The [Cocoon] certainly lived up to its name.

Lin Jianyuan grabbed a handful of the glowing filaments and yanked hard. The texture was surprisingly interesting.

Silky smooth, like satin soaked in milk.

With Squishy freezing time, the victim beside him couldn’t see what was happening at all.

So Lin Jianyuan just kept pulling it out handful after handful.

He pulled out the silk strand by strand, literally unraveling the entire cocoon until nothing remained.

And thus, all that remained in the room was a floor covered in silvery-white glowing threads.

Lin Jianyuan stared at the faintly twitching, barely alive glowing threads, which looked a little dead, and started thinking.

“Y-you... who the hell are you...?” the glowing filaments struggled to ask in a synthesized mechanical voice.

“Pretty nice-looking,” Lin Jianyuan commented.

The glowing filaments: “???”

The Cocoon simply couldn’t believe this.

It couldn’t believe that this utterly ordinary-looking man not only had an S-class Aberrant with him, but could actually grab hold of it.

Why?!

This isn’t scientific!

Even if an ordinary person could see it, there was no way they could touch it because its body was made of light!

What “glowing filaments”?!

It really was an ever-flowing light!

And yet this human in front of it... he... he...

How could he grab light?!

Even more terrifyingly, it discovered that this man’s touch turned its body from free-flowing light into ordinary thread.

Ordinary, silky thread that happened to glow...

How could this happen?!

“What... what did you do to me...?” the Cocoon asked despairingly.

Lin Jianyuan didn’t answer. He merely said, “Mouthball.”

“Roger!”

The Abyssal Maw obediently opened its mouth and chomped several times, swallowing the mountain of glowing threads like vermicelli.

The glowing filaments: “...”

A few minutes later, at the Aberration Management Bureau’s Containment Department.

Lin Jianyuan: “Mouthball.”

“Roger!”

The Abyssal Maw obediently opened its mouth again.

Bleurgh!

It vomited the glowing filaments back out like a pile of undigested vermicelli.

The glowing filaments: “..................”

Transported, registered, and placed in a cell.

And with that, the containment of [Cocoon] was officially complete.

Battle to Defend Little Red Book: Success!

[Cocoon] was an A-class Aberrant capable of communicating with humans, so specialists would question it further. But that was somebody else’s job.

“Done for the day!” Lin Jianyuan let out a huge yawn, pulled his roommate along, and said, “Go home and sleep!”

Lin Jianyuan was really exhausted. The moment he got home, he collapsed into bed and fell asleep.

As for the containment record? He left it to his subordinates.

That was one of the great things about being the team leader. He could dump work on the people under him!

Of course, the team members could only write about the parts they had personally witnessed, in other words, the process of distributing the leaves.

The part where he unraveled the Cocoon still had to be written by Lin Jianyuan himself.

No big deal; that section was short.

There was no rush anyway. It came later in the report, so he could wait until his team finished the earlier sections and then come back to add his part.

And so Lin Jianyuan happily took his wife out on vacation.

Snowy mountains today, desert tomorrow.

Wherever they felt like going, they went. They had both money and free time, after all.

Most importantly, they could teleport.

They flew on a plane last time, so he skipped it this time. This trip was purely for enjoyment.

The biggest advantage of teleportation was that they didn’t even need to pack clothes.

Whenever they needed something, his wife could just go home and fetch it.

And obviously, they weren’t going to wash their own dirty clothes either. They could just hand them over to the hotel laundry service.

In short, it was nothing but fun.

Awesome!

Unfortunately, vacation ended, and it was time to go back to work.

Just thinking about facing those S-class riddlers again made Lin Jianyuan hate work the moment he stepped into the Aberration Management Bureau.

So annoying.

When were these S-classes going to stop making people squeeze every word out of them like toothpaste?

At present, there were five known S-classes in total.

Xie Yu, Delirium, Hesitation, Remorse, and Flash Granny.

Xie Yu was already part of the Aberration Management Bureau. Delirium and Remorse were each contained in S-class Cells No. 1 and No. 3 at the deepest level of the Inverted Spire.

Hesitation’s containment failed, and it was currently at large.

After that fleeting glimpse, Flash Granny left no trace.

Forget traces. There wasn’t even any eyewitness evidence. Everyone else who saw Flash Granny forgot the encounter.

