Online Game: My Decay Drives the Entire Server Crazy

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.