Writing Novels Will Make You Invincible

Chapter 4 : I, Chu Tianxing, Am Going to Activate My Cheat!

I, Chu Tianxing, Am Going to Activate My Cheat!

Writing novels could make him stronger.

This was the boon of his transmigration, and Chu Tianxing could do nothing about it. If he had his way, he would choose the classic stat points system as it’s stable and would never lead him astray.

He can dump the point to STR, AGI, and CON stats, max them out, and be done with it.

But alas, there were no "what ifs."

Chu Tianxing did not want to miss out on the splendors this world had to offer, and he was sick of having to hide behind Qin Ling whenever someone started trouble with him.

That’s why, even though he knew he sucked at writing, he decided to walk back the path that bore no result to him even after ten years. But first things first, he had to figure out the current literature trend of this world.

"Come to think of it," he wondered, "with real martial arts and powerful masters running around, I bet nobody here reads wuxia or xianxia, huh?

However, the results of his online search left Chu Tianxing rather surprised.

He found a website called Huankong Net, which was the Great Ming Dynasty's largest platform for serialized web novels. The ten works with the highest click rates on the site were all wuxia and xianxia novels.

Among them, only one was a historical romance set during the Chongzhen Emperor's reign, with a protagonist who was a common soldier in the Yongwei Battalion. The rest were all wuxia and xianxia novels with straight-up fantasy with vague, made-up settings.

"Now this is interesting," he thought. "You'd think with real-life cultivators around, nobody would care about fantasy martial arts stories. So why are they still such a big deal?"

After pondering for a moment, Chu Tianxing had to admit he had been thinking about it the wrong way. In his original world, high-ranking officials were a real presence, yet novels about officialdom had once been all the rage online. Why? Because everyone once dreamed of becoming a high-ranking official!

The principle was the same here.

Sure, martial arts are real and there exist god-like martial artists of the Astral Qi Realm who roam this world. But out of the Great Ming’s population of 1.6 billion, only about ten million or so people could cultivate internal energy.

The vast majority were just ordinary people, unable to achieve anything in the martial path.

Moreover, the status of powerful martial artists was exceedingly high.

For instance, the nine Astral Qi Realm martial artists of the Great Ming not only enjoyed the treatment of royalty but also wielded actual power. The Great Ming had long since entered an era of a constitutional monarchy where the emperor was merely a national symbol. True authority rested with the Cabinet, and the Grand Secretary of the Cabinet effectively exercised the powers of the head of state.

Yet these Astral Qi Realm martial artists, who were equivalent to human nuclear weapons and pillars of the nation, could completely disregard the Grand Secretary of the Cabinet.

Even a mere True Qi Realm martial artist, whether in politics, the military, or business, possessed advantages that ordinary people could only envy. A True Qi Realm martial artist did not even need to work; they could stay home all day perfecting their martial arts, and state welfare would ensure they lived in comfort.

Given the benefits and power that martial artists enjoyed, it’s inevitable that ordinary people exposed to the martial arts from a young age—even those lacking the talent for great achievement—would still harbor a deep-seated, fervent desire to master a peerless divine technique and rise above the common folk.

Yet reality did not permit it. The vast majority lacked the talent, and no matter how intensely their hearts yearned for it, success was impossible.

This being the case, their intense desires could only be fulfilled vicariously through works of fantasy where they could project themselves onto the protagonists.

"A population of 1.6 billion, the vast majority of whom are ordinary people who strongly admire powerful martial artists... that's the perfect breeding ground for wuxia and xianxia stories to not just exist, but to be wildly successful!"

Understanding this point, Chu Tianxing’s heart instantly burned with fervor.

He then picked a few novels from Huankong Net's top-ten rankings and basically speed ran them.

He could not help but laugh out loud after finishing all of them. "I didn’t expect this world’s web novels to be this backward!”

This backward era of the web novel industry was home to a chaotic garden where you could find any kind of writing style and works. The readers are so starved for content that they aren’t picky in the slightest and would devour literally anything.

Take the currently first-ranked wuxia novel for instance. The protagonist’s life was basically a tale where the tragedy genre met with netorare and they had a child.

It started with his father’s death, followed by his mother’s. Then his younger siblings were killed one by one by his enemies. After that, the typical childhood slash junior sister sweetheart was captured, NTR’ed, then murdered by the villain, setting up the protagonist on his path to vengeance.

Later, the protagonist met a heroine whom he fought side-by-side for half the novel and developed mutual feelings, only for her to be captured by the villain just before the final arc to save the protagonist from the villain’s plot armor and she got fully treated with the NTR Treatment. And when he finally saved the heroine, her stomach was already big and her mind was broken...

