civilwarnovels Chapter 420: Washed-up Author Shangguan Fei
Chapter 420: Washed-up Author Shangguan Fei
The scratching sound seemed to be coming from outside the bedroom.He rolled out of bed, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness for a moment before stepping down barefoot and groping for the light switch.
Flipping it on, the bedroom was instantly flooded with bright light.
Standing at the bedroom door, he listened more carefully and confirmed the scratching sound was indeed coming from outside the bedroom.
So, he returned to the bedroom and picked up his handgun.
He cautiously turned on the living room light.
As the light illuminated the dark living room, banishing the shadows,
Ultimate Rich Kid Lin Feng, like a radar, swept his gaze across the entire living room.
He found nothing unusual.
So, he stood in the living room, closed his eyes, and listened intently, relying on his ears.
The dark night, the surroundings were completely silent.
The scratching sound was very clear.
"Is it outside the door?"
Lin Feng looked towards that metal security door.
He approached, walking over, and the scratching sound grew increasingly distinct.
From this, he could confirm it was indeed outside the door.
His brow furrowed.
He returned to the bedroom.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, he picked up his phone.
It was a white Fruit 17 Pro Max.
For a wealthy person like Lin Feng, getting the new model every year was a given.
He certainly wasn't short on that kind of money.
Of course, he was also increasingly feeling that Fruit Phones were milking it, releasing incremental updates with no real competition to push them or challenge them.
He opened the safe room app.
He pulled up the real-time feed from outside the security door.
The moment he saw the scene unfolding,
Ultimate Rich Kid Lin Feng got a full-body jolt of shock.
There, outside his door,
was a person dressed entirely in a black robe, wearing an extremely exaggerated white screaming ghost face mask. In their hand was a fruit knife, which they were using to scrape repeatedly against the metal security door.
Seeing this, Lin Feng felt the hairs on his entire body stand on end.
He stared fixedly at the mask worn by the person on his phone screen.
The eye holes were empty and dark, symmetrical inward-curving crescent shapes, while the mouth was opened in an exaggerated, shocked gape, stretched open to an extreme degree.
Lin Feng felt like he'd seen this mask somewhere before.
Oh, wasn't this the mask from that foreign horror movie, *Scream*?
"Got too obsessed with horror movies, so now he's imitating the killings?"
He managed to calm down from the initial shock and terror.
The gun in his hand gave Lin Feng an infinite sense of security.
At that moment, a deathly pale hand suddenly landed on his shoulder, followed immediately by a scream: "Ah! Who is that?!"
"Damn it, you scared the hell out of me!!!"
Lin Feng turned his head to look at the screaming Wang Ziyi, who had now woken up, and felt the urge to kill her on the spot.
In the middle of the night, with a murderous psycho outside your door sharpening a knife on it, and then you have a screaming banshee inside the house too.
"I'm... I'm sorry... Brother, hubby, I was just so scared when I saw what was on your phone, so..."
Wang Ziyi put on that pitiful, delicate look again.
Probably, Lin Feng had genuine feelings for Wang Ziyi.
He actually chose to forgive her again.
"If you dare scream like that again next time, watch out for an accidental discharge."
Lin Feng gestured with the yellowish-brown handgun in his hand and said fiercely.
Wang Ziyi nodded carefully, then gently leaned against Lin Feng. Her jade-like finger pointed at the phone screen, at the white ghost-faced mask-wearer still sharpening the knife.
She said, somewhat fearfully, "What... what is he doing sharpening that knife over there?"
Lin Feng said, "Who the hell knows."
Wang Ziyi was still scared, timidly asking, "Are we just going to sit here watching him scrape the door with the knife and do nothing? What if he gets in, what do we do?"
Lin Feng turned his head and said, exasperated, "Impossible. Even if he had a power drill, he couldn't break through this door, let alone a fruit knife. Alright, go to sleep, don't worry, there's nothing to be afraid of."
Wang Ziyi nodded: "Right, he can't get in, and we have a gun!"
Lin Feng: "So, go to sleep."
Even though he said that to reassure Wang Ziyi, having someone like that outside your door, even if you're absolutely sure they can't get in, still leaves a thorn in your heart.
Therefore, Lin Feng didn't get a wink of sleep.
When he woke up again, it was already past 3 a.m.
Only then did he pick up the phone he had accidentally dropped on the floor and looked at it.
He found that the white ghost-faced mask-wearer was gone.
He checked the video playback.
He discovered that person had spent over an hour sharpening a fruit knife outside his door.
Even though this time, Lin Feng himself suffered no physical harm, he couldn't shake the feeling that he had been targeted by some deranged criminal in this apartment.
...
The clatter of typing.
Inside the living room of Alice Apartment 702.
On a small table sat a black laptop.
In front of the laptop sat a person, their fingers flying across a black external keyboard.
Amidst the constant clatter of the keyboard, character after character was created on the computer screen.
Combined together, they became something utterly bizarre.
Shangguan Fei, as a web novel failure surviving on attendance bonuses,
needed to update 12,000 words a day.
He was hustling for attendance bonuses on three different websites.
Like many web novel writers, he originally just enjoyed reading web novels. Later, he saw many people making big money writing them, while he himself was killing himself with back-breaking labor in the real world for a salary of just a few thousand.
So he started writing too.
He originally thought writing web novels was nothing, very simple.
If he started writing, he'd definitely be better than those so-called web novel gods.
When Shangguan Fei started writing, he still fantasized about earning hundreds of thousands, even millions per month.
But the longer he wrote, the more he flopped.
Forget hundreds of thousands a month, earning a thousand a month was considered an achievement.
Thus, his ambition was gradually ground down into nothing.
Only then did he realize that this industry, while having a low entry barrier, had a high skill ceiling.
It was just too hard to make it.
And this field really relied on talent.
Forget those web novel prodigies who became famous at seventeen or eighteen,
just talking about many small-time authors.
Shangguan Fei knew several.
There was this woman in her twenties or thirties. Her husband wrote one novel, then got busy with work and asked her to continue writing for him.
This was the woman's first time writing.
Especially since this was a continuation.
Yet, the continuation actually gained traction, earning over ten thousand a month.
At first, Shangguan Fei thought it was just good luck.
Later, this woman started several more books, each one stable, earning at least ten thousand a month, with some even earning several tens of thousands.
This was just one example.
There were other examples happening around him.
Every time Shangguan Fei saw these damn talented people, he felt that envy in his heart.
But, as time passed, he stopped envying them, because he grew numb.
He had turned into an emotionless word-churning machine.
Now, he had become somewhat crazed.
He refused to accept this fate.
Even if he had zero talent in this area,
even if he couldn't write something super popular, couldn't he at least write one book that could earn a little money? Did he really not have that capability?