19: A desperate counterattack under the naval offensive

At 1:40 AM, the basement air still carried the scent of burnt plastic. Cheng Mo didn't move, his fingers resting on the edge of the keyboard, staring at line 372 of code in the editor. The cursor blinked, as if urging him to act. But he knew he couldn't fix it now—the hotfix blacklist from the previous chapter hadn't expired, and a forced push would be like sending 2,000 players a “daily crash gift pack.”

He closed the source code window and switched to the backend monitoring panel.

The heartbeat curve was stable, and the crash index slowly climbed, indicating that some people were still enduring. Among the 63 online players, half were stuck in the level seven leap platform combination zone, and the operation logs showed they failed an average of 1.8 times per minute. Normal. The pain was stable, as was the traffic.

Until the alarm sounded.

It wasn't a red light, nor a pop-up, but a series of short “ding” sounds, like someone tapping a glass with a fingernail. The server load curve suddenly shot up, jumping directly from 47% to 92%, and the download counter began to spin wildly, the numbers flipping faster than Steel Coin smashing his keyboard.

Cheng Mo frowned and pulled up the user growth graph.

New registered accounts showed a vertical surge, concentrated in the past ten minutes. He zoomed in on the timeline and found that the login IPs for these accounts were scattered across more than a dozen cities nationwide, but the device fingerprints were highly consistent—all low-spec Android emulators, with operating system versions all eight-month-old obsolete editions.

“Fake accounts,” he murmured.

Looking at the comment sections, Steam, Bilibili, and TapTap simultaneously exploded. The front page recommendations were dominated by uniform five-star reviews, with titles like: “Finally, a domestic masterpiece!” “Played for ten hours, never repetitive, the developer is a genius!” “Recommended as a mandatory extracurricular game for elementary school students!”

The templating was absurd.

Cheng Mo sneered and clicked on a highly upvoted comment. The content was passionately written, describing how the game mechanics broke the fourth wall and how emotionally shocking the atmosphere was. He scrolled down through the screenshots and saw the player's clear record—level seven completed in 0.3 seconds.

“Huh?” He sat up straight. “The minimum reaction threshold I set for that level is 0.5 seconds. Who passed it in 0.3 seconds, an alien?”

He switched back to the backend and ran a script to capture the behavior data of these accounts. The results appeared instantly: 98.7% of new users stayed for less than two minutes, logging off immediately after submitting their ratings; the remaining 1.3% were all repeatedly clicking the same ad jump link.

Typical bot reviews.

“Wang Zhen made his move.” Cheng Mo slammed his broken pen onto the table, the plastic shaft splitting into two.

He understood this tactic. The opponent wanted to use fake positive reviews to create a false impression of “reputation reversal,” making the platform algorithm mistakenly believe that leap platform nightmare had entered a period of mainstream acceptance, thereby suppressing the weight of genuine negative reviews. What was even more vicious was that once the system determined this game had been “whitewashed,” subsequent genuine negative feedback would be categorized as “niche dissatisfaction” and directly relegated to the cold start pool.

Unfortunately, Wang Zhen didn't know one thing—

He played it wrong.

Cheng Mo stared at the surging download numbers and suddenly laughed. The laugh wasn't loud, but in the silent basement, it sounded particularly eerie. He opened the developer log page, created a new post, and typed only one sentence:

“Thank you, CEO Wang, for the free publicity.”

Deleted.

Typed it again, this time without deleting, and clicked publish.

He knew this sentence would cause an uproar. Core players already revered him as a “torture maniac,” and this light thank-you was equivalent to publicly revealing: not only do we know you're spamming reviews, but we're also profiting immensely from you.

He didn't start a live stream or screenshot and repost. He just let the sentence lie quietly on the log page, like a timed smoke bomb.

Then he switched back to the monitoring panel and continued to observe.

The data was still rising. Global downloads exceeded 800,000, server load surged to 97%, and edge nodes had already begun automatic scaling. The platform's homepage quietly shifted, and leap platform nightmare was pushed to the “This Week's Hottest Recommendation” spot, with a small line of text next to it: “User feedback polarized, discussion volume exploded.”

Cheng Mo looked at the line of text, the corner of his mouth curving slightly.

He knew what this meant—the system analyzed the five thousand bot accounts' five-star reviews, along with the previously accumulated nine hundred-plus negative reviews and over two thousand refund requests, and concluded: this isn't ordinary controversy, it's a phenomenal opposition. This triggered a hidden protocol, forcing global exposure.

Wang Zhen wanted to use positive reviews to suppress negative ones, but the system took the combination of “positive + negative reviews” as “evidence of nationwide discussion,” and in turn gave it a prime spot on the homepage.

Absurd, yet logical.

