So We Can’t Be Friends After Rejection?

With few exceptions, in this period, it was indeed a little more profitable to write for the female market, and also effortless. Zhou Yuwen’s novel only received a few comments on the first day, and basically no one noticed it.

Then, on the second day, Zhou Yuwen began to show his prowess: the overbearing president gave an evil smile, and began all kinds of 'domination' over the heroine.

The reviews1 below were over a hundred in an instant.

"Uncle update faster! Uncle I love it!"

"Go update, go update! I want to see what happens later!"

"Uncle are you a man? Uncle your writing is so good! Uncle must be a kindhearted gentleman! Can we be friends?"

2010. This era could be regarded as the time of innocence of the Internet; when chatting online, everyone’s first sentence would be “Hi, how are you?”

Then, afterwards, they would say, “It was a pleasure to chat with you.”

Unlike nowadays, “Wanna hook up?”

After a few days of writing the women’s novel, Zhou Yuwen was too lazy to update for the male market. It wasn’t because the men’s novel had fewer subscriptions, rather, those tossers would flame him, saying Zhou Yuwen lacked historical knowledge, like “When Little Qiao2 appeared, Concubine Cai was already forty years old, would you have feelings for a forty-year-old woman?”

Quite a few readers in the review area said, “Did this bitch-ass author come out to write novels before finishing elementary school?”

The female segment’s review area was different. The group of little girls urged him to update, saying stuff like “Brother author update faster, Mister update faster! I really like reading your book! Mister do you have a girlfriend?”

In summary, Zhou Yuwen felt that he could develop further in the female market.

In mid-July, Zhou Yuwen’s women’s novel directly shot to 300,000 words, and received a homepage recommendation. The site traffic suddenly exploded, and the review area was flooded overnight. Several old readers claimed to be Zhou Yuwen's die-hard fans and wanted to help him set up a readers’ group3.

Seeing everyone's enthusiasm, Zhou Yuwen agreed to set up the group, which instantly reached the 500-person limit.

There were many girls, but also a few guys5. Zhou Yuwen saw that the group didn’t have enough places, so he had no choice but to kick out all the guys, and then issued an announcement: This group is for discussion of women’s novels, guys are not allowed to join!4

? ? ?

After the readers’ group was full, Zhou Yuwen's QQ notification beeps never stopped. Not only did the female readers urged for quicker updates, but they also tried to secretly add Zhou Yuwen’s QQ6, saying that they wanted to discuss the plot with him.

Every day, there was gossip in the group:

"Is Mister Zhou really a guy? How could a guy write so exquisitely?"

"Mister Zhou, are you married?"

"Mister Zhou, do you have a girlfriend?"

When Zhou Yuwen saw the rising passion of those readers, he said in a deep old man's tone: “Don't think too much, my child is already six years old.”

"Ah, so it’s Uncle!"

This year, there was a very popular foreign drama called “The Prosecutor and His 18-Year-Old Wife”7, where the little girl said “uncle” every other line. Thus, the “uncle complex” had also become popular in China.

So, Zhou Yuwen received a new name in the readers’ group, “Uncle”.

About that, Zhou Yuwen didn’t care much. The advantage of writing for women was that when a reader knew that you were a guy, she would feel it was very avant-garde, and would want to have a private conversation. First add friends and have a chat about their reaction to the novel; if it felt good, then go further.

Zhou Yuwen didn't have time to waste with those little girls, and continued to write. When he reached 600,000 words, the heroine and the male lead were finally about to meet8.

The heroine pushed past the crowd and crossed the road.

Bang!

Sorry, a big truck hurtled through.

The heroine was knocked unconscious.

The male lead looked after her for three months. When the heroine finally woke up, the resulting sentence when she first opened her eyes was: "Who are you?"

Good heavens, amnesia!

The readers’ group could not help but explode.

"Uncle! How could you write like that!"

"That's right! Uncle, why can't you let the male lead and the female lead be together!"

Zhou Yuwen just turned a blind eye. Are you kidding, who would read if it wasn’t melodramatic? Without setbacks, how could you see the elegance in the author’s writing?

At 600,000 words, there was once again a wave of recommendations.

During the month of July, Zhou Yuwen made 18,000 from his male novel and 42,000 from his female novel.

In total, 60,000 yuan.

One thing he also did in July was apply for a driver’s license test. As a 30-year-old experienced driver, just as he touched the car, the instructor said that he could leave, “The cars are a limited resource; you can directly go to take the test.”

"???"

The July sun was scorching, and the parasol trees9 flanking the road were like two big green umbrellas, seamlessly covering the asphalt.

Cicadas laid on the trees, buzzing tirelessly.

