Chapter 110 The protection fee business is booming; the whole city is coming to Lin Ye for help.

Less than two days after the shopping mall incident, Que De Studio's consultation hotline was ringing off the hook.

Su Qinghan's phone started ringing at 7:00 AM and didn't stop until 11:00 PM; she had to charge it twice in between. The unread messages in the official account's backend had piled up to thousands, taking several seconds just to load the page. The young receptionist's voice was already hoarse. Fatty Wang temporarily pulled three players from the guild to help answer phones, but after a single day, all three collectively applied to go back to the game to clear dungeons, saying that answering calls was more exhausting than raiding a World BOSS.

The content of the calls was varied, but they all boiled down to one thing—they had heard that they could handle those inexplicable, strange occurrences. Someone said their home refrigerator opened its door three times in the middle of the night, and every time they opened it, they found the eggs inside neatly arranged on the floor in a triangle. Someone said their company elevator had stopped at the 12th floor every day since last week, and when the doors opened, there was just a wall. Someone said that scratching sounds of metal came from their residential complex's garage in the middle of the night; the property management checked the surveillance and saw nothing, but every car's hood had a shallow scratch.

The Nancheng Wanda incident hit the local trending topics that same day. Although the official report only stated that a malfunction in the mall's equipment caused abnormal lighting, many of the hundreds of customers present had seen the row of metal seats in the fourth-floor waiting area float up to the ceiling. A self-media blogger who witnessed it on the fourth floor wrote the entire process into a post and published it on a social platform, accompanied by descriptions of gunshots, roars, and dark purple light. The article concluded with: "A young man running a studio arrived and tore a monster apart with his bare hands."

This post was shared over 100,000 times that day, and the comment section was filled with question marks. Some asked what the monster looked like, some said the blogger played too many games, and some posted the business card of Que De Studio in the comments, saying, "This is the place that cured the square-dancing aunties in my neighborhood." After connecting the two events, Que De Studio's official account gained 200,000 followers overnight. The backend received tens of thousands of private messages, asking about all sorts of things, but the hundreds at the very top were all the same sentence: "Can we still buy that protection fee package?"

Lin Ye called everyone for a short meeting the next morning. Fatty Wang brought up a box of Red Bull, saying he'd swiped it from the front desk's phone-answering area. Su Qinghan set her phone on a stand and cast it to the TV wall; the real-time scrolling order list was as dense as the big screen at a train station during the Spring Festival travel rush. Ghost projected the latest version of the business data statistics on the side. The average daily orders for the real-life protection fee package were over 30 last Sunday, but two days after the Nancheng Wanda incident, it had skyrocketed to over 200 orders per day, and it was still accelerating.

"The premium package, which costs 10,000 yuan per order, has already been booked nearly 100 times," Su Qinghan said, pulling up and enlarging the data. "The orders are no longer just from this city. People from two neighboring prefecture-level cities specifically drove over to consult in person. There are also a few from other provinces who paid directly via the corporate WeChat, noting that they would cover the travel expenses themselves and asking if it could be expedited."

Fatty Wang commented from the side: "Our business is even more intense than collecting protection fees in the game. Even the big spenders on the Korean Server aren't as eager to pay as this group of ordinary people pushed to the edge by real-life messes."

Lin Ye stood up and walked to the TV wall, patted the scrolling order number on the screen, and said: "Since the demand is this high, don't take them one by one. Let's offer packages."

Su Qinghan looked up at him, pen already in hand.

"Three tiers. The personal version is 999 yuan per year, covering anti-bullying, anti-scam, anti-noise nuisance, and general electronic equipment troubleshooting. The family version is 2,999 yuan per year, adding door-to-door anti-scam training for the elderly and whole-house abnormal energy hazard inspection; you can report if you have a disobedient refrigerator or strange garage scratches. The enterprise version is 9,999 yuan per year, covering workplace bullying, malicious commercial competition, wage arrears, plus abnormal event detection and emergency response for the entire office building."

He paused and added: "For the abnormal event detection item in all packages, have Ghost set up an automatic identification model in the backend. Let the machine screen them first; only push the ones that remain and require my personal attention to me. Otherwise, I won't be able to finish processing over 200 orders a day even if I don't sleep for 24 hours."

Ghost nodded, already writing the code for the product page. He added a remarks column after each package, requiring users to fill in specific demands and the corresponding responsible department when placing an order, while simultaneously popping up an electronic authorization form—authorizing the studio to synchronize abnormal energy monitoring data with the Guardian Alliance in real-time, with the scope of authorization limited to Abyss energy-related abnormal events.

