48: A Dance in Shackles Worth 500,000 Yuan

The balance digits jumped to 499,632 yuan.

A second later, the log stream in the central control console refreshed automatically:

＞ [FINANCE] Account_Balance → 500,003 CNY

A low-frequency beep sounded, lasting 0.8 seconds, sounding like the system was coughing. The studio's ceiling lights brightened slightly, held for half a second, and then dimmed back, as if it were just an illusion. Cheng Mo's right hand finally moved away from the edge of the keyboard, his fingertips grazing the desk before stopping at the silver stud in his right ear. He gave it a gentle twist, removed it, and used the metal tip to tap the corner of the desk three times—tap, tap, tap. The sound wasn't loud, but the rhythm was clear, like some kind of secret code to clear a level.

This was the celebration ritual they had established three years ago: when the account first broke ten thousand, he had tapped the monitor frame three times with a soda bottle cap; when it broke a hundred thousand, Chen Hao had used a screwdriver to gouge three scratches into the computer case. Now that five hundred thousand had arrived, the action had returned to its most primitive form, which actually felt a bit tacky.

He didn't smile or speak; he just twirled the earring between his fingers, watching the reflection from the metal surface sweep over the wear marks on the keyboard's F key.

Just then, the alarm went off.

It wasn't a high-decibel blast, but rather three short "beeps" from the access control panel, with the red light flashing twice before staying on. The surveillance interface automatically popped up with a view of the hallway: a woman in a beige trench coat was swiping her card and pushing the door open. Her movements were crisp; she didn't look at the camera and walked straight inside. The system labeled her as an "unregistered visitor," but Cheng Mo recognized her as Li Wei at a glance.

Chen Hao stood up almost the instant the alarm sounded. He didn't speak or show surprise, but simply walked quickly toward the door. His pace was half a beat faster than usual, and he didn't even stop when his shirt cuff brushed against the doorframe. This didn't seem like an impromptu response, but rather as if he had been waiting for this day for a long time.

The door was pushed open, and Li Wei walked straight in, the hem of her trench coat bringing in a gust of the night's chill. She stood two meters away, not approaching the main console. Her breathing was a bit fast, and her chest was visibly heaving.

"Are you developing digital narcotics?" she began, her tone sounding like she was reading an indictment. "Fifty thousand players online for more than twenty consecutive hours, people on the forums writing suicide notes saying they want to 'die on the 17th floor,' and others live-streaming self-harming playthroughs—you call this a game?"

Cheng Mo didn't get up or argue. His left hand slid across the touchscreen, calling up a real-time data stream and projecting it onto the central large screen. The display switched to an EEG heat map, where blue-violet ripples flowed over a 3D skull model, and the prefrontal cortex area flashed at high frequency, forming a patch of light nearly as bright as an incandescent bulb.

"This isn't torture." His voice was steady as his finger tapped the screen to switch charts. "It's threshold training. These fluctuation curves show a 27% increase in prefrontal cortex activity. The dopamine release patterns are close to those of extreme sports athletes, and the norepinephrine peaks are equivalent to the ten seconds before a skydive. This isn't a breakdown; it's cognitive overclocking."

He tapped again, and the screen changed to show comparative memory test data of a tester before and after clearing the game: on the left was the initial state, with a word recall accuracy of 68%; on the right was the result after completing the seventh stage of 'leap platform nightmare,' 89%.

"What you see is pain, but what I see is neural remodeling," he said. "We're not making people addicted; we're forcing them to wake up. Scrolling through short videos is the real drug; that kind of passive-fed pleasure is what truly degenerates the brain. We—we're giving the brain squats."

Li Wei stared at the screen, her lips pressed into a thin line. She wanted to argue, but she opened her mouth several times without making a sound. She knew this data was real. Half a year ago, she had participated in the early test evaluations as a psychological consultant, and back then, she had pointed out that players would develop "reverse pleasure dependence" in high-pressure environments. But she hadn't expected them to actually follow this path to the very end.

"Then do you know how many people are suffering from insomnia, anxiety, and dissociation symptoms because of this?" she finally managed to say. "You've already crossed the safety boundary."

"Safety boundary?" Cheng Mo looked up at her for the first time. "Who defined it? The Health Commission? Or the Steam User Agreement? Human evolution was never completed within a safety zone. Ten thousand years ago, we dared to eat unknown berries; three hundred years ago, we dared to debate freedom on the guillotine. Now, we're afraid to let the brain feel a little pain?"