Then there was the flood. Lin Jianyuan already checked the surveillance footage and revisited the scene to investigate.

The flood never came at all, so what exactly was that old lady trying to do?

Did she originally plan to bring a flood over and drown me, then suddenly change her mind for some reason?

Lin Jianyuan thought about it until his head hurt.

City A was exceptionally peaceful today. Lin Jianyuan spent the entire morning at the Aberration Management Bureau, obediently doing physical training.

During a break, he habitually took out his phone and messaged his roommate again.

No reply... Probably busy.

Lin Jianyuan was getting bored, so he sent Pei Shuo a message asking whether he ended up going to Shi Shaoning for that interview.

Surprisingly, Pei Shuo didn’t reply either.

Shi Shaoning... Forget it. Shi Shaoning was even busier than he was.

He sent several messages and got nothing back, but it wasn’t really their fault.

Lin Jianyuan knew they were all busy.

After all, when he himself was spinning around like a top a couple of days ago, he only had time to reply to messages right before bed.

They were all fellow sufferers.

Lin Jianyuan sat there holding his phone and suddenly felt as if there was absolutely nothing to do.

He was sitting on a bench beside the training grounds as he scratched his head.

And finally, very reluctantly, he opened a certain red-colored app.

He used the app too aggressively, so the recommendation algorithm was completely trained. The content it pushed at him became more and more narrowly tailored.

No matter how much he scrolled, it was always the same stuff.

Advertising campaigns. Creative inspiration. Men’s fashion...

Lin Jianyuan was sick of all of it. So he simply turned off personalized recommendations.

Turning off personalized recommendations was basically like wiping Little Red Book’s memory.

The algorithm began pushing a wildly varied selection of content again, trying to feel out the user’s preferences from scratch.

Excellent!

Lin Jianyuan was pleased to discover that he was finally seeing interesting new content again.

Of course, mixed in among the things he was interested in were also a few things that were... Uh. How should he put it?

It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested. He simply never imagined he’d be interested in them.

For example: “How Many Hours Does It Take a Maximalist Decora to Get Ready to Go Out and See People?”

He knew about maximalism, but what was decora?

Lin Jianyuan didn’t think much of the title at first. Then he saw the video thumbnail.

Good lord. It was unbelievably gaudy.

The girl in the thumbnail looked very young, but Lin Jianyuan wasn’t good at judging girls’ ages. Based on her appearance, he figured she was somewhere between fifteen and twenty. He’d just call her a girl for now.

The girl was decked out entirely in pink, blue, and purple. She wore giant fluffy rabbit ears in pink and blue on her head. Her pink-blue-purple twin-tailed wig was covered in all kinds of pink, blue, and lavender hair clips, ribbons, and bows. He couldn’t even tell what style her clothes were, but those were also built around pink, blue, and purple.

Her makeup naturally followed the same palette. Pink eyeshadow and a dark-blue contact lens on the left. Blue eyeshadow and a pink contact lens on the right.

What caught Lin Jianyuan’s attention most, though, were her hands.

Good lord. She had at least twelve rings on ten fingers! And on her two wrists, she wore four strings of bracelets and five bangles!

But despite the sheer quantity, the rings and bracelets were clearly chosen with care. They were all in a very cute style.

Some had that sparkly, gemstone-like bling-bling look, while others were translucent candy colors. Taken as a whole, everything was surprisingly harmonious.

At first glance, Lin Jianyuan felt like someone detonated a pink-blue-purple paint bomb directly in his face.

But once the initial shock passed and he looked more closely, he realized that the girl’s makeup and styling were actually extremely clever. He used to work in advertising, so he knew a fair bit about color coordination.

Looking up close made it seem gaudy and fussy, but as a whole, it was surprisingly pleasant to look at.

Not only pleasant, but even cute.

Lin Jianyuan’s XP were clearly no longer pointed toward humans, but even he couldn’t help thinking that the outfit was cute.

It took him two seconds to realize why. Oh! Because it's genuinely lively and adorable!

That sense of loving to coordinate outfits, of wanting to hang cute accessories all over yourself, was almost like a three- or four-year-old little girl.

The kind who would bounce toward you with every ornament on her body jingling and clattering.

Lin Jianyuan: “...”

Trying to trick me into wanting a daughter again.

