That evening, Qin Zixin, her ears burning scarlet, sat sprawled indifferently on her well-worn computer chair, devoid of any pretense of elegance in her posture. She wore nothing but an oversized t-shirt, a hand-me-down from her father that was at least a decade old. This little scoundrel had once again triumphed through sheer force of will, relying on her thick-skinned persistence to secure the final ten days of blissful summer freedom. Having won, she felt compelled to speak her mind, and the only entity in her home she could talk back to without fear of reprisal was the system.
[Go to hell! Those forty-odd “exam fiends” are just blindly overachieving among the fifty-five of you.]
[Let’s see if you’re still so defiant when you get your test results after school starts and have to face Tang Yuyu.]
The system knew this stubborn girl’s temperament inside and out, vanishing after delivering its taunt. Yet Qin Zixin remained unperturbed, treating its words as if it were simply relieving itself in her mind.
The curtains in Qin Zixin’s room were drawn tight, the lights unlit, and the fluorescent glow of the computer screen cast an almost sinister pallor upon her exquisite, flower-like face. The newly installed RAM was now in place, and the crude whirring of the case fans reverberated, by far the loudest sound in the room.
Qin Zixin opened her student QQ account, and the cheap wired speakers incessantly chimed with message notifications.
“Hey beautiful, wanna add each other?”
“Let’s get to know each other. I’m a senior from Nanshi High School, and I can tutor you.”
Ignoring the four new friend requests, she glanced at the nearly overflowing chat window; it was mostly filled with disgusting sycophantic greetings and friend requests, with scarcely any useful information. Qin Zixin felt a surge of annoyance, realizing that in the time it took to eat dinner, certain self-important individuals had already polluted her chat interface.
Qin Zixin directly switched to her “deviant” account. She had christened herself with the username Grand Master Hunyuan, a tribute to the “previous life” in her memories. However, while her “Hunyuan Zhairen” in her previous life had been an elegant connoisseur who inscribed and sealed scholarly works, this life’s “Grand Master Hunyuan” was merely a little punk hawking magnet links online.
She clicked on the small group chat “Home of the Deviant Souls,” which was pinned in the group assistant. Including herself, there were seventeen members in total, and aside from herself—whose identity remained undisclosed—everyone else was more or less known to each other.
These were the deviants handpicked from her self-created “adult resources” group, and this small group was even more active than the larger one, with daily occurrences of political discussions, lewd content, and heated arguments. As someone who had thoroughly understood and exploited the internet and computers early on, almost none of the group members had low educational backgrounds; they were nearly all university students bored out of their minds. Only Qin Zixin, the group owner, had merely completed her nine years of compulsory education.
At prime time, almost everyone in the group was online. They were fiercely debating whether a certain Korean girl group member’s “bunnies” were real or fake. Their elasticity seemed genuine, but their shape felt overly “manufactured.” One user, convinced they were artificial, even used modeling software for comparison.
Qin Zixin found it immensely amusing, exclaiming that they were all geniuses. She gulped down some soda, took a hearty bite of a peeled lychee, and then directly interjected into the conversation.
However, the moment they saw Grand Master Hunyuan’s ID appear, they immediately abandoned their debate on technology versus nature. They started uniformly sending emoji packs, interspersed with the personal attacks typical of otaku.
Qin Zixin’s breathing quickened in exasperation, and her impressive “bunnies” heaved with her breaths and the furious clatter of her keyboard. The group’s flaming war escalated further.
Qin Zixin once again verbally sparred with the otaku, ranging from their idiotic, single-celled perspectives to her disdain for their XPs and cinematic tastes, and finally, to mocking researchers whose job was merely to fill out forms and wait for quitting time.
After some playful banter, the topic veered towards the latest anime. As if struck by an idea, Qin Zixin directly messaged the guy who had modeled the fake “bunnies” with drawing software.
“Old Fang, did you see that anime they were talking about?”
[Grand Master Hunyuan forwarded a group message]
“This one. That new anime’s cowgirl model. When it’s finished, I’ll find someone to sell it. Usual terms: I take two, you take eight.”
“Okay.”
This wasn’t their first venture into this kind of business. Old Fang, a PhD student at USTC in neighboring Anhui Province, had access to an imported 3D printer in his lab. Ever since Qin Zixin learned this, she had approached Fang Shicheng multiple times, coercing him into using public resources for private, illicit activities.
Once Fang Shicheng shipped the products, Qin Zixin would contact buyers on Tieba. They wouldn’t be too expensive, as they were “three-no” products; with this, she could only earn enough to buy soda and preserved fruits.
