Chapter 2 — The First Crack
The thing about revenge, Jane discovered, was that it sounded cleaner in her head than it did under fluorescent light.
At first, it had been a fantasy—short, satisfying, contained. She imagined the rejections returning like boomerangs, the editors reading her words and choking on regret, the platform's polished logo cracking like glass. But fantasies did not pay rent. Fantasies did not cover the late fees and the loans and the quiet humiliation when her parents asked, again, whether she'd found "something stable."
Reality, as it insisted on being, demanded an engine. Revenge needed momentum, or else it was just another story in her head.
So Jane built one, haltingly, like a child clumsily assembling a model airplane. She did not start with grand plans to destroy a company—those were the things of novels, of villains in movies. She started with one small, precise act: influence. Move a comment thread. Redirect a reader. Make a little noise so that someone—anyone—looked at her work.
Her first night into the rabbit hole felt like trespassing. She wandered through forums whose URLs looked like sentences in a language she didn't speak. There were message boards filled with bitterness, subreddits with usernames like "BurnedByGatekeepers" and "MonetizeTheGrind." There were private Discord servers guarded by invite links and emoji-laden role menus. People shared screenshots, claims, and hurts—authors complaining about unfair moderation, readers griping about paywalls, small-time devs boasting of ways to "boost engagement."
Most of it was noise. A lot of it was bravado.
But buried under the noise were practical offers. People who claimed they could "manage" an author's profile: seed comments, small purchases to trigger the site algorithms, edits to tags and metadata that would push a story into more readers' feeds. There were people who could "farm" coins, people who sold positive reviews in bulk. Some wrote scripts—little mechanical things that clicked and posted and clicked again—automated fingers typing applause into the vast machine of WebNovel.
Jane read and read until the café closed and the barista flicked the lights. Her thumb hovered over her phone. She knew what such services meant in the abstract—pay for visibility, buy your way into the front page. It was common, she told herself. The market was crooked, and everyone cheated. What harm would a little nudge do, if the world had already cheated her out of twelve years?
Morality, she discovered, was negotiable in daylight and breakable at night. She made a list of rationales: everyone who got famous on WebNovel had used tactics to accelerate their reach; she was evening the scales; this was not destruction—only correction. It was still a lie, but it was a useful one.
She picked a handle—JLeeWrites—and made a payment. It was small enough that she could afford it without overdrafting. She avoided the people who promised the moon for a fortune. The one she picked had a neutral avatar and a message that read: "5K reads + comments over two weeks. Organic pattern. No risks." The phrase "no risks" made her laugh, a short bitter bark.
For three days, nothing happened. Jane refreshed her dashboard until her browser blurred. On the fourth day, a trickle came: five new readers. A fan who left a paragraph of praise. Then another. The numbers inched upward. Her heart, which had been tuned to the frequency of defeat for so long that it had learned resignation like a second language, stuttered against novelty.
But the novelty was hollow. She knew, in the quiet of the night, that these were not real readers. They were accounts bought and seeded, hollow vessels to manipulate algorithms. Still, someone clicked. Someone left a comment that read: "Author, please update!!!" A human phrase on her page, even if manufactured, made her breathe easier.
Her first sensation of success was a tug on the inside like a tide. It did not feel like triumph. It felt like permission.
If she could buy visibility, what about credibility? If people saw her name enough times, would they begin to trust it like a brand? What would happen if, instead of nudging the edges, she pulled a thread and watched the fabric tear?
She experimented. She hired a small group to edit titles and tags—tweaks that, according to the vendors, would make the platform recommend her to readers who liked "reborn fantasy" and "dark romance." She bought a few more modest comment packages, timed to mimic natural engagement. She swapped out her cover art for something brighter and more metabolic. It was all small, surgical moves. No one would be hurt. No one would be ruined.
And then, a tiny victory: her chapter got onto a "recommended" sidebar one lazy Tuesday afternoon. It was not the front page, but it felt like a window cracked open. She watched the reads increase, and with them, the real comments—the first legitimate ones that used her characters' names, that questioned a subplot, that pleaded for a resolution. She replied with gratitude, which felt authentic, and then with artful hints: "New chapter tonight!" "Big reveal next update!"