He leaned back, and the chair let out a familiar creak. The silver earring in his right ear glinted under the screen's blue light, as if responding to an invisible opponent. He didn't celebrate or relax; instead, he opened the firewall log to check for any abnormal intrusion traces.

He knew Wang Zhen wouldn't give up.

Sure enough, three minutes later, the second wave of attack came.

This time it wasn't comments, but videos. Hundreds of identical edits suddenly appeared on a certain short video platform: all titles were “Newbie Ten-Minute Speedrun of All Levels in leap platform nightmare!”, the covers uniformly used a screenshot of Steel Coin smashing his keyboard, and the content was “pseudo-recordings” spliced with slow-motion and acceleration.

Cheng Mo clicked on one, watched for five seconds, and closed it.

The technique was too crude. The jump trajectory was clearly post-edited, and the character's shadow direction was wrong upon landing. But he noticed that the release times of these videos were extremely concentrated, and all were associated with the same promotional tag.

“Still trying to set the trend?” He sneered, adding the tag to his blocklist and sending a batch report ticket to the platform's customer service.

After doing all this, he looked back at the main screen.

Downloads stopped at 1.03 million, stable. Server load dropped back to 78%, new user growth slowed, but the retention rate was unexpectedly high—over 40% of new players had passed the third level, and 12% had challenged the seventh level.

“Interesting,” he murmured.

The traffic brought by these bot accounts actually attracted real players. Some people came specifically for “the game that everyone online is scolding,” wanting to see how bad it really was. After trying it, they found that while difficult, it wasn't as unreasonable as rumored; instead, it had a kind of “satisfaction from being targeted.”

He even saw a new post on the forum: “Just bought the full version for six yuan, thought I'd regret it, but after playing for two hours, I'm so angry I want to smash my phone, but... I think I want to try again.”

Cheng Mo saved this screenshot into his “Golden Vein” folder.

It was almost dawn outside. The sound of cleaners changing garbage bags came from the hallway, and the first bus announcement echoed from the distant bus stop. The basement light fixture was still on, illuminating the completely cracked, dried tea stain at the bottom of the empty water cup on the table corner, a small piece peeling up at the edge.

He didn't move.

His eyes were still fixed on the screen, on the download curve that was still slowly rising. He knew Wang Zhen must be looking at the data backend right now, transitioning from smugness to confusion, then to anger.

He was waiting for this moment.

In the office, Wang Zhen stared at the three monitors in front of him, his face turning from green to black.

On the left was the public opinion report: his own bots successfully occupied the top three trending spots, and the topic #leap platform nightmare is truly awesome# had over 100 million views.

In the middle was the platform announcement: leap platform nightmare was selected as “This Week's Global Hottest Recommendation,” with the recommendation text boldly stating, “User feedback polarized, discussion volume exploded.”

On the right was internal communication: the technical team replied, “System determined it as a high-engagement controversial work, automatic recommendation protocol triggered, cannot be manually revoked.”

“Impossible!” He stood up abruptly, his voice extremely low but carrying a blade-like chill.

He had personally overseen it last night, confirming all five thousand accounts were activated, and the comment templates had undergone A/B testing, with a conversion rate as high as 89%. How could such a textbook-level manipulation of public opinion lose control?

He grabbed the Switch controller from his suit pocket, the item he always held to get a feel before negotiations. But this time, he didn't take it out to press; instead, he slammed it hard onto the table.

With a crisp “snap,” the controller casing split into three pieces, and the joystick flew off, rolling under the carpet.

His assistant stood at the door, not daring to move.

“Find me real hackers!” Wang Zhen gritted his teeth, his voice squeezed from his throat. “I want to penetrate their server, delete the database, format everything, make sure they can't boot up tomorrow!”

After he finished speaking, he looked down at the scattered plastic fragments on the floor, his distorted face reflected in them.

At that moment, he suddenly realized—

He thought he was manipulating public opinion, but he was being harvested in reverse by some invisible mechanism.

And the man hiding in the basement, without even lifting a finger, simply by saying “thank you,” turned everything he meticulously planned into the other party's promotional budget.

He stood there, breathing heavily, his fingers unconsciously digging into his palms.

Cheng Mo sat in front of the computer, the screen light reflecting on his face, his dark circles as deep as old scars. He didn't check the fermentation on social media, nor did he investigate Wang Zhen's next move.

He knew the enemy had already lost.

Lost because he didn't understand the rules.

Lost because he thought traffic could crush everything.

Lost because he didn't understand—

Some games, the more they're cursed, the longer they live.

He reached for the broken pen and gently tapped it on the desktop three times.

The rhythm was exactly the same as before.

Not celebration, nor anxiety.

Like checking if the tactile feel of a certain button was still there.