Chen Gui has died twice.
The first time, he was twenty-eight and died suddenly in his rented apartment. Beside him lay five years' worth of civil service exam practice tests, while his phone was still open to the work group chat at the major internet company that had just laid him off.
The second time, he transmigrated into the third month after the supernatural descended. His predecessor had been scared to death by a "Pen Immortal," clutching a bloodstained exam paper in his final moments: "Supernatural Ability Qualification Exam (Mock Test)."
The Pen Immortal stared at him with hollow eye sockets. "Answer wrong... and you die..."
Chen Gui froze.
Not because he was afraid. In his eyes, lines of text appeared over the Pen Immortal, looking just like the data dashboards at his former company:
[Supernatural ID: Pen Immortal Su Wan]
[Type: Rule-Based Vengeful Spirit]
[Behavior Pattern: Triggered Q&A (similar to A/B testing)]
[Probability of Exploitable Flaw: 23.7%]
[Recommended Strategy: Choose none of the options provided. Question the question instead.]
Five years of civil service exam prep had trained his "question-reading muscle memory." Add three years of terror under the rule of "data-driven" thinking at a major tech company, and the two blended together in a bizarre way.
Chen Gui smiled.
While the world at the end of days struggled to survive on ancestral wisdom, while exorcist families still treated "my grandpa said so" as the truth, while ordinary people could only wait to die when faced with the supernatural...
He pulled out a crumpled notebook filled with data analysis models, A/B testing methodologies, growth-hacking techniques, and more...
"You know," he said to the bewildered Pen Immortal, "at my old company, I was best at finding loopholes in the rules and milking them for all they were worth."
From then on, the world gained someone who used modern management theories
