My Wife Is the Empress of Zhou

The spring mountains were dark as ink, the slender willows like mist. The drizzling rain of March veiled every bit of scenery, blurring the entire world, as though three steps into the distance would take one through the fog and reveal this world's utterly different true face.

Through the window, he watched the puddled road stretch away in both directions. Now and then, farmers in rain boots passed by, and yellow dogs drenched in dripping juices ran past with their heads bobbing and tails wagging, but the bouncing bus never came.

"Yesterday at noon, something moving happened in this city's West Lake Park. A woman suddenly fell into the water. Her boyfriend shouted, 'Can anyone swim?' At once, more than a dozen men and women of all ages, heights, and builds jumped into the water, but not one of them could swim. An investigation afterward revealed that they were the author's..."

A plump finger stopped changing channels. After watching this news story promoting the spirit of righteous courage, its owner let out a wistful sigh of admiration. After all, he too knew how to swim.

"I don't know how you found me. Only the website has my address information. Do you know someone who works inside the site?"

"I admit that the endings of some of my books were controversial. But I had my reasons!"

"My first book could at most be considered an unfinished mess, right? What was wrong with an open ending? There weren't any subscriptions left if I kept writing anyway. The effort and reward were completely out of proportion. That was ten years ago! Back then, legitimate readers were as rare as giant pandas. I couldn't even make two hundred yuan a day."

"My second book was completed! Lots of people weren't happy with the ending, but what ending could possibly satisfy everyone? It was nearly four million words long—what more did they want? Everything that needed explaining was explained, and everything that needed wrapping up was wrapped up."

"My third book... I wrote something I shouldn't have. The website told me to start a new book. What could I do? That book ruined my reputation too."

"My fourth book... I wrote some continuations afterward. Most of what needed explaining was explained, and I wrote about the male and female leads too. Did it absolutely have to have some perfect happy ending?"

"My fifth book... I published it on the wrong site. The readers there didn't like my kind of stuff. The platform was important, you know? There weren't many readers or much interaction, so it wasn't interesting to write. Even though it was a buyout, writing novels just for the manuscript fee was pointless."

"My sixth book... was genuinely completed. It's also my only surviving book. I turned over a new leaf and finally stepped out of the palace to be a man for once."

After saying that, the ordinary-looking man—like most middle-aged men, somewhat guileless-looking due to putting on weight—curled the corner of his mouth upward and revealed a restrained hint of pride. Authors spoke through their ability. His professional ethics and character had been terrible in the past, but now he was working hard to rebuild his image. The results were neither good nor bad so far, but at least he was no longer someone everyone wanted to beat up.

His name was Ma Shilong. He was an online novelist, and like most people in this profession, he had many pen names and had written many novels he never finished.

He had been writing for many years and could barely be considered somewhat talented. In his early years, he had worked fairly hard and accumulated some longtime readers through his own style. His intermittent updates and various actions that damaged his reputation had driven some readers away again, but online literature's market kept growing, and the expanding platforms brought in vast numbers of new readers, allowing him to maintain a certain readership.

Ma Shilong's books were fairly well written. Generally speaking, they could not be called flops, but he also lacked some innate qualities needed to become a top god. In short, his current life was better than some and worse than others. Relying on this income, which was enough to keep himself fed and clothed, he lived quite leisurely now.

He lived in a suburban area of green mountains and clear waters. Since he was self-employed and did not need to work nine to five, transportation was not much of an issue for him. As long as deliveries could reach him, someone would always bring his daily necessities to his door. Besides, there were all sorts of errand-running platforms where he could find someone to handle this or that trivial matter of daily life.

This life was pretty good... Recently, aside from being punished by the Scythe of Judgment for running away while gaming and ordering radish soup only to find ginseng in it, the only barely troubling matter was this one: a man claiming to be his reader had come to his door, demanding that he finish an old novel called "My Wife Is the Empress of Zhou."

In fact, Ma Shilong had not even written that novel under his current pen name. Almost no readers knew he had once had such an unfinished work. Dropping a novel was not something honorable. Although Ma Shilong had dropped countless novels, he at least knew right from wrong and would not treat shame as glory, going around bragging about his history of eunuching books.

He had no idea how the person before him had learned that Ma Shilong was the author of that book, or even tracked him down to his home and demanded that he finish it.

"Comrade Author, I came here for only one purpose: I hope you can finish 'My Wife Is the Empress of Zhou.' Have you ever considered that when your novel goes unfinished, who besides the readers might be affected?" the young man seated opposite Ma Shilong asked in a gentle tone.

Ma Shilong looked at the young man. He had an ordinary face, ordinary height, ordinary clothes, and none of those special qualities of quietness, remoteness, cleanliness, or elegance.

If the young man before him appeared in a novel, there were only two possibilities... either he was the protagonist, or he was a passerby without even a name.

After all, for an ordinary supporting character, authors would more or less give them some personality traits or distinctive appearance tags in order to leave an impression on readers and demonstrate their skill at characterization. This would improve the character's recognizability, and those traits and tags could even serve as foreshadowing for later plot developments.

The protagonist was different... A protagonist could have a vivid personality, be ugly enough to get chopped up, or handsome enough to get chopped up. None of that was a problem.

A protagonist could also be completely unremarkable... He was the "protagonist." He only needed that one label; everything else was not so important.

"Who else would be affected?" Ma Shilong came back to himself. He had developed an occupational habit: when looking at people or events, he often drifted off into a writer's way of thinking. The young man before him was named Qin Luming. Ma Shilong remembered that Qin Luming had mentioned during his introduction that he also wrote online novels.

A newbie, perhaps. They were always full of enthusiasm, with countless ideas, high emotions, and active minds, but they often struggled to accurately express what was in their heads.

"The characters in the book."

"The characters in the book?" Ma Shilong laughed. That was a little too pretentious, wasn't it... Ma Shilong thought of all those extreme fans in book communities. But the books those extreme fans pursued were all wildly popular works. That one of his own unfinished novels from many years ago had extreme fans was simply unbelievable.

"Have you ever considered... that in the world you created, those characters are flesh and blood too? They have their own thoughts, their own pursuits, their own joys, anger, sorrows, and happiness... But from the moment you stopped writing, their world came to a standstill, or collapsed... permanently sealed within a world where time has frozen." Qin Luming snapped his fingers. "Just like our world. If it were to come to an eternal standstill after a snap of the fingers, how would you feel?"

Ma Shilong's chubby fingers began pressing the television remote again. Had he known the other man was such a lunatic, he would have simply denied his identity when the man came to his door.

"I've never considered it. Our world won't come to an eternal standstill after a snap of the fingers, and the world I created doesn't have flesh-and-blood characters at all. It's fictional..."

Ma Shilong's voice stopped abruptly. A black iron hammer flew in through the window and smashed into Ma Shilong's head.

Ma Shilong, dead... probably.