To the west of Nanling City, in Anhui Province, Liuan City—just as Qin Zixin was having her ear twisted by Tang Yuyu, who was scolding her as a “dead pig unafraid of boiling water”—Fang Shicheng had just finished dinner. He slowly ambled through the campus, swaying with each step to digest his meal, before strolling back to the University of Science and Technology of China’s materials science lab.
Standing 1.75 meters tall, Fang Shicheng was as thin as a pole. His features were passably decent, but he would likely disappear in a crowd. From years of hunching over a computer, he had developed a stoop and a bowed back. His constant late nights gave him the appearance of someone who had indulged excessively. Though past thirty, his face still bore some acne, and his long, messy hair clearly hadn’t seen a comb in ages.
To put it mildly, he looked unkempt; to put it less charitably, he was utterly disheveled.
Back in the lab, he had no mind to continue working. He opened his computer, logged into his QQ account, and expertly clicked on the “Home of the Deviant Souls” group chat.
Three years prior, as a fresh graduate student, Fang Shicheng had been a somewhat naive young man. His senior lab mate, with a lecherous grin, had introduced him and pulled him into one of Grand Master Hunyuan’s resource groups. From that moment on, his moral integrity became a distant memory. As if a new world had been violently kicked open for him, he was exposed daily to all sorts of bizarre content.
The group owner, “Grand Master Hunyuan,” was a minor celebrity on Tieba, known as a “great philanthropist” who enthusiastically posted pornographic images in abstinence forums and ghost movies in resource forums. If Grand Master Hunyuan had merely done these things, they would have been just another troublemaker among the countless on the internet.
But they were different.
They, along with a few like-minded buddies, had set up a resource site on the dark web called “Tentacle+.” It offered a comprehensive collection of “colorful” resources and occasionally shared free movie links and short films in the resource group. If group members wanted high-definition content, they had to purchase it from the corresponding posts on “Tentacle+” using tokens.
“Tentacle+” didn’t support direct cash payments, as that would constitute illegal profiteering. Tokens, however, could be acquired simply by daily check-ins, and the site’s veterans earned a meager sum from traffic generated this way.
Fang Shicheng was the kind of bad seed who was slow to learn good things but quick to pick up bad ones. Living up to the “nurturing” of his classmates and group members, after the initial shock, bewilderment, and eye-opening experiences, his demeanor grew increasingly casual, and his comments in the group became even more blunt.
One day, after he inadvertently revealed his university and major, Grand Master Hunyuan directly messaged him, confirmed his identity, and then pulled him into “Home of the Deviant Souls.”
At first, he held Grand Master Hunyuan—this selfless resource sharer—in the highest respect reserved for a fellow internet wanderer. But their overly pessimistic remarks and classic passive-aggressive jabs immediately shattered the already tenuous barriers of communication and politeness between them, and the two quickly became familiar.
Although Grand Master Hunyuan never revealed personal information, Fang Shicheng always felt a strong urge to confide in them during their chats. Whenever he encountered depressing matters, he would treat them as a confidant. He didn’t seek comfort from them, because Grand Master Hunyuan would only gloat and mock whenever someone else had misfortune, acting utterly despicable!
But the other party was too adept at hitting sensitive spots. They never bothered with pleasantries; their biting, acerbic words were like sharp daggers. While their mockery could raise his blood pressure, their single remark could also enlighten him.
Yet Fang Shicheng didn’t dislike Grand Master Hunyuan, because lies don’t wound, but truth is a murderous blade.
At that moment, in the group, a few members were currently ganging up on “Mr. Pickles.” Scrolling through the chat history, Fang Shicheng discovered that “Mr. Pickles” had apparently posted a pirated movie recently leaked from a South Korean cinema. Due to camera issues, the picture quality was mediocre, and all the lead actresses were identical-looking members of a South Korean girl group.
The movie’s content was reportedly a “big female lead” story, with women pursuing freedom and liberation, vehemently criticizing patriarchal society and family-centric values. However, most in the group expressed disdain, considering it a joke for a girl group that relied on suggestive content to talk about feminism.
Girl groups should stick to singing, dancing, and selling dreams. These groups started by selling s*x appeal to earn money from men, and now that they had more fans, they wanted to establish a feminist image to earn money from women. Did they want to have their cake and eat it too? They were nothing but hypocritical scoundrels.
When the economy was good, they’d dabble in suggestive content and secretly cultivate an independent image, as if they truly possessed independent personalities. But what about when the economy wasn’t good? Would they be forming groups to go to strip clubs?
