Xia Junqiang's computer screen appeared normal, but Tang Ranno, a player with an extraordinarily high Perception Attribute and insight far beyond the ordinary, noticed some details.
Rows of garbled characters, their colors so faint they were almost imperceptible, steadily cascaded down from the top of the screen. They were concealed within the normal webpages, like a silken rain too fine for anyone to notice.
These garbled characters mingled the texts of various nations with numbers and symbols, all pulverized into a blend. Even glancing at them from a distance was enough to cause dizziness, visual hallucinations, auditory illusions, and even random itching on the skin.
For Tang Ranno, with her exceptional perception abilities, the effect was even more profound. She shuddered violently, immediately twisted her head away, grabbed the trash bin beside her desk, and violently retched into it.
"GAG... ERGH, COUGH COUGH COUGH."
Her head bent, coughing and gagging, she attracted a lot of attention. Li Ang faced the curious onlookers head-on. His large, fat hand slammed the table as he bellowed, "What are you looking at? Haven't seen an unwed pregnancy before? Keep staring? I'll yank your hair out and slap your face, I guarantee it."
His current thuggish appearance was quite intimidating and held enough sway to make the surrounding crowd immediately look away, daring not to meet his gaze.
"COUGH COUGH COUGH."
Tang Ranno raised her head, her eyes slightly red. She didn't take issue with Li Ang's absurd outburst, her face sullen and silent.
She was actually quite curious as to why Li Ang wasn't affected. He had even deliberately enlarged the screen, tempting her to look closer. Could he be trying to harm her?
She had long known that the methods of employing a Cognitive Bias Curse were diverse. Practitioners could cast it through a single sentence, an image, a piece of music, a video, an article, or even a scent. As long as the target came into contact with the curse's medium, their psyche would undergo subtle and hard-to-detect changes.
Skilled practitioners could even insert a single, jumbled word into a newspaper article to induce large-scale cognitive modification in a population.
According to forum discussions, this curse first appeared during the Dark Middle Ages. The Church claimed some Witches used the Cognitive Bias Curse to bewitch the populace, altering them until they lost their autonomy and became loyal minions, serving the Witches.
A potent Cognitive Bias Curse could even cause abnormalities in the function and structure of the cerebral cortex, leading to permanent or semi-permanent cognitive impairments in the victim.
In short, it was a mystical version of potent hypnosis.
This thing sounded very powerful. The stronger a person's perception, the easier it was for them to fall prey to it. However, the higher their Sanity Value, the greater their chance of recovering from the cognitive bias.
Tang Ranno had previously seen related items for sale in the "Black Market Exchange" section of the forums.
It was a single-use consumable scroll of "Excellent" quality named "Pretend To Be A Raccoon For A Day." Its Special Effect was to cause an ordinary person, with all basic attributes below 6 points, to be perceived as a raccoon at a cognitive level for 24 hours.
After the scroll was used, the target themselves would not undergo any physical changes. However, in the eyes of others, they would become a North American raccoon approximately 50 centimeters in length.
Every action he took would be interpreted as a raccoon's behavior. Every word he spoke would be heard as a raccoon's monotonous calls. Even if he picked up a pen and wrote, "I am human," on paper, he would still be considered a peculiar, writing raccoon.
A Cognitive Bias Curse that directly affected the brain and consciousness was terrifying, even for players. After all, who would want to wake up and discover that, in others' eyes, they had transformed into a giant, talking beetle?
Li Ang looked at Tang Ranno's gloomy face and asked with a smile, "How do you feel?"
"..."
Tang Ranno didn't say whether she felt good or bad. Instead, she quickly pulled out a Western-style, gold, circular makeup mirror from her small crossbody bag. She examined her reflection from different angles, only putting the mirror down after confirming she was unharmed.
This makeup mirror came from a scenario mission she had previously undertaken, which was set against the backdrop of a mysterious incident involving evil spirits in an ancient, gloomy castle. Its Special Effect was to check the player's self-awareness, confirming they had not suffered any mental or spiritual interference, influence, or even replacement.
Li Ang saw Tang Ranno's actions and smiled cryptically. "You haven't been affected by the Cognitive Shift Curse, have you?"
Even though Tang Ranno didn't want to look at his bloated, fierce face, full of rolls of flesh, considering they needed to cooperate on the mission, she still answered, "No."
She paused for a moment and glanced at the nonchalant Li Ang but didn't ask about his condition. In truth, Li Ang had also just been subjected to the cognitive interference from those garbled characters a moment ago. However, his Sanity Value had already increased considerably due to the impact of the Origin of Life. After a brief moment of discomfort, he quickly recovered and was able to calmly observe the garbled characters imbued with the power of the Cognitive Bias Curse.
"Now we know this curse is an attack targeting Xia Junqiang, using hidden, garbled characters embedded in the GitHub platform's Anti-996 License project page."
Li Ang idly stirred his coffee cup with a metal spoon, speaking calmly and steadily, "As players, we might escape unscathed, but Xia Junqiang is just an ordinary programmer. He has almost no chance of resisting the curse. The question now is whether the curse targets the entire project page or just Xia Junqiang alone."
Li Ang set the spoon down, picked up a tablet, and typed in a URL, navigating to the GitHub platform's Anti-996 License project page.
The so-called Anti-996 License is fully named the "Anti-996 Open Source License."
GitHub is an open-source code repository. Most of the code within it is written and uploaded by programmers themselves and openly shared with other programmers worldwide.
Programmers everywhere rely on pulling code from it (writing it themselves, line by line, is not only time-consuming and laborious but also prone to errors). An open-source license is a legally binding contract designed to govern the use or distribution of copyrighted software. This means that once a programmer writes a piece of code and appends the relevant open-source license information to it, that code is legally protected, and users must not violate the license's stipulations.
For the Anti-996 License, this means that companies enforcing a 996 work schedule will be permanently barred from using any code marked with the Anti-996 License.
Once this project gains traction and spreads, companies that implement the 996 work schedule will find it incredibly difficult to operate their internet software businesses. Their online services would be unable to use existing, ready-made code, forcing them to have their own coders write everything from scratch.
Development costs and timelines would multiply severalfold.
It would not be an exaggeration to call the Anti-996 License project a proletarian movement by programmers against capitalist exploitation.