Programmers in the Anime World

With the crackle of firecrackers, a year slips away; the spring breeze brings warmth into the spiced wine.

Song Tusu—his name was nothing particularly special, yet it carried a certain poetic charm.

“Hey Song, I’ll leave the rest of the work to you!” a colleague from the same office called out playfully, tossing over a stack of program code for debugging that was more than three times the workload Song Tusu already had in his hands.

“…Alright,” Song Tusu replied quietly, his head bowed, his tone indifferent.

The colleague picked up his briefcase, slung an arm around another’s neck, and strolled out of the room with an easy air. Faintly, Song Tusu could hear another colleague’s guilty murmur, “Isn’t this a bit unfair?”

But the first merely laughed it off, “It’s fine, it’s fine. The young ones need to do more work, anyway…”

Their voices faded into the distance until they could no longer be heard.

Song Tusu gritted his teeth in silence. His gaze suddenly turned fierce, only to dissolve into resignation a moment later.

He exhaled a heavy breath, shook out his arms that ached from a full day’s labor, rolled his weary neck, and lowered his head to resume his work.

He felt he could not dare to ask for more. A second-rate programmer from a second-rate university—neither at the top nor at the bottom. To hold a formal position at a legitimate game studio, what more could he want?

It was, after all, just an ordinary studio. And people like him had an even more contemptuous and humble nickname in society: “code monkey.”