Back to 1997, I became the originator of online literature

Chapter 469 "Cultivation Chat Group"?
After shooting the advertising materials, Wang Jing arranged a farewell dinner for the Tencent publicity team that evening.

Cao Sheng attended the dinner.

This can be considered as fulfilling the hospitality of the host.

Dong Qianyu is the person in charge of the publicity department of Tencent that came here this time.

I sat next to Cao Sheng tonight, and the two of us had a few drinks.

During the visit, she mentioned something: "Chairman Cao! Before I came here this time, General Manager Ma asked me to pass on a message to you. He hopes that you can write a book to promote our QQ as soon as possible."

After saying that, she looked at Cao Sheng a little embarrassed.

From the very beginning of her visit to Huizhou, she addressed Cao Sheng as "Chairman Cao".

Since Cao Sheng already owns 10% of Tencent's shares, which is a significant amount given Tencent's current market value, Cao Sheng is certain to have a seat on the board of directors.

This is precisely because Cao Sheng is now a shareholder of Tencent.

Therefore, she felt very embarrassed when she relayed Cao Sheng's words on behalf of Ma Huateng.

I felt a little uneasy.

She, an ordinary worker, urged the board member to write the book as soon as possible.

Although she was urging Ma Huateng on behalf of others, these words still came from her own mouth, so it was inevitable that she felt uneasy.

Cao Sheng glanced at her, but wasn't angry. He smiled slightly and nodded, "Okay! I understand."

One of the conditions for him to invest in Tencent was to write a book using QQ as the primary communication tool.

From Tencent's perspective, it's understandable to urge him to fulfill this condition as soon as possible.

only……

His ongoing novel, "The Romance of Chinese Martial Arts," was recently released and is still a long way from being completed.

He originally planned to wait until this book was finished before considering writing a book to promote QQ.

It seems that Ma Huateng (a type of vine) won't be able to wait that long.

Of course, his investment in Tencent is a done deal. If he really wants to play the "delaying" tactic and postpone fulfilling his promise for more than half a year or even a year, Tencent will not be able to do anything about it.

It's unlikely that we'd sue him over something like this and force him to withdraw his investment.

However, Cao Sheng didn't want to break the contract he had signed.

Just like when he signed a long-term contract with Rongshuxia, he hesitated several times before publishing his work on Qidian before completing the agreed word count. In the end, he only published his work on Qidian after completing the agreement with Rongshuxia.

He doesn't want to break his contract with Tencent now.

People cannot stand without faith.

Men and women are different.

Many women break their promises but still live comfortably because they generally have someone to rely on. They rely on their parents or their husbands. Whether they can build their own careers or not doesn't matter, since someone will support them anyway.

But men are different.

Traditional Chinese customs place much higher demands on men.

To settle down, start a family, and build a career is a basic requirement of traditional culture for every man.

A man who is untrustworthy will not be trusted by others, whether he wants to start a family or establish a career. Starting a family will be difficult, and establishing a career will also be difficult.

Therefore, when Dong Qianyu conveyed Ma Huateng's message, Cao Sheng decided to publish a new book soon to fulfill the conditions he had promised when he invested in Tengxun.

But what kind of book should I write?
After the banquet, on the way back to his residence, Cao Sheng sat in the back seat, squinting at the night view outside the window, two completely different stories flashing through his mind.

The first story is a simple urban love story.

A long-distance relationship.

A young couple, classmates in high school, developed feelings for each other during the monotonous senior year. The boy couldn't resist and wrote the girl a love letter to express his love.

The girl replied to his letter, encouraging him to study hard and saying that if they could both get into the same university, she would consider being with him. She hoped that they could start dating in university.

The boy studied hard from then on because his grades were much worse than the girl's.

He tried his best to catch up.

However, in the end, he still failed to get into the same university as her.

Even though he had tried his best, as a former underachiever, it was still too difficult for him to catch up with her grades in his final year of high school.

She got into a very good university in Shanghai. Although he also applied to this university in his college entrance exam, he was admitted to the university he chose as his second choice.

Although it is also a university in Shanghai.

However, the two schools are quite far apart, and they won't be able to be together every day during their university years.

