu Songcheng.”
Yu Huaiting’s voice was terrifyingly hoarse.
Yu Huaiting took a big step back, trying to widen the distance from Fu Songcheng, to calm the tangled, restless thoughts.
But Fu Songcheng immediately stepped forward, closing the distance to Yu Huaiting again.
Closer—want to kill him. Farther—mind full of him.
Fu Songcheng felt awful inside, yet subconsciously wanted to maintain the original verdict.
They were trapped in a cage where even breathing was torture.
If they couldn’t get close, at least they shouldn’t drift apart.
Fu Songcheng felt something in his body being hollowed out. His mind raced back through every bit and piece of him and Yu Huaiting.
His various indulgences toward Yu Huaiting—letting him cause trouble, allowing him to get close, soothing his emotions, satisfying his urge to perform.
Now, with 42% of the love value erased, Fu Songcheng could objectively examine himself, and he’d finally thoroughly confirmed the guess that had haunted him throughout the instance, the question he’d asked over and over: the instance had been interfering with his emotions all along.
The love value Lin Feng and Chen Yu mortgaged for their assault had been transferred onto him and Yu Huaiting.
Of that lost 42% love value, how much had been emotions that didn’t belong to him and Yu Huaiting; how much had been his original feelings.
Even recognizing that this emotion was mixed with the system’s pushing, Fu Songcheng discovered, laughably, that deep in his heart he had never truly resisted Yu Huaiting’s approach.
Despite the killing intent filling his heart, he had to admit—he had, before, genuinely been moved by Yu Huaiting.
He couldn’t help but question the system: since it had guided him and Yu Huaiting to meet, to know each other, why use such a despicable means to push them apart?
What was he?
What were he and his emotions?
What were he and Yu Huaiting?
What right did this system and this game have?!
If he wouldn’t mortgage his own emotions, the system would forcibly strip his dignity, using the “Bitter Couple” identity to force them to kill each other.
A deep chill rose in Fu Songcheng’s eyes.
He did hate.
But what he hated wasn’t Yu Huaiting—he hated this damned instance, this system manipulating everything, this infinite game that set the rules.
Only fools resent their opponents in the arena. The wise question and seek to destroy the absurd arena itself.
So, in the silence that felt like torture, Fu Songcheng spoke in a near-everyday, gentle voice that didn’t belong to a Bitter Couple:
“Want to go eat cake? That place you like.”
The instant the words fell, Fu Songcheng’s own heart gave a tiny flinch.
Only then, in the dead silence, did he realize with a start that in their unwitting time together, he’d actually grown used to Yu Huaiting’s pestering, used to Yu Huaiting coming up to him and extending invitations.
And now, he was taking the initiative.
To prevent Bitter Couple Rule 3’s scenario from happening, and more importantly, to preserve his own true will.
He was not fish on a chopping block, to be manipulated at will.
He would only follow his own will, make choices from his own heart.
His story—the system had no right to write it.
Fu Songcheng’s invitation landed in Yu Huaiting’s ears indistinctly, as if sliding off his smooth cerebral cortex.
Yu Huaiting’s heart was in too much chaos—so much that it felt like countless blunt knives were madly cutting through his brain.
He decided to like someone—and he pursued without reservation, like a moth to flame, offering all his goodness before the other; if he loathed someone, he’d chase them to the ends of the earth to hack them down, never resting until death.
A simple CPU couldn’t support him in processing an identity like Bitter Couple.
Rushing through his veins was the killing intent the system gave him, belonging to the “Bitter Couple.”
His right hand spasmed more and more violently, his muscles aching as if torn from over-tension.
Yet his mind clearly, vividly engraved everything that had happened between him and Fu Songcheng.
In A Thought of Old Dreams, amid the hall full of dazzling red silk and double-happiness characters, the moment he reached out and lifted Fu Songcheng’s veil bit by bit.
His own thunderous, deafening heartbeat that he couldn’t control at the time seemed still to echo by his ear.
He was certain that at that moment, the blood throughout his body had been boiling hot.
He clearly remembered the word “happiness,” remembered every heart-fluttering scene—yet couldn’t recall what “happiness” actually felt like.
Yu Huaiting seemed to have returned to before he met Fu Songcheng.
Alone, slaughtering and drifting through endless instances: covered in blood, covered in wounds, ever-victorious, endlessly lonely.
Fu Songcheng waited quietly for Yu Huaiting’s answer, waiting a long time.
“Let’s go. Eat cake.”
Yu Huaiting’s voice sounded faint.
Fu Songcheng had almost forgotten that Yu Huaiting’s very first voice had been this cold and hard.
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