When readers came back, their return felt visceral, like ants reassured by crumbs. It was evidence of life. Jane's chest, which had been hollow for years, felt briefly full.
That fullness was dangerous.
It emboldened her. She stopped being satisfied with nudges. She wanted a proof so undeniable that WebNovel could no longer ignore her. She wanted a storm.
In the dark corners where grudges proliferated, the storm had a price. There were other services—expensive, discrete, surgical. One user on a private Discord promised not only to boost engagement but to remove competitors. "Take down a title," the user wrote bluntly. "Sink it so your title replaces it on the rec lists. We can do that."
Jane read the message more than once. Her palms sweated. She imagined, in a way she had not admitted aloud, the editors waking up to a headline: "Top serial disappears from WebNovel—system error." It was a cartoonish image and yet the sensation it gave her—the idea of a gatekeeper's valuable thing suddenly disowned—felt intoxicating.
She did not say yes right away. She slept three nights on the idea, more restless than any insomnia she'd known. Each morning, she told herself she would stop. Each night, the temptation regained its force. Finally, she typed a DM: "What do you need?"
The responses came in measured waves. It was not a single person but a network, a relay of specialists: coders, moderators-for-hire, account farmers. They used handles—Hex, Falcon, Crow—and their writing was clinical. Prices were in tiers. Slamming a major serial required more credit than she had, but there were workarounds. "We can create friction," Falcon wrote. "Not permanent deletion, not yet—just enough to pull readers away. A pattern of slow throttling and targeted complaints. The algorithm hates inconsistent engagement. Your rival will sink."
Jane's fingers hovered over the payment button. She thought of the nine files on her laptop. She thought of the features page that had once been a holy, unreachable place. She thought about her mother's voice: Why throw it away? And then she thought: Why not take it?
The first operation—small, crippling, designed to leave plausible deniability—was executed over a week. Readers encountered error messages while trying to load a top serial. Comments stalled mid-post. Notifications failed to push. Complaints went unnamed in public forums. The serial's author, a young man whose face Jane had never seen and whose voice had once been a punch in the gut to read—the kind of success story that used to be her dream—wrote desperate pings to the moderator team. The community forum filled with confusion and accusations, and in the vacuum, an opportunistic algorithm, hungry for engagement, before long began to push other titles into empty slots.
Jane watched the analytics like an addict. The rival's numbers dipped. Her own numbers climbed, slowly, inexorably, into the new space. It was not instantaneous; it had to look natural. Silence was a necessary part of the symphony.
With each tick upward on her dashboard, the guilt that should have gnawed at her softened. She told herself the author would recover. Tech would fix it. She told herself she had not broken anyone's life, only shifted the attention. But when the author posted a public plea—raw, personal, the kind of thing that could make readers recoil—Jane felt a flicker of something close to shame. She muted it with the same rationalizations she'd used for buying comments: they had cheated; they had been rewarded; she had merely made the scales level.
The platform's moderators, though, were not blind. WebNovel had teams whose job it was to detect abnormal patterns. They had algorithms whose sole function was to sniff out manipulation. They had human eyes and, sometimes, the patience to follow trails. Within two weeks, there was noise in the backend—a ping, a flagged pattern, an internal ticket created by an analyst who had noticed "atypical traffic."
Jane watched as WebNovel responded by rolling out a maintenance notice. A banner appeared across the top of the site announcing an "intermittent issue affecting comments and chapter updates." The public saw a fog; the company saw a storm. The PR team blamed "unforeseen traffic spikes." The moderators scrambled. On the private side, the engineers dug into logs, and when the pattern became obvious enough, they erected blocks and traced IPs and closed accounts. They fixed a hole here, patched a vulnerability there.
It was the first time Jane felt fear.
