Chapter Five: Folding a City into the Set

With four hours left until midnight, Gu Yan paid everyone first. “Your name is disappearing, and you're distributing twelve million?” Zhou Fang cried. “Money in a company account is a number. Money in your accounts proves we made this together.” Gu Yan stamped each paper payslip. “The more scattered the bank and tax records, the harder they are to erase at once.” Mechanical Compilation revealed that the hundred imitations were not ordinary videos. Each ending contained the same gear watermark. Anyone who saw it had their attention siphoned into the cutting-room layer, then converted into Resonance for the Marquis. Deleting the videos was too slow. Attacking the servers might damage viewers whose memories were already being drained.