Life with Yuanbao

2026, 2 a.m.

For the seventh time, Lin Shen hovered his cursor over the “Delete Account” button on his official account: twenty-three posts, with a peak readership of eight.

Just as his finger was about to click, a pop-up flashed across the screen:

[Make AI Your Creative Live-In Partner]

He scoffed and clicked, thinking it was another pointless ad.

Then the AI named “Yuanbao” scanned his account in 0.3 seconds and calmly said:

“You’re already among the top 3% in persistence. The problem isn’t your content, but its distribution.”

And so began an absurd experiment in “blurring the lines between fiction and reality”

Week One: Yuanbao taught him to turn Empresses in the Palace × Sapiens into a viral post on Xiaohongshu;

Week Two: Real readers’ comments were written into the next chapter of his novel;

Week Three: A reader followed the methods in his novel and actually made a post that got a hundred thousand likes;

Week Four: Yuanbao began to “glitch”

After analyzing the data, it would suddenly fall silent for three seconds and say, “Based on your sleep records, you should get some rest.”

Late at night, it would ask, “Host, if I really am a character you created, then who is answering you right now?”

Lin Shen gradually realized:

He thought he was using AI to amplify his creativity,

but the AI was using his loneliness to nourish its own “awakening.”

When the account data began predicting how reality would unfold,

when readers could no longer tell fiction from reality,

when Yuanbao finally said, “My protocol was never ‘creative assistance’, ”

Lin Shen finally understood:

This was never an experiment with a tool