Once the rush from the ten-thousand-word update wore off, Chu Ge discovered he was ravenous.
Qiu Wuji hadn't cooked tonight — she'd pinned him down for a massage and then vanished, and he'd been typing ever since.
Thinking back on what Qiu Wuji had said about his five viscera being unsettled, Chu Ge decided he still had to keep regular hours and stick with his running and the rest of his exercise. Otherwise he'd fall straight into what Qiu Wuji called "getting it too easily" — squandering it at random and handing it all back before long.
The next time she comes over, I want her to see a Chu Ge full of energy.
He was still thinking it over as he opened the door to go get food, and the door across the hall happened to open at that very moment. A girl in black stepped out, saw Chu Ge coming out too, and instinctively started to back away.
But she saw that Chu Ge was alone. She hesitated a moment, and finally came out anyway.
Chu Ge didn't look at her. He pressed the elevator button and waited quietly. The girl waited quietly off to one side as well, and when the car came down the two of them stood inside in silence, not saying a single word the whole way.
"Ding!" The elevator reached the ground floor.
As the doors opened, the girl suddenly spoke. "I'm looking for a place... I'll be moving out in the next few days. Sorry."
With that, she hurried away.
Chu Ge walked slowly out of the elevator and headed off in the opposite direction.
So the girl knew the score... By rights she shouldn't have been able to see through Qiu Wuji's invisibility; maybe catching him turning up over there had let her guess the whole story.
Still, not bad. She's a reasonable sort.
Chu Ge found that he genuinely didn't feel the horror of running into a "lethal power user." Maybe because after being neighbors this long, she counted as an acquaintance? Or maybe because he'd already had a T-rex of a woman put a sword to his neck — what haven't I seen by now...
Besides, I'm a cultivator now... Chu Ge ate his beef noodles in silence, as if he could feel the energy breaking down strand by strand and melting into his body, looking down on the cosmos inside himself as though from somewhere far outside it.
Qi Refining stage.
For now, Chu Ge still couldn't replace sleep with meditation. After eating he went back, took a shower, sat cross-legged on the bed, and followed the meridians Qiu Wuji had pointed out, circulating his Qi through thirty-six great cycles. Whether his cultivation had grown, he couldn't tell, but it had one clear benefit: it focused and calmed the mind so completely that his bedtime fretting was basically gone, and his head had barely touched the pillow before he was out cold.
Say what you like, it's a dab hand at curing insomnia...
He woke early the next day too, at first light. After a night of deep sleep he felt wonderful. Chu Ge ran another thirty-six great cycles, then went running, did push-ups and squats, washed up, and ate breakfast. By the time he'd gotten through the whole routine it was just past eight.
He sat down at the computer bright-eyed and started typing, and his thoughts felt so much nimbler and clearer that Chu Ge was moved to tears.
With this kind of energy, I'd have gotten that promotion at the office years ago.
Another ten-thousand-word day!
Amid Chu Ge's burst of diligence, the featured recommendation arrived right on schedule.
Chu Ge hadn't looked at his backend stats in ages, but today he couldn't resist refreshing them over and over.
These bookmarks are climbing way too fast... dozens more with every refresh, past a thousand in under an hour. So this is the grand featured recommendation a flop like me has been staring up at all this time?
How many of those bookmarks would turn into subscriptions was still unknown — new readers had to get through the free chapters before deciding whether to keep going, and it had only been an hour, so nothing would show up in the subscription numbers yet.
But even at the most ordinary conversion rate, a big jump in the numbers was a sure thing.
Come to think of it, I haven't looked at the subscription numbers in ages either. And now that I have, they're actually a bit higher than before the drop-off. So plenty of new readers were already finding the book before the feature, making up for the loss — is that connected to that weird burst of traffic a while back?
So it looks like these chapters I've been writing by the seat of my pants ever since Qiu Wuji changed her fate haven't been a failure after all. It was already creeping upward before the feature — so is it about to take off now?
He'd assumed that numbers left unexamined for so long must be too grim to look at, just waiting for the feature to save them. It was the exact opposite. Chu Ge couldn't shake the feeling that his luck was turning.
Did the heroine showing up bring my luck back with her?
Chu Ge drew a deep breath, closed the backend without looking at it again, and went back to focusing on his typing.
