Fantasy Writers 1860

To be honest, when Dorian first transmigrated here, his first thought was, "Could I have transmigrated into the Ghost World?"

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was a wooden desk in front of me, with seven or eight books and two pages of paper scattered haphazardly on it.

On the left is a bottle of ink and a Western-style classical table lamp; on the right is a dark fountain pen, and you can also glimpse the silver-gray pipes and wall lamps on the wall.

There was also a revolver and a large pool of crimson liquid on the table.

Fortunately, after looking closely, he didn't see anything like Antinus's Notebook, and the books on the table were just ordinary textbooks.

Thank goodness, if I had actually transmigrated into a supernatural world, that would have been terrible.

Judging from the circumstances at the time, it was obvious that the original owner died by suicide.

Dorian pulled out an old chair, sat down at the desk, and looked at the manuscript paper, stained with large patches of blood and beginning to turn black—even so, the few words on it were still faintly discernible:

"Suffering creates greatness, so I am already immortal. I hope that all who think this way can be as immortal as I am."

"In my short life, I have only learned one thing: suffering makes nothing."

Dorian was born into a poor family; his father was a miner and his mother was a textile factory worker—a typical family configuration of the lower class in that era.

Dorian, who was originally considered somewhat intelligent, managed to smoothly gain admission to the best high school in Lentinion, despite being a child from a poor background.

This high school is known for its guarantee that once you get in, you're already halfway to university.

Unfortunately, Dorian belongs to the other half of the leg.

After failing the college entrance exam the first time, he took it again the following year and failed again; then he spent two years full-time taking the civil service exam, but still failed.

Then I heard that writing novels and being a writer was both lucrative and respectable, so I stayed home and wrote a novel for another year, submitting many manuscripts, but apart from a lot of rejection letters, I got nothing.

As a child from a poor family, his family's circumstances clearly could not support such a tumultuous life, especially after his father died in a mining accident and his mother fell seriously ill from excessive grief.

He sold the house his family had painstakingly saved up to buy in Lentinion to raise money for his mother's medical treatment, but in the end, he lost both his money and his mother.

After his mother passed away, he borrowed a lot of money from the black market at high interest rates, and then scraped together the remaining money to give his parents a proper funeral.

Yesterday, he burned all the rejection letters he had collected, sold his typewriter, and went to the black market to buy a revolver.

A gunshot rang out, infusing this body with a soul from another world.

It's boring, but it's a story that has played out countless times in this era.

"From now on, I will fulfill your dream of becoming a writer..." Dorian sighed softly, carefully peeled the page full of despair off the table, folded it, and stuffed it into the inner pocket of his worn-out coat.

Perhaps this is the last trace the original owner left in this world.

He picked up the pen, unscrewed the ink bottle cap, and a slightly pungent smell of ink mixed with the smell of dust wafted out.

Looking at the only relatively clean piece of paper left on the table, and glancing at the half-empty bottle of ink, Dorian felt a surge of mixed emotions, both amused and exasperated.

"This is truly absurdly poor. There's enough ink, but only one sheet of paper... what can you write on one sheet of paper?"

The first difficulty I had to overcome was finding a way to get a few more sheets of paper.

Whose time traveler has such a miserable start?

"Should we ask Mrs. Michelle for some? Forget it, I have to avoid her when I come back now. She's already being kind by not kicking me out, why would she lend me money to buy toilet paper?"

"I'm all alone now, with no relatives or friends. Everyone's mocking me like Kong Yiji, and there's no one who can help me..."

After much deliberation, Dorian realized with embarrassment that he really didn't have any good solutions.

The best way is to get up early tomorrow and go to the job market to see if there are any day-paid jobs or odd jobs.

Why couldn't the original owner of this body think of things that Dorian could think of so easily now?

He felt that as a highly educated intellectual who had attended high school and knew that there were four forms of the past and future perfect tenses, how could he possibly work like those uncouth laborers, carrying bags and bricks at the docks or serving tea and dishes at taverns? It was too undignified.

There were actually some decent jobs, such as copyist, accountant, small company clerk, tutor, etc. The original owner had done all of them for a while, but in the end, he either felt he was being wasted and ran away, or he got caught stealing books and other things, and over time his reputation was ruined.

Thinking about this, Dorian couldn't help but feel a little uneasy.

He really is Kong Yiji himself.

In this respect, Dorian no longer has any long gowns he can't take off.

Before he transmigrated, he was a civil engineering graduate student, but he ended up delivering takeout.

Besides, there are world-renowned science fiction writers who went to work in mines carrying bags in their fifties; I'm nothing compared to them.

"Perhaps we can change our approach and think about whether there's anything short that can be written on a single page." By this time, Dorian had already left his desk, no longer expecting to actually write anything on that one page.

The first thing that comes to mind is poetry.

"No, poetry is too dependent on cultural background and language; even the best translation will lose a lot of its charm."

"A short story? Surely none of them are short enough to be written on a single page?"

"Micro-fiction? Or jokes? Like those witty little stories?"

Wait, a joke?

A word suddenly flashed through his mind like lightning—Soviet joke.

He recalled the boring jokes in the Lentinion Weekly, those "jokes" about child labor, parliament, and economic laws.

If even that kind of thing can be called a joke, then the vast collection of Soviet jokes in his head, if he were to write down just a few, wouldn't they make everyone in the world laugh to death?

Moreover, they are extremely short, enough to write a lot on a single sheet of paper.

As we all know, Soviet jokes, as a treasure of human civilization, reflect many commonalities in human society to a certain extent. They can be applied to many aspects of any human-established society.

In his previous life, as a master forensic expert, Dorian had so many Soviet jokes in his head that he could come up with them on the spot, and adapting them into versions suitable for various countries was a piece of cake for him.

Thinking of this, Dorian sprang from the bed with a somersault, sat back down at the table, picked up his pen, dipped it in the half-bottle of ink, and began to slowly glide the pen tip across the paper, leaving clear marks on the rough surface.

The first joke flowed almost naturally from the tip of my pen:

A foreign journalist interviews a Britannian citizen...