Fang Shicheng himself had no goodwill towards anyone from South Korea. He was from Qingdao, Shandong Province. Due to its geographical location, Qingdao always had a large concentration of Koreans, and for economic reasons, these people, who had been considered inferior for thousands of years, had somehow gained an air of superiority.
He had fought with Koreans in high school for no other reason than pure dislike; if he saw something he couldn’t stand, he’d want to hit it hard, his “love” stemming from the former suzerain state.
Now, seeing someone post about a South Korean celebrity, he immediately started blasting them, declaring that the lead actress was South Korean, and all South Koreans were artificial.
“Mr. Pickles,” who had shared the resource, also felt a loss of face. He had more than just this one film. Due to policy reasons, South Korea was the first stop for many big American blockbusters to be shown on the Eurasian continent. He had merely used this film as a stepping stone, hoping for a few words of praise from the group before releasing the rest.
Instead, the group’s reaction was lukewarm, and that unlucky fellow Old Fang had even started openly criticizing it. Damn it! How could he, with his short temper, tolerate this?
Anyway, he was just idling around. When it rains, beat the kids; having nothing else to do, Mr. Pickles went head-to-head with Old Fang. As a rich second generation, Mr. Pickles was well-versed in the world of glamour and could immediately tell that the Korean woman had extensive plastic surgery. Yet, he stubbornly insisted that Old Fang was merely pretending to be knowledgeable about plastic surgery.
Old Fang, also with time on his hands, began to argue with him, even creating a 3D model of the lead actress’s nose to try and prove that her nasal wings and breast shape were unscientific and defied gravity.
When a group contains people from all corners of the world, its stance easily becomes chaotic neutral. Even though both sides unanimously agreed it was artificial, they still argued, not for the sake of truth, but purely to find an outlet for their energy. The other rascals, enjoying the spectacle, chimed in with various provocations, automatically dividing into two camps.
This irreverent atmosphere made the irreverent debate even more heated.
Then Grand Master Hunyuan arrived.
After reading Grand Master Hunyuan’s private message, Fang Shicheng immediately started modeling. It was a task that would take less than an hour, and once Grand Master Hunyuan found a buyer, he would earn at least five hundred yuan.
This was not his first collaboration with Grand Master Hunyuan. At first, he had been apprehensive about using public resources for private gain, but under Qin Zixin’s relentless bombardment of negative energy and instigation, his flexible moral compass quickly forgot his previous integrity.
After finishing his side job, Fang Shicheng saw that it was almost nine o’clock. He shut down his computer, tidied up the lab slightly, turned off the lights and air conditioning, and then slowly ambled back to his dormitory. He planned to watch the legitimate action movie he had downloaded using the lab’s Wi-Fi earlier once he was back in his room.
As he neared his dormitory, his phone rang. It was his mother, and he could guess without answering that it was most likely about his ex-girlfriend.
He had started dating his ex-girlfriend three months prior through a blind date, and she was someone his mother had connected him with. The woman, a city resident from Qingdao, Shandong Province, had expressed dissatisfaction with his rural family background during their first meeting, although she emphasized that she would not discriminate against rural household registrations.
She repeatedly stressed that she was a city person, had been one since childhood, unlike Fang Shicheng, who had only moved his household registration after attending university. Although her education was merely from an ordinary first-tier university and her appearance was unremarkable, she always displayed a strange sense of superiority in her interactions with Fang Shicheng, and she had repeatedly demanded that he grant her access to monitor all his social media accounts.
Fang Shicheng couldn’t stand it anymore, but he was too cowardly to block her, resorting only to passive-aggressive cold treatment. She had already told his mother that Fang Shicheng was unwilling to deal with her, and his mother had called him multiple times to give him a lecture.
Listening to his mother’s nagging, Fang Shicheng felt a sudden realization, tinged with melancholy. If he had enough courage, he would have directly grabbed her by the collar, cursed her as a stinking b*tch with a head full of biogas, whose fishy smell of rotten flesh could be detected even across a province, and then punched that stupid, pampered, pancake-like face.
Of course, that was just his imagination.
Honestly, he truly envied Grand Master Hunyuan; they lived a clear-sighted, worldly life.
Fang Shicheng was now thirty, an age when one was expected to marry. Even though he was pursuing his doctorate, he himself wasn’t in a hurry, but his family was genuinely anxious. Unfortunately, his previous blind dates had all been unsuccessful. The prevailing public opinion still dictated that men should be magnanimous, but sometimes, Fang Shicheng truly couldn’t endure it.