Chapter 13 November 13th, Morning

"Yo, you're up." When Feng Bujue returned from his morning run, Ruoyu was tidying up the living room.

Not long after Ruoyu moved in, they agreed to take turns doing housework. However, despite the agreement, Ruoyu ended up doing more of the work. After all, girls liked cleanliness, and she would often tidy up when she couldn't stand the mess any longer.

"Been up for a while." Hearing Jue-ge's words, Ruoyu continued what she was doing, replying without looking up, "Just waiting for you to bring back breakfast."

"Heh..." Feng Bujue smiled. "We're having soup dumplings today, so be careful."

The reason he smiled so mischievously was simple... everyone had one or two things they weren't good at. For example, Jue-ge wasn't good at tying knots, and Xiao Tan wasn't good at lying. As for Ruoyu... she wasn't very good at using chopsticks.

Of course, "not very good at using" didn't mean she couldn't pick up food; it was just... because Ruoyu didn't learn the correct way to hold chopsticks as a child, her technique was slightly worse than the average person. Normal use wasn't a problem, but... when it came to slippery or easily broken foods like tofu or fish balls, or things like soup dumplings with thin skins and soup inside... she often embarrassed herself.

Actually... it wasn't a big flaw, and in some ways, it was even a cute quirk. However, when you revealed a weakness in front of someone like Feng Bujue, malicious teasing and mockery were inevitable.

What kind of person was Jue-ge? If there were a competition for snatching food with chopsticks, he would at least be in the world's top ten. During his student days, if he wanted to, he could prevent the person sitting at the same table from eating a single piece of meat. Someone even challenged him while using their hands, but he still managed to snatch a chicken leg with his chopsticks... With such a sense of superiority, how could he not repeatedly mock her about it?

"Careful about what?" Ruoyu immediately glared at Jue-ge. "It's just soup dumplings... if I break them, the soup will just spill out."

"That's such a waste, the whole point of soup dumplings is the soup, isn't it?" Feng Bujue revealed a sinister smile. "Why don't... I feed you..."

"You're thinking too much." Ruoyu interrupted him before he could finish speaking. "I haven't been fed by anyone since I can remember."

"So that's why you're twenty-two and still can't use chopsticks?" Jue-ge retorted.

"Does a twenty-four-year-old man who can't even tie his shoelaces properly have the right to talk about me?" Ruoyu's ability to retort had improved, and she could now hold her own in a verbal sparring match with Jue-ge.

"Hehehe..." Feng Bujue smiled even more perversely. "I wouldn't mind you tying them for me."

"Is that so..." Ruoyu then snorted coldly. "Hmph... how about we make a bet?"

"Oh? What kind of bet?" Jue-ge was also intrigued.

"For a week, I'll practice using chopsticks, and you'll practice tying knots." Ruoyu continued, "After a week, I guarantee I can pick up anything you can, but you also have to guarantee you can tie any knot I can tie."

"This..." At that moment, Feng Bujue... was actually a little scared.

"Are you afraid?" Ruoyu asked.

"Ha!" Jue-ge laughed dryly. "I've almost forgotten how to write the word 'fear'." He forced a confident expression. "A bet's a bet, you say... what's the stake?" As soon as he finished speaking, he immediately added, "Oh, I'm declaring in advance, I'll have to consider any requests involving getting into bed, I'm an upright person."

The next second, before Ruoyu could even open her mouth, Asathoth, who was lying on the sofa, complained, "In the years in Hell, meow~ I've heard and seen many shameless words and deeds, but in my experience... only you can perfectly combine shamelessness and cheapness, meow."

Hearing this, Ruoyu looked at Asathoth expressionlessly. "I say... no matter what, he's still my boyfriend. If you make him sound so terrible, wouldn't it make me look like I have bad taste?"

"No... this isn't a matter of good or bad taste, meow." Asathoth replied, "It would be one thing if you were just looking at his face... but after understanding Feng Bujue's personality, you still chose to date him, which can only mean you're also a weirdo." She paused, scratching the back of her neck with her paw, "Come to think of it... you really are a weirdo, meow."