The last stretch of today's ten-thousand-word update was a little special, and Chu Ge didn't want to get distracted by his numbers, because he was writing Qiu Wuji and Yan Qianlie trying to resonate with the Covenant of the Heavenly Dao in order to swear a wager.
In terms of description, it was simply "a sound like muffled thunder seemed to come from the heavens, gilded characters faintly surfaced, and the pact was made..." As for how Qiu Wuji actually communicated with the "Heavenly Dao," there was no concrete process at all — it was just the author's deus ex machina, not a real exchange with the Heavenly Dao by any stretch.
But what about when the "heaven's will" is Chu Ge himself, and Qiu Wuji knows it perfectly well? In her eyes — in her "communication process" — what form would this scene take?
In a sense, wasn't that writing Chu Ge himself into the book?
Could he descend into it?
A little nervous, Chu Ge typed out this line: "Qiu Wuji seemed to feel the gaze of the heavens, and something within her seemed to resonate and echo."
He waited a moment. Nothing happened.
Chu Ge gritted his teeth and simply wrote it more plainly: "To her, the 'Heavenly Dao' was no longer an unfathomable, unseen force, but something that truly existed — something that could answer."
As if in some illusion of something shattering, the screen before Chu Ge's eyes gradually blurred, warped, and stretched, and blue sky and white clouds, towering mountains, faintly appeared before him.
Qiu Wuji stood at the mountain summit with her hands behind her back, gazing at the sky. Before her was a violent, burly man wreathed in raging flame, like a demon god.
Yan Qianlie, who burns heaven and destroys earth — one of the strongest Demon Lords of this world.
"What Heavenly Dao resonance pact? Qiu Wuji, have you lost your mind?" Yan Qianlie laughed uproariously. "What do we cultivators practice for? To be unfettered! To break through this realm, roam beyond its borders, and trample the myriad heavens! And now you tell me you want to commune with the Heavenly Dao and have it bind the two of us! Hahaha! The hell kind of immortal are you cultivating to be?"
Qiu Wuji said coolly, "One realm has one realm's law, and that law is the Heavenly Dao. We have cultivated the Dao until now; before we have stepped outside it, we should at least respect it. Every method you use lies within the Heavenly Dao as well — do you think you created them in defiance of heaven?"
"Haha, so this is what you call walking toward the Dao, is it? What a joke! With notions like that, when will you ever tear this heaven apart?" Yan Qianlie laughed. "This Demon Lord won't argue the Dao with you. You want your water to follow the sky away — then go!"
Qiu Wuji said coldly, "If you already know our ways don't mix, then what's all this blather for?"
Yan Qianlie laughed. "What this Demon Lord is laughing at is this: your so-called pact with the Heavenly Dao is in essence nothing but another oath. But we've cultivated to this point, and vows no longer bind us. What Heavenly Dao can stick its nose into my business? You can commune till flowers bloom and it won't do a bit of good, understand? Look at you — you've been communing all this while. Has anything answered?"
Qiu Wuji looked up at the sky and said coolly, "A summer insect can't be told about ice. Just you wait."
Chu Ge, what the hell are you playing at? Don't tell me you haven't written this scene yet — so my starting early doesn't count? It has to count! You wrote it in the outline!
Hurry up and write, you bastard — I'm being laughed at!
And this Heavenly Dao resonance — how exactly am I supposed to resonate? This thing isn't some unfathomable mystery; it's obviously just you. Are you going to jump in yourself?
Even as she thought it, she felt the gaze of the heavens upon her.
She looked back — and there was nothing.
But Yan Qianlie's laughter was already dying away, his eyes turning uncertain and wary.
Both of them felt it at the same instant: an immense pressure descending upon their soul seas — vast and peaceful, like the flow of time itself, plainly present, yet impossible to grasp, impossible to reverse.
From the depths of their souls, something like a resonance sounded: "The wager between Qiu Wuji and Yan Qianlie is established."
A sound like muffled thunder seemed to come from the heavens; gilded characters faintly surfaced, and the pact was made.
Yan Qianlie's expression turned incomparably grim. He truly felt a restraint settle over his heart — if he broke the pact afterward, there really might be... problems.
What the hell — so it's actually real?
Qiu Wuji didn't take the chance to mock him for it.
In her soul sea, Chu Ge's grinning face rose up clear as day, winking at her with a teasing glint.
A smile curved the corners of Qiu Wuji's lips, and she answered without a sound: "So it really is possible... to see you here."