I was exposed for adding my female boss to my group of female friends.

Since his rebirth into this world and the discovery that it lacked any of the cultural works from his previous Earth, he had never felt such a sense of frustration.

He never expected that Jiang Xinhai was a prouder person than him.

However, considering her resume, which is even more advanced than that of a reborn person, this attitude is not surprising.

So he quickly regained his composure.

Chen Ya pulled a piece of paper from his pocket: "Sing this song."

Jiang Xinhai glanced at the paper; the crumpled paper had the words "red bean" written on the top.

"Why should I sing?" She looked up at him.

"Because this was written specifically for you."

Jiang Xinhai's first reaction was to refuse.

It wasn't that she was arrogant; it was just that Chen Ya was the 12th boy to say he would write a song for her.

This is a coastal university; there are many male students who can compose music.

She stared at Chen Ya's face with a regretful expression. She had already experienced this kind of dating tactic 11 times, and even the confident expression on Chen Ya's face was similar to that of the previous 11 people.

“This song is at least a Golden Melody Award winner, a Top 5 song of the year. You could live off this one song for the rest of your life,” Chen Ya added.

Jiang Xinhai became somewhat interested.

After all, not everyone can boast as much as he can.

"If you're so good at it, why did you choose me, an amateur who's only sung a few songs?"

“You have a unique quality that allows you to master many of my musical styles,” Chen Ya said. “Only you can bring this song to its fullest potential. Of course, if you can’t sing it, then I’ve misjudged you.”

Jiang Xinhai couldn't stand it when people said she couldn't do it, so she grabbed the paper.

"I haven't even had a chance to properly appreciate the weather when the snowflakes are blooming..."

She sang two lines and then returned the paper to Chen Ya:

Can I sing?

With just one glance, he sang the exact pitch without going off-key at all.

Chen Ya's eyes lit up, and he nodded, saying:

"Okay, not bad, but the emotion is a bit off. It should have a feeling of a woman's lament. I'll sing it once for you to hear."

He sang it once. He sang quite well.

He then handed the sheet music to Jiang Xinhai.

Jiang Xinhai glanced at him twice, then sang two more verses.

“Very good,” Chen Ya said. “It seems you were born for this.”

Jiang Xinhai remained expressionless, but inside she was bursting with joy.

"If I want to become a singer, can your company sign me?" Jiang Xinhai asked.

“Sure, but not now,” Chen Ya said. “If you sign the contract, the company will control you. They can tell you what to do and you can’t do what they say. Offending one or two people could mean being blacklisted for life. Are you willing to do that?”

Jiang Xinhai shook his head, then asked, "Are all singers like this?"

"Pretty much," Chen Ya said. "You'll understand once you get into this industry. There are too many turtles in a shallow pond. Why are those popular singers popular? It's not just because they sing well, but also because their companies provide them with resources."

Jiang Xinhai's heart sank: "Then what do we do?"

"So we have to negotiate on our own." Chen Ya had unconsciously started using "we."

Jiang Xinhai, unaware of the implications, readily accepted the premise and asked:

"So how do we talk about this?"

“Let’s release an album first, get the company to provide resources for it, and split the profits 30/70,” Chen Ya said.

Jiang Xinhai widened his eyes slightly: "You have an album of songs?"

"Not yet," Chen Ya said somewhat awkwardly. "They're all in my head, I just need time to write them down."

"Oh," Jiang Xinhai said, "Then you'd better hurry up, I have an exam in two months and I need to study."

"You're going to be a pop diva, exams are nothing to you. My advice is to just drop out of school."

"You went through so much trouble to get into this school through a special admission program. Would you drop out if you were in your shoes?"

“I dropped out of school in junior high.”

“…Okay. I’m going to have lunch.” Jiang Xinhai was speechless.

Chen Ya followed behind her, talking incessantly:

"My suggestion is that you rent a house nearby first, and I will focus on creating music in the house. You can practice singing after class. I will write a song, and you will learn it. In the end, we will release an album that will be a nationwide bestseller!"

Jiang Xinhai turned around: "Good idea, but why should I be the one renting the house?"

"Uh, for some reason, I don't have any money on me right now."

"Oh." Jiang Xinhai turned and left. "I'll think about it."

"Then could you treat me to lunch? Because I don't have any money on me right now."

"can."

