Wei Jing woke up feeling like he had been beaten black and blue; every bone in his body ached.
He struggled to open his eyes and realized he was lying in an unfamiliar room. The interior was extremely luxurious, and a crystal chandelier above him sparkled brilliantly. On the wall directly in front of him hung a huge photograph, its high-resolution image enlarging the two people in it several times, showing them clearly.
It looked like a wedding photo. Both were wearing white suits, with large red flowers pinned to their chests.
Yes, both of them were men, and at first glance, they were so strikingly attractive that Wei Jing felt his eyes glued to them, unable to look away even an inch: this was a real-life, high-looks gay wedding photo!
The man on the left looked about twenty-five or twenty-six, with deep-set features and sharp, defined facial lines, a type of person who clearly wasn’t to be trifled with.
The man on the right, or rather, the young boy, looked just over twenty, exquisitely handsome, with fair, smooth skin, and a face full of collagen. Even with the photo magnified so many times, not a single pore on his face was visible.
So… he was lying in someone else’s new house?
Wei Jing stared blankly up at the sparkling chandelier. Its brightness hurt his eyes. He forced himself to blink, then, afraid of the pain, lightly pinched himself, hiss—
Immediately, he drew in a sharp breath. It really hurt. This wasn’t a dream.
This place was clearly not his home. So… how had he gotten here?
Last night, despite the heartbreak and overwhelming exhaustion, Wei Jing marked his flop novel on Jinjiang as complete, planning to take a break. He had already booked his tickets on [1]Ctrip is a major Chinese online travel service platform—similar to sites like Expedia or Booking.com. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1898354_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1898354_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });Ctrip and would leave the next morning for [2]Sanya is a tropical coastal city in southern China, located on Hainan Island. It’s one of the country’s most popular vacation destinations, known for its beaches, warm climate, and resort tourism. jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1898354_1_2').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1898354_1_2', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });Sanya, a five-day, six-night group tour, with plans to return and continue working hard.
Two years ago, Wei Jing became a contracted author on Jinjiang. After the bitter experience of his first flop, which had even led to a downgrade, he carefully analyzed his failures. He spent a month reading every new top-ranking novel over several months, almost spending all his manuscript fees in the process. Finally, he launched a second project. Luck turned in his favor: it surpassed ten thousand bookmarks and brought considerable earnings.
When he started on his third project, he got caught up in online gaming.
Unable to focus on two things at once, he couldn’t even maintain a basic daily update schedule. In the end, that novel flopped too.
Three months ago, he deleted the game entirely because of a fatal incident, determined to focus on writing. Jinjiang was trending with silly, meme-like novels, so he followed the trend and wrote The Handbook of Becoming a God.
It told the story of a lowly social nobody who accidentally finds a gold coin, releasing an imprisoned evil spirit. By a series of misunderstandings, he inherits the spirit’s power, then rises against all odds, stirring up chaos along the way, ultimately defeating the evil dragon, marrying the princess, reaching the pinnacle of life, and becoming the supreme ruler of the world.
This pseudo-meme novel, full of illogical plot points and absurd setups, naturally failed to win readers over, so he remained a flop.
Wei Jing felt miserable. Despite daily updates for three months, the bookmarks didn’t even reach three hundred. He was thoroughly demoralized, his gloom soaring to the clouds.
It wasn’t until much later that he learned that on that very night, a magnitude seven earthquake struck near his home, and he… died in his sleep.
Back in the present, Wei Jing still hung his head in gloom. He touched the silk quilt covering him and looked down at the extra-large double bed he was lying on. He still hadn’t figured out what had happened when a sudden urge to pee surged up.
The room had a private bathroom. Slipping on his slippers, Wei Jing walked over and pushed the door open. Inside was a full-length mirror. He glanced at it casually, then suspected his eyes were playing tricks on him. Not trusting himself, he looked again, and this time his eyes went wide in shock, his entire body frozen in place: holy crap! holy crap! holy crap!
Who could tell him why he had turned into this weak, pretty-boy-looking form!?
What was this flawless, soft skin, this tiny palm-sized face, the delicate, refined eyebrows and eyes, the small, high nose, the cherry-red, moist little mouth, so ridiculously feminine it was explodingly so! Even though this body looked about 1.75 meters tall, and lifting the pajamas revealed a faint set of abs, none of it could ease his current mood.
Wei Jing was a gym-loving, closeted gay homebody, a self-proclaimed “top” type, but self-proclaimed only, because in reality, he had zero experience. He went to the gym religiously every week. Although he didn’t have six-pack abs, he had worked up a thin set of four-pack abs. At nearly 1.8 meters tall with long legs, he had always fantasized about finding a petite, cute partner.
If the person in the mirror were not himself but his future spouse, he would have been a hundred percent satisfied. But why did it have to be him!?
Wei Jing spun around in panic, his mind in chaos. Was this… a transmigration?
Where had he gone? Who had he become? What happened to the original owner of this body? And most importantly, how could he get back? Despite the fact that, ever since he got hooked on online games, the few novels he’d started all flopped, when The Handbook of Becoming a God ended, he had promised his readers that he would start a new project in a week!
As a flop author who kept his word, Wei Jing felt he had to return as soon as possible to fulfill that promise.
