Qiu Wuji's grand book-writing plan advanced at a furious pace.
After all, she already had ten thousand words as a foundation... and while Sect Master Qiu waited for the channels to open up, she'd added another ten thousand.
Old Man Kuzhai's disciples in the literary arts were scattered all through the human world, and many a storyteller was, by some tangled detour, an outer-sect disciple's disciple of his. Within three days, Sect Master Qiu's masterpiece began appearing on storytelling stages across the human realm.
The result made Qiu Wuji want to die even more.
Because nobody listened at all.
In teahouses that had been packed to the rafters, the moment her story began, the audience would start nodding off, and plenty walked out early.
"What the hell is this book even about? How boring can you get?"
"Must be some bigwig's book shoved down our throats through connections. It's awful. Dry as dust."
"This person's writing is first-rate, but what is this supposed to be — a running ledger?"
That was the general verdict of the human world.
After three days, the packed houses had thinned to a scattering, and the storytellers went weeping to their masters: "Master, can't we switch to another book..."
Qiu Wuji sat before Old Man Kuzhai, face blank.
Old Man Kuzhai was quaking in his boots, convinced the sky above was packed with dark clouds, winds howling, hidden thunder muttering — any second now, this one was going to go berserk and slaughter the whole mountain.
Right now, Qiu Wuji just wanted to hug a pillow and curl up in a corner.
So this is what "flopping" feels like. It feels awful.
How did Chu Ge and the others ever get through their flop phase...?
Qiu Wuji sniffled, rose to her feet expressionless, and said, "Pull the storytelling. This Sect Master will study it a while longer..."
"Mmm..." Old Man Kuzhai said cautiously. "If Sect Master Qiu is truly interested in our Dao of Books, this old man would gladly hand over everything a lifetime of study has yielded..."
"No need. I have a master!" Qiu Wuji said, face stiff, and rode off on a cloud.
When I get back, Master is buying me cotton candy!
Ten of them, and that's the minimum to console me.
Just as she was thinking that, Qiu Wuji suddenly felt again the gaze of the unseen Heavenly Dao upon her. She faltered and looked up — but this time she saw nothing at all... Chu Ge isn't watching me?
How dare you not look at me!
For the first time, Chu Ge was actively trying to "observe" the changes in the book's world.
Ever since that mental test at the Black House, when he'd visualized the entire world, Chu Ge seemed to have gotten something of a feel for it.
The feeling was blurry, hard to catch. All he could do was try as best he could.
He prepared thoroughly: while pouring himself into plotting and typing out chapters, he split his attention in two to circulate his cultivation method — the soul tempering in particular.
Then, from some deep, unseen layer of his mind, he pondered "the changes Qiu Wuji's book-writing in that world is causing to that world."
Without his noticing, a faint trace of that unseen sense came to him.
Because the world really had changed.
Qiu Wuji was proud of this: she hadn't used a pen name. She'd published as "Qiu Wuji."
And so the human world had a book written by Qiu Wuji, and it was spreading far and wide.
This was something that could never have existed in the original plot... though on the surface it really did seem to have no effect on where the story was headed. So what if a book got written in the human world? It couldn't sway the established course of events.
But the butterfly effect was a tricky thing — Qiu Wuji had never left a trace in the human world, and now she had suddenly plastered her name all over it. Might that not produce unknowable changes?
Impossible to predict — but that was exactly what a variable was.
Chu Ge found he could sense feedback from that vast human world inside the book: the book had flopped.
Oh. It flopped. Well. Nothing to worry about, then.
The moment he thought that, that sense of looking down on it from above vanished.
He leaned back in his chair and tried to recall the feeling... still hard to pin down. Did there have to be some change, with his attention fixed on that change, for this bird's-eye result to come about?
But back during the mental test, he'd managed it with no change to trigger it.
Now, trying to observe with no purpose in mind, he simply couldn't reach it.
Never mind. This was bound to be a long, slow grind, and figuring it all out in a month or two was surely a pipe dream. Still, Chu Ge felt it probably had something to do with the book's performance too: more and more people knew this world, the world had more and more presence, and so he could feel it more clearly.
His earlier guess about the approach was probably right. So he'd keep at it.