Not because she thought she would be caught—the measures she had paid for were designed to make detection slow—but because she finally saw, in hard data, the scale of what she'd set in motion. WebNovel's response was methodical, and Jane realized with a cold lurch that the company had resources beyond her imagination. The current that she had tapped into now had strong undertow.
Her vendor messaged: "We pulled back. They tightened monitoring. Best to lie low." Jane wanted to say yes. She wanted to be cautious. Instead, she felt the opposite—a rising heat at the back of her throat. The company had reacted; that proved it could be influenced. If they could be influenced, they could be manipulated more decisively.
The next moves were bolder. She found herself drawn, as if by gravity, toward bigger players in the ring of revenge. She listened to podcasts by ex-moderators who ranted about the dark corners of content economies. She read interviews with disgruntled employees who had left companies to "protect creators" only to find their platforms always swayed by the money behind visibility. The narratives blended together in her head until righteous fury and strategic thinking became indistinguishable.
Jane began to experiment with a new angle: narrative sabotage that looked like fan outrage. She would plant a meme—a rumor about a serial's plot twist that would inflame readers—then seed it with accounts that looked and operated like real fans. The rumor spread. Readers argued fiercely in comments. The platform's content moderators had to step in to de-escalate. The serial's momentum stalled in the process. While moderation did its job, traders of attention shifted their bets. Jane's serial rode the vacancy again.
There were nights when her exhilaration was so intense it felt like vertigo. She would sit in the dark, laptop screen the only light, and watch tiny graphs and numbers move. She celebrated quietly when she passed twenty thousand reads—an arbitrary number that made her feel less like a nobody. She spent the money she made from micro-sponsorships—small, shameful amounts—to pay for more manipulation. An inner voice told her that she was self-funding justice.
When it worked, it was intoxicating. When it didn't, it was crushing. There were campaigns that fizzled, investigations that reversed the gains, and days when her account was flagged for suspicious activity. Each setback was a lesson in escalation: diversify methods, make patterns complex, recruit more accounts that behaved like humans. The costs rose with each refinement. So did the stakes.
And then, almost inevitably, the human thing happened. Jane made a mistake.
It was not technical. She slipped in the only way humans slip—through intimacy. In the private Discord channel she frequented, she struck up a conversation with someone called Marta. Marta was funny and blunt and had opinions about everything. The conversations began about tactics—the morality of "vote farming," the ethics of review inflation—but then moved, in the way lonely people move, into life. Marta told stories about a sister who had died and about a little apartment with bright curtains. Jane, who had rarely told anyone the real facts about her life beyond the curated grief and ambition she wrote on panels, found herself telling Marta about her parents, about the restaurant, about the nights when she kept her head from exploding by typing.
There was warmth in that exchange, a dangerous, soft human warmth. Marta said she lived two states over and worked odd hours as a moderator freelancer. Jane, who had spent years imagining enemies in business suits—editors with neat nails and indifferent hands—found herself enamored with a voice on the other end of a screen.
One morning, in a flurry of misplaced trust, Marta sent a message: "My client needs a favor—can you seed a few comments on this serial? He's launching today and wants good traction." It was a simple request, harmless. Jane obliged, thinking of it as community reciprocity. Then later that day, she watched, muted, as the serial Marta had asked about exploded beyond any reasonable expectation of growth. The author's name trended, coins poured in, and comments skyrocketed.
This could have been normal. It could have been a small service provided in exchange for future favors. Except that within forty-eight hours, the trending author posted a message: "I suspect something—someone is inflating my reads. If this keeps up, WebNovel might investigate and I'll lose everything." A nervousness leaked into the author's prose, and then accusations. A community debate flared. The platform noticed anomalies, and in an attempt to placate upset readers, they froze transactions to the author's account pending review.
Jane watched the thread twist, then derail. She felt a pang that was not entirely guilt—something more complicated: culpability mixed with the shame that comes from being implicated by association. Marta's responses were dismissive and cold: "It's business. Clients want results. Don't be naive." When Jane pressed, Marta answered: "Sometimes you have to get your hands dirty."
