Chu Ge swept back into the rented room like a wildfire and got straight down to it the moment the document opened.
What am I waiting for? Dump chapters now and drag Qiu Wuji over here.
"The Update Assistant reminds you: Big Chu has posted today's third chapter."
Someone in the group passed it along flatly. Nobody paid it much mind — those reading kept reading, those hanging around just kept shooting the breeze.
By now a third update from Chu Ge was nothing special. A chapter ran three thousand-odd characters, three chapters made ten thousand; that was pretty much the daily standard, and it beat the hell out of those too short, too weak authors who squeeze out two thousand-odd characters a chapter and two chapters, that's it...
If one of those too short, too weak types ever wrote a protagonist who was a web novelist, he'd probably dump all his ten-thousand-word-a-day dreams onto that protagonist...
Only today Chu Ge's third update had landed a little early. It wasn't even late afternoon.
"Big Chu's not going for a fourth today, is he?" someone asked out of the blue.
"You wish... that guy won't add a chapter even for a Golden Alliance. Steady as an old dog."
"Is the Golden Alliance big shot even in this group? How come I've never seen him surface?"
"Someone dug it up. He used to be a writer — flopped a bunch of books, then abandoned his new one and ran off. All of a sudden he's flinging money at a pile of books... probably went home to inherit a few hundred million and came back to tip writers as encouragement."
"Praise the Holy Light!"
Chu Ge glanced at the group chat and felt indescribably weird.
He was the one who'd said Lin Wuyang was currently wreathed in holy light; everyone else thought it was Zhang Qiren wreathed in holy light.
Yet behind the scenes, where nobody could see, the two of them were one light and one shadow — and they were facing off.
Speaking of which, Zhang Qiren's Golden Alliance had blown in a fair few new readers; the two-thousand-member chat group was full, and Chu Ge had to cough up for a Super Annual VIP just to expand it to three thousand.
All that money just to make a chat group a little bigger. Capitalists really have no shame about scooping up cash.
He took a look at the numbers while uploading: average subscriptions past nine thousand, the ten-thousand-plus badge in sight.
And yet he felt no excitement at all, for some reason he couldn't name... Maybe because it wasn't what he was chasing anymore. If he expected anything from the numbers now, it was proof of his earlier guess: the more people read a book, the more real its world becomes. Each fed the other.
"Ugh, what do I care whether the Golden Alliance big shot's in the group — why has my Sect Master Qiu not surfaced for two days? Wuwuwu, Qiuqiu, I want Qiuqiu..."
I want Qiuqiu too.
Everyone was in perfect sync: they all wanted Qiuqiu, not Jiji.
Chu Ge shut the group and went back to typing.
Qiu Wuji's alliance was meant to be a secret one, but with a mole in the room it had been an open alliance from day one. Qiu Wuji didn't care. She crushed the dissenters with thunderous means, joined forces with City Lord Xie and the rest to pull the alliance together, and set about planning how to take on the Fire Prison Sect.
There were, in fact, moles within moles — people who backed the alliance in public while quietly looking for a place to stick the knife.
At first Qiu Wuji hadn't known that, in the book's plot; she was simply wary of every attendee. After a series of later events the mole was finally uncovered, and she turned the scheme back on them, staging a Jiang Gan steals the letter, feeding Yan Qianlie false information through the mole.
But Qiu Wuji had actually read the outline, and she knew all of this better than anyone. The mole was known to her in advance. If she didn't want to follow the plot, she could run him through with one sword strike — or start feeding him false information ahead of schedule. Wouldn't that change the plot too?
Chu Ge pushed the story forward step by step, his mind long since flown off into the world inside the book.
What will she do?
Qiu Wuji did nothing at all.
Even just speaking out of turn in public and breaking character had been enough to set the Heavenly Dao trying to correct her. If she altered the established course again, Qiu Wuji strongly suspected it would genuinely affect Chu Ge — she'd suspected as much before. If the plot went wildly off the rails, at the mildest the book would go wrong; at the worst, Chu Ge himself would.
In what form, she couldn't yet know — but Qiu Wuji no longer dared test it.
There was a thought stirring under the surface that she didn't want to look at: her breaking free of the Heavenly Dao, becoming a person in her own right, was in its essence at odds with Chu Ge. She was a variable beneath the Heavenly Dao, and the Heavenly Dao ought to erase her.
