I asked you to write a light novel, but you wrote about living?

The mechanical keyboard clicked away, producing a dense and even sound.

The live stream title has been there for over an hour.

Online users: 0.

A cyber addict who was just passing by clicked in, watched for two seconds, and then left, muttering "What garbage 2D graphics, it's blinding me," which brought the number of users down from 1 back to 0.

Yu Wen didn't even look at the comments.

His daytime live stream is always like this; people in the lower city are working themselves to the bone during the day, who has the time to watch a pair of hands typing on a keyboard?

Those who stay are mostly a few unemployed people or old viewers on night shifts off. They don't say anything, they just hang there and listen to the noise.

It doesn't matter what the rest of the text is, I'll just keep writing.

……

Study room on the third floor of the School of Narrative Languages ​​at Weiming Academy.

Compared to that moldy basement in the downtown area, this place is a completely different world. The air is filtered, the temperature is a constant 22 degrees Celsius, and each table has a holographic workbench with a cup of hot tea on it.

Four students walked in one after another and found their usual seats.

"Senior Sister Jiang," Lin Wan spoke first, "do you think Senior Uncle Shen is acting a bit strange today?"

Jiang Ci didn't look up, slowly brewing tea. "Yes, a little. I've been working on a project with my senior for almost a year, and I've never seen him put this much effort into a web novel."

Lu Zhao coughed. "How about we read that book first? My senior uncle said we'll read it today and report back next Monday."

"See? There's no way to avoid it anyway." Lin Wan nodded.

The four people simultaneously turned on their respective retinal projections.

Lin Wan was the first one to be found.

She typed "Yu Huashi alive" into the search bar, and the links that popped up were so shabby that they made her pause for a moment. "...That's it?"

Lu Zhao leaned over for a look and said, "What the heck is this cover? Even the covers of our undergraduate assignments are better than this."

Cheng Shuqiao also found it. He glanced at the word count, raised an eyebrow, and said, "36,000 words, ranking a little over 14,000 in the Spark Cup."

Jiang Ci took a sip of tea and said in a flat tone, "Uncle Shen, are you asking us to read this?"

"Mm." Lin Wan nodded.

There was a two-second silence in the study room, then Lu Zhao couldn't help but laugh. "I suddenly feel like, was our Senior Uncle Shen fooled by that senior brother named Liu Feng? It's normal for the reviewers to get tired of reviewing hundreds of books a day. Maybe they just saw something that looked like a preface and sent a message to Senior Uncle."

Lin Wan chuckled. "Senior Brother Lu, if Uncle-Master hears you say that, he'll definitely deduct your credits. You'd better keep this a secret for me."

Lu Zhao chuckled.

Jiang Ci didn't join in their jokes and silently opened the book. "Let's read it first. It's 36,000 words. We're fast, we'll finish in half an hour. We can complain after we've finished reading."

……

Each of the four became engrossed in reading.

Graduate students at Weiming University have all received professional speed reading training.

The text projected onto the retina is presented in a "paragraph anchoring" manner. As the eye scans a paragraph, the brain processes it simultaneously, and on average, it can digest more than a thousand words per minute.

Thirty-six thousand words is nothing to them.

The study room was quiet for about three minutes.

"What is this?"

Lin Wan frowned and flipped the projector forward. "Preface?...It really is a preface?"

Lu Zhao saw it too, "I thought it was a chapter title, but it turns out it's a preface."

Cheng Shuqiao didn't speak, but his eyes flickered. Jiang Ci raised an eyebrow. "These days, there are actually people who write this kind of thing."

Lin Wan read aloud the opening passage: "'A true writer always writes only for his heart; only his heart can truly tell him how prominent his selfishness and his nobility are.'"

After the reading was finished, the study room fell silent for a moment, then Lu Zhao laughed, "Does this author think he's a great writer?"

Lin Wan laughed along, "I think so too! Where did he get the courage to call himself 'a real writer'? He's an author ranked over 14,000th on Weiguang.

"Let me tell you,"

Lu Zhao tapped his fingers on the table. "I saw this kind of pretentious opening all the time when I was in college. It was full of immature teenagers who would start talking about the soul, writing, and art, but the actual writing was terrible."