"Hmm..." Ruoyu heard this, pondered for a moment, "Then... the stake is..."

"Hey!" Jue-ge couldn't help but shout, "You abruptly changed the subject!"

Ruoyu ignored him and continued, "If I win this bet... unless I'm in a good mood and want to interfere... from now on, you'll be responsible for all the housework."

"Whoa~ What's the concept of 'from now on'?" Feng Bujue replied, "If we get married in the future, wouldn't that be like me prepaying decades of labor?"

"If you don't dare to bet, just say so." Ruoyu retorted.

"Tch..." Feng Bujue raised an eyebrow. "Then... what if you lose?"

"From now on, I'll tie your shoelaces for you." Ruoyu replied.

"Good! You said it." Feng Bujue said loudly.

"Yes, I said it." Ruoyu replied calmly.

After a second of silence, the two of them said in unison, "It's a deal!"

"Sigh..." Asathoth sighed, shaking her head. "What weirdos, meow~"

***

Several hours later, ten o'clock in the morning, Feng Bujue's Landing Space.

"Hmph... saying she wants to organize things in the Landing Space alone, who would believe that..." As soon as Jue-ge entered the elevator, he began to complain, "She's probably secretly practicing using chopsticks in the game world... no doubt searching for related videos on the touchscreen right now!"

While muttering, he shamelessly opened a certain search engine webpage on the touchscreen and typed in the words "how to tie knots".

For the next hour, he used unprecedented concentration and enthusiasm... to study the techniques of tying knots. Although he had told Ruoyu before logging in that "I'm going online to gather competition information," in reality, what they were both doing was pretty much the same...

Before he knew it, an hour (game time) had passed. After watching a large number of pictures and video tutorials... Feng Bujue closed all the webpages, took two steps back, opened his arms, and, with a pose like the protagonist in *The Shawshank Redemption* when he regained his freedom, roared to the sky: "This is so hard—"

As the saying goes... everyone has one or two things they're not good at.

In short, after doing those extremely painful things, Jue-ge finally opened the Dream Inc. website and forum, and began to view information about the competition.

At this time, the top eight list for the Pinnacle Melee S2 had already been released, and the names of the eight teams were placed in the most conspicuous position on the homepage.

These eight teams were: [Order], [Deity], [Jianghu], [Red Cherry], [Warring States], [Hell Front], [Good-for-Nothing Alliance], and [Rivers and Mountains].

Since no two teams from the same studio had entered the top eight together, and no "second team" had entered the top eight, the list directly omitted the teams with "Team One" in their names.

Overall... six of these eight teams were professional teams with a studio background, and the other two were teams composed of individual players.

This result could be said to have greatly exceeded the predictions of the vast audience and various intelligence analysis teams...

In team-based competitive games, professional teams have a very large advantage. Professional teams have access to the resources of the entire studio, and are much stronger than "wild" players in terms of personnel coordination, item mobilization, and pre-match intelligence...

Teams like [Good-for-Nothing Alliance], which consisted of four individual professional players, couldn't really be considered a "professional" team... a "professional team" wasn't just about finding a few players with professional-level skills and putting them together; in addition to the players, a large number of people were working to help the team win... it's just that these people's work took place outside of the competition, and the general audience often overlooked their existence.

However, this time, in the team competition format of the Pinnacle Melee S2, and in a competition system where there was almost no room for luck... there were still two non-studio teams that made it into the top eight. This result once again made the leaders of the major studios realize... that they couldn't use the mindset of looking at ordinary online games to look at Thriller Paradise.

"Looking at this list, none of these teams are easy to deal with..." Feng Bujue said, squinting his eyes as he looked at the list.

While that was true, he wasn't surprised at all when he saw the list, because as early as when he saw the top sixteen matchup list, he had already predicted which eight teams would advance next. The current problem was... how would these eight teams be matched against each other.