Can they still date?
The girl had actually witnessed his hard work during his high school sprint and was already moved by his sincerity. So, at the high school graduation party, she gave him her QQ number and said, "Do you have a QQ number? I promise I'll never change this number. Add me as a friend and you'll always be able to contact me. I'll be waiting for your message."

The subsequent plot involves the two of them entering different universities in Shanghai.

One is in the south of Shanghai, and the other is in the north of Shanghai.

Even though we live in the same city, we can't see each other every day.

They communicate using QQ.

At first, we would just send each other messages on QQ every few days, and the communication was not timely.

One weekend, when they were on a date, the girl leaned on the boy's shoulder and whispered, "If only we both had a computer, then we could video chat on QQ every night when we were studying. If you wanted to see me, you could just look up and see me on the video. And if I missed you, I could just look up and see you on the video. Unfortunately, neither of us can afford a computer."

The boy listened and seemed to understand. After that day, he tried to earn money to save up to buy two computers, one for himself and one for the girl.

One weekend, the girl came to the boy's university to look for him. She learned that he had gone out to set up a stall to make money. She was surprised to learn from his roommate that he had been going out to set up a stall whenever he had free time, working from dawn till dusk, making money like crazy.

Late at night, the boy returned from his stall, dragging his tired steps. He glanced up and saw a girl waiting for him under the streetlight. Their eyes met.

The boy was surprised.

The girl's eyes showed deep concern.

She approached him and asked what had happened to him recently and if he was short of money. Before he could answer, she took out her wallet, intending to give him some money.

The boy resolutely refused her money.

At first, he refused to explain why he was working so hard to earn money, but he finally revealed his purpose in doing so after she kept pressing him.

The girl was very touched.

After returning to her own university, she also began to think of ways to make money.

She spent some time finding a part-time tutoring job.

However, tutoring is not a stable job.

The children she taught were all different. Some had no interest in studying at all, and no matter how much she tried to persuade them, she couldn't change their mindset that they didn't want to learn.

Some were more interested in her body than in her lectures.

Some children are very willing to learn, but the children's mothers are very suspicious. From the first day that she came to tutor the children, she suspected that she wanted to seduce the male homeowner.

……

and many more.

In the story, the two lovers go through different hardships in order to earn money to buy a computer.

But hard work always pays off. A year later, when they were sophomores.

As they worked hard to earn money, they both became more mature and composed, and they also had enough money to buy computers.

From then on, although they were separated by distance, they lived a shameless life together—every night, when they were studying in their dormitories, they would have QQ video chat on their computers, and when they got tired of studying, they would look up at their lover in the video.

They're constantly showing off their love to their roommates.

……

This is Cao Sheng's first work conceived using QQ as the primary communication tool.

Cao Sheng defines it as an urban romance genre.

In terms of style, it is similar to his first novel after his rebirth, "Living with an Air Hostess".

After finishing the book "Flight Attendant", he would often see people asking him in the book review section of his other works when he would write another love story like that.

He used to think that he would probably never write a pure love story like that again in his life.

This is not only because he prefers to write fantasy, martial arts, and other fantasy genres, but also because the audience for pure love stories is getting smaller and smaller, especially in the last two years with the increasing popularity of online novels. Most young people are attracted to online novels, and the readership of pure love stories is shrinking.

Moreover, he never felt that he was good at writing pure love stories.

However, one of the conditions for recently investing in Tencent was to write a novel that uses QQ as the primary communication tool.

This gave him the idea to write another pure love story.

Because these kinds of pure love stories don't usually last too long, around 100 million words is a suitable length.

The love story he recently came up with has a rather thin main plot.

Having been accustomed to writing long online novels, he was confident that he could enrich the storyline, add some plot elements, and make the story a million words long without much difficulty.

However, even though he had almost figured out the main storyline, he still wanted to write about another subject.

Another topic was something he had already thought of when he was negotiating the terms of the investment with Tencent.

This is not a pure love story!

It's actually "Cultivation Chat Group".

Combining QQ with cultivation.

This story was originally written by a paladin in the original timeline.

Holy Knight published this book in the urban category on Qidian.com. The core of the story is actually a cultivation story set in modern society, so it can be considered a cultivation genre disguised in an urban setting.

The story is very original.

