Chapter One: The Boss Vanishes on the Spot

After Lu Chen rejected the seventh draft and Lin Mo missed the last train home, he had rested his forehead on the desk and typed: “If the boss vanished on the spot, the world would finally be quiet.” One minute later, the platform automatically attached an image: a man in a suit dissolving into translucent pixels, with bold white lettering below—THE BOSS VANISHES ON THE SPOT. Lin Mo had assumed it was a new auto-caption feature. Somehow, the image was reposted more than eight hundred times. The replies were full of “claiming this,” “may your words come true,” and “please roll this out nationwide.” By one in the morning, it had reached the bottom of the local trending list. Now the world was quiet indeed.