6: The seven-day countdown to death

Cheng Mo's finger was still resting on the Enter key. The seven words "Zone_Comfort Deleted" on the wall emitted a faint heat as if they had been seared by a branding iron. Just as he was about to say something, the screen suddenly went black.

It wasn't the kind of black from a power outage.

The entire interface was covered in blood-red, and text exploded from the center:

[Release your first game within seven days, or developer privileges will be revoked]

The font was unadorned and lacked punctuation, scrolling line after line as if the system were mechanically copying the same sentence. Cheng Mo blinked, thinking his eyes were playing tricks on him. He rubbed the silver stud in his right ear and pressed the restart button. The screen flickered, but the red text remained.

Chen Hao looked up. "What's wrong?"

"You didn't see this?"

"See what? Everything's normal on my end."

Cheng Mo grabbed the test machine and rushed over, shoving the screen in front of Chen Hao's eyes. Chen Hao adjusted his glasses, looked for three seconds, and shook his head. "It's just a white screen launcher, nothing else."

"Impossible!" Cheng Mo pointed at the line of red text. "It's right there! It won't go away!"

Chen Hao pulled up the backend logs and scrolled through them for thirty seconds, his frown deepening. "In the system logs... there's no such prompt at all. No abnormal processes are occupying the UI layer either. What you're seeing isn't in the execution logic."

Cheng Mo took a step back. Cold sweat slid down his neck.

This wasn't a bug.

It was a death notice meant for him alone.

He looked down at the instant noodle bowl, which still had half a mouthful of braised beef noodles left. He suddenly raised his hand and smashed the bowl onto the floor.

Porcelain shards and soup splashed everywhere. Noodles hung from the feet of the server rack, and oil spots landed on the printed code.

"Then it's not a countdown," he said. "It's a seal. We only have seven days."

Chen Hao didn't move. He simply took out his phone, opened the stopwatch, and connected six devices to synchronize the time. Then he looked up. "All external time sources are normal. Does your 'countdown' have a specific value?"

Cheng Mo looked at the screen. The red text had vanished, replaced by a small line of text in the corner:

[Time Remaining: 6 days 23 hours 58 minutes 17 seconds]

The numbers dropped second by second, without frame skipping or delay.

"It's moving," Cheng Mo said. "And it's only showing it to me."

Chen Hao stood up and walked to the old wall clock on the wall. It was supposed to be dead; its metal casing was covered in dust, and the hands were stuck at 3:17. It was said to be a trophy taken from an abandoned teaching building. But now, the second hand was moving.

But it wasn't moving clockwise.

It was moving backward.

Tick-tock, tick-tock—with every sound, Cheng Mo's heartbeat would follow. He walked over and placed his hand on the clock face. It was ice-cold. There was no battery compartment, no wires; the back was completely empty.

"This thing was broken long ago," Chen Hao said. "I tested it last week; the internal gears were jammed, and the insulation layer of the electromagnetic coil was ninety percent aged."

"But now it's counting down."

"It's not just counting down." Chen Hao took out an oscilloscope probe and pressed it against the inside of the clock casing. "It's receiving a pulse signal. The frequency is consistent with the server's clock frequency. It's being sent from our side."

Cheng Mo whipped his head around to look at the host machine. The fan speed was at its limit, and the noise was at least two levels higher than before. He remembered that he hadn't touched the power management settings.

"Did you do this?" he asked the system.

Naturally, no one answered.

But he knew the answer.

This place was starting to listen to the system.

He turned and walked to the console, his fingers tapping the keyboard as he prepared to create a new project folder. Just as the input box popped up, the screen darkened again.

[Time Remaining: 6 days 23 hours 57 minutes 03 seconds]

A low-frequency hum sounded, like someone grinding your skull with sandpaper. Cheng Mo's temples throbbed, and brief shadows appeared at the edges of his vision. He bit the tip of his tongue, the taste of blood clearing his mind.

The folder was created. The name was "leap platform nightmare".

The moment the input was complete, the F1 key on the keyboard popped up automatically, as if it had been pressed hard. Cheng Mo looked down, took off his silver stud, and gently placed it on the F1 key.

This was a habit from when he was writing his graduation project in university. He did this before every all-nighter. He called it "sacrificing to the keyboard."

Chen Hao looked at him. "If you really believe in this metaphysics, you might as well go to a temple to burn incense."

"It's not that I believe in it." Cheng Mo sat back in his chair. "I'm telling the system—I'm playing for real now."

