Do you like big ones?

"How boring..." Chen Shang yawned, lying on the bed and turning on his phone.

Two days had passed since his "video call" with that goddess. Chen Shang had been keeping an eye on the progress in the abyss, but the conglomerates were still conquering it like a hot knife through butter, having already successfully explored three or four regions.

Among the major live-streaming platforms, the most popular one right now was "Abyss Conquest Live," broadcasted by the official "Abyss Expeditionary Force." This channel aired for five to eight hours every day, showing the public the military's progress in exploring and conquering the abyss, while incessantly seizing every opportunity to tout the brilliant and mighty wisdom of the Conglomerate Alliance.

On the screen, a voluptuous beauty reporter wearing a suit with a plunging neckline held a microphone and talked eloquently, occasionally making a pretense of interviewing a few soldiers patrolling the "Dead Crypt District."

Although the female reporter's delivery was not entirely fluent, and her script was stiff to the point of awkwardness, perhaps mostly because her appearance was very much to the viewers' liking, the screen was still flooded with gifts and complimentary scrolling comments, keeping her popularity sky-high.

Just as the reporter was running off at the mouth before the camera, a few harsh wolf howls suddenly echoed from not far away.

Several tall ghouls burst out from the mist, charging toward the reporter and the production crew.

At this sight, the chat room instantly filled with comments like "Miss, you're in danger!" and "Run, reporter sis!"

However, the beauty reporter showed no panic, saying with confidence instead: "You don't need to worry about me! If you ask why, it's because soldiers will be here to protect me right away!"

Just as her voice trailed off, several soldiers wearing silver armor from the "Doomsday Horn" rushed into the frame, aiming their submachine guns at the ghouls and unleashing a barrage of gunfire, directly suppressing them with firepower and turning them into sieves.

Watching those sharp-clawed, fanged ghouls fall, the female reporter let out a sigh of relief, then confidently shook her two alluring watermelons, revealing a soothing smile:

"The duty of the Alliance soldiers is to protect the safety of all citizens in the city, and of course that includes me~ They are our heroes, and no matter what kind of monsters we encounter, everyone must believe that they will protect us!"

Listening to the female reporter's excruciatingly awkward and forced praise, Chen Shang furrowed his brow in cringe.

At that moment, a text message popped up on his phone, sent from Black Alice:

"So cringe! I'm dying of cringe! Little Chen, why are you watching this kind of stream? Don't tell me you've fallen for that female reporter?"

"Ah, well..." Chen Shang was stunned for a moment, then dialed her directly: "Don't you have anything better to do? Why are you monitoring my phone?"

Black Alice replied, "What, do you have a problem with that?"

"What problem could I have? Anyway, I can't stop you." Chen Shang curled his lips and smiled with feigned ease.

He glanced at Black Alice's favorability rating and found it had risen to [86/100], likely due to the riot incident in the Barren Refining District a few days ago.

Aside from White Fox, whose favorability was already maxed out, Black Alice should be considered the non-romanceable character with his highest favorability. But compared to the simple-minded White Fox, this hacker lady could be described as extremely troublesome.

The fact that his phone was being monitored by this top-tier hacker was presumably because he had boosted her favorability too high.

"I just happened to be bored, so I came to see what you were up to," Black Alice teased in a lazy tone. "You're actually watching such a boring conglomerate stream. Could it be because you like big ones?"

"Impossible! I'm an equal-opportunity lover, I'm not picky about those things!" Chen Shang quickly defended himself with a solemn expression: "Even if you have none at all, I won't look down on you!"

Upon careful reflection, although Chen Shang had never seen Black Alice's true appearance, the Black Alice he saw in the virtual world was that kind of flat-chested, shut-in otaku persona.

"Go to hell! You're the one who has none! Your whole family has none!" Black Alice's tone suddenly grew agitated: "Wait, are you trying to hit on me? Why are you acting like I'm your girlfriend? What gives you the qualification to look down on me?!"

"Angry~?" Chen Shang smiled. "If you're free, don't keep me from watching a great beauty... Don't keep me from observing the conglomerates' actions!"

"..." Black Alice fell silent for a moment, then her tone returned to calm: "Forget it, I happen to be bored too. Let's watch the stream together~"

"No problem~ Having a beauty like you accompany me while I watch the stream is a pleasure~" Chen Shang nodded and switched the screen back to the broadcast.

"You've never even seen me, how do you know I'm a beauty?" Black Alice laughed, half-annoyed.

"It's a gentleman's etiquette, Miss Hacker~" Chen Shang smiled with decorum. "Even if your true form is a radiation-mutated female boar-orc, I would still call you a beauty."

"F*** you, you damn..." Black Alice was clearly choked up by his words, too many dirty words popping into her mind while she struggled to choose which one would be more aggressive.

Chen Shang ignored Black Alice and continued to focus on the uneventful live stream.

He had previously unlocked intel on the crypt district and knew that beneath this seemingly peaceful area lurked an entity known as the "Ghoul King," something the conglomerates were completely unaware of.

However, the army dispatched by the conglomerates had directly occupied the entity's territory and slaughtered so many undead monsters; the appearance of the "Ghoul King" was only a matter of time.

Moreover, that goddess had promised him she would personally awaken the Ghoul King, giving these conglomerate soldiers a thorough taste of hopeless defeat.

The two watched the stream for another half hour. The content was basically the female reporter wandering and strolling through the "Dead Crypt District" under the protection of several "Doomsday Horn" soldiers. Every now and then, a few zombie dogs and ghouls would pop out, only to be blasted into pieces of flesh by the soldiers' heavy firepower, while the reporter seized the chance to brag about the conglomerates' great achievements nearby.

"How boring... Do we still have to keep watching?" A message came from Black Alice's end.

"I think it's pretty boring too, let's just turn it off." Chen Shang had lost interest in such an overly official live stream and lacked the patience to keep watching, preparing to exit the broadcast room.

Just at that moment, Chen Shang suddenly heard a scream from the female reporter in the stream, and the camera began to shake wildly. He glanced back at the live screen and found that a three-meter-tall humanoid monster had suddenly materialized right before the lens.

Unlike the ghouls and zombie dogs found everywhere in the graveyard, this monster had a skull resembling a beast's cranium, and its entire body was enveloped in a robe made of a formless dark cloud. Even separated by a screen, Chen Shang still felt a sensation of his soul trembling.

If those zombie monsters were mere cannon fodder, then the aura exuding from this monster made it a "King" in every sense of the word.

In an instant, the scrolling comments in the stream vanished, perhaps because the viewers had also been paralyzed with shock by this monster.

The monster extended a rotting hand wrapped in bandages and pointed it directly at the soldiers and the production crew members.

"[???] has initiated a Soul Shock against you, executing a sanity deduction check, 1d70 = ???. Deducting the rolled sanity value."

Even though the automated medicine injectors equipped inside every soldier's helmet sensed their wearers' abnormal brainwaves and administered large doses of calmative drugs to them, such blood-red text still flickered across the minds of these soldiers.

Immediately following that, wisps of white, soul-like substance flew out from the crowns of the heads of these soldiers and the reporter, being sucked into the monster's body.

All of these people collapsed to the ground, a look of ecstatic bliss frozen on their faces. The monster nodded slightly, turned, and vanished into the fog.

As for the stream's screen, it was swiftly cut off by the platform, leaving only a black screen and the prompt: "Live broadcast signal error."