350 Thunder Bonus

Update] — The first story arc. The mindset of Chen Le, new hire at the Demolition Office: just push through it. After all, stick around long enough and you get a permanent post, decent pay, room and board included.

For someone at that stage of life — no job, no savings, broke and anxious — it was a cushy gig to ride out the rough patch. Then Chen Le had regrets, because Mr.

Huang needed to locate a client's corpse and wanted Chen Le to moonlight as field staff. Chen Le: Are you out of your mind?!

There's a whole office full of people with serious supernatural power — whether it's magic or divine strength, whatever, doesn't matter. The point is: why send the one rookie to the scene?

Going solo into a village full of conspirators to find a body — can you even call the cops? And if you do call the cops?

What then — play customer service and chat up the victim's ghost? The Demolition Office is an official body operating below; it should be coordinating with the official bodies above.

Why take such a massive detour? Chen Le went off. Mr. Huang, though — special status. Can't casually interfere in human affairs; everything requires filing a report.

But Chen Le is different. Chen Le: 'So what am I?' Mr. Huang: 'Not quite human, not quite ghost. Why else would you have taken my offer?' Chen Le: '...?' Because Chen Le had teetered on the edge of life and death eighteen times, drifting back and forth between both sides so often that she'd become a walking human-shaped bug.

Absurd. Absolutely absurd! Who dies that many times? Mr. Huang: 'Don't you know? You'd fall asleep and die, then die your way back to being alive!' Chen Le was blindsided by that description and followed his logic right off the cliff: 'So...

I'm not fully human anymore... can I still die?' 'Not as long as you keep working for us.' Chen Le: ...Fine. I'm in. Then Ma Jie handed her a Black Gold Bracelet.

Chen Le assumed it was just a bonus gift — but the next second: transformation — it had actually fused into a skintight layer of armor. Add the field-ops uniform on top, and the result was the launch photo that would carve a path for Xuan Leron on Douyin.

The cold, gorgeous guy handed her a Jade Flute — blow it and you're invisible for fifteen minutes. But there's a catch: you only get three blows.

According to the case files, the first client to consult the office had been trafficked — that happened years ago. Death: seven years back.

The mountain village was sparsely populated; a few years ago it was absorbed into a neighboring settlement under the 'consolidation' policy. The people now living in the town at the foot of the mountain talked about it with barely concealed envy.

The village had several households under state welfare protection, with the village committee regularly dropping by to check on them, delivering rice, flour, and cooking oil — water and electricity free of charge. Chen Le's heart sank.

The residents had moved away, the original location was vacant — in theory, easier to investigate thoroughly. But if the old houses had been demolished or cleared out, the details about the property that the client had described in their chat messages wouldn't match anymore.

And what if the killer had also moved away instead of consolidating? Shan Niang sent a message: the killer was still in the area.

Shan Niang could recognize him on sight, because the killer had a piece of her bone — maybe because it was missing from her body, she couldn't remember where she'd died. She sent another message: as long as Chen Le could get that piece of bone, her resentment would have something to anchor to, and maybe then she could.

Chen Le: '...' The difficulty was way too high! Chen Le racked her brain, then rallied a crowd of people from the town at the foot of the mountain and the whole group marched into that village looking for trouble.

That's right — looking for trouble. The reason: 'Some guy was catfishing me as a woman, scammed me out of money, and I know he's in this village — get him out here and give me my money back!' 'Don't think playing dead means I can't find you.

Bro, help me find him — I'll recognize the voice the second I hear it!' Chen Le's performance was genuinely good — all the humiliation and fury of someone scammed by a man pretending to be a woman, completely convincing. In an unfamiliar place, investigating without alerting anyone, relying on three uses of invisibility — would that even work?

What if it blew up? Chen Le decided to take a different approach entirely. The men, women, young, and old from the town who'd tagged along for the spectacle didn't suspect a thing — they all bought it.

Why choose that particular story? Because this village and the surrounding ones were all suppliers in trafficking rings — extreme sexual repression, willing to commit crimes just to satisfy it.

Repressed people understand each other best. In a place this poor, it was entirely plausible that some villager was online using a voice changer to catfish people as a woman and scam them for money.

That story would naturally put a small portion of people off their guard. She was looking for a man, not a woman. But she couldn't let them relax completely.

Chen Le immediately cosplayed as a rich kid, flinging a stack of cash in front of the villagers: 'You're blocking me? Ha.

