Chapter 221: Neuromancer

Qi Fei's eyes fell, looking at his fingers.

Zhong Kui was right. If the murderer stabbing other parts of Hao Weiwei was to torture him, then cutting off the tip of his right index finger seemed more like pointing to something.

"He exposed the point he hated Hao Weiwei the most." Qi Fei muttered while moving his index finger, "He hated Hao Weiwei for clicking the mouse to press the report button, not for typing on the keyboard to scold him!" His hands tightly held Zhong Kui's slightly cool hands, his eyes shining brightly, "The motive of the cyber killer is because Hao Weiwei reported him, not because of the bad reviews of his works. If this is the case, the list we screened is not accurate. Although Ji Peng was reported by Hao Weiwei, the work has already sold the copyright, and there is no serious consequence, which is not enough to reach the level of killing.

Xu Liang received Hao Weiwei's bad reviews and was not reported, neither of which fits this motive."

Zhong Kui's hand pulled away, grabbed the mouse, and clicked twice. The screen lit up. What was opened in the computer was the homepage of the platform where Hao Weiwei published his novels. Her mouse clicked to the announcement bar and said: "Today I made up for the publishing rules of web novels. This announcement bar will regularly publish works suspected of violations. They have a word called 'take down.' As long as it is judged to be a violation, this work will not be seen.

If your speculation is not wrong, then the cyber killer's work should have been taken down because of Hao Weiwei's report."

"If the works are not on the internet, where can we track the suspicious objects?" Qi Fei was in trouble.

Zhong Kui seemed to have expected his distress long ago. Her fingertips touched the scroll wheel on the mouse, and the content of the announcement bar appeared one after another: "This novel platform will irregularly publish the novels that have been processed, hanging out the names of the novels and authors. Perhaps here, you can find the person you want to find."

Strings of names of violating authors and works came into Qi Fei's eyes. That is to say, once processed, this author basically cannot continue to create with this pen name.

"And, I found that the writing platform has its own classification method. For example, Hao Weiwei's works belong to male frequency, modern, and rebirth novels. I studied their competition rules. Basically, whether it is the competition for readers or the opportunity for platform exposure, they are all carried out in the same group classification. From the current point of view, Hao Weiwei's purpose of giving bad reviews to other authors or malicious reporting is to suppress the emerging new authors through vicious competition. So, the possibility that the authors of these processed lists belong to the same type of novels as Hao Weiwei's is very high."

Qi Fei listened intently, not without surprise: "I thought you didn't understand internet things at all. I didn't expect you to understand the rules of these web novels so thoroughly."

Zhong Kui raised an eyebrow: "I have never said that I don't understand the internet. Zhong Xiaoyu's setting for me is about twenty years ago. Don't forget that the internet and web novels were already very popular at that time. It's just that the medium for reading web novels has changed from computers to mobile phones now. I just don't like smartphones, that's all."

Without further ado, Qi Fei took the mouse from Zhong Kui and looked at the works on the announcement bar seriously.

Zhong Kui on the side also seemed to be interested, getting closer and closer. Her thick black hair occasionally brushed against Qi Fei's cheeks, teasing Qi Fei into biting his lips, trying to keep himself from being distracted.

"Hmm?" Zhong Kui hummed, simply sticking to Qi Fei.

Qi Fei hesitated, and his left hand unrestrainedly hugged her shoulders.

Zhong Kui looked at Qi Fei with a wicked smile, her red lips almost touching the tip of his nose, and suddenly leaned back, smiling wickedly: "What about your principles?" Then her fingers slid across the back of his hand holding the mouse, "I just saw an interesting name, you have to flip back."

Qi Fei awkwardly lifted the hand that was hugging her. With nowhere to put it, he scratched his head redundantly and muttered stammeringly: "You, which one did you see?"

Zhong Kui raised her hand, and her fingertips landed on the computer screen. What she pointed to was a novel that was judged to be taken down a year ago. The title of this book was "After the Consciousness Anchor Fails, I Rebirth into the Third Dimension." The reason for the violation was suspected of using AI writing.

Qi Fei didn't understand and read this awkward title back and forth twice: "Is it because there are the words 'rebirth' in the title of this novel? Hao Weiwei's 'God of War' is also about rebirth."

"Of course not. I have already studied Hao Weiwei's 'track' in depth. Nine out of ten books talk about rebirth. What I care about is this person's pen name." Zhong Kui said, sliding her finger and stopping at that name.

Qi Fei followed her pointing and frowned when he saw the name, because he still didn't quite understand: "Neuromancer? This name is quite nervous."

"The collective hallucination experienced daily by billions of legal operators." Zhong Kui suddenly recited a sentence that Qi Fei had never heard before, "This is the definition of 'cyberspace' by science fiction writer William Gibson in his novel 'Neuromancer' in the 1980s." She said, glancing at Qi Fei's face full of questions, and answered first as if anticipating what he was going to ask, "That's right, after I heard the word 'cyber' for the first time last time, I was very interested in understanding its ins and outs. William Gibson was not the first person to use the word 'cyber,' but he was the one who pushed it to the public. In the novel 'Neuromancer,' he depicted a 'high-tech, low-life' dystopian future—giant enterprise monopolies, humans implanting mechanical limbs, consciousness accessing virtual 'cyberspace'..." Zhong Kui said, and the smile she often wore began to ooze a gloomy chill, "Does this forty-year-old fantasy sound not strange now, even familiar~"

Qi Fei almost forgot why they were discussing this, froze for a while, and finally sorted out his thoughts: "You mean, this author has read William Gibson's novel?"

"At least judging from this pen name, he has special feelings for the cyber world, doesn't he? Think back to those cold texts like code. No wonder it was judged as AI writing. However, he released emotional texts in Hao Weiwei's novel to prove that he is not AI. Of course, a pen name can't explain anything. Perhaps, we can ask the platform for the full text of this novel and compare it with the chapters published by the cyber killer."

Zhong Kui's suggestion reminded Qi Fei, and he slapped his thigh: "I can ask those two web writers to help determine if it was written by the same person!" ===== CHAPTER 222 =====