This kind of novel, if it were published in Chu Tianxing’s original world, would have been flamed by the netizens so hard that the author would go dig his own grave with his own hands. Yet, it was massively successful in this world. What’s worse, the novel was still firmly perched at the top of weekly rankings even a month after its conclusion.

And with the precedent still perched by the top, half of the top ten were the same kind of edgy, torture-the-hero story... Chu Tianxing could only shake his head. The readers of this backward era could truly stomach anything.

After studying the rankings, Chu Tianxing’s confidence surged.

Set aside his limited writing skills, in a backward era overrun with such toxic waste, he was confident he could dominate the industry by relying on the outdated tropes of his original world.

What's more, what he possessed was not just the tested formulas from his original world.

Ten years of writing nothing but flops had at least taught him how to write clean, easy-to-read prose. He knew how to get an idea from his head onto the page without tripping up the reader.

But good and easy-to-read writing wasn’t enough. It was merely the foundation; it did not even rank among the top three most important elements.

The top three most important elements of a novel are the concepts, plots, and characters.

Chu Tianxing knew of one top author who used voice-to-text software; his work was riddled with typos and chaotic punctuation, yet he was still wildly popular. Why? Simply because his concepts were bold enough and his plots compelling enough.

And now, Chu Tianxing had the recipes, and he had a whole other world's worth of legendary stories to back him up.

"A transmigrator who doesn't engage in literary plagiarism is not a qualified transmigrator."

Chu Tianxing searched online for some time and, after confirming that the classic wuxia novels from his previous life did not exist here, he knew exactly what to do.

"My debut work will be Legend of the Condor Heroes! Hmm, the historical setting can remain the same, but the power levels need a boost... The Five Greats will be peak True Qi Realm masters. As for the Astral Qi Realm…"

"That's a realm even Emperor Chongzhen never reached. The first Astral Qi Realm martial artist only appeared a hundred and fifty years ago as the tides of Spiritual Qi grew stronger. So, a novel with this kind of historical setting has no need for an Astral Qi Realm martial artist to appear…"

After mulling it over and recalling the plot of Legend of the Condor Heroes, Chu Tianxing opened a domestic word processing software and started moving his fingers. "Time to show off my true typing speed!"

Of course, he didn't remember the book word-for-word. But he'd read it and watched all the adaptations so many times that the story was burned into his brain.

Even without remembering the original text, he could easily rewrite it from scratch using his own simple, clean style to bring all the characters he knew by heart to life. With the countless shows as his cheat, he could easily describe the scene in his mind without much difficulty.

Click-clack, click-clack.

The sound of the keyboard was incessant.

All those years of being a failed writer had at least given him insane WPM. In just two hours, he had sixteen thousand characters ready to go.

He gave it a quick proofread, chopped it into eight chapters, logged into Huankong Net as an amateurish author under the pen name “Skywalker, " and uploaded all eight chapters in one go.

He stood up to stretch his stiff limbs and was about to press on and write another ten or twenty thousand characters when he suddenly heard the sound of a key turning in the front door lock.

Only then did Chu Tianxing notice that the sky outside was already completely black.

Could the person entering at this time be the parents of this world?

A hint of nervousness suddenly bloomed in Chu Tianxing’s chest.

He had seen a family portrait in a photo album; his parents' appearances were only slightly different from their counterparts in his original world. Because of this, he did not feel much resistance toward the parents of this world.

But he was no longer the Chu Tianxing of this timeline. For all he knew, this world’s Chu Tianxing might have gone to his world to take his place as a rich second-generation heir.

He looked the same, and they looked the same, but their lives had been totally different. This made him unsure how he was supposed to act around them.

After hesitating for a moment, Chu Tianxing took a deep breath, straightened his clothes, and walked out of the bedroom to greet his familiar yet strange parents.

But when he stepped out and took a look, he was stunned.

Because the person who had come in was, unexpectedly, Qin Ling.

She was carrying a large plastic bag filled with various vegetables and meats. After entering, she pulled the door shut behind her, expertly changed into a pair of slippers at the shoe rack, and looked up to see Chu Tianxing standing dumbfounded in his bedroom doorway.

She could not help but shoot him a glare. "Don't just stand there like an idiot. Come give me a hand!”

Chu Tianxing asked in surprise, "Why are you here again?"

"What do you think? Someone has to feed you." Qin Ling rolled her eyes. "If Uncle Chu and Auntie Shen hadn't specifically entrusted me to look after you before they left, do you think I'd want to come over and cook for you? I have a Martial Arts Tournament to compete in, and I plan to get a good ranking. I'm incredibly busy these days, you know."