In that sense, are we... enemies?
Chu Ge had been helping her all along — making an enemy of himself.
Put that way it was downright thrilling, and it left Qiu Wuji's feelings in a tangle.
She looked at the man before her, Tianyuan Sect Master Lu Yuanzhang, and after holding it in for a long, long while, finally spoke her scripted line: "Thank you for your trouble, Sect Master Lu. The Fire Prison Sect's operations in Little Burning Heaven — I'll have to ask you to keep a close watch... The Fire Prison Sect is powerful, and that serves no one."
Lu Yuanzhang pledged himself with spirit: "Rest assured, Sect Master Qiu. This is not a Cloud Horizon Sect matter — it is a matter for the righteous path under heaven!"
Qiu Wuji's smile was beyond reproach. "Wuji has always known of Sect Master Lu's noble heart."
I don't want to deal with these people anymore. Hurry up and get this stretch over with — I want to go into seclusion, dammit!
She knew perfectly well, though, that it made no difference whether he skimmed it. Even if he dispatched it in a single stroke, she still had to live through all of it, merely as plot that lay outside the scenes. When he wrote seven days later, she still spent a full seven days; he was the only one who got to shorten the wait. She couldn't.
Unfair. Why can't I shorten my time a little?
Huh... actually, I could leave my original body here to handle them and send my split soul out to play...
Except I've only just gotten back, and my divine soul is still tired — not enough to cross worlds again. But it doesn't strictly need time to recover — there are other ways. My Cloud Horizon Sect has none, but other people do.
"Ah — Sect Master Lu, a moment. There's something I'd like to ask of you."
Lu Yuanzhang, already on his way out, looked at her curiously. "What is it?"
Qiu Wuji produced a single lotus petal. "I hear you have on hand Origin-Returning Liquid, which swiftly restores a weary divine soul. We sword cultivators have something similar, but we're not much good at it and the effect is poor. This is a petal of the Dark Water Green Lotus — rather marvelous, and beneficial to your cultivation, Sect Master Lu. Would you trade me a bottle of Origin-Returning Liquid for it?"
"Easily done, a small matter." Lu Yuanzhang chuckled. "Why stop at one bottle? I've three on me; I'll give them all to you, Sect Master Qiu. But mind you, taken one after another, the medicine's effect drops off sharply."
"Much obliged, Sect Master Lu."
Qiu Wuji took the three white jade bottles with a placid expression and watched Sect Master Lu take his leave. Only when he'd vanished past the horizon did she break into a grin. "Two extra bottles just to buy my trust — moles really do come in handy!"
Outside, Chu Ge was writing away furiously to get his mass update out — how was he to know that out beyond the plot, details like this were unfolding?
"Reminder from the Update Assistant: Big Chu has posted chapter four."
"Holy shit?" The group erupted. "What expired aphrodisiac did Big Chu take today? He's gone beast mode."
"It's barely evening — is there going to be a chapter five today?"
"Is this him making up for the Golden Sprout with extra chapters?"
Chu Ge took a short break, rubbed his aching head, glanced at the clock — just past five — and privately reckoned, I can squeeze out a little more — half a chapter after dinner and I really will hit five today.
Whatever it took, he was going to get Qiu Wuji through this stretch of plot as fast as possible.
He was still thinking that when a huffy voice came from behind him: "Who said you could eat the durian?"
Chu Ge rubbed his eyes, suspecting he was hearing things.
He turned his head stiffly. Qiu Wuji stood behind him in a shirt and jeans, hands on her hips, a cold fury in her brows and eyes. "Who's the master here, you or me? You think you can just decide the training methods on your own now? Out with it — how should I punish you?"
Chu Ge blinked a couple of times. "I think we ought to combine dynamic training with punishment — say, using Master's feet to step on the places the durian rolled over..."
Qiu Wuji hauled him up out of the chair by the scruff and glared at him.
Chu Ge looked at her softly and said in a low voice, "This is really nice."
Qiu Wuji's mouth twitched. She wanted to say that was disgusting, but the words wouldn't come out that way; what came out was: "Aren't you bursting with energy, adding chapters? I'll deal with you after you're done."
"How could typing matter more than Master? Even if the King of Heaven himself turned up, there's no update tonight!"