Jiang Ci smiled, a rare occurrence for him. "Let's not jump to conclusions. There must be a reason why our teacher specifically asked us to read this. Let's finish reading it first."

The four people continued scanning downwards. About two more minutes passed.

Lin Wan frowned again, somewhat bewildered. "This opening feels a bit strange to me. A 'me' who collects folk songs meets an old man plowing a field, and then the old man starts talking about his past as a prostitute and gambler. What kind of opening is this? Where's the main plot? Isn't this a web novel? Where's the cheat code? Where's the system?"

Lu Zhao saw the same thing too. "I just saw the part where the old man was calling out to the cow. He called out five names to one cow: Erxi, Youqing, Jiazhen, Fengxia, and Kugen. Five names! For one cow!" He almost burst out laughing. "Is this old man out of his mind?"

Lin Wan rubbed her forehead. "I understand. What my senior uncle showed us was a mental illness article from the lower district."

"Don't rush to conclusions."

Jiang Ci shook her head. "Let's look further down."

Her tone remained relatively calm, but she herself frowned slightly.

Based on her academic experience, the author's level can generally be judged from the first two thousand words of a book.

The first two thousand words of this book are indeed strange. Strange in a way, not because it is bad, but because it doesn't seem to fit this era.

The pacing of the narrative, the restraint in the choice of words, the unexpected shifts in first-person perspective...

Jiang Ci read a few more paragraphs, her eyes gradually becoming serious, but she hadn't spoken yet.

Lin Wan's side exploded again, "Wait! What happened to Fu Gui, the male lead? Why did he go to a brothel? And ride a prostitute home?!"

Lu Zhao was laughing uncontrollably. "I saw it! I saw it! The part where he rode the fat prostitute past his father-in-law's rice shop! I'm impressed. This male lead, he's such a useless piece of trash at the beginning! He hasn't even lost all his family fortune yet, and he's already humiliated his father-in-law. Is he trying to rebel against the Heavenly Gang?"

Lin Wan's face scrunched up. "Senior Brother Lu, this...this really is the book that Senior Uncle instructed us to read? Could there be some misunderstanding?"

Jiang Ci didn't speak, but her pace noticeably slowed down, and she lingered for quite a while on a certain stretch.

Cheng Shuqiao didn't participate in the吐槽 (tu cao, meaning to complain or criticize) at all; he just kept his head down and watched intently.

"Senior Brother Cheng, why aren't you saying anything?" Lin Wan asked.

Cheng Shuqiao looked up at her and said, "You guys keep watching, I need to think about it."

"...Huh? What are you thinking about?" Lin Wan looked confused.

Cheng Shuqiao did not answer immediately.

He lowered his head again, flipped back a few pages of the projector, and came to the preface.

Lu Zhao leaned closer to look. "Senior Brother Cheng, why are you looking at this? Didn't I just say this is just an act?"

Cheng Shuqiao slowly shook his head. "Junior Brother Lu, this wasn't an act."

"What is that?" Lu Zhao was taken aback.

Cheng Shuqiao did not answer immediately. He slowly traced the line of text on the projection with his finger: "'A true writer always writes only for his heart'... The structure of this sentence is a speculative style from pre-civilization."

Lin Wan's smile froze. "...What?"

Jiang Ci put down her teacup. "Shuqiao, are you sure?"

Cheng Shuqiao nodded. "Senior sister, my research direction is an extension of pre-civilization stylistics. This sentence structure of 'subject + adverb qualifier + value judgment' is a typical opening structure of 20th-century narrative prose. This structure was widely used before the era of big AI, but current AI will not write like this because its pace is too slow and does not conform to the dopamine curve."

Lu Zhao's smile gradually faded. "Senior Brother Cheng, you mean...?"

"What I mean is,"

Cheng Shuqiao looked up and glanced at the three people. "The author of this book might not be pretending. He might actually know what he's writing."

Lin Wan subconsciously looked at her projection screen.

Looking at that phrase, "a true writer," which she had just ridiculed, now seems a little different.

Jiang Ci picked up her teacup again, but didn't drink. After a few seconds of silence, she said to the other three, "Don't talk. Read carefully, from the beginning."

The study room fell silent again, with only the occasional soft sound of the retinal projector turning pages.

This time, none of the four laughed.