……

Although Jiang Xinhai is a young star and doesn't have many people she can call friends, she is actually very generous to her friends.

Of course, they have to be true friends.

Now that Chen Ya had become someone of "us," it was no problem to treat him to a meal. She took him to the school's small cafeteria, and Chen Ya just pointed out what he wanted to eat, and she helped him order.

The cafeteria was quite crowded. Everyone in the school knew her, and seeing this scene filled them with dread.

Could it be that the little fairy has been seduced by this big jerk?

Chen Ya didn't mind, and while eating, he talked to her about music.

Xin Hai has a small appetite; she only ate a little before she couldn't eat anymore, so she sat there watching Chen Ya eat.

The first thing she learned about Chen Ya was that he had a huge appetite. One lunch cost her a full 50 yuan.

She watched him finish eating everything. At that moment, Jiang Xinhai had no idea that there would be a show called "mukbang" in the world. So she thought that she must have something wrong with herself because she kept watching Chen Ya eat so well.

"Do you have paper and pen?" Chen Ya asked, hiccuping.

"Have."

She took out a fragrant little notebook and a pink pig-shaped ballpoint pen from her delicate handbag.

Chen Ya placed the notebook directly on the greasy table and wrote various words in messy handwriting on the latest page.

"The first song is decided to be 'Red Bean,' and for the second song, you should play to your strengths and sing 'Legend,' using your clear voice and high notes to conquer the audience. The third song will continue the style, 'Because of Love,' and the fourth song... 'Those Fleeting Years'... Cantonese songs are popular now, and to cater to the current audience's aesthetic, we'll have 'Easily Hurt Woman' as a safe bet..."

Jiang Xinhai didn't understand what he was talking about at all, and felt a little sorry for his notebook.

"I don't speak Cantonese."

“It’s okay, I don’t know either,” Chen Ya said. “You can start learning now.”

"That sounds a bit excessive."

He pointed at her with a ballpoint pen and said, "You'll have many wonderful Cantonese songs to sing in the future. Moreover, the Cantonese-speaking region has strong purchasing power and will be our place of origin. You'll benefit from starting to learn now."

He looked down and tapped the songs on the notebook, then looked up and said, "Only five."

Jiang Xinhai was taken aback: "Huh? That's five songs already?"

Chen Ya lowered his head: "Let me think about it some more."

Jiang Xinhai stood up: "I'm going to buy some fruit. I'll be back in a bit. You can sit here and think about it slowly."

“Don’t go,” Chen Ya grabbed her hand, “Think about it with me.”

"I have no idea what you're thinking!"

"You just need to sit here and look at your face; it helps to stimulate your thinking."

"This makes no sense."

Author's Note on the Launch of Chapter 121

Before I knew it, this book had already reached 270,000 words, and it will be available for purchase at midnight tomorrow.

Actually, I've been working overtime non-stop these past few days because of the pandemic, and I've used up all my drafts. When I got home today and saw my drafts backend all empty, I felt like the colonel in "Nobody Sends Him a Letter"—I wanted to eat shit.

I couldn't help but think back to ten years ago, when I was seventeen or eighteen. I could never have imagined that I would look like this now—

With dark circles under his eyes, deep wrinkles around his mouth, and a mysterious smile that appears from time to time, he racks his brains trying to figure out how to swindle money from his readers.

—This is exactly the kind of person I hated most when I was seventeen or eighteen.

When I was seventeen or eighteen, I had just started university. I stood freely on the earth, a man determined to stand at the very top of the social hierarchy.

To prove his taste, he squatted in the school library and read through all the names written in literary history with the air of someone confiscating property and ordering execution.

Flaubert, Maupassant, Dickens, Dumas fils and fils, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Voynich, Chekhov, Shaw, Kafka, Joyce, Woolf, Proust, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Saint-Exupéry, Bunin, Camus, Sartre, Goethe, Baudelaire, Calvino, Modiano, Nabokov, Turgenev, Shokhorov, Tagore, Romain Rolland, Milan Kundera, Lu Xun, Guo Moruo, Mao Dun, Ba Jin, Lao She, Cao Xueqin, Yu Dafu Qian Zhongshu, Shen Congwen, Eileen Chang, Su Tong, Yu Hua, Ge Fei, Mo Yan, Can Xue, Zhang Xianliang, Yan Lianke, Jia Pingwa, Wang Xiaobo, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Seicho Matsumoto, Osamu Dazai, Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Kenzaburo Oe, Haruki Murakami, Tomihiko Morimi, Nanae Aoyama, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, J.D. Salinger, Anthony B.S., F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Paulo Coelho, Mario Vargas Llosa…

These are some of the most amazing writers in the world. A literary figure could have gone on reciting a list of dishes for a long time, but if they went too far and strayed from the topic, people would think I was showing off, so I stopped. Anyway, you should know that back then I read them so intently I knew them better than I knew my own toes.

