24: The Last Crazy Flower of the King of Online Trolls

At 2:17 AM, the number of viewers in Steel Coin's livestream room was still climbing, and the bullet chat had turned into a battlefield of multilingual chaos. At the same moment, on the top floor of an office building at the other end of the city, the lights in Wang Zhen's office were still on.

He was gently placing a folder on the desk, its cover embossed with five gold-leafed characters: "Extreme Game Nemesis." Hanging nearby was a newly framed pennant he had ordered overnight—red background with yellow text and flame patterns embroidered on the corners, resembling a declaration of victory. He stared at the flag for two seconds, and just as the corners of his mouth began to curl up, his phone suddenly vibrated.

A push notification popped up with the headline: "'Reverse Popularity Chart' Update: Dark Horse 'leap platform nightmare' Surges to Third Across All Platforms."

The smile on Wang Zhen's face was wiped away as if by an eraser; his fingers stiffened as he clicked into the details page.

The ranking curve climbed steeply all the way. There were no traces of purchased traffic or trending topic redirection; it was driven purely by spontaneous player propagation and a bombardment of negative reviews. The comment section was a sea of curses, but the top-rated comment read: 'This game is disgusting. I stayed up all night and tried thirty-seven times; now my head is filled with nothing but the jumping rhythm.'

He stood up abruptly, his chair sliding back and hitting the floor-to-ceiling window with a dull thud. His gaze swept over the pennant on the wall; his eyes looked as if he had been slapped in public.

“A monster propped up by a bunch of lunatics deserves to be called a game?”

He strode over, grabbed the top edge of the pennant, and yanked hard. The hooks snapped off, the wooden frame crashed to the floor, and the fabric crumpled like a dead snake. He raised his foot and ground his leather sole into it, twisting several times until the words 'Extreme Game Nemesis' were crushed into the carpet fibers.

Then he pulled out his phone and dialed a number, his voice low and urgent: “Get me the contact for the European regulatory agencies, immediately.”

The call connected, and while the other party was still exchanging pleasantries, Wang Zhen cut them off: “Skip the small talk and listen—I want to file an emergency application. Use this title: 'This Chinese Game is Systematically Abusing Adolescent Psychology.' List the keywords clearly: continuous failure inducing emotional breakdown, lack of positive feedback mechanisms, and profiting from adolescent frustration. For the data part, scrape Steam's public reviews and pick out all user comments containing 'depression,' 'wanting to smash my computer,' or 'can't sleep,' then create a word frequency analysis chart.”

He paused, walked to his desk, pulled open the bottom drawer, and tossed a stack of blank report papers onto the desk. “Find two writers with psychology backgrounds; the first draft must be out tonight. I don't need a rigorous study; what I want is a 'public risk warning' that can make it into a parliamentary discussion.”

The person on the other end asked if they should contact the media for a warm-up. Wang Zhen sneered, “No need. This kind of thing is scarier the lower the profile. Once they start investigating and find a Chinese developer behind it, public opinion will ignite on its own.”

After hanging up, he opened his mailbox and composed a new email. He addressed it to three regulatory agencies and CC'd his entire legal team. He didn't write a single word in the body, only attaching a seriously-named PDF document: 'Preliminary Assessment of Potential Psychological Hazards (Draft).'

He hovered the cursor over the 'Send' button but didn't click immediately, turning instead toward the floor-to-ceiling window.

Outside, the city lights were as usual. A few high-rises in the distance still had scattered lights; among them, the windows of an eight-story small factory building emitted flickering blue and white screen light. A silhouette could be seen sitting motionless in front of a console. That was the direction of Cheng Mo's studio, though Wang Zhen didn't know the exact location, nor did he care.

What he cared about was control.

Having been in the game industry for so many years, he believed in one iron rule: traffic can be bought, hype can be manufactured, and reputation can be manipulated, but out-of-control emotions are the most dangerous. Yet this 'leap platform nightmare' was somehow getting more popular the more players cursed it; the more negative reviews it got, the higher its ranking went, completely defying conventional operational logic.

“You think you can make a comeback relying on a bunch of enraged users?” he whispered, his finger finally pressing the send button.

The screen flashed; the email was sent.

