Early the next morning, Wos was woken by his alarm clock.
Seeing nine in the morning on the clock face, he jumped out of bed excitedly.
“Tom! Jerry! Get up! Today we’re paying the rent!”
Hearing the words “paying the rent,” Tom and Jerry snapped awake instantly too.
The fifteen hundred dollars earned last night could finally get them out of the danger of being kicked out by the landlord.
Wos counted out eight hundred dollars for the rent and carefully put it in an envelope.
He split the remaining seven hundred into two parts, one to keep for living expenses and the other to be used for getting various documents.
“Let’s go! First we’re finding the landlord to pay the rent!”
The old landlord lived on the first floor.
He was an Italian-American man in his sixties who always wore a stern face, especially toward tenants who owed rent.
“Knock knock knock!” Wos knocked on the landlord’s door.
“Who is it?” an impatient voice came from inside.
“It’s me, Wos. I’m here to pay the rent.”
The door opened, and the old landlord poked his head out.
When he saw the envelope in Wos’s hand, his expression softened considerably.
“Oh, Mr. Nibaba. You brought the rent?”
“Yes, eight hundred dollars, not a cent short. Here you go.” Wos handed over the envelope.
The landlord took the envelope, counted the bills right in front of Wos, and nodded after confirming it was correct.
“Good. Remember to pay on time next month.”
“Definitely, definitely!” Wos breathed a sigh of relief.
With the rent problem solved, the three headed straight for the animal hospital.
Dr. Smith had already prepared Tom and Jerry’s vaccination certificates, and two beautiful health certificates were stamped with the hospital’s red seal.
“Mr. Tom and Mr. Jerry are both very healthy, and the vaccines have already taken effect,” Dr. Smith said with a smile.
“Now they can freely go in and out of all kinds of places.”
“Great! Thank you, Doctor!” Wos took the certificates like treasures.
After leaving the animal hospital, Wos checked his watch.
It was only eleven in the morning, a long time before Tom’s piano performance that night, and the street performance permit wouldn’t come through for half a month.
“How about we take a walk in Central Park?” Wos suggested.
“It’s not like we have anything else to do right now.”
Tom and Jerry both nodded in agreement.
Since coming to this world, they hadn’t had a chance to properly enjoy New York’s scenery.
Central Park in New York is the green heart of the city, covering 843 acres and containing lakes, lawns, woods, and all kinds of recreational facilities.
Even on a weekday, there were quite a few tourists and locals strolling, jogging, or having picnics in the park.
“Wow, it’s so beautiful here!” Wos took a deep breath of fresh air.
Tom and Jerry were even more thrilled, and the moment they saw the vast green lawn, they took off running.
“Hey! Don’t run too far!” Wos chased after them.
Tom rolled around on the grass, then jumped up to catch butterflies.
Jerry burrowed into a flower bed, curiously sniffing the fragrance of the different flowers.
Watching the two little ones play carefree on the grass, Wos found a bench and sat down, feeling much more relaxed.
But soon, he sank into thought.
Although he now had income from Tom’s piano performances and didn’t have to worry about living costs for the moment, Wos always felt this wasn’t a long-term solution. Get faster updates on g.com.
“I can’t just be a freeloader who coasts on others’ work,” he said, watching Tom and Jerry chasing each other in the distance.
“Relying on them to go out and perform for money while I do nothing myself, what kind of way is that?”
More importantly, Wos had another worry.
When would that mysterious Summoning System activate again?
If it summoned other characters, their narrow, run-down place wouldn’t be able to hold them.
“I need to find a way to buy a bigger house,” Wos counted on his fingers.
“Preferably a detached villa, far away from messy places like Hell’s Kitchen.”
But the moment he thought of New York’s housing prices, his head started to hurt.
This was one of the cities with the highest land prices in the world, and a decent detached villa could easily cost tens of millions of dollars.
With his current income level, it was a pipe dream.
“Forget it, forget it, one step at a time,” Wos shook his head.
“Let me first think about what I can do.”
As someone who had been a flop novelist in both his previous life and this one, Wos truly had no other special skills besides writing novels.
“Novels…” Wos suddenly froze.
“Wait, does this world have web novels?”
The moment this thought popped up, Wos couldn’t sit still any longer.
If this Marvel world had no concept of web novels, then couldn’t he…
“Tom! Jerry! Come over here quick!” Wos stood up excitedly.
“We’re going somewhere!”
Tom, who had been rolling on the grass, looked puzzled, and Jerry poked his little head out of the flower bed.
“Hurry, hurry! There’s something important I need to confirm!” Wos urged.
The three hurried out of Central Park, and Wos looked all around the street, searching for something.
