Couldn't Understand It, but Was Deeply Shocked!

On Friday night, the dorm room was already filled with the aroma of cup noodles and the fighting spirit of laptops preparing for an all-nighter.

As the ancients once said—Lao Tan Sauerkraut and campus internet belonged at the same table!

Unfortunately, Wu Shaoyou was one of the beneficiaries—victims—of that ninja-turtle-tier campus internet speed.

Irritably refreshing the webpage as his mouse clicked away amid game sounds and the clatter of his roommates' keyboards, he tried to dig out the ancient webnovel Terror and Infinity from his nearly overflowing cloud drive.

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No one could understand the pain of a college student who had to give up queueing with friends because his internet was too slow, who did not even want to watch his sworn sons slaughter their enemies and frantically loot red drops anymore!

No one!

As he let his thoughts wander, the cold glow of the screen reflected Wu Shaoyou's somewhat puzzled face.

"Strange..."

It was gone.

The title he had typed into the search bar hung there all alone, while the results returned nothing but a blank page—405 not found.

He refreshed the page, but it was still the same.

What the hell?

His gaze once again carefully swept through the folder names in his personal cloud drive from top to bottom.

All the other miscellaneous novels he used to kill time were still there, but the file marked "Terror and Infinity Complete, Proofread Edition.txt," which he had clearly skimmed a few chapters of only days ago, had vanished without a trace.

It had not been moved, nor did it seem to have been renamed.

There was not even the slightest trace of the book in his reading history.

Rather than feeling as if he might have accidentally deleted it, it felt more as though it had disappeared completely, as if it had never existed in the first place.

"This lousy cloud drive is glitching out again, isn't it?" Wu Shaoyou muttered, switching windows to open a particularly obscure novel resource forum he frequented, intending to download another copy.

After entering the keywords "Terror and Infinity download" into the search bar, he casually hit Enter.

Yet after several seconds of loading, quite a few posts popped up—but the newest titles looked rather strange.

—[Does anyone have a local copy of Terror and Infinity? Mine won't open anymore!]

—[Holy crap! Even the groundbreaking monster-tier Terror and Infinity is gone?]

Wu Shaoyou's heart gave a slight thump as he clicked in.

The original poster described a situation nearly identical to his own: a file stored in their cloud drive had disappeared for no reason.

The string of replies below fully confirmed the original poster's claim.

"+1. Mine's gone too. It was fine last week."

"Could it be a copyright issue? Did it get purged in a cleanup? But there wasn't any notice."

"Doesn't seem like it. The other 'study materials' in my drive are basically fine. This seems to be the only one that disappeared."

"Poster above, please elaborate on those study materials [doge]."

"+1, requesting study materials. Also, I heard several sites took this book down, and the sources seem to have been wiped too..."

"+1! No way, officer, this book can violate regulations too? There aren't even any veteran drivers driving—it's just an infinite-flow monster-fighting story!"

He automatically ignored the human repeaters below who had invisibly exposed their true nature by madly posting +1.

It seemed he was not the only one who had encountered this.

His mind settled slightly.

Scratching his head casually, Wu Shaoyou found it rather baffling. It was an old book from years ago—why had it suddenly been targeted?

Scrolling down the forum section a few times, another post title caught his attention.

—[Lots of people have been asking about "Main God" lately. What's going on?]

The poster said that while asking for lewd pictures in several chat groups over the past two days, he had seen people indirectly probing for information about the concept of "Main God." Their questions were highly detailed, and they did not seem like ordinary readers debating the story.

What was even more outrageous was that some people claimed they were willing to pay for "detailed setting materials and source research" concerning "Main God" and the "Main God Space."

That made things feel off.

Then, upon looking back, they discovered that these were basically all unfamiliar faces who had joined the groups that very day.

Even more outrageous, someone had replied below—

"OP, you ran into this too? I thought it was just me. Yesterday, some guy claiming to study Chinese internet culture overseas contacted me on Twitter. He asked whether I knew about the novel Terror and Infinity, and even said he was willing to pay in U.S. dollars for the original TXT or EPUB version."

