YJJ Entertainment Company

The average sleep time for adults in Stick Country is about 6.5 to 7 hours.

That's the official data.

Official data—anyone who knows, knows. Like Stick Country's traditional culture, it's so waterlogged you could farm fish.

In reality, most Stick Country workers consider themselves lucky if they get five hours of sleep; it's like smoke rising from their ancestors' graves.

That's why the internet once buzzed with rumors that people in Stick Country had evolved past sleep, making them pioneers of human genetic mutation.

Anyone who's looked into it knows there's no evolution—it's all coffee keeping them alive.

Legend has it that coffee was originally a stimulant for livestock. Then some genius added coconut milk, mixed in dairy, and it reinvented itself as a human-exclusive energy booster.

Stuff meant for beasts of burden, now drunk by beasts of burden. Makes sense, I guess.

Whether that's ironic or just plain ironic.

Lin Mo walked the streets of Seoul.

At this hour, there were still plenty of people out. Coffee shops with their lights on outnumbered convenience stores.

This city was like it had been injected with adrenaline, refusing to sleep, the very air reeking of caffeine.

He didn't linger. His target was already locked in.

The YJJ Entertainment building.

As one of Stick Country's biggest idol factories, the building was more impressive than Lin Mo had expected.

Six floors underground, twenty-three above ground—twenty-nine total.

A circular design with a hollow core, the center housing a massive indoor garden packed with tropical plants. Under the lights, it looked lush and vibrant.

A stark contrast to what went on inside this building.

Lin Mo extended his divine sense, and the entire building's layout unfolded in his mind like a map.

Employee dormitories took up several floors, packed with trainees—hundreds of them, male and female combined.

Production rooms, recording studios, photography studios, dance studios—everything was there.

Past two in the morning, and there were still seven or eight practice rooms with lights on, young people inside pushing themselves to exhaustion.

A true factory.

The products on this assembly line weren't parts; they were people.

Lin Mo's body flickered, vanishing from the ground. In the next instant, he stood on the rooftop terrace.

The night wind rushed in, snapping his robes with a sharp rustle.

He'd done his homework before coming here.

The building's publicly reported numbers were twenty-two floors above ground and five below.

But in reality, there was one extra floor above and one extra floor below.

These two extra floors weren't listed in any public records.

Floor 23.

When Lin Mo's divine sense scanned that floor, his expression visibly twisted.

The level was decked out in extreme luxury: imported Persian carpets, limited-edition paintings on the walls, wine cabinets stocked with bottles older than everyone in the room combined.

As for its purpose...

How to put it? Like an underground version of those infamous elites' clubs you hear about on the internet.

The world was pretty much the same everywhere. Powerful people liked to build an extra layer on top of the visible structure, a place to stash things they didn't want seen.

Some countries hid it deep, some shallow. Stick Country was the kind that hid things but not completely.

Except...

Two men.

Engaged in some high-intensity exercise—maybe squats, maybe something else.

Lin Mo's expression shifted a few times before he mentally blurred the two figures in his divine sense vision with pixelated censoring.

Not out of discrimination, but sheer physiological disgust.

He even applied two layers of censorship.

Then he pushed the door open and stepped inside.

"Who's there!"

The two men on the bed clearly sensed the intrusion. They grabbed the blanket and wrapped themselves up, four eyes staring in terror at Lin Mo, who had appeared out of thin air in the room.

Lin Mo took two steps back and mentally censored his own vision again.

He wasn't being prissy—he seriously couldn't handle it.

A direct soul search would be simpler, but he preferred something more silent and subtle.

His eyes glowed with a faint purple light. With a thought, both men's eyes went vacant, their pupils losing focus, their bodies freezing in place.

Mind control.

"Who are you? What's your identity? Who do you answer to?"

The man on the left spoke first, his voice mechanical and flat: "My name is Cheng Dongxu. I'm a member of the idol group kapako under YJJ Entertainment."

The man on the right followed: "My name is Li Xinyun. I'm the Chairman of the Stick Country Mass Culture Exchange Committee."

Lin Mo raised an eyebrow.

An idol and a government official.

He'd expected to catch a YJJ executive on this floor, but instead, he'd landed a much bigger fish.

The Stick Country Mass Culture Exchange Committee governs the nation's cultural industry exports—basically the big shot sitting at the top of the entertainment industry.

This chairman, in the middle of the night, wasn't at home sleeping but hanging out in an entertainment company's secret floor with a male idol.

Tsk.

No wonder they needed an extra floor.

"Do you know a man named Cai Junhuang?"

Both shook their heads: "No."

Looks like these two were just here for some private fun. No connection to the person he was looking for.

Lin Mo erased their memories of him and turned to leave.

He took two steps, then stopped.

Pulling out his phone, he turned back and snapped a photo of the two men wrapped in the blanket on the bed.

Good composition. Good lighting. Both faces were perfectly clear.

He'd send this photo to Dongfang Shuye at the opportune moment—it might come in handy as a leverage.

Diplomatic cards were never a bad thing to keep in your hand.

He put his phone away, flickered, and passed straight through the concrete ceiling down from the 23rd floor.

Basement Level 1: parking garage. Basement Level 2: also parking garage.

The cars parked in those two lots alone were worth enough to buy a whole building.

But further down, the scenery changed.

Basement Level 3: officially registered as a comprehensive training facility.

Training, my ass.

Lin Mo's divine sense swept through: a bar, a casino, and a few rooms with suggestive decor where transactions were happening that had nothing to do with training.

Pure internal consumption—keeping everything in-house.

Privacy was pushed to the extreme. Access was controlled by a single elevator requiring both facial recognition and fingerprint verification, with stairwells all sealed off.

Basement Level 4: lodging.

Overnight stays for guests who had drunk too much, gambled too hard, or partied too wildly.

The rooms were decorated like five-star hotels, each one designed as a themed love nest.

Service so thorough it was horrifying.

Basement Level 5.

When Lin Mo's divine sense scanned this floor, his nose wrinkled involuntarily.

White powder, syringes, foil sheets, and pills of all names lay scattered across the floor in the dim light.

Seven or eight people slumped on sofas, pupils dilated, drool at the corners of their mouths, looking completely out of it.

In a corner, two people were making a transaction—one transferring money on their phone, the other handing over the goods—as casually as buying groceries.

In China, touching a single gram of this stuff meant three years in prison; selling over fifty grams meant a death sentence.

Stick Country had it officially banned too, but as for their anti-drug enforcement... let's just say it's like their movie industry: what's on screen looks tough, but in reality, it's business as usual.