284: Chapter 284 The Colors of Stars

Lin Que clicked on the image and double-clicked to enlarge it.

This was a background traffic monitoring report for Hong Guo Net from the past two days.

The red line graph plummeted toward the axis without any buffer.

Daily active users had plummeted by nearly forty percent.

The conversion rate was even more abysmal, directly cut in half.

What terrified the website operations the most was the average user reading time,

which had shrunk from the original two and a half hours to less than thirty minutes.

This cliff-like drop was nothing short of a disaster for any web novel platform that relied on traffic and retention time.

Hong Hu's messages were still popping out frantically.

"Master Dream Weaver! Have you seen it? The sky is falling on the web novel circle!"

"That Jian Shen's 0.1 yuan per thousand words is simply leaving no way out for his peers!"

"It's not just our Hong Guo Net; our neighbor Zhongdian Network also collapsed this morning."

"Several of their Platinum authors were grumbling in the group, saying that new subscriptions weren't even half of the average from the previous fourteen days."

Hong Hu's words were filled with extreme anxiety.

As one of the giants in the web novel world, although Hong Guo Net focused on a free-plus-ads model, it couldn't withstand this tsunami-like loss of traffic.

"Background data shows that many of our site's old readers aren't even doing their check-in tasks anymore."

"The comment sections are all talking about 'ordinary world,' saying that after reading about Sun Shaoping eating black flour buns,"

"watching the system novels on our site that start with a hundred million reward feels like chewing wax!"

"It's not just the readers; even the authors on our site are going crazy!"

Hong Hu sent a screenshot of the backend, the screen filled with eye-stabbing leave of absence notes.

"Look! Several authors with hundreds of thousands of readers stopped updating collectively today. I asked in the group, and they've all run off to join the excitement at New Tide!"

"And that spark section New Tide is about to launch. I have a hunch this is definitely a big move by New Tide!"

Hong Hu threw out her conspiracy theory.

"They're using Spark to dig up the foundations of our mid-to-low-tier authors. They want to use the name of righteousness to unify the web novel and physical book markets!"

"Master Dream Weaver, with a traditional titan like Jian Shen doing low-priced serializations, if we don't fight back, the entire web novel world will be crushed by them."

"Don't you have even a hint of a sense of crisis?"

Lin Que sat in his chair,

his gaze sweeping over the dense lines of text in the chat box, where even the punctuation marks seemed to radiate anxiety.

His fingertip tapped the rim of his cup, using the action of drinking water to hide the corners of his mouth that couldn't help but twitch.

This drama of fighting oneself was indeed somewhat absurd.

Lin Que set down his water cup and placed both hands on the keyboard.

As Hell Dream Weaver, he had to stabilize the morale of Hong Guo Net.

He typed out a calm and indifferent reply:

"It's good to have flowers blooming everywhere."

After a pause, he added another sentence:

"Furthermore, Jian Shen writes about the soil, while I write about the abyss. The audiences are different, so there's no need to be overly nervous. Once they've seen enough, they'll naturally come back."

Hong Guo Net headquarters, Editor-in-Chief's office.

Hong Hu sat in front of the computer, clutching her hair tightly, her entire body in a highly tense state.

When she heard the notification sound for her Special Follow contact, she immediately lunged for the mouse.

On the screen, Dream Weaver's two extremely brief replies lay quietly in the chat box.

"Soil... Abyss..."

She froze, repeatedly mulling over the words "soil" and "abyss."

Her anxious heartbeat hadn't fully calmed down, but a new line of thought emerged in her mind.

She realized that

Dream Weaver wasn't ignoring the crisis but had accurately seen the core differences between the two tracks.

This composure of remaining unfazed even as Mount Tai collapsed before him

was in itself a powerful force capable of stabilizing the author and reader base.

The reverence in Hong Hu's eyes grew even stronger. She immediately sat up straight and her hands flew across the keyboard.

"Rest assured, Master Dream Weaver! Hong Guo Net will do its utmost to hold its ground and not fall into disarray. We will fully cooperate with your rhythm!"

Lin Que had just finished his conversation with Hong Hu when his phone screen on the desk lit up.

Accompanied by a cheerful ringtone, his father, Lin Jianguo, sent a video call request.