You think I can't find him?!' All Mr. Huang's money, by the way. Another stack. 'Am I seriously going to let this go?' One more stack!

'You think I'm short on cash?! My dignity, the humiliation of being scammed by a man — some man better step aside for me!' Sure enough, they were rattled.

The villagers' eyes lit up green at the sight of money; they nearly started fighting each other over it. It cleared a path for Chen Le perfectly.

Shan Niang's resentment surged like a storm, charging straight at the killer — but like smoke, it dissolved the moment it reached a living person. Over and over, tireless, she rushed at him: an ordinary-looking, ordinary-dressed, middle-aged man with no trace of menace.

He seemed completely unbothered by the fact that he'd killed someone — not a shadow of darkness on him — cheerfully dividing up the money. Chen Le committed to the full performance, making every middle-aged man present squeeze their voice up and call her 'big bro.' The scammer's voice changer fell off, and that's how he got caught — so naturally everyone had to go find that scammer.

Several villagers dropped their guard, stood to the side watching the joke unfold, grinning blankly. ... That stretch was peak Chen Le.

Sure, listening to those middle-aged village men squeak out 'big bro' in pinched voices, with Chen Le's whole devil-may-care attitude, looked easy enough on the surface. But the outcome was hard to sit with.

The piece of Shan Niang's bone that the killer had on him — it was the middle finger of her right hand. The killer had deliberately filed it to a point, tied it together with one of his dog's teeth, threaded them on a string, and hung it from his belt loop.

Because on Shan Niang's middle finger there was a writer's callus — the kind only educated people get. Chen Le nearly threw up.

Those people were less than human — closer to animals. They dared to kill because the mountains were high and remote, no one could touch them, and the deep hills were the perfect burial ground.

But using a 'trophy' like that to desecrate a victim — that level of cruelty wasn't something any animal could produce. · The living room was full of the sound of people blowing their noses. Everyone was completely absorbed.

For working people, a story that doesn't feel disconnected from reality — one you can actually follow — is enough to let your brain decompress on a break. Two celestial beings from the upper crust falling in love, one minute threatening to destroy the world, the next saving it — everyone's sick of it, bored to death.

For middle-aged viewers: don't be too juvenile, don't be too mentally taxing, and ideally touch on some social issues with room for discussion. For older viewers: you absolutely need scenes with big emotional payoff.

What counts as big emotional payoff? The answer is right there in why those long-suffering female leads in CCTV dramas are so beloved.

The hardships must pile up, the backstory must be brutal, the whole world must be against the protagonist — that's the feeling that hits right. The Demolition Office... everything lands just right.

The concept of a Demolition Office straddling the world of the living and the dead is genuinely fresh. All the coworkers are familiar faces from the underworld — first, it's interesting; second, you can guess they'll have something to offer the main character.

But none of them are cheap golden fingers! Then there's the fact that every client consultation pulls out a new mini-story.

No overly tangled subplots running through it — easy on the brain. Some dramas pack in so much that if you zone out for a second, or exchange two words with someone, you come back and have no idea what's happening — that awkward feeling.

The supporting characters in each mini-arc were filmed to the crying standard, and the actors chosen were all plain-looking with genuinely excellent performances. — That kind of storyline can't use actors who look effortlessly chic bare-faced, who look made-up even without makeup — you can't let the audience get pulled out of the immersion at first glance.

So the suffering reads as especially raw. The old man in Sang Ying's family was the type who liked to keep up appearances — quietly sniffling while dabbing at the corners of his eyes beneath his reading glasses with a tissue.

The three women were sniffling in overlapping waves. Sang Ying, seizing a moment when no one was watching, silently sped up her blinking, trying to fan away all the moisture with sheer airflow. · Chen Le burned through everything, used every resource available, and got the bone — but Shan Niang had no idea where the rest of her bones were.

The only option was to outsmart them. Make the enemy expose themselves. Chen Le used the Jade Flute and started playing tricks, and the overall atmosphere was anything but light.

Because everyone knew Chen Le would find a way to make the killer slip up. Three uses of the Jade Flute was too few. Way too dangerous.

As the plot unfolded, Chen Le followed the killer — guilty conscience driving him to check on Shan Niang's remains — and found the bones. Dumped in a gully thick with wild grass, hidden by the awkward angle, completely invisible from any normal vantage point, reduced to white bone.

A large hole in the skull. A skeleton missing the middle finger bone of the right hand. No forensics degree needed — any idiot could tell this wasn't a natural death.