He opened the voice memo and pressed record.

"First development rule: No sleeping for more than three hours. Whoever breaks the rule is out."

Chen Hao closed his laptop and unplugged all the USB cables for the external alarms. "I've already disconnected all scheduled reminders."

"Second rule: Push the server load to its limit. I don't need stability; I want every bit of computing power squeezed out."

Chen Hao didn't speak; he opened the server panel and switched the resource scheduling mode from "Balanced" to "Berserk". The roar of the fans instantly surged, like the howl of a beast driven into a corner. The host machine's casing began to heat up, and the temperature monitor showed it had reached 68 degrees.

"Add another set of cooling fans," Cheng Mo said. "If that's not enough, use an industrial blower."

"You'll burn the motherboard."

"Then get a new one. The money given by the system will increase anyway."

"Provided that someone curses you."

"There will be soon," Cheng Mo sneered. "As long as we make something that makes them want to uninstall it the first second they open it."

He picked up a pen and wrote three characters on the wall: D-7.

The pen tip scraped across the wall, making a harsh sound. He wrote with so much force that the pen refill snapped, and a fragment pricked his index finger. A bead of blood emerged; he didn't wipe it away, letting it drip at the end of the "7" like an unfinished period.

Chen Hao stared at the drop of blood for a second before turning to connect the power cables. He plugged all six test machines into independent power supplies, each connected to a different network channel. One used 4G, one used WiFi, one connected to a satellite hotspot, and three were connected to modified Raspberry Pi repeaters.

"How many types of user environments are you going to simulate?"

"Every scenario that could possibly crash," Chen Hao said. "Low-end machines, weak networks, touch failure, high-frequency accidental touches. I want to know at what point players are most likely to explode."

"Then add another rule," Cheng Mo said. "No tutorials."

"No tutorials?"

"We'll make them," Cheng Mo smiled. "But we'll teach them the wrong operations. Once they develop muscle memory, we'll change the mechanics."

Chen Hao nodded and added a new item to the testing checklist: "False Teaching Module, Phase One Behavioral Induction."

Just as he finished speaking, the wall clock gave a "tick," and the second hand jumped back another notch.

Cheng Mo looked up.

The countdown numbers changed: [6 days 23 hours 55 minutes 11 seconds]

He discovered one thing—every time he made a key decision, time would decrease faster.

It wasn't natural passage.

It was being consumed.

"This system doesn't want us to take our time," he said. "It's pushing us to go mad."

"Then let's show it how mad we can be." Chen Hao typed the final line of command. "Calculation priority locked to maximum. Memory pool cleared, cache direct write, all security checks disabled. Now, if this machine takes even another 10% load, it will trigger overheat protection and shut down automatically."

"Don't let it shut down." Cheng Mo stared at the screen. "Make it hold on. Even if it starts smoking, it has to finish running this version."

"Can you guarantee you'll make something that can go live before it burns?"

"I can't," Cheng Mo picked up another pen and started spinning it. "But I can guarantee that the first person who opens the game will want to smash their phone."

He spun it too fast; the pen slipped and hit the spacebar on the keyboard.

The screen flickered.

[Warning: Core process occupancy 97%, temperature critical]

The red text popped up for three seconds before automatically disappearing.

Cheng Mo didn't stop. He continued spinning the pen until the tip snapped and the metal head flew off, hitting the silver stud with a crisp clang.

Chen Hao glanced at him. "Do you plan to keep wasting away like this?"

"What else?" Cheng Mo threw the broken pen into the trash can. "If we can't hand something over in seven days, we'll have nothing left. We won't even have a chance to start over."

"Then you'd better survive until the seventh day first."

"I don't want to live that long." Cheng Mo stared at the countdown. "I want to make a game that makes the whole world curse before I die."

He stood up, walked to the host machine, and placed his hand on the scalding chassis. Heat transferred through his palm, like touching a heart that was about to burst.

"Listen," he said to the air. "You want to seal me? Fine. But in these seven days, I'll show you what true hell development mode looks like."

Chen Hao sat back in his position, hands on the keyboard.

Six phones lit up simultaneously, entering standby mode.

The wall clock moved in reverse, every backward tick of the second hand synchronized with the roar of the fans.

Cheng Mo's shadow was elongated by the blue light, cast onto the wall that read "Zone_Comfort Deleted". He whispered:

"Come on, let's see what kind of hell can be forged in seven days."