Doctors had already given up explaining Feng Bujue.
They could measure his heartbeat, examine his brain, and ask him the same questions over and over, but the answer never changed. Fear simply didn’t exist for him anymore. Whether it was a life-threatening accident or something that would leave an ordinary person trembling, his emotions barely moved. Nobody could tell him why it happened, and after enough hospital visits, he stopped expecting anyone to.
That strange condition follows him into a newly released virtual reality game called **Thriller Paradise**.
Most players log in hoping for excitement or bragging rights after surviving terrifying scenarios. Feng Bujue joins for a much stranger reason. If a game built entirely around fear cannot make him feel anything, perhaps nothing ever will. It sounds ridiculous, even to him, but it is still more promising than another doctor telling him everything looks normal.
The first scenario quickly makes it clear that this isn’t the kind of game where bigger weapons solve every problem. Locked doors, cryptic notes, abandoned hospitals, forgotten villages, impossible murders, and things hiding just outside the edge of the light demand patience more than courage. Missing a tiny clue can trap players for hours, while rushing ahead usually ends badly. Sometimes escaping with everyone alive is harder than defeating whatever is chasing them.
That happens to suit Feng Bujue surprisingly well.
He notices details other people dismiss, asks questions nobody else thinks to ask, and has an annoying habit of treating monsters the same way he treats suspects in one of his detective novels. Even when everyone around him is panicking, he is still trying to figure out why a bloodstain is on the ceiling instead of the floor. It makes him useful, although not necessarily pleasant to have as a teammate.
As more scenarios are cleared, odd inconsistencies begin piling up. Certain characters seem to remember previous encounters when they shouldn’t. Hidden files appear where nobody was supposed to find them. Some stories refuse to end cleanly, as if another answer is waiting somewhere outside the game itself.
By then, Feng Bujue has almost forgotten why he logged in.
Recovering his sense of fear slowly becomes less important than understanding who built this world, why so many impossible things fit together a little too well, and whether the line separating the game from reality was ever as clear as everyone believed.