"Win one more match... and we'll be in the finals." Jue-ge muttered as he quickly browsed the webpage, "The finals are a four-team free-for-all, so there will be a lot of variables. Generally speaking... more variables mean the weaker teams will have more opportunities." His gaze shifted slightly, stopping on the words [Order]. "Adopting this mechanism for the finals seems to be taking care of the teams other than [Order]..." He paused. "Not only do they get to play one less round, but it also increases their chances of defeating the strongest team on paper."

Thinking of this, Feng Bujue had already scanned every piece of information on the homepage at a super-fast speed—mostly news that he could tell the content of just by looking at the title. Therefore, he quickly opened the game forum, wanting to see if he could get anything from there.

"Whoa~" As soon as he opened the homepage of the competition discussion area, Jue-ge was attracted by a "Today's Hot Topic" that was pinned to the top.

The title of that thread was—[Semi-Finals: Analysis of All Possible Matchups and Predictions of Victory and Defeat].

"Heh..." Feng Bujue clicked into the thread and glanced at it, smiling. "So, coming to the forum is still very helpful. This thread lists all the content I needed to calculate mentally, saving me a lot of trouble... That way, I can easily store the list in my head through graphic memory."

With that said, Feng Bujue completely ignored the victory and defeat prediction part, quickly memorizing all the "matchup possibilities" listed by the other party (including 28 single matchup combinations and 105 complete matchup lists), and verified them to make sure there were no errors, before closing the thread.

Then, he opened each of the discussion areas one by one, filtering the information at an extremely fast speed, flipping through the threads page by page.

Given the popularity of the Pinnacle Melee event, the number of posts on the forum was imaginable. Even though it was a weekday morning, and even though the forum had various mechanisms for filtering out garbage posts, the posts in each discussion section were still increasing at a rate of at least one per minute.

"Oh? This seems a little interesting..." Suddenly, Jue-ge's gaze stopped on a thread with a very eye-catching title—[Let's Gossip About the "Past and Present Life" of the Good-for-Nothing Alliance].

To be honest, the team that Feng Bujue least wanted to meet at this stage was [Good-for-Nothing Alliance], because of the seven teams that could become opponents, Jue-ge knew the least about this team.

Naturally... this was also due to Honghu's planning. The strategist was indeed a strategist, and he adopted a strategy similar to [Hell Front] in the preliminary round, turning on all the privacy protection options. In addition, the people on their team also had very amazing strength, and often achieved victory before the enemy could figure out what was going on, which made their match recordings, and the information revealed in the recordings, very limited.

For Feng Bujue, a man who "had already calculated more than 70% of the factors that determine victory and defeat before the battle," a lack of information was a very bad thing. Especially when he "knew that the enemy was strong, but didn't know exactly how strong," it made him feel like he had a lump in his throat and couldn't sit or stand still.

In comparison, he would be much more comfortable if he encountered a professional team. Even if he ran into [Order] or [Deity]... anyway, most of your information was already public knowledge. As long as he had enough data, even if it was a god... Jue-ge could calculate them to death.

"Let me take a look..." Feng Bujue clicked open the thread and found that it was a long, lengthy argument, and the font color was a blinding purple that made people's eyes hurt. He immediately complained, "This person is trying to take revenge on society, right... forcibly reducing the reader's eye endurance to zero..."

Regardless of what he said, he still continued to read...

Feng Bujue forced himself to stare at the unbearable font, and with the intention of gathering information, he finished reading the entire article, and then...

"This is a scam!" He really wanted to throw a cup or something, but he didn't have anything in his hand. "What is this? No wonder the title gave off a tabloid reporter vibe, it's all just gossip! What's so interesting about the fact that Good-for-Nothing Uncle participated in a male idol group in Korea when he was young! Now he's just an uncle whose main body is a pair of sunglasses!"

Just as Jue-ge was loudly and fiercely complaining, suddenly, a small icon popped up in his social bar... This was a notification that a "friend" had sent a message.

Seeing this, Feng Bujue opened it almost without thinking. Unexpectedly... the person who sent the message was actually...