It was a bit noisy, but it didn't really feel that way.

Perhaps, this was summer.

A bottle of iced cola, a fat-ass computer, and typing away day and night, this was the last high school summer of Zhou Yuwen.

When Zhou Yuwen’s admission notice arrived, he chose to defer to fill10, and was inexplicably assigned to a major in ‘Garden Design’. This major felt a bit novel in 2010, and its future usefulness was unknown.

Mother Zhou’s suggestion was to choose a different major, like computer science, so that it would be easier to later become a civil servant.

Zhou Yuwen said that it didn’t matter: university is just a process, and the result isn’t important.

He lowered his head and continued to write the novel. His QQ buzzed twice; it was Su Qianqian who had sent a message.

"Are you really not going to repeat the year?"

"Is it any of your business?" Zhou Yuwen directly replied.

"You!"

Su Qianqian was outraged. Since the end of the party that day, this guy went as far as to disappear and never look for herself again. Didn't she just say a few slightly disagreeable words? Was it necessary for him to be like this? Was he still a man?

Didn't he know that it was all for his own good!

After Su Qianqian received her acceptance letter, she mustered her courage and finally took the initiative to contact Zhou Yuwen online, wanting to persuade him again. Even if you don’t want to think about the present, at least you have to think about your future.

What if she agreed to be his girlfriend?

You, a third-rate university student? Where is your future?

Wasn't she just looking out for him?

He turned out to have such an attitude towards herself!

Good!

"Okay! Then I won’t ever care about you anymore!" Su Qianqian clenched her cute little tiger teeth11 and indignantly replied.

Having sent this message, after a while, Su Qianqian felt that it was maybe a bit overboard? Did he get angry?

"Why aren’t you saying anything?" After more than ten minutes, Su Qianqian couldn’t hold it anymore. Facing Zhou Yuwen's constant silence, she cautiously sent another sentence.

"?"

"Are you there?"

"Zhou Yuwen?"

Zhou Yuwen was ignoring Su Qianqian all along, so Su Qianqian fired another triplet.

"Fuck, you’re so annoying, you’ve already rejected me, so what do you still want from me?" Zhou Yuwen replied; he really wasn’t afraid of trouble12.

"Do you mean that we can’t be friends if I reject you!? Zhou Yuwen, I didn't expect you to be so petty!”

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I would guess that these are ‘comments’ (as in the first paragraph) instead of ‘reviews’, but since the author uses the word for ‘review’ I will use its translation.Younger sister of the Qiao twins. Author is referring to the ‘harem list’ in chapter 3. This sentence is also a CG in retrospect.Equivalent of a fan club, but usually limited to a special online group chat.One commenter reveals what he used to do to get into such groups: use a female profile.In this chapter, the raws explicitly transliterate to ‘male child’ (‘boy’) in each case; I use ‘guy’ wrt the context but wouldn’t go as far as ‘man’.I believe that this is akin to adding Whatsapp/FB friends/Private snaps or something. QQ was once the biggest messaging app in China.Apparently this one https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0499174/The phrase used in the raws is ‘600,000 years old’, with ‘words’ swapped for ‘years old’. Given that this was not later changed in an update, there may be reason to believe that it is not an error, but a pun, though the general comment consensus is that it should be ‘words’. Another note: “Novels before 2015 generally had chapter word counts over 3,000; in 2010, 600,000 words would be around 60 chapters.”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmiana_simplexI just chose a close-enough name, but I’m sure there’s a ‘real’ name for this as I recall seeing it on UK admissions emails as well. Explanation, from a search: an enrolment scheme where you meet the cutoff score for the university but do not meet the quota limit score (ie if limit is 10 people, they take the highest 10 scorers, but you’re number 11+) of the applied major, you can choose to ‘defer to fill’ a random (unpopular) major at the school. Presumably accepted if you really want to go to that school in particular and hope to transfer to a better major later.This is an Asian aesthetic phenomenon (primarily in China and Japan, idk about Korea) where the maxillary canine teeth on the upper jaw prominently protrude beyond the dental arch. Some regard tiger teeth as making the person look cute. Example.I thought the meaning could be “couldn’t take it anymore”, but a search shows the idiom used means “wasn’t afraid of trouble”. Another note: I tend not to change syntax and punctuation in speech, such as the comma splice in this paragraph, in order to preserve the author’s original intent. Otherwise, I do edit for fluidity and clarity in the translated product, as CN authors (especially this one) very much abuse commas as a “general punctuation” and basically disregard run-on sentences. Case in point: this chapter’s raw only has full stops at the end of a paragraph, ie. every single paragraph is ONE sentence.