Qiu Wuji couldn't hold out under Chu Ge's strange look.
She felt that look could dissolve a person, like some corpse-melting elixir — her whole body went jittery, and her instinctive reaction was to give him a beating. Then again, he hadn't actually done anything, so wasn't hitting him going a bit too far...? Whichever way I think about it, it's wrong. So she simply stamped her foot and headed for the door. "I'm going out to buy groceries. Go write your words — what are you standing there spacing out for!"
Chu Ge burst out laughing. "As you command."
Qiu Wuji really didn't need an escort to buy groceries anymore. In a wonderful mood, Chu Ge sat back down in his room, turned on the computer, and started hammering away at the keys.
She said it was really well written!
Chu Ge felt like every part of him was brimming with strength.
So much had happened yesterday, but all of it had taken only a single day. He'd banked half a chapter before bed last night, and now inspiration was gushing like a burst bladder; a whole chapter came out fast and went up, and the streak of ten-thousand-word daily updates felt sustainable — maybe he could even do more.
Chu Ge figured it might have something to do with the exercise and the cultivation — his mind was much sharper now. In the past he'd squeeze for ages and not get a chapter out; now it flowed really smoothly.
Those tentacle monsters must all have great physiques, Chu Ge thought.
He uploaded the chapter and took a casual look at the subscription data — and his jaw dropped.
Since the featured recommendation, he'd gained over a thousand average subscriptions...
He'd only recently crossed into premium, then crept up a little, to around 3,500. This wave had shot him straight past 4,600, and it had been a single day — it could still climb!
For growth off a featured recommendation, that was an unbelievable, dreamlike number compared to anyone else; plenty of people didn't gain even two hundred in a whole day.
This is...
Even Chu Ge felt it was a bit unreal. He scratched his head and puzzled over it for a long while without finding the answer. There's no reason for this... True, there were cases where little early exposure meant a big recommendation sent a book skyrocketing — but those people wrote well, and his own had clearly gone a bit off the rails later on. Could it really get this effect too?
The effect was a chain reaction, a snowball. Chu Ge opened the bestseller list, and sure enough, as expected: over a thousand average subscriptions gained in one day showed up vividly on the real-time bestseller list, and it looked set to charge straight into the top ten.
He didn't know how long it would hold, but this was exposure too — big exposure.
Once the snowball got rolling, who could say how much more it would grow? This had already left behind anything a normal recommendation could be reckoned to deliver. Maybe ten-thousand-plus subscriptions were in sight before long?
Chu Ge scratched his head raw and still couldn't find anything impressive in what he'd written later on. Never mind the romance line — the protagonist had been faded into the background that much; normally that shouldn't bring anything good at all...
After thinking it over for ages, I can only credit part of it to the recent burst of updates?
Without hurting quality, a burst of updates absolutely gives results a big boost. Dianniang also runs a combat-power leaderboard; if he kept going and managed to get on it, that would be more good exposure. Back in his clumsy-fingered days he could only drool over it; now it looked like he could make a push.
Put that way, is the future really that bright?
Really strange. I never even hoped for this, so how did it turn out this way... Is it really just a willow cutting planted by accident growing into deep shade?
The only thing slowing his speed was that he'd picked a rough road to walk — the more he wrote, the more of an ensemble cast it had become, and that was a real hassle, hard to control. But having come this far, he could only grit his teeth and keep writing. If an ensemble cast was done well, the results were another matter, but the reputation was usually good.
Screw it. If I'm going to die, I'll die with my dick to the sky. I was writing before all this without ever looking at the backend — so what do I have to feel anxious about now? Draining this much energy over it is pointless. Chu Ge drew a deep breath, closed the backend, and opened the document to write the next chapter.
The plot in this stretch had the whole world in upheaval; it truly did need to be polished with care.
In the section he was writing now, the camera didn't focus much on Qiu Wuji's side; it just mentioned in passing that she was "arranging for her disciples to act while she herself remained in seclusion, tempering herself, preparing with all her strength for the battle with Yan Qianlie."
And then, thanks to Chu Ge's own smuggling, he added one more line: "Her divine soul grew ever more solid; her split soul roamed at large to observe the changes of the world, enduring without end."
This wasn't just to tell readers that Qiu Wuji's seclusion wouldn't stop her from keeping up with the situation in the book; more importantly, of course, it was so she could stay here a little longer... So the Creator God wasn't omnipotent after all — even a personal addition like this had to be added step by step along with the plot; he couldn't force her hard power up with one stroke of the pen.
Now he'd finally gotten it added.
But as he wrote on, Chu Ge suddenly frowned slightly, his fingers pausing.
Seclusion? Tempering herself? Where?
