Several months ago, Xu Youyuan was still the producer of "Reshape the Universe," a high-profile industry heavyweight whose every move drew attention. As the game approached its fifth anniversary, she poured all her energy into the special anniversary update.
Everything was progressing smoothly until the critical testing phase, when Xu Youyuan received a call from her father.
Two years earlier, her mother had been diagnosed with cancer. Xu Youyuan was the first to know and had been actively pursuing treatment. She never hesitated to spend whatever it took, hoping to cure her mother. Even if a full recovery wasn’t possible, she wanted to minimize her suffering as much as she could.
In the past, when ordinary people were diagnosed with terminal illnesses, most had no hope of a cure, or the treatment costs were astronomical—so they resigned themselves to fate. Some died quickly, sparing themselves and their families prolonged agony. Others suffered a drawn-out death, draining their loved ones’ life savings in the process.
Now, with advanced medical technology, things should have been better. Many previously incurable diseases now had hope—if you could pay enough. Even in hopeless cases, cutting-edge treatments could reduce the patient’s pain to a minimum.
Everyone dies eventually—the question is how. Do you enter the world crying and leave smiling, or cry your way through both? It all depends on how much money you can throw at the problem.
With such a temptation dangled before you, would you pay?
Xu Youyuan had no choice but to pay.
The daily cost of standard medication alone was 200,000 yuan, not counting special drugs or photodynamic therapy. Each treatment brought temporary improvement, suppressing the cancer cells—but no one could say for how long.
Day after day, the expenses piled up. Even for someone as wealthy and accomplished as Xu Youyuan, the burden was becoming unbearable.
She sold two properties, and her savings dwindled at an alarming rate. Fortunately, her years of success had left her with enough reserves to see a glimmer of hope.
The last surgery had been a success. Knowing their daughter was busy with work—sometimes too busy to come home even during holidays—her family encouraged her to return to her job. But not long after Xu Youyuan left, her mother’s condition took a sharp turn for the worse.
This time, the critical condition notice was graver than ever. She didn’t need her father to explain—she understood.
Exhaustion was written across Xu Youyuan’s face as she stepped out of the vacuum train station.
The anniversary update was on the verge of launch, but with her mother’s life hanging in the balance, she couldn’t stay away. After her father’s call, she booked the earliest ticket available—the 6 a.m. train the next morning. She spent the entire night delegating urgent tasks before rushing to the station.
She had a feeling this would be her last chance to see her mother, and she had no idea how long it would take.
She stayed at home for five days. Every day, her team called, and she meticulously addressed each issue, documenting everything.
Something felt off. Her subordinates spoke hesitantly, and video calls were constantly disrupted.
It was bizarre.
Xu Youyuan wasn’t one to let her guard down.
On the sixth day, her mother’s condition improved slightly. She even managed to eat some porridge and insisted on removing her oxygen mask to talk to the family.
They spoke in fragments late into the night, neither Xu Youyuan nor her father daring to sleep. As dawn approached, her mother mentioned craving *guobian*—a thin rice-flour soup from a stall near their home, a breakfast the family had often enjoyed when Xu Youyuan was a child.
Xu Youyuan placed a delivery order, and the food arrived quickly.
Hospital rules required delivery personnel to wait outside, so she left her father in the room and went to retrieve the meal.
Every second counted. She was terrified she wouldn’t make it in time to fulfill her mother’s last wish—or worse, that she’d miss their final moments together.
When she returned to the ward, holding a thermos full of steaming *guobian*, her mother was still awake—frail, her body reduced to little more than skin and bones, yet clinging stubbornly to life, unwilling to leave her family with regrets.
Just as Xu Youyuan expected, her mother took only a single bite before passing away.
Her father collapsed from grief, unconscious for a long time. Relatives came to help, but their presence only added to the chaos.
Xu Youyuan handled everything alone. She remained composed—there was no time for sorrow. A cold, relentless voice in her head reminded her that death was final, and grief changed nothing. At least she had given her mother the best care possible while she was alive. She had no regrets.
The day of her mother’s death coincided with the fifth anniversary of "Reshape the Universe." While she was arranging funeral services, countless video calls flashed across her computer—none of which she answered. Later, she would discover that the call logs had been erased, an eerie detail that went unnoticed for a long time.
Then, disaster struck.
In the midst of funeral preparations, an unprecedented critical flaw emerged in the anniversary update. It happened too fast for anyone to react.
After the update went live, the exploit surfaced.
Tens of thousands of players began mass-duplicating epic-tier vehicles. Word spread like wildfire, and with "Reshape the Universe’s" massive player base, the situation spiraled out of control almost instantly. The game’s balance was shattered beyond repair.
As the industry leader, SQUALL had safeguards in place. The simplest solution was to shut down the servers, force all players offline, and work on a fix.
Compensation would be issued, and players who abused the exploit would be penalized. Over its five-year run, "Reshape the Universe" had weathered countless crises. Though this one erupted with unprecedented speed and scale, the team remained confident they could contain it. At worst, forums would buzz for a while before fading once compensation rolled out.
That was the conventional wisdom.
But what followed left even the most seasoned professionals stunned.
What happened next remained unknown to the public—only high-ranking insiders caught whispers of it.
Someone had used the exploit to hack into the game servers. Within minutes, they bypassed encryption and stole account data from tens of thousands of players. These accounts were linked to bank cards and digital wallets—and the hackers began draining them.
Five hundred… a thousand… ten thousand… fifty thousand…
Before anyone could react, over a hundred million yuan vanished. And the number kept climbing—by hundreds of thousands every second.
