56: An unexpected success of reverse public relations

At 2:17 AM, Cheng Mo's fingers were still hovering over the keyboard. The Enter key felt like a piece of red-hot iron, so hot he didn't dare press it down. The unfinished conditional statement on the screen—'if (parental_input == false && child_stress_level > threshold)'—had been stuck there for nearly twenty minutes, the cursor blinking as if in a sneer.

He could still hear the last sentence from his headphones echoing in his mind: 'If you have ever been misunderstood, please persevere just once.'

Persevere? He twitched the corner of his mouth, his hoodie's hood sliding down to cover half his face. That kid Steel Coin spoke quite fiercely, but the reality was that the livestream was off, the bullet comments had finished their insults, and the popularity was dropping faster than a test server crash. No one believed them. They didn't plan to believe at all.

He leaned back into his chair, his backpack pressing uncomfortably against his lower back. The city lights outside the window were still dense and packed, like a map that would never finish loading. This map didn't lack players; it lacked people willing to click on the instruction manual.

He twirled a pen in his right hand, the tip scraping across the desk with a soft 'zzt' sound. He had twirled it for an unknown number of rotations, from before the livestream started until it ended, until the pen cap loosened and popped off with a 'snap,' rolling under the monitor and out of sight.

He didn't go to pick it up.

Just then, a golden badge animation suddenly floated up in the bottom right corner of the screen. There was no sound effect, no vibration alert, only a line of small text quietly appearing:

【Reverse PR Master Lv.1】 unlocked! Current public opinion negative feedback conversion rate +3%

Three seconds later, it disappeared automatically.

Cheng Mo froze.

He blinked, thinking he was hallucinating from staying up too late. He waited another five seconds, but the system gave no further prompts, and the background logs showed no updated records. But he remembered clearly—that wasn't a UI special effect or a test pop-up; it was the standard notification format of the system's native interface.

He suddenly sat up straight, his eyes beneath the dark circles flashing with sudden light.

“The harder they curse... the more useful it is instead?” he repeated in a low voice, his voice as dry as a jammed old-fashioned tape recorder.

His finger finally fell, typing out a command: `check_system_status("public_opinion")`

The returned result had only two fields:

- Negative Emotion Absorption Efficiency: Activated

- Recommended Weight Gain Coefficient: +0.03 (Cumulative)

He stared at that string of numbers for a full half-minute, then suddenly let out a laugh, short and sharp like a sneeze.

“So the more you say I'm putting on a show, trying to whitewash myself, or being controlling...” As he spoke, he pulled up the background data panel and quickly filtered user feedback from the last twelve hours, “...the more the system treats me as a 'real signal'?”

Lines of negative reviews slid across the screen:

“Might as well rename it 'Survival Instinct Tester'”

“Is the next step developing an 'Eating Reminder'?”

“The scripted actors were too lazy to even fill the bookshelf properly.”

He looked through them one by one, his brow furrowing deeper, yet the corners of his mouth slowly curled upward. It wasn't a cold smile or mockery, but a kind of... excitement that only comes when discovering a loophole.

“It turns out we don't have to convince them,” he murmured. “We don't need to convince them at all.”

He threw the pen with the broken tip into the trash can with a crisp 'clatter.' Then he opened a new blank document, typing a minimalist title:

**Real Action List**

The cursor blinked for a moment, and the first line of text jumped out:

No press conferences, no promotional videos, no KOL endorsements.

He paused for a moment and continued typing:

Let the functions speak for themselves.

Let the skeptics see with their own eyes what a family has changed because of this thing.

Reaching this point, he stopped, his right hand unconsciously touching the silver stud in his right ear, his fingertip meeting a bit of chill.

He knew what the public thought. They felt this was a new trick from capital, a death rattle after a reputation collapse, high-level rhetoric packaging family affection as a product. So he couldn't reason with them, nor could he issue a statement.

He had to let people see it with their own eyes.

For example, a father who receives a notification in the dead of night that his child has cleared the fifteenth floor, hesitates for three seconds before clicking 'reply,' and finds a bowl of prepared noodles on his son's desk the next morning.

For example, a mother who, through the 'Challenge Peak Alert,' realizes for the first time that her daughter isn't skipping class to play games, but is repeatedly practicing a puzzle task that requires three hundred consecutive successful operations.

These things won't make the trending searches, nor will they be edited into viral short videos. But as long as one real case is captured, shared, and seen by another parent currently angrily holding a banner—that will be enough.

What the system wants isn't praise, but real adversarial signals. The more violent the questioning, the more it activates its push mechanism. So he doesn't need to fight back, nor does he need to explain.

He only needs to do one thing: put the most real things out there, and then wait for those insults to, in turn, push him in front of more people.

He closed his laptop and looked out the window. A sliver of grayish-white had appeared on the horizon, as if the map was finally starting to load a new area. The studio was so quiet he could hear the low hum of the computer fans and the sound of his own breathing.

He stood up, walked to the wall, and tore off a sticky note that had been there for a long time. It said 'Estimated Parent Binding Success Rate,' and had been crossed out three times. He crumpled it into a ball and threw it accurately into the trash can, right on top of the broken pen.

Then he returned to the main console, restarted the machine, opened the project folder, and found the source code path for 'BP_Monitor_Prototype.'

The cursor stopped after the last unfinished conditional statement.

He typed:

```python

else:

trigger_hidden_event("heartbeat_heard")

```

Save, submit.

He knew that this line of code wouldn't change anything immediately. It wouldn't turn the next livestream around, nor would it stop more mockery tomorrow. But it would exist, like a seed buried in the soil, waiting to break through the ground after a heavy rain.

He took off his hoodie's hood, ran a hand through his messy hair, and slowly let out a breath.

Since you don't believe in sincerity, then I'll use facts to smash you awake.

The game controller lay quietly on the desk, the joystick tilted slightly to the left, as if it had just executed a limit dodge.