Chapter 3 — The Needle and the Vein
The email sat like a knife in Jane's inbox.
She'd answered once, admitted more than she ever thought she would, and WebNovel's representative had been professional, calm, almost kind. But the calmness unnerved her. It was the way doctors spoke before delivering test results: quiet, measured, preparing you for news that would alter your life.
Jane spent the next two days in a state of tension so tight her hands shook when she boiled water. Every noise from her phone made her flinch. She imagined faceless investigators combing through her account logs, each keystroke she had ever made lit up on a screen in a sterile office. She imagined them zooming in on the times her readership had spiked unnaturally, the suspicious comments, the clusters of activity that no real audience would replicate.
At night, she couldn't sleep. The hum of her refrigerator sounded like a clock counting down.
That was when Marta called.
---
The first time Jane had heard Marta's voice, it surprised her. After weeks of messages, late-night chats, memes, and confessions, Jane had built up an image of her friend: sharp, sardonic, unflappable. She expected a voice like a cigarette and gravel. Instead, Marta sounded almost gentle. Low, calm, each word deliberate, as if she was measuring its weight before letting it go.
"Hey," Marta said that night. "You're spiraling."
"I'm not," Jane said too quickly, though she was curled in her desk chair with her knees pressed to her chest. "I'm just… thinking."
"Thinking doesn't make you forget to eat."
Jane blinked at the clock. It was past midnight. She hadn't had dinner.
Marta exhaled softly. "Listen. They've flagged you, sure. But they flag dozens of accounts every week. Most get warnings, some get temp suspensions. Very few get nuked. Don't panic yet."
"That's easy for you to say," Jane muttered. "You're not the one who—" She cut herself off.
Marta's silence on the other end was pointed. "Who what, Jane? Who made their own luck? Who refused to roll over like a kicked dog?"
Jane closed her eyes. She could almost see Marta leaning back in a chair, one hand on a coffee mug, speaking with the steadiness Jane had never managed to keep.
"I just…" Jane's throat tightened. "I wanted it so badly. I wanted them to see me."
"They will," Marta said. "But you can't play the game hoping for fairness. The house is rigged. You need to stop thinking like a guest at their table and start thinking like a card counter."
Jane let out a shaky laugh. "What if they catch me counting?"
"Then you stack the deck so hard they can't tell where the trick begins and where it ends."
There was a long pause.
Then Marta said, more softly, "Let me help you."
---
The "help" came the next day. Marta sent Jane a folder through an encrypted link. Inside were documents, screenshots, and lines of code Jane barely understood.
"This," Marta explained over voice chat, "is a map. Not the whole fortress, but some cracks in the wall. Old employee access points. Leaked moderator tools. They're patched often, but not perfectly. If you know how to press at the seams, you can make the system twitch."
Jane scrolled through the files, her pulse pounding. Some of it looked like technical jargon—IP redirections, proxies, server logs—but other parts were disturbingly simple. There were step-by-step guides on how to mass-report a competitor's story until it was automatically flagged. Templates for fake copyright claims. Even scripts that generated "reader churn," simulating an audience that clicked on the first few chapters of a book and then abandoned it en masse, tricking the algorithm into thinking the story wasn't worth promoting.
"This is…" Jane's voice cracked. "This is insane."
"It's leverage," Marta said. "You don't have to use all of it. But it's better to have tools in your hand than wait for them to hammer you blind."
Jane leaned back in her chair, staring at the ceiling. Her apartment smelled faintly of damp carpet and exhaustion. She thought of her parents again—her mother's sharp disappointment, her father's silence. She thought of Mr. Davidson at her old office, smirking as he belittled her in front of her team. She thought of the rejection letters, the "does not meet our standards," the "good luck in your future endeavors."
Maybe she'd been waiting all her life for someone to hand her a weapon.
"Show me how," she whispered.
---
The first time she pressed the needle into the vein of WebNovel's system, it felt like standing at the edge of a cliff.
Marta guided her through the process. They picked a target together: a rising author whose serial had just entered the top rankings. It wasn't personal; it was strategic. The story was in the same genre Jane wrote—dark fantasy romance—so its downfall would leave a vacuum her own novel could slide into.
"All you're doing," Marta explained, "is sending a signal. The algorithm doesn't know morality. It only knows numbers."
They used a script from the folder: a wave of fake accounts mass-reporting the story for "graphic content violations." Within hours, the author's chapters were temporarily locked for review. Readers flooded the comments with confusion. Engagement dropped like a stone.
Jane watched it happen in real time, her stomach knotted. She expected guilt to crash over her, but instead she felt something else: a dizzy, heady rush.
It worked.
Her own story, The Glass Kingdom, slid into the empty slot like a tide filling a hollow. New readers trickled in, real ones this time, curious wanderers who saw her book recommended because the competitor's had been pulled. They left comments, theories, demands for updates.
