By Friday night, the dorm was already filled with the spirit of instant noodles in plastic tubs and laptops prepared for an all-night study battle.
As Confucius once said—Lao Tan Sauerkraut and the campus network belong at the same table!
Unfortunately, Wu Shaoyou was one of the victims—er, beneficiaries—of the campus network's (ninja) god-(turtle)-tier speed.
Irritably refreshing the webpage, he clicked his mouse wildly. Amid the game audio and the clattering of his roommates' keyboards, he was trying to dig the old novel Terror and Infinity out of his nearly bursting cloud drive.
No one could understand the pain of a college student who had been forced to give up playing with his friends because his internet was too slow, and who no longer even wanted to watch his adopted sons slaughter their way across the battlefield and frantically loot red-tier items!
No one!
Lost in his thoughts, Wu Shaoyou's confused face was reflected in the cold glow between the screens.
"That's weird..."
It was gone.
The title he had typed into the search box hung there forlornly, but the returned results were completely blank—405 not found.
He refreshed the webpage, but the result was the same.
What the hell?
His gaze once again slowly swept from top to bottom through the folder names in his personal cloud drive.
All the other light novels he used to kill time were still there, but the file clearly labeled "Terror and Infinity Complete, Proofread Edition.txt," which he had browsed through just a few days ago, had vanished without a trace.
It hadn't been moved, and it didn't look like the name had been changed.
Even the related reading history contained no trace that the book had ever existed.
Rather than having been accidentally deleted by him at some point, this felt more like it had disappeared completely, as though it had never existed here at all.
"This is ridiculous. Did this lousy cloud drive glitch again?" Wu Shaoyou muttered as he switched screens and opened a highly obscure novel-resource forum he often visited, intending to download another copy.
He entered the keywords "Terror and Infinity download" into the search box and casually hit Enter.
The problem was that, after several seconds of loading, quite a few posts did appear—but the titles of the newest ones looked rather strange.
—[Does anyone have a local copy of Terror and Infinity? Mine won't open!]
—[What the hell! How did the pioneering classic Terror and Infinity disappear?]
Wu Shaoyou's heart gave a faint thump, and he clicked into it.
The original poster's description was almost identical to his situation: the file that had been saved in their cloud drive had inexplicably disappeared.
The string of replies below thoroughly confirmed the poster's account.
"+1, mine's gone too. It was fine last week."
"Was it purged during an anti-piracy sweep? But I didn't receive any notice."
"Doesn't seem like it. The other 'study materials' in my drive are basically fine. It looks like this is the only one that's gone."
"Upstairs, elaborate on those study materials [doge]."
"+1, asking for study materials. Also, I heard several sites have taken this book down. It seems the source files were wiped too..."
"+1! No way, sir, was this book really against the rules? There aren't even any old drivers taking people for a ride in it—it's just an Infinite Flow monster-fighting story!"
He automatically ignored the human repeaters who had unconsciously exposed their true nature by frantically posting "+1."
It looked like he wasn't the only one who had run into this situation.
His mind settled somewhat.
After casually scratching his head, Wu Shaoyou still found it baffling. It was an old book from many years ago—why had it suddenly been targeted?
As he scrolled down through the forum section, another post title caught his attention.
—[Why are so many people asking about the "Main God" lately?]
The poster said that over the past two days, while asking for risqué pictures in several groups, they had noticed people indirectly probing about the concept of the "Main God." They asked very detailed questions and didn't seem like ordinary debate-oriented readers.
The truly bizarre part was that some people had even offered money to buy "detailed setting information and source research" about the "Main God" and the "Main God Space."
That was when things began to feel wrong.
After looking back through the thread, he found that almost all of them were unfamiliar faces who had only joined the groups that day.
Even more bizarrely, someone had replied below:
"Poster, you ran into this too? I thought it was just me. Yesterday, someone claiming to research domestic internet culture from overseas contacted me on Twitter. They asked whether I knew the book Terror and Infinity, and even said they were willing to pay in U.S. dollars for the original TXT or EPUB version."