Lin Que pressed the answer button.

The image shook for a moment, focusing on the glass counter of the old stationery shop outside the residential compound.

"Son, look at this. Will it work?"

Lin Jianguo's loud voice came through the speaker.

He brought the camera closer, filming a stack of thick kraft paper hardbound notebooks.

The covers were printed with peony patterns that felt very nostalgic.

"This paper is thick; the ink won't bleed when you write with a fountain pen. I just tried it, and the feel is great. I grabbed ten of them at once!"

Old Lin neatly stacked the notebooks on the counter, his spirited energy

making him look exactly as he did back when he received the Model Worker award at the factory.

Lin Que watched his father's excited appearance on the screen and nodded with a smile:

"Very good, you have the air of an old writer now. Dad, are you planning to write a million-word masterpiece right away?"

Lin Jianguo moved the phone a bit further away and asked in a lowered voice:

"Son, let me ask you something serious."

"Do you intellectuals always leave two spaces at the beginning of every paragraph when you write?"

"And, if I write about our workshop director from back then, can I use his real name?"

"He docked my bonuses plenty of times back then; I have to make sure he's well-recorded in the book."

Lin Que suppressed his laughter and patiently began to guide him.

"Leaving two spaces is the rule; it makes the layout look neat and isn't tiring for readers."

"As for the name, it's best to use a pseudonym. After all, it's going to be posted online. If an acquaintance recognizes him, it wouldn't be good if they caused trouble for you."

"You could call him Wang Datou, Li Tiezhu, or something like that—the more down-to-earth, the better."

Lin Jianguo nodded repeatedly on the other end of the screen.

"Makes sense! You really know your stuff. Alright, I won't talk to you anymore; I'm going to pay and head home. Since I'm feeling it today, I'll write two thousand words before lunch!"

The video hung up, and Lin Que looked at the darkened screen, a wave of warmth rising in his heart.

Giving ordinary people an outlet for expression was exactly his original intention for creating the spark section.

The studio returned to silence.

Lin Que put away his gentle expression and turned his gaze back to the computer screen.

Hong Guo Net's traffic drop was indeed ugly.

Since the web novel circle's morale was currently low, being suffocated by 'ordinary world,'

then as Hell Dream Weaver, it was time for him to add some fuel to this market.

He opened a folder deep within his computer.

Inside lay documents he had already written.

During this time, besides discussing the creation of the spark section and the Ordinary Literature Foundation with Wang De'an,

he had hardly rested, having already typed out this highly representative chapter of the cthulhu mythos.

Lin Que looked at the text in the document.

A meteorite falling on a farm brought a strange color that did not belong to the Earth's spectrum.

It was silent, yet it greedily sucked the life force of all surrounding living things like a sponge.

Unlike the oppressive bloodline alienation of 'the shadow over innsmouth,' the new chapter brought another form of extreme despair.

There were no specific monsters, no bloody massacres.

Trees bore fruitful yet poisonous crops, animals mutated, and humans drifted toward madness and annihilation without even realizing it.

This was a fear that transcended the physical level, a pure reverence for the unknown universe.

That kind of mental pollution—watching the surrounding plants, animals, and even loved ones gradually alienate and wither with nowhere to run—

would definitely bring a brand-new sensory bombardment to the readers currently immersed in the hardships of the Loess Plateau.

Lin Que skillfully logged into the Hong Guo Net author backend.

He dragged all the chapters, one by one, into the upload box.

He set the publishing status.

The mouse moved slightly and clicked.

A green notification box saying "Published Successfully" popped up in the center of the screen.

At the moment this story, filled with indescribable colors, connected to the internet.

At the same time,

in Mo City, the northernmost frigid city of Huaxia.

Dan Yi sat in a dim room, staring blankly at the mirror.

The boy in the mirror had deep features, and his heterochromatic pupils seemed covered in a thick, inseparable mist.

Just then, the phone screen beside him suddenly lit up,

and a notification for a Special Follow contact pushed its way arrogantly into his sight; the familiar black icon looked like an eye from the abyss.

【The author you follow, 'Hell Dream Weaver,' has published a new chapter of 'cthulhu mythos'—'the colour out of space.' Come and check it out!】

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