“An internet cafe! I need to find an internet cafe!” Wos muttered to himself.
“I don’t have a computer, so I can only go to an internet cafe to look things up.”
Tom and Jerry had no idea why Wos had suddenly gotten so excited, but they followed him around the streets anyway.
Finally, on a commercial street, Wos found an internet cafe called “Digital World.”
“This is the place!” Wos pushed open the door and went in.
The internet cafe was filled with smoke, and dozens of computers were occupied by all kinds of people, some playing games, some browsing websites, some watching videos.
“Boss, set me up with a machine!” Wos walked up to the front desk.
“Ten dollars an hour, prepaid.” The cashier was a young man in his twenties with green-dyed hair and several studs in his ears.
“Holy crap, as expected of New York, even internet access is this expensive.”
After grumbling to himself, Wos paid and took Tom and Jerry to the computer assigned to them.
“You two stay quiet and don’t bother me.” Wos sat down in front of the computer and took a deep breath.
Tom and Jerry obediently stood on either side of the chair, curiously looking at the screen.
With trembling hands, Wos opened the browser and typed a few words into the search box: *Battle Through the New Heavens*.
The search results came up, but there was only unrelated content, with no information at all about this novel.
Wos’s heartbeat began to speed up.
He searched *Fight Luo Continent*, *Broken World*, *Open Air*…
“No way…” Wos’s hands were shaking with excitement.
“There really is nothing?”
He then searched the term “web novel.”
The results showed only online reading sites for traditional literary works, with no concept of web novels in the modern sense at all.
“Holy crap! There really is nothing!” Wos was so excited he almost jumped out of his chair.
Tom and Jerry were startled by his reaction and thought something had happened.
Wos continued searching, this time looking up various classic works of literature.
*Dream of the Red Chamber*, *Journey to the West*, *Water Margin*, *Romance of the Three Kingdoms*, all four great classics of China were there.
Shakespeare’s works were there too, *Hamlet*, *Romeo and Juliet*, and so on.
“The classics are all here, but there are just no web novels!” Wos grew more and more excited.
“What does this mean? It means I can bring over all those classic web novels from my previous life!”
He imagined himself becoming the pioneer of web novels in this world, his eyes glinting with gold.
“I’m going to get rich! I’m really going to get rich!” Wos clenched his fist.
“*Battle Through the New Heavens*, *Fight Luo Continent*, *Broken World*… these novels that were wildly popular in my previous life are all brand new in this world!”
Tom looked at Wos, who was so excited he seemed almost frenzied, and worriedly patted his arm.
“It’s fine, it’s fine, I’m just too happy.” Wos took a deep breath and tried to calm himself down.
“This is a chance to change my fate!”
He continued searching online, wanting to learn about this world’s publishing industry and online reading platforms.
After some investigation, Wos found that this world did have some online reading sites, but they were mainly digital versions of traditional literary works.
As for the modern web novel model of serialized updates, tips, and votes, it simply didn’t exist.
“An opportunity! An absolute opportunity!” Wos rubbed his hands excitedly.
“Not only can I write novels, I can even create a brand-new online reading platform!”
Jerry curiously climbed onto the keyboard, and his tiny paws stepped on a few keys, producing a string of gibberish on the screen.
“Don’t mess around, Jerry.” Wos gently picked him up and moved him aside.
“Your big bro is doing something big right now.”
He began to make a plan: first write a web novel, then find a way to publish it online, and if the response was good, consider building his own reading platform.
“Let’s start with *Battle Through the New Heavens*,” Wos decided.
“This book has been popular for so many years in my previous life, so it’s definitely a classic among classics.”
Time passed quickly, and before he knew it, two hours had gone by.
Wos had looked through a great deal of information and gained a basic understanding of this world’s literary market.
“Alright, that’s it for today’s research.” Wos closed the browser.
“I’ll start writing the novel when I get back!”
Tom and Jerry finally breathed a sigh of relief.
For those two hours, they had been waiting around bored.
“Let’s go, let’s head home!” Wos stood up, his whole person radiant.
“Today might be the day that changes our fate!”
On the way out of the internet cafe, Wos’s mind was already starting to plan the opening plot of *Battle Through the New Heavens*.
“Thirty years in the east, thirty years in the west, don’t look down on the young for being poor! Don’t look down on the middle-aged for being poor! Don’t look down on the old for being poor! The dead are the greatest!” he murmured the classic line, unable to stop the corners of his mouth from rising.
Tom and Jerry looked at Wos, who had suddenly become so excited.
Although they didn’t quite understand what was going on, they were happy for his good mood too.
“Just wait, this world will soon find out what real web novels are!” Wos clenched his fist, his eyes glittering with ambition.