"I laughed my ass off at the time."

"He specifically requested the earliest possible version. Versions with illustrations or particular extra chapters were even better. He spoke seriously, and the price he offered was not low."

"Damn, seriously? Foreigners read this too? They're even putting up bounties? Could someone just be messing with you?"

"Not just that. It seems people have been asking on some domestic platforms too. They're being extremely subtle about it, and they don't feel like ordinary netizens either, but the meaning is about the same—they want information on this book and the Main God Space."

"What the hell? It's just a novel. Why does it suddenly feel like it's become some hot commodity, and the kind that burns your hands?"

Someone else simply posted a clear phone screenshot. Judging by the language and style, it appeared to be a post from some encrypted foreign forum.

There was no specific date in the screenshot. Based on the displayed time alone, it appeared to have been posted either three hours or twenty-seven hours ago, while the poster's ID was also a string of garbled characters.

The specific content was clearly written in a particularly clumsy mixture of Chinese and English translation—

"Seeking original text files of 'Terror And Infinite' at a high price, especially portions involving the core setting of 'Main God.' Uncut earliest version required. Bitcoin payment, price will be absolutely astounding. Contact PGP key: XXXXXX..."

What the hell was this?

"Terror And Infinite"... an extremely stiff literal English translation of Terror and Infinity.

And "Main God"... the main god? Main God?

Wu Shaoyou could not help clicking his tongue.

What kind of machine translation could produce such an absurd format?

Even more ridiculously, as though some inexplicable competitive instinct had been stirred up, he saw someone posting several new screenshots farther down the thread.

They were also from similar foreign-language apps, with pages covered in long strings of English function names he could not understand. Beside the series of screenshots was a helpful additional label: "dark web marketplace."

Wu Shaoyou took a close look and found information similar to the previous post in these new screenshots as well. There was clearly more than one, each coming from users labeled in different languages, or simply dark IDs made up of numbers.

But the key point was that, judging from the brief message titles selected in the screenshots by that responder, as well as the translations of the main content that had been circled...

These bounty notices, written in different languages, appeared to be seeking various versions of the same book, the author's later related expanded settings, or unofficial common research materials regarding concepts such as "the apex," "ruler," and "god king" in myths and legends from different cultural systems...

And... the prices were clearly substantial.

Looking at the golden bounty amounts listed below, nearly all of them started in the tens of thousands—U.S. dollars, British pounds, euros. The seemingly most "stingy" offer was still a straightforward ten thousand U.S. dollars for "relevant valuable information," with no clearly defined upper limit.

Wu Shaoyou's eyes could not help widening.

The purchasing tone in each message also seemed quite urgent, as though they were exceptionally interested in the book being offered a bounty for, or in factors such as the so-called "leaders" and "great gods" circulating in legends across various mythological systems...

By this point, Wu Shaoyou also felt that something was off.

...This did not seem as simple as a bunch of dumbass netizens taking turns making up stories.

It was mainly because the screenshots from these two sources—especially their webpage layouts and the various scalp-tingling information entries—looked...

As though they carried an overly rigorous, strange sort of authenticity.

—Us dumbass netizens generally can't pull off work this precise.jpg

After hesitating for a moment, he enabled incognito mode in his browser and tried entering keywords such as "Terror and Infinity" and "Main God" into several major search engines.

Yet as the pages slowly loaded, the results he got were mostly irrelevant, extremely old, or simply ancient dead links.

There was not a single recent discussion related to the novel among the actual search results.

Uh, was it... being suppressed?

As though he had realized something, an absurd, confused, even scalp-prickling feeling finally began to grip the college student who had originally only wanted to find a casual read.

This no longer seemed like an ordinary copyright check or simple content cleanup, did it?

It was just a novel. What had it done to deserve a wide-scale purge across domestic platforms, and even bounties from both within and outside the country?

Was this even reasonable?