Dirty hands, Jane found, left marks.
The freeze on the author's account escalated. People threatened to leave the platform. The PR team posted reassurances that WebNovel took integrity seriously and was investigating the anomaly. The incident drew attention from community influencers who posted thinkpieces about the ethics of platform economies. For the first time, there were public conversations not just about content but about the ways in which visibility was manufactured. That conversation, for better or worse, was precisely what Jane had hoped for—it shifted the lens from her work's supposed defects to the platform's mechanisms. It was validating in a way that nothing else had been.
But validation came at a price. The investigation widened its scope. WebNovel started contacting creators directly, requesting logs, screenshots, and proof of organic engagement. They updated terms of service. They bolstered detection systems. They hired outside consultants. For a while, the space Jane had crawled into seemed shrinking, as if the company had rolled a giant broom across its stage and swept away many of the tricks and stalls.
Her vendors grew anxious in private chats. "Lay low," Falcon wrote. "They're hunting a net." The cost of securing the same manipulative gains increased dramatically. Some vendors disappeared altogether, handles going silent, Discord invites expired. A few were taken down by the company. Jane felt the web around her tighten.
Most dangerous of all, there was a change within her. The moral cost of her actions started to calcify into something darker. The doubt that had been a soft, intermittent ache now hardened into an edgier, pricklier thing. She found herself less interested in whether she was right and more absorbed in whether she could win. The distinction kept narrowing: winning meant survival; survival meant whatever it took.
That narrowing ate at her relationships. She lied to her mother about freelance gigs. She missed calls from old friends she'd once thought would anchor her to a life outside the screen. She stopped writing long, considered drafts and instead focused on episodes—each update designed to hook, to maximize retention. Her art lost nuance. Characters began orbiting around plot devices she'd read in other successful novels. Her inbox, which had once been a place for potential readers to reach her heart, became a ledger: who had been paid, who owed favors, which vendor was reliable.
There were moments, sometimes—rare and sharp—when she would open one of her old drafts and feel a stab of unfamiliar shame. She had started this war because she believed in stories' power. Now, she often wrote tactics rather than truth. She had become what she had once resented: a merchant of attention.
Still, the climb back was real. Publishers and agents sometimes peeked at trending lists. A couple of small blogs wrote about the "mysterious newcomer ascending the rankings." One agent reached out with a polite, contract-shaped email. Jane, who had once been starving for any sign of life, felt hunger morph into something else: greed for permanence. The agent's offer was not a grand one—republishing rights for a small advance—but it was tangible. It smelled like validation that could be pinned to a wall.
She considered it. It seemed, at first glance, like proof that the plan had worked. If the platform would no longer be the only gatekeeper, then the prize could be taken and made stable. She imagined telling her mother—maybe, finally, a dinner without worry. She imagined buying back some of her dignity.
But the reality was more complex. The agent asked questions: about her growth, about her audience, about promotional tactics. There was a line in the contract about "organic readership and authenticity," oddly formal, oddly pointed. Jane's fingers hovered. She recognized the catch: the thriving readership was not entirely organic. Would she sign and pretend? Would she confess? Would she stand naked before an agent and admit that many of her pages were purchased ghosts?
She folded the contract into a drawer and, for three days, did nothing. The silence felt like a held breath. It was during that pause, while she was rationing cups of instant ramen, that she received a message—a terse email from a corporate address she recognized: "We have noticed activity associated with your account that violates our terms of service. Please contact us for review."
Her stomach dropped. The cursor blinked on the screen like a metronome counting down.
This was the moment she had always known could come—the moment when the river she'd diverted would swell and claim its course back. She could compose a response that was honest and risk losing everything. She could lie and hope the trail had been cleverly disguised. She could erase evidence, ask vendors to cover tracks. Or she could step into the light and accept the consequences.
She chose, for the first time since the descent began, a path that felt unfamiliar: she opened the email and wrote, slowly, without rhetoric. She explained that she had tried to support her writing, that she had made choices she regretted, that she was willing to Cooperate. It was not a Confession that absolved her. It was merely admission that the act of Climbing has cost her something she could not name - her purity maybe her peace.