Carrying emotions too complicated to release, he finished the third major life task of “eating, drinking, and relieving himself,” stepped out of the bathroom, and decided to first look around the room for clues to figure out exactly what was going on.
In the bedside drawer, Wei Jing easily found the original owner’s documents: ID card, marriage certificate, various membership cards, a thick stack of crisp green 100-denomination bills, and an ultra-thin smartphone.
He picked up the ID card and studied it carefully, then fell into thought: Tu Shihua, male, born January 1, 2030, address: Room 101, Commoner Guesthouse, Beichuan Prefecture, Shenyun Continent, Hailan Star.
The strange thing was, every single Chinese character looked unfamiliar, yet he recognized them all. Even “Tu Shihua” and “Shenyun Continent” felt oddly familiar to him!
Flipping open the marriage certificate, he saw that the other man in the photo, the one who looked tough, was called Qin Dalao, and Wei Jing felt completely unsettled.
No wonder it felt familiar! Shenyun Continent, Qin Dalao, Tu Shihua, all of them appeared in his flop, pseudo-meme novel The Handbook of Becoming a God!
Qin Dalao was the ultimate villain in The Handbook of Becoming a God, the evil dragon, an incredibly ferocious tyrannosaurus. In his original form, he was 14.5 meters long, 6 meters tall, and weighed 14.5 tons! In human form, he stood 1.9 meters tall with 1.17-meter-long legs, wealthy and handsome, with a charming deep voice, and most importantly, extraordinary endurance.
In Wei Jing’s writing, Qin Dalao was the story’s visual centerpiece, a powerful figure who controlled most of the planet’s economy, having anything he desired, practically perfect.
He had to admit: when he first designed the character, he had imagined himself as Qin Dalao, doing whatever he wanted. But when he saw the outline, he realized, “Oh no, this person is too perfect! How could the protagonist ever defeat him?” So—
He pounded the keyboard at lightning speed, and Qin Dalao got a ridiculously troublesome wife: the other tyrannosaurus on Hailan Star, named Tu Shihua. Compared to the big boss, this Tu Shihua was weak, with almost no strengths besides a good-looking face, a ridiculously difficult personality, and a talent for offending a huge number of people.
At first, Qin Dalao had only taken Tu Shihua out of the Commoner Guesthouse because he was one of his own kind. Tu Shihua, unwilling to remain a lowly servant, schemed to make the big boss believe that they had slept together, and that he was pregnant!
Who knew a male tyrannosaurus could get pregnant? What kind of absurd setup was that? There was no way Qin Dalao would believe it, but not only did he believe it, he genuinely treated a mysterious egg he had anonymously bought from a black-market auction as their child.
But lies can’t become truth. When the egg hatched, it wasn’t a tyrannosaurus at all, it was a fire-breathing dragon. Tu Shihua, though chaotic and constantly abusing Qin Dalao’s power to offend people everywhere, knew the truth: if it got exposed, he would die miserably. So he ran away.
During his escape, Tu Shihua encountered a minor pawn he had wronged in the past in Dongchuan Region, was outsmarted, and lost his life.
When Qin Dalao found Tu Shihua’s body, he felt utterly humiliated. In a rage, he destroyed the entire Dongchuan Region! This also set the stage for him eventually being defeated by the protagonist. After all, how could such a cruel, violent, and unreasonable villain compare to a protagonist who was compassionate, just, and good-hearted?
At the time, when Wei Jing was drafting the story’s outline, he had even felt smug, thinking, “Look at how ridiculous this plot is!”
During the serialization of The Handbook of Becoming a God, readers had criticized the existence of Tu Shihua, the ultimate troublemaker, for being completely illogical. Unfortunately, he hadn’t listened.
Now, overwhelmed by regret, tears streamed down Wei Jing’s face like a 300-pound man sobbing, crushed by guilt. The mess he had made, who could he turn to for justice?
No, he had to save himself!
First, he needed to figure out how far the story had progressed.
His whole body ached, was it because Qin Dalao had beaten him so mercilessly the night before, or… had the plot already reached an irreversible point? For example, had Tu Shihua already been killed, and what should have been a corpse, because he arrived at the wrong time, ended up possessed by him, faking life, and then brought back by the big boss?
The first possibility was almost zero. As the author, he knew perfectly well that Tu Shihua had never slept with Qin Dalao. It wasn’t that the big boss couldn’t, but that the “troublesome little flower” was just too good at causing problems. Every time the situation got tense, he could always stir up a bunch of nonsense to ruin Qin Dalao’s mood.
It was also Wei Jing’s own selfishness. Such a perfect big boss paired with a “troublesome little flower” full of flaws, if it weren’t for the plot, he would never have paired Tu Shihua with the big boss in the first place!
Just as he wallowed in regret, remorse, and heartbreak, the bedroom door was pushed open. Qin Dalao walked in, his face impossibly handsome, his physique model-perfect, and even in a set of light gray loungewear, he radiated the commanding aura of a runway model.
Wei Jing swallowed enviously. This was the ideal version of himself in his mind, absolutely stunning! Then—
His gaze fell on the little dragon cub cradled in Qin Dalao’s arms. His jaw almost dislocated, and in his heart, blood and tears silently flowed: was it already too late? The egg had already hatched!
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