She's out touring bars, catching shows, reading novels and scrolling videos.
At this rate, won't it affect her strength and drag down the battle?
The book had ordained that she would definitely win; by rights it should be a certain victory. Yet he couldn't help feeling a little uneasy.
Could something go wrong?
The thought left him restless. Chu Ge, whose calm mind had shrugged off even the joy of his skyrocketing numbers, now couldn't sit still; he pulled out his phone and sent Qiu Wuji a WeChat message: "Where are you?"
Qiu Wuji was at a beef stall in the wet market, scanning a QR code to pay. She'd discovered that if she walked in the opposite direction from where Chu Ge usually went, there was a market with cheaper goods than the supermarket over there, and it looked fresher too. She had no idea why Chu Ge always headed for the supermarket — such a pig-head.
Today she planned to make potato stir-fried with beef. Nobody over there had ever heard of a plant called the potato; that pig-head is such a stickler for accuracy in his books, and said this thing came from foreigners, so having it in a xianxia world was jarring...
So pointless. Who even cares about that? He's cost me so much good food.
Just as she was thinking this, she suddenly felt her divine soul growing more and more solid. Last night, saving Yueying had cost her a good deal of power, so logically her stay this time should have gotten shorter; yet now she felt none of that, with the illusion that she could stay as long as she liked.
In a wonderful mood, Qiu Wuji scanned and paid, the corners of her mouth curling up in a smile without her noticing.
No need to guess — he's up to something in the book again, slipping me more stuff.
She herself didn't even realize it: the resentment she'd once felt over his casually altering her body's abilities had grown fainter and fainter.
The WeChat notification sounded right then. Qiu Wuji tapped open Chu Ge's two-dimensional anime-girl avatar and pursed her lips.
"Where are you?"
Qiu Wuji hooked the bag of potatoes and beef over her little finger and sent a voice message as she walked: "At the wet market."
"Can you come back? I'm a little uneasy."
"Why? Is there something left over from the Yueying business that'll come looking for trouble with us?"
"No... I remembered that your cultivation gets reduced here, and I keep worrying it'll hurt you when you go back to your own world. The more I think about it, the more uneasy I get."
Qiu Wuji was taken aback for a moment, then started laughing again: "Ha..."
She turned to look at the crowd around her and said with a smile, "Wait till I'm home and I'll tell you."
Not long after, Qiu Wuji got home. She hadn't locked the door, and at a glance she saw Chu Ge sitting on the sofa fidgeting like a monkey. The moment he saw her come in, he hurried over and took the groceries from her hands.
Qiu Wuji said, "I forgot I don't have a key. Have one cut for me later."
"You've got the presence of mind to talk about that?" Chu Ge set the groceries aside, speechless, and asked seriously, "What do you think about what I said earlier?"
Qiu Wuji's lovely eyes shifted; lazily, she said, "Suppose I said I want to go back and practice my cultivation — what then?"
Chu Ge pressed his lips together. Unwilling as he was to let her go, he said, "That works too. At least before the fifteenth of July..."
"Ha..." Qiu Wuji couldn't help laughing. "Isn't it that the will of heaven is not to be defied? With the victory you've already fixed for me, how could I lose?"
Chu Ge said angrily, "That's exactly what I'm afraid of — you thinking that, then underestimating the enemy and doing something reckless. Can you win by standing there without throwing a single move and letting people pound on you? We're still testing this so-called connection to heaven's will — we haven't reached a final verdict yet, all right? And here you are..."
"All right, all right, stop scolding." Qiu Wuji smiled faintly. "Do you really think I'd think that way? Aren't I your Qiu Wuji? Don't you know me?"
Chu Ge: "..."
"Whether heaven's will fixes me to win or to lose," Qiu Wuji's smile faded, and she said seriously, "I am Qiu Wuji, and all I can do is use everything I have to defeat every opponent."
Chu Ge said helplessly, "Then what you're doing now is..."
"Chu Ge... you're a storyteller; you can define our cultivation, but you're not a true immortal, so it's hard for you to grasp the subtleties of it."
Qiu Wuji said mildly, "You wrote it yourself: to be able to grasp and savor every detail around you, to miss not a single piece of scenery along the road — that is cultivation, not sitting withered in seclusion, not knowing the years, knowing nothing of the human world.
You wrote that; the definition you gave us suits my heart exactly. But when you actually run into it, you can't put yourself in that place and feel it..."
Her smile bloomed again. "Does Father God really not know that right now, this is me cultivating?"
Chu Ge was dumbfounded for a long while. Is that so? I do seem to have written that, but this...
Qiu Wuji turned and carried the groceries to the kitchen, her high ponytail bouncing with each step. "Maybe you're just... worrying too much because you care?"