Unfortunately, whether a book did well wasn't up to him. All he could do was polish the story as hard as he could; the rest had to be left to the readers, to the market, and to whether Dianniang gave him a recommendation slot.
Chu Ge rubbed his swollen head, saw that the new chapter had already reached three thousand words, clicked, and published. A site message in the backend caught his eye; he opened it: "System Notice: Hello. We are pleased to inform you that your work Chu Tian Wu Ji will be featured in the client's Bestseller Picks column on such-and-such a date..."
Chu Ge: "..."
Another big push. Talk about dozing off right when someone hands you a pillow... Lately I get whatever I wish for.
It was ironic, really: he used to crave results, crave recommendations, and he'd stayed neither a hit nor quite a flop the whole time. Now he had no craving for results at all — wanting the book to do well was mainly for other reasons — and yet it got better day by day, and recommendations came pouring in.
Besides the world's presence, the other connected factor had to be his own cultivation. Qiu Wuji hadn't said, and Chu Ge had no idea which Qi Refining layer he was on now, or how far his soul tempering had come — five-star mental strength?
Chu Ge let out a breath, rose to his full height, and made to head out for training at the Black House.
Just then, his phone rang.
He picked up, and Zhong Yi's voice came fast and urgent: "Ah Jun and Fatty got hurt. They're in the hospital. You got time to come by?"
Chu Ge's grip on the phone tightened slightly.
Wan Zijun and Panda, hurt...
It was easy to connect this to the earlier business: Wan Zijun had used his face-writing power to walk them into the nightclub and had been the most conspicuous of them, while Panda was the one who'd shot the video that got the alarm out.
So... could this be revenge?
He raced to the hospital at breakneck speed and found a two-person ward.
Wan Zijun, bandages wound around his waist, leaned weakly against the headboard talking with Zhong Yi. Panda's nose and face were so swollen and bruised he barely had a face left, and he was still flirting with the young nurse: "Hey, actually it's not just my face that's hurt. Why don't you check my other parts too, Sister Nurse?"
The nurse sneered, "How come they didn't beat you to death?"
Seeing Chu Ge come in wearing the Third Brother mask, the nurse frowned. "Please wear a mask properly. Do you think that thing is funny?"
Chu Ge silently lifted the bottom half of the mask to show her: "I do have a mask."
"So this is performance art?"
"My face is as ugly as this fatty's. I was afraid of scaring a pretty nurse like you."
The nurse pursed her lips. Whether he was ugly or not she couldn't tell, but this one was nicely built — tall enough, his short-sleeve tee hugging his pecs and biceps, actually looking a bit strained at the seams.
So these fellows had gotten hurt in some brawl, and now they'd brought in a muscleman to get even?
The nurse was weighing whether to call the police as she quietly packed up her kit and left.
Watching her go, Chu Ge asked Zhong Yi, "What happened?"
Zhong Yi looked very grave. "Fatty got beaten up through the internet cable."
Chu Ge: "?"
Panda was close to tears in his bed: "When I hit someone through the cable myself, all I can put out is a faint shadow, hardly any force. How could he hit that hard?"
Wan Zijun said weakly from his bed too: "I was still out working the fields, almost harvest time... and someone suddenly appeared in front of me, and 'Dad' was written on my face, and I just stood there and took a beating from him. On his way out he stabbed me and said, 'Learn your lesson. You can't afford to offend just anyone.'"
So it really was revenge.
Chu Ge sucked in a quiet breath. Revenge was understandable enough, but what was this pattern — had Murong Fu shown up? Turning a man's own methods against him? And one level above the other guy, no less?
Chu Ge looked at Zhong Yi, who said gravely, "They're carrying out their revenge now. They haven't come for me yet — maybe I didn't stand out that day? Or maybe my kind of power doesn't mean anything to him, doesn't leave room for a higher-level suppression? Either way, Third Brother, you watch yourself. You blocked the mouth of that alley that day. The odds you're on their list are very high."
Chu Ge was silent a moment, then said slowly, "That's what you two are worried about?"
"Huh?" Zhong Yi said, puzzled. "What else?"
"As a normal citizen of this country, I think the first thing we should do is call the police."