"You..." In the cafe, Gu Ruoyan set down her coffee cup, a little hesitant. "I hear you're a writer?"

The cafe's saxophone drifted lazily; afternoon sunlight spilled through the floor-to-ceiling windows onto the table, where the rose at its center still had dewdrops glistening on it—delicate and vivid, fragrant and pleasing.

The setting was beautiful, and Gu Ruoyan was beautiful too. For this blind date she had specially put on a long dress she rarely wore, and her usual crisp high ponytail had been let down on purpose; her black hair, falling like a waterfall, only set off her elegance the more.

She'd had expectations for this blind date, but the man in front of her disappointed her somewhat...

His looks were tall and handsome enough, but he was dressed carelessly and hadn't even shaved his stubble clean—which at least proved his attitude toward this date was nowhere near as serious as hers. That aside, he seemed to lack any vigor, and he'd been all nerves when he laid eyes on her, like some shut-in who holed up at home gaming all day and never met another soul.

Hmm... a writer, maybe that's just how they are? Decadent, sloppy, bad with people?

A writer—that sounded interesting... which was also why Gu Ruoyan was willing to take this blind date seriously, even though she, who fancied herself a lover of books, had never once heard this so-called writer's name.

Chu Ge sat across from her with his chin propped on both hands, heart pounding. He'd been through plenty of blind dates arranged by his mother; it was always a formality, and the other side played along, no words needed—they'd eat, part ways, and not even leave each other a WeChat contact.

He hadn't counted on his date this time being such an elegant, beautiful woman. A woman this gorgeous—why wasn't she off making movies somewhere instead of going on blind dates!

I was completely unprepared for this!

"I asked you a question..." Gu Ruoyan sighed. "Auntie Wu says you're a writer. Could you talk about your work? I'd like to read a little of it."

"...Ah, yes."

Chu Ge cleared his throat.

"I've written a great many novels, but I feel none of them have fully displayed my true level. The ancients put it well—writing is the vehicle of the Dao.

At present I'm conceiving a grand narrative set against a special historical period, one that focuses on the vast cosmos and the boundless natural world, expresses the spirit of the lowly common man striving unceasingly against adversity, ponders the deep questions of the fate of China and indeed of all humanity, and bears the social responsibility a writer ought to bear!

So I've been searching for my muse, my goddess of inspiration..."

"Speak human?" Gu Ruoyan folded her hands on the table, eyes lowered slightly.

Chu Ge sheepishly pulled back his flailing hands. "Uh, lately I'm writing a xianxia novel. Good-for-nothing protagonist genre."

Understanding dawned in Gu Ruoyan's eyes.

So this is... a web writer.

Does a web writer even count as an author?

She didn't know whether it counted. In any case, it was a field she understood nothing about, very different from her usual idea of what an author was.

"How much do you make a month? Is it stable? Do you have the five insurances and the housing fund?"

"Rousseau once said: to write for bread is soon to stifle my genius and destroy my talent. Nothing vigorous, nothing great, can come from a mercenary pen. Need and greed may make me write faster, but they cannot make me write better..."

"Speak human!"

"It's not very stable. Some months are leaner. This month I've passed ten thousand..." Chu Ge's eyes flickered slightly. "As for the five insurances and the fund... actually, these days you can pay your social insurance yourself..."

"Isn't that just an unemploy—" Gu Ruoyan blurted out, and finally choked it back.

Chu Ge smiled faintly and said nothing.

Gu Ruoyan somewhat regretted the slip; those words had to sting... But she felt that being unemployed at twenty-seven or twenty-eight meant that if he ever wrote an autobiography, it would be a solid good-for-nothing-protagonist novel. How was this blind date supposed to go on?

In the end she smiled an apologetic smile and rose from her seat. "I have some things to do..."

Chu Ge sighed. "Go ahead."