The strangest part? Large-scale fraudulent transfers were usually flagged and frozen by government monitoring systems. Yet this time, the hackers had found a loophole, skillfully evading detection as they funneled the money overseas.
The transfers went through seamlessly. Some victims didn’t even receive transaction alerts.
It all unfolded in eerie silence.
"Reshape the Universe’s" past success, its pride in its vast user base—now, it all felt like a cruel joke.
Over 40% of the population in the country had accounts in *"Rebirth Universe,"* with global players exceeding one billion. The game utilized an online hosting system, allowing accounts to remain active in the virtual world even while players were working or asleep.
The fifth-anniversary update boasted numerous events, and the massive rewards and benefits naturally drew countless players into the servers, pushing online numbers to a historic high.
The more players logged in, the higher the amount of money stolen.
What should have been a proud achievement instead became a crushing backlash.
Eventually, someone discovered their money was gone—quickly reporting it to the police and taking the issue online, where it spread like wildfire.
Players rushed to check their accounts, only to find it was already too late. Their balances had been wiped clean.
There was no concrete evidence linking the theft to *Rebirth Universe*, as the transaction paths were encrypted and remained uncracked. Given the encryption level, even if deciphered, the true trail might never be found.
The public, however, didn’t let SQUALL off the hook just because of a lack of hard proof. Their fury needed no justification.
Online criticism raged on, yet SQUALL remained silent, no one stepping forward to address the chaos.
The exact amount stolen was never disclosed by the authorities—not even in a public press conference.
Rumors claimed that by the time all affected accounts were frozen, the total siphoned funds had reached a staggering *800 billion*.
But 800 billion was only the beginning.
*"I didn’t tell you, but the moment I returned from my hometown, the police were already waiting for me. They took me straight from the train station."* Xu Youyuan recounted the incident calmly, while Shi Ye felt a chill run down her spine.
*"800 billion… my god…"* Shi Ye murmured. *"I knew the amount would be huge, but I never imagined it’d be this horrifying…"*
Xu Youyuan replied, *"The financial losses are one thing. What comes next is far worse."*
As the pioneer of fully immersive holographic gaming, *Rebirth Universe*’s neural-linked interface had been hailed as revolutionary upon its release—even dubbed one of the *greatest inventions of the 21st century*. It allowed players to truly dive into a flawless virtual world, offering an experience so vivid and exhilarating that it blurred the line between game and reality. This was the core reason for *Rebirth Universe*’s unprecedented success.
Yet, from its launch to this day, skepticism had never ceased.
While direct neural interfacing did construct incredibly lifelike environments in the players’ minds, critics argued that SQUALL’s reports on neurological safety were insufficient—lacking the authority to definitively prove the game caused no harm.
SQUALL ignored these concerns. After all, all data showed players remained unfazed by the doubts, and the profits rolling in were undeniable.
As the game’s producer, Xu Youyuan had always prioritized *"ensuring players’ safety"* above all else. Like any ambitious young professional, she yearned for success and dreamed of making a world-changing impact—but the phrase *"human lives are paramount"* had always weighed heavily on her conscience.
From the earliest stages of development, she had been among the first volunteers. Every experimental report confirmed her game posed no harm to the human body.
She had seen it with her own eyes, experienced it firsthand. It couldn’t be false.
Yet this incident didn’t just drain players’ accounts—it fatally injured over two hundred people.
According to their families, the victims had collapsed within two minutes of logging in, screaming before losing consciousness, foaming at the mouth. To this day, they remained comatose, their symptoms eerily similar.
Instantly, all media and public scrutiny zeroed in on *Rebirth Universe*, unleashing relentless condemnation.
Whether she acknowledged it or not, whether she stepped forward or not—Xu Youyuan, as the project lead, had been pushed to the edge of the cliff.
She spent two weeks in police custody before being released on bail.
Those two weeks were a black hole—she knew nothing of what had transpired outside.
By the time she returned to the company, it seemed everything had been resolved.
Rumors claimed SQUALL had hired experts to recover most of the stolen funds and compensated the victims’ families—who then abruptly retracted their accusations. More surreal, the families even changed their statements, insisting the hospitalized victims hadn’t been harmed by *Rebirth Universe* at all. Instead, they claimed pre-existing conditions were to blame, absolving the neural interface of any fault.
Most crucially, a scapegoat had already taken the fall.
Xu Youyuan was utterly stunned.
Soon after, an army of paid commentators flooded social media, scrubbing away all negative discourse about the company.
The hacker group responsible for infiltrating the game and stealing 800 billion was swiftly exposed by SQUALL and handed over to the authorities. The public’s fury, once a raging storm of collective outrage, softened as funds were returned and hefty compensations doled out. By the end, even without PR manipulation, many voluntarily defended SQUALL.
In the wake of disaster, SQUALL had not only dodged a fatal blow—it had ridden the tidal wave to even greater heights.
All of this, resolved flawlessly within two weeks.
It was unbelievable.
Shi Ye inhaled sharply. *"It’s almost like—"*
*"You feel it too, don’t you?"* Xu Youyuan’s gaze turned razor-sharp. *"Like everything was prepared in advance."*
*"Are you saying… SQUALL’s higher-ups anticipated this?"* Shi Ye hesitated. *"Could you be overthinking it? Even with the best PR, with people paid to spin the narrative, SQUALL can’t escape the lasting damage. Who benefits from this? And besides—someone *did* take the blame."*
Xu Youyuan replied coldly, *"That’s exactly why it’s called a ‘scapegoat.’ Everyone knows that person was just a stand-in. The real problem still leads back to me."*
*"Those two weeks in custody felt longer than two centuries. At the time, I truly thought my life was over. But after getting out and seeing the situation clearly… I started sensing something else at play."*