Earlier, when I wrote that the protagonist won the Nobel Prize in Literature, many readers complained, saying, "Isn't this nonsense? It's so ridiculous, so ridiculous, so ridiculous!"

They may think that the Nobel Prize in Literature is too prestigious and that authors are not worthy of plagiarism.

Actually, I think it's alright.

(It's a literary prize that even Tolstoy never won, so what's so special about it?)

You can absolutely believe all the nonsense I write. You may never read the authors I write about in your life, but that's okay, because I've read them for you (how kind of me).

You could say that while others are eating grass and producing milk, I'm eating milk and producing grass. I read so many books ten years ago just to write this pretentious scene now.

So when you read this book, don't use your brain. Don't try to understand it, just feel it.

It seems a bit late to say this now.

Furthermore, as someone aspiring to be at the top of the social hierarchy, my role model is Martin Scorsese in the literary world. Besides the aforementioned "menu list," I could also list a musical version and a film version; in short, they are all works of human culture that have gone down in history.

Later, you'll see these legendary pieces of music, movies, and more shamelessly copied into the protagonist's resume. A word of warning: don't use your brain, just enjoy the experience. I've already shown you those amazing works (I'm so kind).

……

Going back ten years, that was when I was most quick-witted, and also when I was most arrogant.

Back then, I wrote on platforms like Zhihu and JianShu, and easily gained thousands or tens of thousands of followers, so I thought I was very capable.

Some magazine editors, like those from *Youth Digest*, came to me asking if I could authorize them to publish my articles. I said no problem, but they still haven't paid me the royalties, and they haven't even asked for my bank account number.

Another person, Baizou Big Event, asked me if I wanted to go to Shenzhen to write copy for them. I said I hadn't graduated yet and didn't want to go to Shenzhen (thankfully I didn't).

When I went out for a social event with girls from other colleges, they said, "You're Chen Yeliang from Zhihu? Our teacher even read your articles aloud in class. We didn't expect you to be so young." I replied, "Oh, not at all."

There were all sorts of things like this that made me feel invincible, so I came to Qidian to write web novels, thinking that web novels were just something that couldn't even be used as toilet paper, and that with my skill level, they would be a piece of cake. Then I failed miserably.

Even the prettiest girl in school wouldn't dare humiliate me like Qidian did.

But my reaction was: Woman, you've piqued my interest. So I got into a battle with the starting point, and now I'm still immersed in that struggle.

I once thought I could keep writing like this, but I never expected that fate would play tricks on me so unexpectedly. For five or six years after graduating from university, I hardly wrote any novels.

My mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and after battling cancer for two years, she passed away.

During the last days of her life, I was stationed in the village working on epidemic prevention and control. I ate three boxes of Master Kong instant noodles in two months. After Hubei successfully ended its lockdown, she passed away.

As people get older, the brilliance of their youth fades more easily, and eventually, people simply judge a person's brilliance by their income.

Without realizing it, no one was interested in talking to me about Guns N' Roses, Nirvana, or Steins;Gate anymore. My contact name in people's phones changed from a three-character name to "So-and-so from XX Department".

So many people ask me: How much do you earn now? Have you considered buying a house? Are you still paying off a loan? When are you going to buy a car? What brand of car are you planning to buy? ...

Before my mother passed away, she said that I was her alternate account, that she believed I was destined for greatness. Or perhaps I was already great, just lacking a way to showcase it. I interpret this "way" as something like a well in a Haruki Murakami novel, or a pore connecting the real world and the world of the little people—in short—

I finally realized that I really needed a success in the conventional sense.

Then I picked up my pen again, reclaimed my Qidian account, and started writing novels again in a down-to-earth manner.

The reason I decided to make writing my lifelong career is because I like things that are simple and clear.