560: Chapter 560 The Favors of the Old Order

The third floor of the China Writers Association headquarters, the Network Data Monitoring Center.

From the outside, this office didn't look like anything special.

Grey anti-static flooring, with several rows of servers embedded in the walls emitting a low-frequency hum.

At this moment, on the three-meter main screen facing the door, dense streams of data were refreshing three times per second.

He Yuanda stood in front of the main screen, the marker between his fingers having been uncapped and recapped a dozen times.

His shirt collar was unbuttoned, and a thin layer of sweat glistened on his forehead.

From two in the afternoon until now, the risk control team had been reviewing for five consecutive hours.

He Yuanda hadn't taken a drink of water, staring at those four IP segments and verifying them repeatedly, terrified that one of the links might break.

Zhou Wenyuan sat at the head of the long table, a thermos cup placed at his side, the lid not screwed on tight.

His gaze remained fixed on the big screen, his expression calm.

He Yuanda swallowed, placing the marker on the table.

"Vice Chairman Zhou, the risk control team has just finished the latest round of verification."

Zhou Wenyuan's gaze shifted away from the screen.

The main screen was split into left and right columns.

"three or two things in jincheng" was on the left, "qin opera" on the right.

Once the two curves appeared, the disparity was glaring.

He Yuanda clicked on the left column first.

"Shen Jiangping posted a creative discussion this morning, and Huanyu Publishing Group pushed it simultaneously on their official account."

"Seven minutes after the creative discussion was posted, the entrance to 'three or two things in jincheng' was pried open again, and its popularity briefly surged back into the top ten."

He pointed at the upward-sloping curve:

"Looking at this line alone, the creative discussion is indeed effective."

Zhou Wenyuan didn't speak, just picked up the thermos and gently blew on the hot steam at the mouth of the cup.

He Yuanda paused for two seconds, then moved the cursor to another curve below the left column.

The trend of this line was the exact opposite of the one above.

"But the problem lies here."

He Yuanda's voice lowered by half a degree.

"Effective reading completion rate."

He magnified the numbers.

"After the bot accounts stopped operating yesterday afternoon, Shen Jiangping's completion rate continued to decline."

"But after the creative discussion was launched today, a large number of new readers flooded into the main text."

He raised the tip of his pen, pointing into the air toward the plummeting curve.

"The exit point for this batch of readers is highly concentrated between the third and fourth chapters, with an average dwell time of eleven minutes."

"The completion rate dropped from 33% to 26.8%."

"Every time the creative discussion brings in a new batch of readers, the main text loses another batch."

He Yuanda turned around to look at Zhou Wenyuan.

"It's still dropping."

Zhou Wenyuan set down the thermos.

"How much has it dropped?"

"As of the last refresh, it has fallen to 25.1%."

He Yuanda's voice was taut.

"And it's not a slow decline; it's a stepped plummet."

"Every time a new batch of readers floods in, the exit peak for the third and fourth chapters piles up even higher."

"The more readers the creative discussion brings in, the harder the completion rate gets hammered."

The two technicians at the control console stopped at the same time, making the low hum of the servers seem especially clear.

He Yuanda didn't give Zhou Wenyuan too much time to digest this, directly switching the cursor to the right column.

"Look over here."

The data panel for "qin opera" lit up.

Two curves appeared side by side in the center of the big screen.

On the left, "three or two things in jincheng"—the click-through curve went up, the completion rate curve went down, looking like an open pair of scissors.

On the right, "qin opera"—the two curves were almost stuck together, climbing steadily toward the upper right.

He Yuanda used his marker to draw a circle around the data in the right column.

"'qin opera' is basically running naked."

"Yet, the readers called to the doorstep by Dream Weaver were all retained by the main text in the end."

"Effective reading completion rate: 76.3%."

"Average dwell time: 58 minutes."

"Collection conversion rate: 24.1%."

"All three core indicators are rising continuously, without exception."

He Yuanda placed the two sets of numbers on the same line, adjusting the font size to the maximum.

Completion rate comparison: 25.1% versus 76.3%.