The cold blue light reflected on his glasses, like a layer of ice covering the fire in his eyes.

He didn't sit down, standing by the window as his reflection overlapped with the city nightscape. His suit was sharp, his tie tight, and even his cufflinks were meticulous, but his breathing was half a beat faster than usual. He knew that this punch might not knock the opponent down immediately, but as long as the regulatory agencies intervened—even if only with a verbal warning—it would stall the opponent's update rhythm, financing channels, and publishing qualifications.

Capitalism never plays by fair competition; it plays by the rules themselves.

He picked up the water glass on his desk and took a sip; the warm water was bland and tasteless. When he set it down, he noticed that the residual water ring on the bottom had blurred a small patch on the report paper, perfectly covering the 'Pre' in 'Preliminary Assessment,' leaving it as 'liminary Assessment.'

He glanced at it and ignored it.

Regardless, the goal wasn't demonstration; it was labeling.

As long as the label of 'potential hazard to adolescent mental health' was attached, no amount of cleaning could wash it off later. Parents would object, platforms would throttle traffic, investors would withdraw, and streamers wouldn't dare co-promote it—even if the game itself was legal, it would be dragged to death in the quagmire of public opinion.

This was the true 'Dimensional Strike.'

He sat back in his chair and pulled up the internal monitoring backend to check the real-time data of his own major games. Everything was normal: active users were stable, payment conversion rates met targets, and the community atmosphere was controllable. Everything was within his controlled rhythm.

But as his gaze swept over the small window in the bottom right corner, he clicked open the game page he had just reported again.

The online player count for 'leap platform nightmare' was still slowly rising. The latest count of negative reviews had broken 1,200, yet the rating strangely maintained at 8.9—this was fundamentally illogical. Normally, with such a density of negative reviews, it should have dropped below 6 long ago, yet it remained steady.

Wang Zhen stared at that string of numbers, his brow furrowed into a deep scowl.

Refusing to believe it, he opened a third-party data analysis tool, entered the game ID, and ran a user profile. A prompt popped up: **Abnormal Sample: The proportion of high-stress behavior users far exceeds similar products; assessment combined with psychological intervention models is recommended.**

“Psychological intervention?” He scoffed. “This is a game, not electroconvulsive therapy.”

But he knew in his heart that this thing could no longer be measured by conventional standards. It didn't feel like an entertainment product; it felt like a large-scale social experiment, using player emotions as fuel, burning brighter and brighter.

He closed the page and tapped his fingers twice on the desk.

The first step had been taken; now it depended on whether the regulators could catch the baton. He didn't expect an immediate ban; he only sought to create enough trouble to let that developer hiding in the dilapidated factory taste what 'compliance costs' felt like.

He felt his inner suit pocket, which contained the strategic briefing sent by the board this morning. The first page read: 'Focus on independent game ecosystem trends to prevent uncontrollable variables.'

He had thought it redundant at the time. Now it seemed someone had caught the scent of the wind even earlier than him.

He reopened his email client and sent an instruction to his assistant: “Tomorrow morning at ten, convene a meeting with PR, Legal, and Marketing. Agenda: Psychological risk prevention plans for non-mainstream games. Prepare a PPT, focusing on the 'collateral impact of user emotional loss of control on corporate branding.'”

Having done all this, he finally loosened his tie and leaned back into his chair.

Silence returned to the office, save for the faint hum of the air conditioner. Only the empty frame of the pennant remained on the wall, the nails crooked like an unhealed wound.

He didn't have anyone remove it, nor did he have it fixed.

Let it stay, as a reminder—some things you think you've crushed are actually just beginning to crawl.

Meanwhile, inside the old factory, Cheng Mo was still sitting in front of the console.

In the bottom right of the screen, the minimized 'Breakdown Replay' window lay dormant, like an unexploded seed. His fingers rested on the edge of the keyboard, eyes fixed on the constantly refreshing global IP access logs. He had half a lemon-flavored lollipop in his mouth, the stick already showing several teeth marks.

He didn't know that Wang Zhen had just launched an invisible war.

Nor did he know he was standing at the center of a storm, and the eye of the storm hadn't even begun to rotate.

He only knew that dawn was coming.