August 18, Saturday.

As usual, Yan Qi arrived at the office building where Morning Dew Gaming Platform was located during normal working hours in the morning to continue finding bugs.

To be precise, finding bugs was only the secondary purpose; the primary purpose was to verify the authenticity and universality of last week’s theory about mystical patterns.

Did this feng shui treasure spot stop working on weekends? Did bugs not work on weekends?

This question needed proper verification.

Last weekend, Yan Qi had his testing team work overtime for two days, but the bugs they found in those two days were fewer than what they found on Monday morning alone—the efficiency was truly concerning. Had he known the overtime efficiency would be so low, he would have let everyone rest at home instead!

Therefore, Yan Qi told everyone that this weekend they would only work half a day first. If they found that bug-finding efficiency remained low on Saturday morning, then they might as well take the weekend off completely and continue fighting bugs when the feng shui treasure spot returned to normal on workdays.

By now, most of the “Empire Blade” testing team members had arrived, and testing teams from other companies were also gradually moving in.

All the workspaces on this floor of the building had been rented out, and even the floors above and below were about 70-80% occupied.

However, although everyone was enthusiastically discussing in the group chat, attracting many companies from other cities, there were still many companies in the group that didn’t participate.

Perhaps these company heads had stronger scientific literacy and more determined willpower, so when it came to mystical matters like this, they remained unmoved no matter what others said.

Yan Qi didn’t mind these companies, of course.

For him, giving a heads-up was already being extremely considerate. Come or don’t come—whoever visits this place will know just how high the bug-finding efficiency is!

The heads of other companies’ testing teams all basically knew Yan Qi by now and greeted him.

However, when passing by other companies’ workspaces, he clearly saw confusion on these testers’ faces.

“Huh, strange, why are we finding fewer bugs today? There aren’t many bugs left.”

“Have we found them all? That can’t be right.”

Clearly, the huge change in bug-finding efficiency between Friday and Saturday had been noticed by everyone.

Yan Qi suddenly realized he hadn’t mentioned this to the other companies yet.

He quickly sent a message in the group chat.

“By the way, I forgot to remind everyone of something: last weekend I discovered that this feng shui treasure spot doesn’t seem to work on weekends, so don’t worry if you can’t find bugs. It will return to normal on Monday.”

“I only scheduled half a day of testing today to verify this, and currently it seems to follow this pattern. So if you don’t have other work, you can go home to rest and recharge, then come back on Monday to continue fixing bugs.”

Soon, the company managers in the group responded.

“What? Bugs don’t work on weekends? That’s too unscientific!”

“It’s not scientific, but it is mystical! A feng shui treasure spot that forms a sphere in space is already unscientific, so the existence of this space having certain time patterns doesn’t seem surprising…”

“I don’t believe it!”

“Let’s keep looking for bugs. If efficiency really drops, then Manager Yan is right, and there’s no need to look for bugs when efficiency is low—might as well do something else.”

This time, people in the group seemed to accept this premise quickly.

Although this still sounded extremely absurd, most companies that had moved in had already been baptized by the mystical experience and objectively acknowledged the existence of this special space. Adding a time-based rule didn’t seem like something worth making a fuss about…

Yan Qi sat down at his workspace and took out his phone to run through his game several times.

Yes, indeed.

Bugs really didn’t work on weekends!

Actually, before testing, Yan Qi had been conflicted about whether he wanted bugs or no bugs.

Having bugs would mean working overtime on weekends, but the game’s progress could be pushed forward significantly. Having no bugs meant progress couldn’t be accelerated, but they could rest on weekends.

Now that the dust had settled, he felt more at ease—it provided a reason for employees to rest on the weekend.

Not bad.

As a boss, Yan Qi was actually quite conflicted about overtime work.

He wasn’t like many unscrupulous bosses who forced employees to work unpaid overtime purely to reduce costs and further exploit their labor. But even as a boss with some conscience, requiring employees to work overtime was sometimes unavoidable.

After all, as a small startup company without abundant resources or a large pool of high-quality employees, overtime was sometimes a necessary choice to meet deadlines.

The gaming industry is highly time-sensitive. If two games of similar types launched with a one or two-month gap between them, the difference in revenue could be millions or tens of millions.

For small companies, such timing differences could determine life or death.