Although Lin Jianyuan would never have a daughter in this lifetime (probably not anyway, since his wife didn’t exactly have the organs required to give birth), he was still thoroughly charmed.

Besides, the title itself caught his attention too.

What exactly was maximalist decora? Was it this kind of candy-colored style where you cover yourself from head to toe in accessories?

Did “how many hours does it take to go out and see people” mean how long it took to prepare the whole outfit and makeup?

Lin Jianyuan’s curiosity was piqued, so he tapped the video.

It started playing.

Since it documented the makeup and styling process, Lin Jianyuan assumed it would begin with the creator bare-faced and in pajamas.

Instead, the moment the video started, her makeup was already completely done. Even the pink-blue-purple twin tails were already styled.

The creator explained that the makeup process was in another video.

Lin Jianyuan was straight... Uh. A gay... Uh. That didn’t seem quite right either.

Lin Jianyuan, an intestine-sexual, naturally had no interest whatsoever in how women applied makeup, so he simply kept watching.

Setting aside the bright and elaborate clothes and accessories, the makeup and hair alone were already pretty cute.

Pink, blue, and purple candy colors, plus some bling-bling glitter and even tiny freckles. Lin Jianyuan immediately understood what people meant by “girlish heart.”

After briefly showing off the makeup, the creator moved on to the process of choosing an outfit.

The camera switched to a large walk-in closet.

It was packed with all kinds of elaborate, extravagant, and adorable clothing.

Lin Jianyuan didn’t know much about this stuff, so his first thought was: Lolita?

At that moment, the video sped up to N-times speed, and captions appeared at the bottom of the screen, accompanied by a Monkey King-style voice-over:

“At this point, the creator starts picking, picking, picking until she gets sick of it.”

“Every time I go out, I spend two hours deciding what to wear. So annoying. Seriously, so annoying.”

Lin Jianyuan’s pupils trembled.

What kind of clothes took two hours to pick?!

The video was already running at God knew how many times normal speed. The pink-blue-purple twin-tailed girl scurried everywhere like a deranged ant. One second, an extra top appeared in her hands. The next, a skirt disappeared.

One moment, a dozen necklaces were draped over her. The next, both hands were empty again.

Holy shit, did she just reject all her earlier choices?!

No wonder it took two hours... She really was indecisive!

For some reason, Lin Jianyuan knew he definitely wasn’t interested in a video like this back then.

Yet today, he unexpectedly watched with great enthusiasm.

The hyper-speed footage continued for dozens of seconds. Finally, the pink-blue-purple twin-tailed girl finished choosing her outfit.

The video returned to normal speed. Still wearing a cute bunny pajama set, she stepped in front of the camera and briefly showed off the clothes and accessories she selected. There had to be at least twenty pieces altogether.

Then she snapped her fingers.

Snap

Cut. The next second, she was wearing the outfit, but none of the accessories yet.

Another snap.

Her already adorable twin tails and bangs suddenly sprouted an enormous quantity of hair clips and bows.

Another snap.

The pink-blue-purple Lolita dress, which was already packed with those three colors, suddenly gained a lethal dose of clips, charms, tassels, plush toys...

Another snap.

More than a dozen bracelets and bangles appeared around her wrists.

Another snap.

More than a dozen rings appeared on her fingers.

Snap

Snap

Snap

Lin Jianyuan felt his brain overload.

No. How could one human being possibly wear that many things?! Altogether, there had to be dozens of individual items on her!

No, it was more than that! There might be over a hundred!

Good lord. If you put that entire loadout on a scale, it had to weigh at least 2.5 kilograms.

With that much stuff on her head, won’t her neck get sore?

Ah. Young people are truly healthy.

The video ended with the creator taking a selfie outdoors.

The Monkey King voice-over said: “As expected. It's my destiny to leave home when it's already dark.”

“Got to the subway station and discovered the last train was already gone AAAAAAA.”

“Today’s outfit: including makeup and styling, total preparation time: 6h21min.”

“Babies, what do you think of this whole outfit? [heart]”

Lin Jianyuan: “.”

He couldn’t resist looking up at the title one more time.

“How Many Hours Does It Take a Maximalist Decora to Get Ready to Go Out and See People?”

6 hours and 21 minutes...

Who could be special enough for a girl to dress up like this just to meet them?

The Emperor of the Galactic Federation?