The pleasure of revenge, like the bubbles in a carbonated drink, came quickly and faded just as fast.
After the excitement of schadenfreude passed, Chen Mo turned back into that hamster hiding in its shell—and he realized that his shell was being drilled into with an electric drill.
"Boom-tss, boom-tss—boom-tss, boom-tss—"
The heavy bass from next door, like a sledgehammer wrapped in cotton, pounded his fragile nerves one blow after another. The wall was so thin that he could even feel the water cup on his desk trembling slightly with the beat.
The new neighbor, a wealthy second-generation kid named Du Shao, seemed to have turned his partitioned room into a private internet café and disco combined.
Chen Mo took a deep breath, clinging to the last dignity of a corporate slave, and decided to be polite first, then take tougher measures. He walked to the thin door and knocked.
The music didn't stop.
He knocked harder.
The door creaked open a crack, and a young face—full of impatience—peered out. Du Shao was wearing a pair of expensive-looking over-ear noise-canceling headphones, and music poured out from the crack. He frowned, looking Chen Mo up and down with contempt, as if Chen Mo were a cockroach that had invaded his territory.
"I'm sorry to disturb you," Chen Mo forced a humble smile. "Could you turn the music down a bit?"
Du Shao seemed not to hear. He took off one headphone and leaned his ear closer. "Huh? What did you say?"
The loud game sound effects instantly filled the entire corridor.
Chen Mo had to raise his voice and repeat himself.
Du Shao looked even more impatient. Without saying a word, he pulled out his wallet from the pocket of his brand-name casual pants, randomly took out a few red hundred-yuan bills, and threw them on the ground at Chen Mo's feet like he was discarding trash.
"Annoyed by the noise?" he said lightly, a sneer on his lips. "Go stay at a nice hotel then. Here, a gift from me."
With that, he slammed the door shut, shutting Chen Mo and the scattered money outside together.
In the corridor, only the muffled "boom-tss" and Chen Mo's stiff figure remained.
A sense of humiliation, like molten iron, rushed from the soles of his feet to the top of his head in an instant.
Chen Mo silently bent down, picked up the money one by one, and clenched it in his hand. He closed his own door, leaned back against it, and his body trembled slightly with anger.
Using money, huh?
Fine. Very fine.
Chen Mo returned to his desk. The last trace of gentleness belonging to civilized society disappeared from his eyes, replaced by a calm bordering on madness. He opened the interface that only he could see.
Sometimes, revenge doesn't need to wait until tomorrow.
He would use magic to defeat money.
The interface of [Reality Editor] unfolded before his eyes. This time, Chen Mo operated it much more skillfully. He directly brought up the 3D structure diagram of the rental house and locked his target on the wall connecting his room to the neighbor's.
[Editing Instruction]:Target: Wall - ID (A07-B)Modified Parameter: Sound Transmission Damping
He had found this term in the editor's built-in physics dictionary. Simply put, it meant making sound 衰减 more drastically when passing through this wall.
[Adjustment Plan]: Temporarily Increase to 95%
He thought for a moment, feeling this wasn't safe enough. Who knew if this wealthy second-generation kid would turn the volume up loud enough to shake the building?
He clicked on an "Advanced Option."
[Energy Structure Model]: To ensure the stability of rule editing, please select a basic energy structure.
A bunch of geometric model options popped up on the interface: cube, sphere, four-sided pyramid... Chen Mo was dazzled.
He didn't understand the differences between these models, so he simply followed a simple, geeky sense of aesthetics and chose the shape that looked the most stable, coolest, and most sci-fi to him.
A perfect hexagon.
"This one," he muttered to himself, as if picking vegetables at a market. "Honeycomb structure—it looks solid."
[Confirm Execution, Estimated World Essence Consumption: 0.2]
Confirm!
[World Essence - 0.2, Remaining: 0.32]
The moment the instruction took effect, it was as if someone had pressed the mute button.
The entire world went quiet.
The "boom-tss" from next door—loud enough to make one's heart resonate—was completely blocked by an invisible wall. No, it was more thorough than just blocking; it was as if the sound had been swallowed whole by a black hole, not a single trace of it leaking through.
Chen Mo could even clearly hear his own heartbeat, which was too rapid from nervousness.
Immediately after, a series of warm currents—far more intense than the last time—flowed into his body.
[Detected 'entropy increase' being suppressed, local area returning to 'order'...][World Essence + 0.98][World Essence Balance: 1.3]
Chen Mo was stunned. As he looked at his rapidly increasing balance, a realization suddenly dawned on him: rather than creating chaos to make others laugh, the editor seemed to prefer when he restored order and reduced noise. Resolving "entropy increase" earned him more "recognition" from the world than creating "chaos."
At the same time, in the next room.
Du Shao was in the middle of an intense team battle when he suddenly felt something was wrong. The sound in his room seemed to have become very "muffled," as if it had been sucked away by something, losing its open, three-dimensional quality.
He irritably took off his headphones to check if the speaker was broken.
Sure enough, the sound was really off. Even though he had turned the volume knob to three-quarters, it sounded like it was covered with three layers of cotton quilts.
"Crappy speaker!" he cursed, thinking the desktop speaker—worth several thousand yuan—was broken. Annoyed, he turned the volume up to maximum.
A sound wave loud enough to shatter glass gushed out of the speakers, but it only made the sound in the room a little louder, and it still felt unbearably muffled.
He subconsciously glanced in the direction of the next room.
It was quiet.
That poor neighbor didn't even come to knock on the door? That didn't make sense.
This strange incident—something money couldn't explain—made Du Shao feel, for the first time, a faint, inexplicable curiosity about his seemingly ordinary, poor neighbor.
And on Chen Mo's side of the wall, he was enjoying an unprecedented peace and quiet.
He looked at the 1.3 balance in the editor interface, then at the rent reminder message the landlord had just sent on his phone—attached with a photo of a new lock and a cold ultimatum: "Xiao Chen, tomorrow is the final deadline."
His joy cooled instantly.
He realized that this little bit of essence and these trivial tricks couldn't be turned into money to pay the rent.
The problem was far from solved.