The new product page went live in less than an hour. The title was as straightforward as the last one, just six characters: "Citizen Safety Package." The prices and contents of the three tiers below were clearly written, and a countdown animation was added next to the purchase button, stating that the first 100 orders would receive a free on-site inspection. The countdown numbers jumped every second, and in less than 40 minutes, the 100 spots were snatched up.

The order flow began to spill out from the city to surrounding areas. First, small and medium-sized enterprises in the two neighboring prefecture-level cities placed bulk orders, followed by sporadic orders appearing in several second- and third-tier cities within the province. By the evening of that day, the backend system showed that six users from other provinces had paid via corporate online banking. Their remarks listed various demands—some requested to rectify malicious sales gangs that had been occupying elevators in office buildings for a long time, some reported that the property management of their residential complex embezzled maintenance funds and hired people to threaten the homeowners' committee director, and a small food processing plant said that a nearby chemical plant had polluted their water source with wastewater.

Su Qinghan marked the out-of-province orders with stars and forwarded them to Ghost for preliminary background checks. Ghost spent most of the night pulling up all public business data, administrative penalty records, and associated litigation from the China Judgments Online for all the companies and individuals involved in these orders, organizing them into complete background files. When he handed the files to Lin Ye the next morning, he said: "These six orders are all legitimate requests, and the evidence chains are very solid. Problems that cannot be solved through normal channels have all flowed to us."

Lin Ye finished flipping through the files and nodded: "Accept them. Process them one by one, starting with those furthest away."

Over the next few days, the studio's operation mode completely transformed from a handicraft workshop to a standardized assembly line operation. Su Qinghan was responsible for reviewing all orders and scheduling them according to urgency and geographical distribution. Ghost's automatic identification model ran 24 hours a day in the backend, automatically matching skill templates for ordinary dispute-type orders, with effect tracking automatically followed up after one-click triggering. Only those involving Abyss energy anomalies or villains that required Lin Ye to personally confront them were put on Lin Ye's to-do list.

After the order volume exploded, manpower was clearly insufficient. Fatty Wang poached five retired professional players from the game guild to do online customer service and backend monitoring; every person's resignation certificate had the same reason written on it: "Advised to quit by the dungeon." Su Qinghan used the Su family's connections to poach two operations staff and one legal counsel from major internet companies, specifically responsible for docking evidence materials with local market supervision departments and police stations. Qin Wentian was also assigned new business sectors; he took the overseas operations specialists who had previously worked on the global protection fee package and began working on translating the real-life protection fee service instructions into multi-language versions, while simultaneously building an overseas user feedback tracking system.

The cooperation with the Guardian Alliance also began to be institutionalized. Sister Chen opened the data interface of the national Abyss energy anomaly monitoring network to Ghost, automatically synchronizing the full amount of data every morning. Ghost superimposed a heat map of the studio's order geographical distribution onto the anomaly point distribution map. After the two maps overlapped, they presented a result that no one had expected—in any city, as long as the density of Abyss energy anomaly points increased, the order volume for real-life protection fees in that city and its surrounding areas would inevitably rise simultaneously that night. The fluctuation amplitude and inflection points of the two curves were almost exactly the same.

"Ordinary people may not feel things like Abyss energy, but their bodies and emotions will instinctively react," Ghost projected the trend analysis report onto the conference room's TV wall. "In areas where the concentration of Abyss energy rises, people will become inexplicably irritable and prone to anger, making them more prone to conflict and violent tendencies. Therefore, the incidence of workplace bullying, neighborhood disputes, and malicious wage arrears in those places will be significantly higher than in other areas. They don't know why they are suddenly so uncomfortable, but they know they need to find someone to help them when they are bullied."

After reading the report, Su Qinghan slowly clenched her hands into fists.

Sister Chen called that afternoon, her voice much more serious than usual. She said that the Guardian Alliance headquarters had just detected a significant fluctuation of Abyss energy in six provinces simultaneously, and the fluctuation pattern was highly similar to the data characteristics eight hours before the Nancheng Wanda incident. She preliminarily judged that these Abyss fluctuation points were highly likely signals that Abyss Scouts were about to appear, and the number in the same batch would not be less than 12. Even more troublesome was that they were not scattered randomly in terms of spatial distribution, but vaguely formed a kind of circular encirclement, surrounding the city where Lin Ye's studio was located.

"Last time they sent one to test the waters, this time they are preparing for a batch deployment. Lin Ye, we may need to initiate a formal joint response."

Lin Ye put on his jacket while speaking to the phone on speaker: "Sister Chen, tell your assault team to get the cars ready. I'm treating tonight, and I'll treat them to some debuffs."