Jane sat there until dawn, responding to every single one, her fingers trembling with a mix of joy and terror.
---
The terror lingered. Every time she refreshed her dashboard, she half-expected to see a warning banner. Every knock in the hallway made her flinch, convinced it was someone coming to drag her out. But the warning never came. WebNovel was too big, too slow, too distracted by thousands of authors and millions of readers to notice one subtle sabotage.
And so, little by little, the fear dulled.
Jane learned to walk the knife's edge. She didn't launch massive attacks—those would be too obvious—but small, precise cuts. She'd use churn scripts to make a rival look unappealing. She'd plant rumors in comment sections, seeding doubt about other stories' quality. Sometimes she even used Marta's copyright templates, sending takedown claims that stalled updates just long enough for her own chapters to gain momentum.
Each victory was a drop of poison in her blood. And with each drop, she stopped thinking of herself as a victim and started thinking of herself as a player.
---
But paranoia is a shadow that lengthens with power.
One night, as Jane sat updating The Glass Kingdom, she noticed something strange. A new account had left a comment—not the usual flattery or criticism, but a cryptic line:
> "You climb fast. Careful. The fall is faster."
The username was generic, no profile picture, no history. But the comment lodged in her brain like a splinter.
She tried to dismiss it. Trolls were everywhere. But then more comments appeared across her chapters:
> "Do you deserve this attention?"
"Funny how your numbers look unnatural."
"We're watching."
Jane's chest tightened. We.
She showed Marta the comments.
"Probably just trolls," Marta said casually, but Jane thought she heard a note of unease beneath the calm. "Don't feed them."
But Jane couldn't shake the feeling. Someone knew. Someone was watching the way her growth had curved unnaturally, the way her meteoric rise didn't quite match the years of obscurity behind her.
Her sleep grew worse. She started hearing phantom pings from her laptop even when it was closed. She imagined moderators combing through her activity, their eyes narrowing. She jumped every time the café barista glanced at her screen.
The rush of power was still there—but now it was chased by dread.
---
The breaking point came with the second email from WebNovel.
> Dear Ms. Lee,
Following our previous correspondence, we have continued monitoring your account. While your cooperation has been noted, anomalies persist. We request that you attend a formal interview with our Compliance and Security Division. Please confirm your availability within 72 hours. Failure to respond may result in account suspension.
Jane read it three times, her pulse hammering. An interview. Not just emails. Voices. Questions. Proof.
She called Marta, nearly hyperventilating.
"They're onto me," she whispered. "They'll find everything. The reports, the scripts—"
"Calm down," Marta said firmly. "They're fishing. They want to see if you'll panic. If you play it cool, they'll back off."
"What if they don't?"
"Then you stop playing defense."
Jane frowned. "What do you mean?"
"You've been poking at the system from the edges," Marta said. "It's time to hit the center. If they want to make you a suspect, make them too busy cleaning their own blood to come after you."
Jane's mouth went dry. "You're talking about—"
"About WebNovel itself, yes," Marta said smoothly. "Their infrastructure isn't perfect. A few targeted strikes, and they'll be scrambling so hard they won't have time to look at one author's account."
Jane stared at her laptop. The thought was insane. Dangerous. Criminal.
And yet… she thought of the rejection letters. Of the endless nights alone. Of the comment: We're watching.
Maybe it was time to make them look at something else.
---
That night, Jane opened the folder Marta had given her again. This time she didn't stop at the surface-level tools. She went deeper, into the files that looked like they belonged in movies about cybercrime: scripts that crashed servers under heavy loads, backdoors into outdated moderation portals, even instructions on how to exploit payment systems.
Her hands shook as she scrolled, but she couldn't look away.
She picked one. A simple one. A script designed to flood the platform's search function with nonsense queries, slowing it to a crawl. Users would complain about lag. Moderators would scramble. Nothing permanent, nothing devastating—just chaos.
She hesitated for hours, finger hovering over the enter key.
Then, just before dawn, she pressed it.
Her screen filled with lines of scrolling text. Somewhere across the world, thousands of fake searches began to hammer WebNovel's servers.
She sat there, heart racing, as if waiting for thunder after lightning.
Within minutes, Twitter lit up:
"WebNovel down? Anyone else?"
"Search is broken, I can't find my reading list."
"Lol this site is trash."
Jane covered her mouth, half in horror, half in exhilaration. She'd done it. She'd made the giant stumble.
For the first time in her life, WebNovel wasn't rejecting her. It was reeling because of her.
---
But as dawn broke and the city outside began to stir, Jane realized the truth: she'd crossed a line she could never uncross.
The rejection of her novels had once felt like the end of the world. But this? This was the beginning of war.
And war never ended clean.