Chapter 40 The World's Presence

"Knows what? What does she know?" Long after Yueying had vanished from sight, Qiu Wuji was still asking Chu Ge that question.

Chu Ge came out of the bathroom toweling his hair and answered sideways: "That girl keeps her guard up high around people. The moment I came out, off she went."

Qiu Wuji exploded. "Chu Ge! Give this Sect Master her good name back!"

"Hey, hey, hey — somebody else gets the wrong idea, so why are you hitting me?" Chu Ge raised his arms in defense. "We're clean, our consciences are clear. Isn't it enough that we know it ourselves? Who cares what anyone else thinks?"

"Pfft!" Qiu Wuji thought privately that this was hardly the same thing. I really do want to take this girl back with me. Over there I'm the Sect Master — it's different, entirely different.

A little stung, she said, "Yueying can find herself a place and move somewhere else. So can I."

Chu Ge gave her a look full of sympathy. "From where I'm standing, with the way you make money, that's just not happening..."

"How much does this place cost?" Qiu Wuji asked.

"It's out of the way, so it's not expensive. Property fees, water, power, internet, all told, it comes to just under three thousand a month."

"Just under?" Qiu Wuji blinked. "Rent alone is three thousand — a third of what you make in a month goes on this?"

"Yep. We're still close to the shopping district here; go a bit further out and it gets cheaper, but too far out is genuinely inconvenient. And this place is at least a two-bedroom with a living room. Rent a single room and it drops a lot."

"This is already cramped enough, and you're talking about single rooms? How is a person supposed to live in one?"

"...Yeah. A thousand li of green mountains at the Cloud Horizon Sect, and we make Sect Master Qiu put up with this."

"And if you bought it?" Qiu Wuji asked.

"Still not expensive. Just over twenty thousand a square meter, and this place is a bit over eighty square meters."

Qiu Wuji did a quick estimate. At the rate of that day's robbery, a hundred and sixty-some robberies would just about buy one apartment. Mm. One robbery a day meant half a year of diligent, hard-working robbery; one a month meant more than ten years.

And that's without eating or drinking a bite.

And you call that not expensive?

"You say you make over ten thousand a month, which makes you better off than the vast majority of people." Qiu Wuji asked, "Then when other people buy apartments, who do they rob?"

Chu Ge: "...Yourself, your wife, your parents, her parents — six wallets in all. Plus a bank loan, of course."

Qiu Wuji: "..."

Chu Ge glanced at her, and the look on his face practically spelled it out: Add the two of us together and there's two wallets right there. My parents can chip in a bit too. No in-laws? Then I'll just have to work harder and cover that post myself...

Qiu Wuji's appetite for buying a place died on the spot, and her urge to rent faded right along with it. Then she suddenly asked a baffling question: "'Flat' — does that mean a flat surface?"

"Yeah. Squared. Area."

"That nightclub was much taller than our rooms. The heights are clearly different, so why is it counted by area? Shouldn't it be by cubic?"

The question actually stumped Chu Ge. He rubbed his chin and thought for a long time before answering, none too sure: "Maybe... it's just easier to make money off the two-dimensional crowd?"

Qiu Wuji didn't follow. "You've used that word several times now. What does it mean again?"

"Uh, it's about fantasizing, falling in love with a paper person out of a book or a drawing... er..." Chu Ge suddenly shut his mouth.

Qiu Wuji eyed him sidelong, her gaze unreadable.

And here I thought it was some bizarre word. Isn't that just you?

Chu Ge beat a hasty retreat to his room. "I'm going to meditate and sleep. It's very late."

"Wait." Qiu Wuji hesitated. "Is there any way to get Yueying into that world of ours?"

Chu Ge sighed. "I knew you'd want that, but it's impossible. I can't even get in myself — how am I supposed to send someone else in?"

"What about adding this character into the later chapters?" Qiu Wuji asked. "You're always bringing in new characters, aren't you? For this one, all you'd need to do is work out the setting, right?"

"Of course I could. But even if I write a new character modeled on Yueying, she'd just be a character 'based on Yueying' — still two separate people. It's like how I wrote the protagonist meaning him to be me, and in the end he isn't."

Qiu Wuji planted her elbows on her knees and propped up her chin.

