Doctors gave up trying to explain Feng Bujue a long time ago. They’d run every test they had, ask him the same questions visit after visit, and the answer always came back the same, fear just doesn’t register for him anymore. Car crash, near-death accident, whatever would send a normal person into a panic, and he’d barely blink. Nobody ever figured out why, and eventually he stopped bothering to ask.
So when a new VR game called Thriller Paradise drops, promising to scare the hell out of people, Feng Bujue’s got a theory worth testing. Most players are chasing a thrill or something to brag about afterward. He’s chasing proof that he’s not completely broken, because if a game engineered from the ground up to terrify him can’t manage it, maybe nothing ever will. He knows how that sounds. Still beats another doctor telling him his brain scans look fine.
Turns out this isn’t the kind of game where you shoot your way through trouble. It’s locked doors and cryptic notes, abandoned hospitals, murders that shouldn’t be physically possible, things lurking just past what the light reaches, and one wrong guess can trap you in a scenario for hours while rushing in gets people killed. Sometimes just getting everyone out alive is harder than beating whatever’s hunting them.
And that’s exactly the kind of problem Feng Bujue’s built for. He catches details other players walk right past, asks the questions that always hit the nail, and treats every monster like a suspect out of one of his detective novels, which makes him genuinely useful and genuinely insufferable to be stuck with on a team. While everyone else is losing it, he’s standing there wondering why there’s a bloodstain on the ceiling instead of the floor.
But the deeper he gets, the stranger things start looking. Characters remember conversations they were never supposed to remember. Files show up in places nobody could’ve hidden them. Some scenarios just won’t resolve, like there’s a real answer sitting somewhere outside the game itself. Somewhere along the way, Feng Bujue stops caring whether he can feel fear again, because the bigger question is who actually built this place, why the impossible pieces keep locking together so neatly, and whether the wall between the game and real life was ever as solid as he thought.