He paused, his finger tracing a path on the screen. "Look at this fluctuation peak; it appears after the player's third death. It doesn't look like a fear response; it's more like a neural discharge when breaking through a bottleneck. It's like when your lungs feel like they're going to explode while running—if you hold on for ten more seconds, suddenly your breathing becomes smooth. That kind of rush is bought with pain."

Li Wei fell silent. She looked at the jumping data as if she were looking at the physiological records of a group of strange creatures. She suddenly realized that she and they were no longer on the same wavelength in their language systems.

She turned and walked toward the door, her steps slower than when she had entered. When her hand touched the doorknob, she paused for a moment but didn't look back.

"I just... don't want you to destroy yourselves." Her voice was so soft it was almost inaudible.

The door closed and locked automatically. Silence returned to the room, save for the low hum of the server cabinet fans, their frequency steady at 1,200 revolutions per minute.

A few seconds later, Chen Hao brought a cup of black coffee from the coffee machine and set it down by Cheng Mo's hand. The bottom of the cup made a soft "clack" against the desk, and steam rose, twisting into the shape of thin snakes under the cold light of the screen.

"She's just worried we're becoming obsessed," Chen Hao said, his tone casual, as if reporting on server load.

Cheng Mo stared at the data stream and didn't touch the coffee. After a moment, he nodded. "I know."

Neither of them looked at the other. Cheng Mo's right hand slowly moved to the rim of the cup, gripping the warm ceramic, while his left hand remained on the edge of the keyboard, his thumb unconsciously rubbing the indentation on the space bar. Chen Hao stood two meters behind and to the side, hands shoved into his cargo pant pockets. The reflection on his glasses obscured his eyes, but there was a very slight relaxation at the corners of his mouth, as if a string that had been taut all day had finally loosened by half a turn.

On the left screen of the main console, the financial flow chart continued to jump: 500,003 → 500,017 → 500,029... The growth rate was slowing down, but it was still climbing. A small window on the right showed the number of players online stabilized at over 86,000, with 37,000 of them in the 17th-floor maze area. On the heat map, that area was red to the point of being black.

Cheng Mo took a sip of coffee, the bitterness suppressing the dryness in his throat. He called up the real-time behavior log of an anonymous player: forty-three consecutive attempts at fork B-7, with the average interval between deaths shortening by 1.2 seconds each time. The trajectory of the final jump was already close to the optimal solution.

"Someone's about to clear it," he said.

Chen Hao didn't respond; he just pulled his phone from his pocket to check the time. Real-world time 02:19:11. System time was still seventeen minutes fast.

Cheng Mo put the cup back in its original place, pressing exactly onto the edge of the previous dried water stain. The circular mark from the bottom of the cup covered the end of a bracket, like putting a period at the end of a sentence.

He put his hands back on the keyboard, his knuckles turning slightly white. The screen reflected his messy stubble and dark circles—the part of his skin he called his "Hardcore Player Medal," which looked grayish-blue under the cold light.

"The harder they curse us, the more it proves we're on the right track," he said.

Chen Hao pulled a pen from his pocket and wrote a line of text in his pocket notebook, then immediately tore the paper out, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it into the trash can. As the paper ball hit the ground and rolled half a turn, a corner of the handwriting was revealed: "Risk value has not exceeded the threshold; the trust chain remains intact."

Cheng Mo didn't look at the paper. He was focused entirely on the central large screen, where a new prompt was popping up:

＞ [USER_ACTIVITY] Player_ID: #A7X9K2

＞ Event: First_Clear_of_Layer 17_Fork_B7

＞ Time: 02:19:33

＞ Achievement_Unlocked: "Hell's Courier"

The system automatically saved a screenshot of the moment the player cleared the level: the character was suspended in mid-air with arms outstretched against a backdrop of the collapsing maze structure. A golden achievement badge popped up in the corner of the UI, the title flashing for three seconds before freezing.

Cheng Mo's right index finger hovered over the Enter key, ready to input a new observation log. Chen Hao also stepped half a pace closer, staring at that ID. The reflection on his glasses mirrored a series of rapidly scrolling predictive model parameters.

In the central area of the main console, the cursor was stationary.

The fund balance jumped to 500,041 yuan.

The hum of the fans remained unchanged.

The steam from the coffee was nearly gone.