Plenty of people had told Chu Ge that the name his parents gave him was a bad one. His name, Chu Ge, echoed the old phrase "Chu songs on four sides"—besieged on every side—and the omen was too ill: it doomed a man to fail at whatever he tried. Other things he could live with, but if he couldn't even land a girlfriend, that was called, to put it another way, "destined to die alone."

And on top of that, it sounded like "cherry boy"—wasn't that just asking for trouble?

So Chu Ge had been on eleven blind dates, and not one had worked out.

Of course, the earlier failures were really because he hadn't wanted to find anyone at all.

How could women possibly be as fun as video games? If Mom hadn't hounded me into it, those eleven dates would never have existed.

What a shame... this one was truly lovely—so lovely that even now Chu Ge found it a little unreal. That instant of heart-flutter still hadn't settled.

Chu Ge sat quietly where he was, watching the dew on the petals, and did not follow Gu Ruoyan's lovely back with his eyes. Two or three seconds later, though, his whole body seemed to relax; he leaned lazily against the soft backrest and took a leisurely sip of the coffee he had only just sipped.

As though what had just happened had never happened at all.

A hundred and twenty a cup. Chu Ge didn't know whether this bitter stuff—bitter as his mood right now—could lengthen a man's life, or why it had to be so expensive.

He lazily fished out his phone, opened QQ, and tapped into a group chat called "Fratricide."

It was a small group—counting Chu Ge himself, just over three hundred people. Compared to some groups that claimed two thousand members and were dead as doornails, this one didn't have many people but was certainly lively; every mouth in it was a Gatling gun, and you'd come back from the toilet to 99+ messages.

That a small group could stay this active—Chu Ge deserved no small credit.

Someone had once summed up what an active group required, writing out twenty items at great length. The most important of them, item number one: you need an idiot for a group owner...

The summary was spot on. Chu Ge was the group owner.

It was his reader group. He was the author, and his pen name was his real name, Chu Ge. "Fratricide," of course, meant a bunch of readers all in one group fu—never mind.

At that moment the group seemed to have reached a collective consensus over a screenshot of some news item, and the members were repeating it in unison.

"Marriage-phobia +1 for today."

Chu Ge clicked +1 out of habit.

Chu Ge: "Marriage-phobia +1 for today."

The group went quiet for a moment, then someone asked, "Big Chu? Didn't you say you had a blind date? You surfaced that fast?"

"How long does a blind date take?" Chu Ge did his best to sound calm. "It's GG."

The group cheered right back up: "GG is fine. How could women possibly be as fun as writing? You haven't updated today!"

Chu Ge's fingers hovered over the keys for a few seconds; he didn't reply again.

Most people don't care what mood the person on the other side of the screen is in; they only care that you haven't updated today. Which was why Chu Ge wouldn't even ask for leave when he came down with some minor illness—because the feedback he'd get usually wasn't "rest well" but "making excuses again."

Unless you had old readers who were invested in you. Unfortunately, at this point Chu Ge had no such following.

In the end he was still just a man his blind date took for an unemployed vagrant...

He put his phone away and drained the now half-cold coffee. "Check, please."

The waiter came over. "One hundred twenty."

Chu Ge blinked. There were two cups of coffee: "Is it half price today?"

"The young lady already paid for her own."

Chu Ge turned instinctively to look out the window, then remembered that Gu Ruoyan had left at least five minutes ago.

Gu Ruoyan's blurted slip had stung him a little, but he didn't hate her for it—because the vast majority of the world saw this profession exactly that way, and he'd long been used to it.

Besides, nervous as he'd been, his acting had been far too over the top... What the hell was all that garbage I was spouting?

Chu Ge didn't know why a woman with Gu Ruoyan's looks and bearing would even need blind dates. If he were to guess maliciously...

Forget it. Why go there? A passerby's past—what business is it of mine?

For him, right now, the thing that actually had to be faced was that awkward line from the group: today's update still wasn't finished, and if he dawdled any longer he'd be going on hiatus.