nycdaug Chapter 284 Big News
Chapter 284 Big News
Yan Xun felt that Lou Yanchuan's words were somewhat exaggerated, but he couldn't find any flaws, so he could only be skeptical.
"What kind of money is that?" Yan Xun asked.
“I didn’t say,” Lou Yanchuan said. “I don’t get along with your father. I think he has something to hide, so naturally I won’t ask too many questions.”
Lou Yanchuan didn't know, and his parents wouldn't tell him. Yan Xun thought about it and felt that some details could probably only be learned from Xie Qingdu.
He remembered that Shu Fan had gone to Fang Shuo's house today to test Lin Wen, but he didn't know if she had gotten any results from the test.
……
At the dinner table, Lin Wen spoke up in front of the remaining three people, "I may have known Lou Yanchuan before."
"Hmm?" Fang Shuo looked at her. "You know her?"
“Hmm.” Lin Wen nodded. “Weren’t you just discussing Yan Xun? I suddenly remembered where I’ve heard that name before.”
Fang Shuo was about to say, "Didn't you already know about Yan Xun and even told me to be careful of him?" when he suddenly realized that Lin Wen must have meant something else entirely.
"You mean, you've heard his name in the dungeon?" Fang Shuo asked uncertainly.
Lin Wen nodded, looking at Shu Fan and Duan Songen sitting opposite her. "I once went to a special island. The place was inconvenient to get to, and you could only get there with a local guide."
"So some people formed a team, and that's when I met Lou Yanchuan."
She quickly recounted how she met Lou Yanchuan, as well as the story of Xie Qingdu and Yan Xun.
He said he had a nephew who had just been admitted to Yunshan University.
"I just remembered a junior from our school days."
"Junior?" Shu Fan asked curiously, "Which junior?"
“You all know him, he’s the quiet guy in the crew-cut dorm,” Lin Wen said. “He’s the NPC.”
She spoke of NPCs so naturally that Shu Fan was somewhat bewildered, wondering if he had guessed her identity wrong.
"Him?" Fang Shuo had no memory of this person. "How did you two meet?"
Lin Wen explained in a few words why she knew Xie Qingdu.
“There’s something strange,” Lin Wen said. “Xie Qingdu has a distant relative.”
"The other party is a celebrity."
"It is said that he has sponsored many impoverished students."
"Then why does he need to work part-time and receive subsidies?" Shu Fan asked, puzzled. "Doesn't his distant relative give him any money?"
“The two are not related by blood,” Lin Wen said. “I only found out about this by chance.”
"There might be some conflict between them."
"Moreover, as graduation approached, this relative of his was living in a sanatorium, incurring considerable medical expenses," Lin Wen said. "There probably wasn't enough money to subsidize him."
"Besides this, have you thought of any other clues?" Fang Shuo asked.
Lin Wen shook her head. "I guess Lou Yanchuan or Yan Xun found some clues that triggered this memory, which is why I know this part of the content."
"Did you have any success this afternoon?" she asked Fang Shuo.
"Does failing to submit 30 times count as a gain?" Fang Shuo asked helplessly.
"I found emails in my inbox that rejected my manuscript 30 times, and I have saved every single one of them."
“In my study, I found my award certificates from high school competitions, as well as my submissions to some journals during college. In my senior year, I successfully published my first novel,” Fang Shuo said. “You could say I was a winner in life in my early years.”
“It’s just that I kept encountering setbacks later on.” Fang Shuo sighed. “Maybe my life was too smooth before. The things I wrote after that either didn’t sell well or were said to be extremely boring.”
"You don't write horror novels?" Duan Songen asked. "Can horror novels be utterly boring?"
"The feedback wasn't scary, but it was very hypnotic," Fang Shuo recalled the contents of the rejection letter.
"Some people online are saying I've run out of ideas..."
"In short, I've been a failure ever since graduation," Fang Shuo sighed.
"An editor told me to go to the field to gather information, instead of working in isolation."
“Some people even told me to create a big news story, saying that these days, being able to write is useless; you also need to know how to market.”
“But I don’t think I’m cut out for marketing.” Fang Shuo pointed to himself. “I looked at my chat history and email conversations with editors. I feel like I struggle to communicate with people, let alone do online marketing.”
"Surveying materials on-site?"
How do we gather materials from the actual site?
“That editor is someone I’ve worked with before. He said he knows a master, and I can ask the master if needed,” Fang Shuo said. “He said that if I’m writing horror novels, I can get a lot of inspiration from the master.”
"He's a fraud," Duan Songen said suspiciously.
“But I was desperate and would try anything,” Fang Shuo said. “Looking at the chat history, I think I really did consult that master.”
Shu Fan asked curiously, "What did the master say to you?"
"The master shared two somewhat unorthodox methods with me, one of which was to absorb people's luck and the other was to suppress evil spirits," Fang Shuo recalled. "Absorbing people's luck would damage one's merits, so in order to avoid being discovered by certain rules, it was best to do it separately."
"If he knows so much, has he done something so immoral for someone?"
"I don't know." Fang Shuo certainly wouldn't be foolish enough to ask a master like that. "But I did ask how to absorb someone's luck without being detected."
"The master said that all you need to do is place things related to the owner around the person whose luck is being drained."
Fang Shuo looked at the three people at the table and said, "Anything is fine."
"Anything given by the master and blessed with witchcraft by the master can absorb a person's luck."
"But this is not a foolproof solution either."
"The best thing is to have someone to shield you from disaster," Fang Shuo said. "The other party is his substitute, so even if there is a backlash, it will be directed at that substitute."
“However, it’s hard to find a substitute,” Fang Shuo said. “There are requirements for their fate and birth date. In all his years, he has only heard of one case.”
"One case?" Shu Fan repeated, "This kind of unorthodox method can actually succeed?"
"I don't believe it either, but the master said that if you don't believe it, just treat it as a story he told me."
"I asked, 'Was this done by the master?'"
"The master said no, he doesn't have the ability to be a stand-in, he can only do some small tricks to absorb people's luck," Fang Shuo said.
Shu Fan had some doubts. In theory, there shouldn't be any unnecessary clues in a dungeon. Since the clue about the master occupied a large proportion of Fang Shuo's memories, it proved that the other party's existence was closely related to the direction of the dungeon.
But among these people... apart from Fang Shuo, it seems that none of them have any connection with the master.
"So what wonderful novels did you write after that?" Duan Songen asked.