Call the police. Then the plot twist the audience had been dreading most actually happened. The killer sensed something, tried to run.

He turned a vicious look on Chen Le, the one blocking his path — one more body wouldn't matter to him. As for the female lead — a perfectly timed entrance.

Sang Ying had been worried the couple dynamic would get cringey. The female lead suddenly doing the male lead's signature smirk, showing off her jawline, deliberately acting rough and careless.

The male lead turning deliberately coy, putting on an act, doing the baby-voice thing, imitating every female stereotype. Or worse — the male lead's signature princess-carry spin getting flipped so the female lead carries the male lead in circles.

She couldn't handle that. Not that a reversal is wrong — it's the slow-motion spin with the tongue-out, lip-lick moves that are inherently immersion-breaking.

Nobody pulls that off. But none of that was here. The chemistry between the leads — it just worked. Especially the chase sequence.

Pure power-meets-power teamwork. A different kind of 'evenly matched.' The female lead Sang Luoling was magnetic. Her movements weren't flashy, no slow-motion cuts — every muscle was working toward one clean purpose: catch the target.

The camera briefly jolted with the violence of her sprint, but her gaze stayed locked, fixed on the target ahead. That high-speed chase used no Stunt Double — the run felt so satisfying it hurt.

Sang Ying thought one word covered it completely. The male lead didn't have the female lead's stamina; he started gasping as he pushed into a sprint.

But he didn't slack off for a second — he could herd the target like a border collie herding sheep, keeping the direction from drifting. While maintaining speed, he funneled the guy right into Sang Luoling's line.

It lined up perfectly with all the clever little moves he'd shown before — someone who knows how to use his own brand of smarts, someone who actually thinks. And then there was his build...

A mind that dazzles, paired with a frame so lean and long it looked like a paper cutout — it became its own kind of appeal. Not physically dominant?

That just made it more compelling. Heart-rate spiking just watching it. The most surface-level, universally readable ship moment was also the most direct hit of satisfaction.

At the start, there was zero romantic framing between the two of them — no lingering eye contact, not even a sustained look; any glance that landed immediately broke away. Two people, zero wasted energy.

The female lead was unstoppable on the physical front — clean, decisive, agile — while the male lead supplied the mental shortcuts, acting as her buff. The screen split left and right, the two of them in perfect sync, like each was the other's cheat code, solving everything together at double speed.

Standing side by side: 'physical power + brainpower = complete victory.' The '1+1>2' partner energy... So addictive. Sang Ying was watching with her breath held.

No hug, no kiss, just two leads chasing the same villain — and it was still this unbearably exciting? 'Buzz.' Sang Ying's phone vibrated once.

She ignored it. Then it vibrated again. What now? Sang Ying grabbed it and looked. Today The Demolition Office dropped six episodes in one go — since the total episode count was slightly higher than The Favored One, the premiere batch was bigger too.

She'd been planning to watch it all in one sitting. Didn't mind a small interruption to pass the time. Yin Rong: [Boss Sang, check your messages — The Demolition Office has been reported.]

Sang Ying: '?' That report felt very familiar. Back when the author of that body-swap fic was calling people out, playing the victim, and steering fans to tip them — 'reporting' was the target they used.

That time there had been a legitimate reason to report, and there were real victims. What was the reason for this report?

The show hadn't aired on TV from the start — supernatural elements meant it went straight to streaming only. What's there to report?

It wasn't like those dramas where the script got quietly flipped from version A to version B after the crew assembled. The Demolition Office's script was basically locked in from day one and barely touched.

It all passed review fine, didn't it? Even a helicopter parent couldn't do anything here! She sent Yin Rong a reply: 'Do you know the grounds for the report?' Yin Rong: [Multiple complaints were filed.

Two of them are waving some pretty big flags.] [First: desecrating, distorting, and maliciously exploiting traditional culture.] Sang Ying: '?' Are we talking about the same show she just watched? [Second: undermining the image of law enforcement, likely to mislead minors into developing distrust toward that group — a seriously harmful effect.]

Sang Ying: '?' If she remembered correctly, the female lead Sang Luoling was a cop — and had just put on quite a show. Yin Rong: [Both complaints hit red-line categories.

The other party's intent is clear: force The Demolition Office off the platform. There are precedents in Domestic Entertainment where it worked, so they seem to be trying to replicate the playbook.]

Sang Ying was speechless: 'Can my show seriously be lumped in with those? Those ones deserved it.' Using the same move on every target?

Don't even check if it applies.