She sent the reply and then, in the hollow silence afterward, she felt a curious mixture of terror and relief. The decision did not return her to innocence. It only made the consequences certain.
When WebNovel's response came—formal, corporate, cool—it was not an immediate public burning. They requested a call. They wanted proof of the traffic sources and an explanation for anomalous patterns. They asked for her cooperation. They warned that penalties could include removal, restitution, and legal remedies if they found deliberate fraud.
Jane paced while waiting for the call, the apartment small and loud with her own thoughts. She thought of Marta and whether she should tell her. She thought of Falcon and the vendors and whether this could be contained. More obsessively, she thought of the author whose account had been frozen and whose plea had rattled the community. She thought about the agent's contract tucked in the drawer like an accusation.
When the call finally happened, it was not the dramatic showdown she had imagined. A soft-voiced representative—sober, professional, and not yet judgmental—listened. Jane explained, haltingly at first, then with more confession as the conversation went on. She admitted to purchasing small promotional campaigns, to using third-party engagement services, to having associations with intermediaries who might have engaged in harmful practices.
There was silence on the other end of the line. The representative's voice recalibrated. "We appreciate your candor," she said. "This is serious. We will need to investigate further, but your cooperation could be a mitigating factor."
Cooperation. A word that sounded like an offer of mercy and like a sentence at once.
As she hanged up, Jane felt both relieved and frightened. In the span of months she had built a house of cards, and now the platform had asked for a single breath to see if the house would stand. She had the option of being helpful—a chance, perhaps, to come out of this with a story that retained her dignity—or the option of doubling down, of pulling tighter the strings that had made her climb possible.
In the quiet that followed, she realized that the gamble she'd made had already altered her, perhaps irrevocably. She had tasted power: small, manufactured, and dangerously convincing. The feeling of being read—the warmth of other people's attention—had become addictive. The justifications that had once been sugar-coated had calcified into necessity. And now, with WebNovel watching and asking questions, she had to decide whether she would reclaim the honest version of herself or rebuild the machine with cleaner hands.
She could imagine both outcomes: one where she cooperated and was punished but maybe salvaged some future; another where she resisted and threw more fuel on the conflagration. She thought of the nine novels on her laptop, the lives she had built and abandoned, and an absurd, private terror clutched at her throat—what if in doing this she had killed the possibility of ever being taken seriously again?
Outside, the city moved on, indifferent—the hum of traffic, a distant siren, someone laughing. Inside, Jane's life felt smaller and larger at once: smaller because everything she had done had been contrived in secret, larger because the consequences were no longer theoretical.
She sat back in her chair and felt the weight of the years settle in her shoulders. Revenge, she had learned, was not a single strike. It was a long, corrosive process. It changed its carrier. It demanded compromises and collected debts.
She opened one of her old manuscripts—When Stars Shatter—and read a paragraph. The sentence was honest, raw, full of the kind of nuance that had once made her stay up for nights. She let the words wash over her like rain. For a moment, she felt the pulse of the writer she'd always wanted to be.
Then, a notification popped up: an incoming message from Marta. "They sniffed around," it said. "Be careful."
Jane stared at the screen, the pulse of fear and exhilaration intermingling into a single, dangerous warmth. She had wanted to make them pay, to carve a crack in a machine that had always spat out mediocrity and rewards for the loudest. She had not quite known, the way one cannot know the full shape of a river until one is in its current, that the river's pull would change the person who entered it.
She closed the manuscript and opened a blank document. Her fingers hovered above the keys, trembling. For a long moment she did nothing. Then, slowly, she began to type.
Her handwriting was no longer purely art. It had become an instrument, and in this next chapter—whatever shape it would take—she would need every ounce of craft to navigate the mess she had made.
Outside, the city kept moving; inside, a small woman with a laptop had stepped over the threshold of something that had once been only a story. The first crack had been made. The question now was whether she could control how the fracture widened.