"I burst out laughing right then."
"They specifically asked for the oldest version possible. One with illustrations or certain side stories would be even better. They spoke with a completely straight face, and the price they offered wasn't low either."
"Wait, seriously? Foreigners read this too? And they're offering a bounty? Couldn't someone just be messing with you?"
"That's not all. It seems people have been asking on some domestic platforms too. They're being ridiculously cryptic, and they don't seem like ordinary netizens either. But the gist is about the same: they want this book and information on the 'Main God Space.'"
"What is going on? It's just a novel. Why does it suddenly feel like it has become a hot commodity—and the kind that's too hot to handle?"
Someone else simply posted a clear screenshot taken with a phone. Judging by the main language and style, it seemed to be a post from an encrypted forum on the wider internet.
The screenshot had no specific date. Judging only by the displayed time, it had been posted either three hours or twenty-seven hours earlier, and even the poster's ID was just a string of garbled characters.
The actual content was clearly written in a clumsy mixture of Chinese and English translation:
"High-price request for original text file of 'Terror And Infinite,' especially the sections involving the core settings of the 'Main God.' The earliest unabridged version required. Bitcoin payment, price absolutely astonishing. Contact PGP key: XXXXXX..."
What the hell was this?
"'Terror And Infinite'... That's an absurdly stiff literal English translation of Terror and Infinity."
"And 'Main God'... the main god? The Main God?"
Wu Shaoyou couldn't help clicking his tongue.
What kind of machine translation could produce such an outrageous format?
As if some inexplicable competitive spirit had been stirred up, he noticed that someone had posted several more screenshots farther down the thread.
They were similar foreign-language applications, with strings of completely incomprehensible English function names scattered across the webpages. Beside the screenshots was also a considerate additional label: "Dark Web Marketplace."
Wu Shaoyou examined them carefully and found similar information in the new screenshots as well—and clearly more than one instance. They came from users identified by names in different languages, or simply from dark IDs made up of initial numbers.
The key point was that, judging from the brief message titles selected by the replier in the screenshots, along with the main content they had circled and translated...
These bounty notices, written in different languages, all seemed to be seeking various versions of the same book and additional related settings by the author. They were also seeking unofficial research material about such things as the "pinnacle," "ruler," or "god-king" figures found in the myths and legends of different cultural systems...
And they were clearly offering a great deal of money.
Looking at the golden bounty amounts displayed below them, almost every offer started in the tens of thousands—U.S. dollars, British pounds, or euros. Even the seemingly most "stingy" offer was a straightforward ten-thousand-dollar purchase for "relevant valuable information," with no clearly stated upper limit.
Wu Shaoyou's eyes widened.
The tone of the requests in all the messages also seemed rather urgent, as though they were especially interested in the book being offered—or in the so-called "rulers" and "great gods" from various mythological systems whispered about in rumors...
By this point, Wu Shaoyou also felt that something was wrong.
...This situation didn't seem to be as simple as a relay race of ridiculous stories made up by bored netizens.
The main issue was that, in the screenshots from both sides—especially the webpage layouts and the various bone-chilling information entries—when he looked closely...
There was an oddly rigorous quality to them that seemed a little too real.
—We ridiculous netizens generally can't produce work this precise.jpg
After hesitating for a moment, he opened his browser's incognito mode and tried entering keywords such as "Terror and Infinity" and "Main God" into several major search engines.
But as the webpages loaded slowly, most of the results he got were irrelevant, dated far into the past, or simply ancient links that had long since stopped working.
Recent discussions genuinely related to the book did not appear in the relevant search results at all.
Uh, was this... throttling?
As though he had realized something, an absurd and incomprehensible feeling—one that could even be called hair-raising—finally crept over the college student who had only wanted to find a novel to pass the time.
This didn't feel like an ordinary copyright review or a simple content cleanup anymore, did it?
It was only a novel. What had it done to deserve a sweeping purge across domestic platforms, or even bounties from both inside and outside the country?
Was this for real?
Before you continue