Cthulhu Office Drone: Blessings Are Curses

Thirty-two-year-old Lin Yuan, an unemployed office drone, starts a new job at Xukun Technology, only to fall into a Lovecraftian workplace nightmare. Contract clauses writhe like tentacles, his ID badge burrows into his flesh and becomes a surveillance terminal, and overtime turns into “merit points” that devour his sanity, with Sanity tied to annual leave. The office building becomes a sacrificial altar: new-hire training is a 72-hour brainwashing ritual, the elevator mirrors show coworkers with multiple arms, and bloody writing in the break room conceals a code of resistance. He discovers that “wolf culture” is a ritual to summon an evil god, and that his ID badge, numbered “0001,” is the central offering. With help from agents of the Ghost-Hunting Bureau and the Slacker Sect, he uses scraps of the Labor Law to fight report-devouring tentacles, and a sacred mechanical keyboard to break the overtime spell in the OA system. He exposes the CEO as an agent of the King in Yellow, seeking to bring an evil god into the world by feeding on the terror of a million hours of overtime. As his Sanity nears zero, Lin Yuan awakens in a time loop: “merit” is a curse born of capital’s corruption. He leads the awakened in using the law as a blade and slacking as a shield, building defenses in break rooms, restroom stalls, and server rooms. With the righteous cry of “nine to five,” he strikes back at the Lovecraftian shadow looming over the workplace. This is a fantasy allegory that fuses the dehumanization of 996 work culture with Lovecraftian horror, an epic tale of office drones fighting to protect their annual leave, sanity, and humanity amid a flood of data.