Therefore, to keep the company alive, to ensure employees wouldn’t have to look for new jobs, and to potentially have more bonuses in the future, Yan Qi sometimes had to ask employees to work overtime to meet development deadlines.

This always made him feel conflicted.

Although employees were very understanding and cooperative about this, Yan Qi still felt somewhat guilty.

Now it was settled—no more conflict. Since even the feng shui treasure spot didn’t advocate weekend overtime, and weekend overtime had virtually no efficiency, they might as well give employees time off to rest and adjust, then continue battling bugs on Monday.

With this in mind, Yan Qi said: “Alright, we’ve verified it—fixing bugs on weekends really is inefficient. Today let’s order Slackin’ takeout for lunch, my treat, and after lunch, you can go home!”

“Of course, if you have lunch plans, you can leave earlier.”

Upon hearing this, the employees cheered jubilantly.

“Boss Yan is awesome!”

“Thanks for the treat, Boss Yan!”

So, a small portion of employees who had lunch plans with friends or needed to eat at home said goodbye to Yan Qi and left, while the others stayed to have lunch before departing.

Yan Qi also stopped looking for bugs and opened the Morning Dew Gaming Platform’s official website to check its current status.

He was shocked by what he saw.

“Huh? The gaming platform already started trial operations yesterday afternoon?”

“I think they mentioned it before, but isn’t everyone still fixing bugs?”

Yan Qi vaguely remembered that Morning Dew Gaming Platform staff had mentioned trial operations in the group chat before, but everyone was so focused on fixing bugs and overwhelmed with work that they subconsciously assumed the trial operation would definitely be delayed.

With barely any games, how could the platform start trial operations?

But as it turned out, they were really going ahead with it!

Opening the gaming platform, everything seemed normal at first glance.

The platform’s homepage had various featured positions and was divided into different sections by game type and device. Although the content wasn’t extensive—incomparable to platforms with hundreds or thousands of games—it looked relatively neat.

Yan Qi habitually clicked on the action games category to check.

After all, he made action games himself and wanted to see if there were any direct competitors to his own game on the platform.

However, upon clicking in, he was surprised to find his own game, “Empire Blade”!

“Huh? That’s not right, isn’t our game still being modified?”

“How did it already appear on the gaming platform?”

Yan Qi quickly clicked to view the game’s details page.

The details page had the game’s introduction, information, and promotional images—these had been provided to Morning Dew Gaming Platform earlier, so seeing them on the platform wasn’t surprising.

But the original download game/start game button was in an unavailable state, and there was a special notification bar that displayed the current number of bugs in “Empire Blade”!

This number seemed to be data directly fetched from the game’s testing backend.

Yan Qi asked the testing team leader: “Hey, did Morning Dew Gaming Platform ask for our testing backend data interface?”

The testing team leader nodded: “Yes, we provided it after signing the contract, since they also need to monitor our bug fixing progress in real-time.”

Yan Qi then clicked on other games and found that the vast majority were also in a bug-fixing state, with the only difference being the number of bugs.

He could even occasionally see changes in the bug count, indicating that the company was working overtime. After fixing and submitting a bug, once the testing team confirmed there were no issues and the fix was complete, the bug would be removed, and the backend bug count would change, synchronizing in real-time to the gaming platform.

Most games on Morning Dew Gaming Platform were in this state: you could see how many bugs remained to be fixed, but you couldn’t play.

Yan Qi browsed for quite a while before finally finding a playable game—an old game that had been launched on other platforms half a year ago, which in terms of lifespan should already be in the middle to late stages of its life cycle.

Such games indeed had very few bugs because the versions were already very stable, but this also meant they had no fresh content and practically zero appeal to new players.

Although games like “Empire Blade” that hadn’t launched were also mobile games developed by small companies, they were at least new games with some competitiveness in the mobile gaming circle.

As a result, all the competitive games were fixing bugs, while the uncompetitive ones were available but couldn’t attract many players.

Moreover, although Morning Dew Gaming Platform had made some distinctions between downloadable games and those still fixing bugs—such as special icons and filters to screen for playable games—these distinctions weren’t very obvious.

This led to players entering the platform being unable to find playable games immediately, clicking on one game to find it was fixing bugs, then clicking on another to find the same thing…

Needless to say, this experience was extremely frustrating.