It pioneered the niche category of "chat groups" in online literature.

Since the publication of this book, many other "chat group" works have appeared.

Examples include "Chat Group of All Gods", "Chat Group of Emperors", and "Chat Group of Journey to the West".

It is worth mentioning that "Cultivation Chat Group" performed exceptionally well in the Qidian Urban category, and for a long time it topped the Qidian Urban category's monthly ticket chart and bestseller chart.

In Cao Sheng's memory, the Holy Knight wrote more than 800 million words for this book. With such a long length, how long did it take to write? This book dominated the monthly ticket chart and bestseller list in the urban fiction category for quite some time.

This book also propelled Holy Knight to become a top-tier author on Qidian.com.

Cao Sheng still vividly remembers some of the plot points from this book.

For example, at the beginning of the story, the male protagonist uses an induction cooker and a hot pot to refine pills. The key point is that he actually succeeds in refining pills using such an absurd method.

This completely stunned the group of cultivators in the chat group.

Many cultivators tried to refine this "elixir" using professional alchemy furnaces but failed. However, the male protagonist succeeded on his first attempt using an induction cooker and a hot pot.

For example, when the male protagonist was accompanying a cultivation master to learn how to fly a plane, he flew the helicopter to a space station in outer space.

And: After attaching various speed-boosting, invisibility, and other talismans to the tractor, use the tractor to speed on the road, overtaking cars and sports cars one after another.

and many more.

Of course, Cao Sheng didn't finish reading the book because it was so long.

He didn't watch much of the later plot.

With over 800 million words, he simply couldn't keep up.

Following a book is such a painful experience.

Fortunately, he didn't intend to copy the entire book.

When he was negotiating the investment terms with Tencent, he thought of writing a book of one or two million words with the title "Cultivation Chat Group".

But now Ma Huateng is urging him to start writing the book as soon as possible.

His novel "The Romance of Chinese Martial Arts" has only recently been released, and the story is getting better and better. There are still many exciting plots that haven't been written yet. If he were to start a new book at this time, he would have to do two at the same time.

He has always found it very painful to work two jobs at once.

The ideas in the two books will continue to interfere with each other.

To maintain the serialization speed of two books, the pressure of writing every day will increase dramatically.

That's why he came up with the idea of ​​writing a pure love story to fulfill the agreement.

Because it's a pure love story, reaching a million words is already quite long. Once it's finished at a million words, no one will say it's short.

However, if you were to write a novel like "Cultivation Chat Group," which has a humorous and slice-of-life style, you could easily write a million or two words. This is because if you want the plot to be funny and relatable, you need to depict many details of daily life, and you also need to lay a lot of groundwork in the plot.

It looks very much like a hydrological article.

If you write it this way, the male protagonist's cultivation level hasn't even increased by a few major realms, yet the story already has millions of words.

So, which story should I write?

In the back seat of the car, Cao Sheng squinted at the brightly lit city under the night sky, feeling very hesitant.

Even after returning to the villa, taking a shower, and sitting in front of the computer in the study on the third floor, he still couldn't make up his mind.

Because this matter kept swirling in his mind, and coupled with the fact that he had drunk some alcohol that night, he couldn't get into a writing mode for a long time.

He sat in front of the computer until after 11 p.m. before getting up and going back upstairs. Holding a cup of tea, he stood on the second-floor balcony, gazing at the city under the night sky with a self-deprecating smile.

He felt that this was also a problem for those who were reborn.

Other authors usually need a long time to come up with a good idea. Some authors he used to know would spend more than half a year preparing for each new book.

It's not that I can't come up with ideas for a new book, but rather that I need to come up with truly amazing ideas.

However, after his rebirth, he often finds himself in situations where he has difficulty making choices.

It's hard to decide which story to write.

In fact, he knew in his heart that he had a preference.

He wanted to write "Cultivation Chat Group" instead, a topic he had considered when he was negotiating the investment terms with Tencent.

In this day and age, "Cultivation Chat Group" is absolutely innovative in the cultivation genre.

Furthermore, QQ has not yet launched a QQ group function.

If he were to publish "Cultivation Chat Group" some time after QQ launched QQ groups, it would likely give readers a greater sense of novelty and immersion.

(End of this chapter)