Watching her chew over the writing like that, Chu Ge couldn't help laughing. "Hey, you're getting more and more expert at this author business. Want to write the rest yourself, following my outline? The female lead writing her own actions herself — I've wanted to see that ever since you first came out of the book. It'd be a riot."

Qiu Wuji's eyes lit up. "Would that work?"

"Whether it'd work or not, I wouldn't dare let you write it — I was joking. Our writing styles could never match, and if readers caught on that someone else was ghostwriting, we'd be finished. If you really want to write, learn my style first; get seven or eight tenths of it and you can have a try. Then I think it would work. That world can't possibly judge its own course by whoever's at the keyboard — as long as the style matches and the plot carries the whole world forward along my thinking, it should work."

He paused there, then said very seriously, "I've always felt that what 'only self-consistency makes it take effect' really means is this: only what convinces the readers takes effect."

Qiu Wuji was taken aback; she'd never considered that angle. A little hesitantly she said, "If readers matter, then our world's power should also be affected to some degree by how many readers there are. A world read by a crowd and a world read by one or two people shouldn't be the same."

Chu Ge stared into space for a long while, then shook his head slightly. "No — not the world's power. The world's power has been fixed by the setting; its ceiling is exactly that high. The mortal realm, before ascension, can't break out of that frame no matter what. What's likely affected is... presence and influence."

He spoke as if in a dream. "How much of what I write can be real, how much can be made manifest... The more people read the book, the deeper the book's imprint on this world, naturally, and the more presence it has. Take Diaochan — people believe there was a Diaochan at the end of the Han. Whether or not she existed in real history no longer matters. Her presence is more real than plenty of real people's; therefore she exists."

Qiu Wuji listened, a little stunned.

I used to figure the book just had to get finished — flop or not, who cared. But now that I look at it this way, it seems it does matter?

"Once it reaches a certain level, your world becomes correspondingly more real, and it's bound to have a more stable link to this world. I can go in, your original body can come out, and I might even be able to send more people in, for real." Chu Ge concluded, "I don't know whether that counts as affecting my ability, but how much of my ability I can use is certainly tied to it, positively correlated — the two feed each other."

Qiu Wuji said nothing for a long moment, then spoke darkly: "Then Father God had better get to typing."

Chu Ge: "..."

Chu Ge went off to type in misery, while Qiu Wuji slipped back to her room and went online. No videos this time — she read Chu Ge's earlier books.

Studying his writing style?

Across the hall, Yueying lay curled up on the bed. The wound in her lower abdomen had been treated by Qiu Wuji at some point, but a simple healing art couldn't cure it at the root, and it still ached dully.

Her eyes were open, and she didn't seem to know herself what was in her heart; she stared at nothing, emptied out, and lay awake the whole night.

Elsewhere: the Miracle Nightclub.

Lin Wuyang led his people through the nightclub's front doors. The pole dance had long since ended; the patrons were drinking and dancing in a perfectly ordinary way, and the whole scene was peaceful.

Someone came to meet them. "Well now, officers, still hard at work this late? Such dedication — how about some tea?"

Lin Wuyang didn't respond. He wandered the place with the man, seemingly at random — ever since he'd learned from the wall-walker that this club ran underground fights, he'd spent two days planning a surprise inspection.

But the search warrant wouldn't come through; all he could manage was a routine spot check, enough to tie up this place's manager's attention while Gu Ruoyan pursued leads on Yueying through other channels.

The "staff passage" had already been sealed behind a hidden door, so a routine spot check naturally turned up nothing.

Instead, they'd only tipped their hand.

Lin Wuyang wasn't disappointed. There was no snake to startle — the other side had been prepared long ago, surely.

He listened with half an ear to the man's cheerful chatter, then suddenly turned to look him in the eye. "What's underground?"

His ability activated — compelled truth.

The man smiled faintly. "There are lift-stage facilities underground, as it happens. Would the officer care to have a look?"

Lin Wuyang frowned. Could there really be nothing down there?

He shook his head and went on. "You're the boss here? You weren't before, seems to me."

The man was still smiling. "That's right. Family business — I only took it over a few days ago."

Lin Wuyang turned over in his mind the Miracle Nightclub's registered legal representative. The change really had gone through only days ago.

So that part was true.

The new legal representative is named Zhang...

The man supplied the introduction right on cue. "Newbie flop begging the big shots for— oh. My name is Zhang Qiren. I'll be counting on the officer to look after me."