This gap, displayed on the big screen, made one's eyes ache.

Zhou Wenyuan looked at those two numbers, his fingers tapping lightly on the thermos.

"What about real interaction?"

He Yuanda immediately switched to the second panel; that column of data had long been marked in red by the risk control team.

"The real interaction ratio for 'qin opera' has already exceeded 85%."

"The number of long reviews has risen from 47 at noon today to 312 now."

"The keywords in reader discussions are concentrated on core imagery from the main text, such as 'Old Zhao,' 'stone tablet,' 'opera tune,' and 'barbed wire.'"

"Conversely, look at 'three or two things in jincheng.'"

He Yuanda opened the comment section on the left.

"In the last two hours, 43% of the high-credibility comments have pointed to the same thing."

"If this ratio continues to rise, the judge's backend will list it as major reading feedback."

He clicked on the cluster label.

A line of bold red text popped up on the screen:

"Main clustering direction: Discrepancy between creative discussion and main text perception"

He Yuanda read out a few comments marked as high-credibility samples by the system.

"Feels like the creative discussion is better written than the main text."

"After finishing the first four chapters, I feel the interview has more power than the novel."

"That Shen Jiangping in the creative discussion is more vivid than the characters in the novel."

"Was tricked in by the creative discussion, only to find the main text isn't as good as the interview."

...

He Yuanda closed the comment clustering chart and turned to face Zhou Wenyuan.

"Vice Chairman Zhou, once this clustering direction gains momentum, the system will automatically classify it as the work's major reading feedback."

"By then, when the judges check the data in the backend, this set of conclusions will be the first thing they see."

Zhou Wenyuan didn't speak immediately.

He tightened the lid of his thermos, placed it in the center of the table, and let his fingers rest on the cup for two seconds.

"What about Huanyu Publishing Group?"

This was the question He Yuanda had been waiting for.

He walked quickly to the console and typed a string of commands on the keyboard.

The screen on the big display switched.

A complete backend log was brought up.

Once the backend log opened, timestamps, device fingerprints, IP attribution, and behavioral paths were all arranged in four columns.

Each column could be traced individually.

He Yuanda pointed at the title bar at the top of the screen.

"This is the abnormal behavior log our technical team extracted from the Kunpeng Award system's risk control layer."

He flipped down a page.

"From twelve noon to four in the afternoon, 3,842 accounts swarmed into the Program work area to post negative comments."

"Time, path, and phrasing all overlap."

"The behavioral characteristics of these accounts are highly consistent: registration time concentrated within three months, reading paths extremely short."

"The repetition rate of the comment phrasing exceeds seventy percent, and the posting intervals show a regular distribution."

He Yuanda flipped another page.

"Device fingerprint backtracking shows that over sixty percent of these accounts are concentrated within four IP segments. We've done an attribution comparison."

He paused.

"All four IP segments point to a technical service company under Huanyu Publishing Group."

Zhou Wenyuan looked up.

He Yuanda withdrew his hand from the keyboard, his voice lowering.

"Vice Chairman Zhou, the evidence chain is now complete."

"Device fingerprints, IP attribution, behavior clustering, phrasing comparison—all four lines match up."

"This isn't a scattered skirmish; it's an organized, premeditated matrix operation."

He paused, licking his dry lips.

"But..."

He Yuanda's speaking speed slowed down.

"Huanyu Publishing Group, you know how they are."

He didn't spell it out, just shifted his gaze from the screen and landed it on Zhou Wenyuan's face.

"That old line behind them—pulling it out will alarm many people."

He Yuanda gripped the marker tightly in his palm.

"What Huanyu Publishing Group has done, to put it mildly, is unfair competition; to put it bluntly, it is destroying the fairness of a national-level literary award."

"But if our Technical Department takes direct action to ban them, it won't just be a matter of a few accounts."

"If this blade falls, it won't just hit a few accounts."

"Huanyu Publishing Group, and those silent gazes in the old order, will all be alarmed."

He Yuanda stopped there.

He looked at Zhou Wenyuan.

"Does the Technical Department need to intervene? I am waiting for your decision."