Chu Ge was just a hack with a book that was neither a hit nor quite a flop — no immortal. He had never imagined his own work could build a real world. Yet the fragrance still lingering in the air proved this was no hallucination.
Looking back on it now brought a belated chill.
In his own setting, Qiu Wuji was no gentle, kindly sort. Cultivators fought heaven for their span of years and fought men for supremacy; she was decisive and ruthless in the killing. She might not be of any demonic sect, but the lives on her hands were plainly not few.
Given her circumstances and her temperament, the likeliest course was simply to kill this "Creator God" and let the book's course run itself from then on — free to roam as far as she pleased.
For the first time, Chu Ge felt how close death had come.
Maybe she feared that if the "Creator God" fell, the whole world might collapse with him... After all, this was a work whose worldview had never been fully unfolded. For one thing, Chu Ge hadn't even worked out in his later outline what the immortal realm beyond ascension was like. As the top figure in her world, Qiu Wuji must have some obscure sense of it — this "Creator God" could not die.
Which was why she had said, "I'd risk the world collapsing just to kill you."
The logic held... which somehow made it all the more absurd.
To be fair, one book, one world — that wasn't so hard to swallow. Other people's Huang Rong and Wanwan could run out of their books into the modern day; other books could do the same, surely. Maybe it had little to do with how well a work was written. If it's a book, it really is a world, and even a trashy book counts.
People were always hopping between novel worlds, characters from different worlds crossing over... That's exactly what "the myriad heavens" means.
Seen that way, his own heroine running out wasn't so strange. It took no wildly bizarre imagination, and he didn't need to be an immortal himself — it was just the familiar notion of "breaking the dimensional wall."
The problem was, in other people's cases it was at least a finished world, the characters' fates already set. What was this? The world wasn't even built yet, the plot had barely begun, and the heroine was already out here forcing the author to revise his manuscript?
Luckily, for some reason Qiu Wuji couldn't stay long. Before she'd had time to think up a development that fit the world's logic, she was gone. In the end, the whole mess still landed back in Chu Ge's hands.
Still seems controllable...
But it still hurt like a kick in the balls!
The outline for the mortal realm up to Qiu Wuji's ascension was very complete indeed. If the first female lead suddenly had nothing to do with the male lead, wouldn't the whole mortal-realm story collapse?
How am I supposed to rewrite that?!
Even if he gave Qiu Wuji less screen time and grafted her material onto the other female characters, just barely keeping the story running, there would be plenty of jarring spots. And as far as the readers were concerned, a perfectly good stunning sect master just up and losing her part — isn't that what they call dropping a heroine?
That's a guaranteed flop.
But he couldn't not change it. A flop would only cost him money; not changing it her way would cost him his life!
Chu Ge sat in front of the computer with a face like a man badly constipated and stared into space for a solid half hour, unable to write a single word.
Before he knew it, the hands of the clock had crept to eleven thirty.
"Shit!" A stray glance at the time snapped Chu Ge back to himself.
He'd already written most of this chapter but hadn't finished it — dawdle any longer and he really would miss the update!
No need to describe how miserable Chu Ge felt. Missing updates while your book is on the rise wrecks your author cred. He hadn't even been willing to take leave for a small illness before, and now some inexplicable nonsense was about to break his streak.
The book's prospects looked bleaker than ever.
"Who the hell did I even piss off..." Chu Ge was seething. Other people's miraculous encounters were a stroke of luck; his own was... beyond even description.
"So as long as she's not with the male lead, it's fine? Writers don't scare easy — who's afraid of who? If I'm going to die, I'll die with my dick to the sky!" Chu Ge gritted his teeth, straightened his keyboard, and hammered away at the keys:
"Qiu Wuji stood at the window for a while, then drew her thoughts back. How had she come to think of that Chu Tiange? Really... was there a man alive in this world worthy of her? To say nothing of a mere disciple. Even if lone yin cannot thrive alone and that makes for loneliness — if she truly had to find a man, it should be the Father God of Creation himself!"
Drafted, done — publish!
Inside the world of the book.
Qiu Wuji was not at any window. She was in a sealed chamber, cultivating in stillness.
Her actions were not in sync with what the author wrote. Their timelines weren't the same, and anyway, characters obviously had their own business outside their allotted scenes — it wasn't as though they'd simply been written out.
Inside the chamber, a wraithlike figure descended out of thin air and merged into her body.
So the one who had left her world and met Chu Ge earlier was only her divine sense, not her physical body.
She had not yet met the conditions for ascension. That single thought of hers had broken the boundary only because extreme fury had forced out her latent potential; it could not last. Forcing herself to stay outside might have torn body from soul, which would have been a serious problem. Feeling her limit, she'd had no choice but to return.
That was why Chu Ge had found her air of menace weaker than he'd expected — plainly put, what he'd met was nothing but a wisp of will that had barely forced its way across the boundary between worlds.
Her divine sense returned to its seat, and Qiu Wuji opened her eyes. The look in them shifted from faintly blank to a hard, determined light.
Never mind that Chu Ge had been dumbstruck — Qiu Wuji's own mind at that moment had been anything but calm.
When she saw a man sitting before a strange glowing screen, striking a strange grid-boxed treasure, characters appearing on the screen one after another, setting out the innermost thoughts of Qiu Wuji herself — the shock of it was beyond words.
The shock and bewilderment of that moment could not be put into words to any outsider.
This man is writing a story, and I am actually nothing but... a character in a story he made up?
The whole world is just a book... then everything I have lived through — is it real, or is it illusion?
Or is this what they call "the will of heaven, dark and unknowable"?
It wasn't that the immortal path had no such cultivation concepts as the Dao of Calligraphy or the Dao of Painting; there were even notions of conjuring a universe of one's own. But everyone here was confined to a mere "lower realm," without cultivation that high, and to this day no one had ever succeeded. Still, the concept existed, and as a top figure of her age, Qiu Wuji grasped the matter easily enough.
Only, when she herself was a living being inside a book, the blow to her understanding and her feelings was truly hard for anyone who hadn't lived it to fathom.
But it didn't matter...
In all things, what people fear is the unknown; the vast will of heaven is the hardest thing to fathom and the hardest to resist. But now that she had seen through to the truth, there would surely be a way.
By relying on that "Creator God" who can't even truss a chicken?
One threat or two, and he won't dare go west when I say east.
By then, never mind seizing control of my own fate — if I want more than that, I can have it too.
Sure enough, after her return, the image of that disciple in her mind had grown blurrier and blurrier. That "Creator God" still didn't dare defy her — this must be him finding a way to sever that nonsense red thread of fate, wasn't it?
The key question now was that this crossing had been something of an accident. The pressing task was to find out how to break the boundary at will, stably, and how to remain outside for long.
By then, retreating she could weave her own world as she pleased, and advancing she could roam the outer world and explore the myriad heavens. A boundless universe, sky high and sea wide — what couldn't she do?
Fall for a disciple? What a joke! How could that ever be my future?
It could never be a choice that I, Qiu Wuji, would make.
If I truly had to find a man, it should be the Father God of Creation himself!
The transition had been so seamless, so silky, that for a while Qiu Wuji didn't notice anything wrong at all. Only after a good long while did she begin to come back to her senses — how could I possibly think something like that?
Something stirred in Qiu Wuji's heart, and her eyes slowly widened.
Did he write that? He actually dared to write that!