Why Did He Write About a Damn Spy?

Li Ye settled things with Jin Peng, which meant the people accompanying him to the provincial capital had been arranged.

At that point, Hao Jian raised a new concern. "If the two of us are going to the provincial capital, we'll need at least two bicycles! One bike has to carry the goods, so it can't carry a person."

Qingshui County was forty kilometers from the provincial capital. It took two or three hours by bicycle, and even less by vehicle.

But if you tried to take a vehicle while hauling one or two hundred jin of malt candy, there would be no end of trouble in these times. Forget how exhausting it would be—there were inspection posts along the way!

Fortunately, Li Ye had prepared in advance. Jin Peng himself owned a bicycle, and Li Ye could trade bicycles with Li Dayong from time to time. That would be enough for the initial stage.

After hearing Li Ye's assured answer, Hao Jian finally set his mind mostly at ease.

But smart people always thought things through more thoroughly. He asked about Jin Peng's character, indirectly trying to find out whether he was some reckless brute who loved fighting.

Li Ye said, "You don't need to worry about that. Jin Peng is very shrewd. He knows when to be tough and when to be soft, and he has trick after trick for scaring people.

"Besides, he knows the county town well. You can ask him about buying raw materials and such. With him along, a lot of things will be much easier to handle."

Jin Peng being shrewd was a conclusion Li Ye's grandfather had reached. An old man who had seen countless people surely knew how to judge them.

Hao Jian nodded and asked again, "Scaring people? How does he do that?"

Li Ye casually pulled a brick down from the top of the wall. Holding it in one hand, he chopped down on it with the other.

Crack!

The solid blue brick broke into two pieces with one strike.

"Like that. Sometimes he even smacks bricks against his own head."

Hao Jian understood completely. So the man was a street performer who traveled the jianghu. Whether he could scare others or not was another matter, but Li Ye's little display had certainly scared Hao Jian stiff.

Both Hao Jian and Jin Peng were highly capable. Two days later, they had boiled up their first batch of malt candy, nearly one hundred and eighty jin.

No one had ever pinned down the load limit of those big twenty-eight-inch bicycles. The Black brothers in Africa often carried four hundred jin on them. Though that was work that risked their lives, it also showed the design characteristics of these cargo bicycles.

When Li Ye suggested trading bicycles with Li Dayong for a while, Li Dayong happily agreed at once.

Although his bear-like body looked somewhat out of place on a twenty-six-inch Phoenix, his battered Guofang rattled and clanked everywhere. How could it compare with Li Ye's brand-new Phoenix?

After trading bikes, Li Dayong rode around the county town's main streets twice. In the dead of winter, he was practically ecstatic.

Li Ye went to deliver the bicycle to Jin Peng. Jin Peng and Hao Jian had agreed to leave before dawn tomorrow, and Jin Peng was heading to Chenzhuang Township that very evening to watch Hao Jian weigh and load the goods.

But when he reached the entrance to Jin Peng's little courtyard, another complication arose.

"Senior Brother, let me go too! I don't want money. Just give me candy to eat. I won't eat much. One or two liang a day."

A broad-shouldered, sturdy boy with simple, guileless eyes clutched Li Ye's sleeve and looked up at him pleadingly, begging Li Ye to take him along.

Li Ye sighed, not knowing what to say.

The boy was Wang Jianqiang. He and Li Ye had known each other since childhood, but his mind was too "honest," and he simply was not cut out for business.

He had tried several times to get recruited into factories, only to be sent back every time. His parents and brothers all disliked him. They even thought he wasted grain when he ate, and his life had been truly hard.

Now that Wang Jianqiang had come begging to him, refusing would make Li Ye seem far too cold-hearted.

Li Ye could only ask, "Qiangzi, I don't object to you following Brother Peng to the provincial capital, but does your family agree?"

Qiangzi nodded repeatedly. "They don't care about me. I've been eating at Brother Peng's house these past two days, and they haven't even come looking for me."

Jin Peng hurriedly said, "Xiao Ye, don't overthink it. I'll take Qiangzi with me. I'll cover his meals and everything. Anyway, one jin costs two cents. The two of us can eat our fill."

"What kind of talk is that?"

Li Ye was displeased. He took out five yuan and stuffed it into Jin Peng's hand. "Take good care of Qiangzi on the road. If anything happens, don't try to show off. We're going out to make money, not to get into a pissing match."

"Xiao Ye, what are you doing? I haven't even started working yet. Why are you giving me money?"

"These five yuan are Qiangzi's meal money. You still get your two cents per jin. Those are two separate matters."

Jin Peng and Li Ye pushed and pulled for a while before Jin Peng finally accepted the money, sighing and praising Li Ye again and again for being loyal.

After arranging for Hao Jian and the others to "storm the provincial capital," Li Ye returned to school to work on his novel.

The malt candy business was indeed the kind of trade that brought immediate results. Once it started, it could generate quick profits that could be seen and touched.

But Li Ye only controlled this business indirectly. Hao Jian was obedient now, but once the profits from wholesale malt candy became high enough, there might not be no surprises.

Money was something that truly tested a person's character.

So, to be safe, Li Ye still planned to walk on two legs and earn his first bucket of gold as soon as possible.

If he got into a Beijing school next year, he would need to set up a little nest for himself there, wouldn't he?

Though Li Ye did not intend to get obscenely rich by hoarding houses, there was no reason not to get a little grease from the fat meat right in front of him.

How much did a Siheyuan in 1982 cost again?

Li Ye activated the Biological Hard Drive in his mind and found the relevant information.

By 1982, Beijing houses could already be legally traded. A Siheyuan that was not particularly large but stood in a good location could be bought for one or two thousand yuan.

What did one or two thousand yuan mean in that era?

Li Ye's grandfather earned a little over one hundred yuan a month. After supporting the whole family, he could probably save thirty or twenty yuan each month.

In other words, if they lived frugally, they could probably save enough to buy a courtyard in five, six, seven, or eight years—but only if there were no major expenses during those years, and Beijing Siheyuan prices did not rise.

Was that possible?

This is your stop. Time to wake up.

By 1986, one courtyard had risen to ten thousand yuan.

Ten thousand yuan! Would a Ten Thousand Yuan Household take out its entire fortune to buy a dilapidated house?

Ordinary people definitely would not be willing to do it.

But in Li Ye's eyes, that price might not even cost the royalties from a single novel.

He had to pad the word count, and he had to do it skillfully.

Li Ye made up his mind to reverse-adapt the short story Lurk into a novella. No matter what, he had to make it one or two hundred thousand characters long.

But after Li Ye wrote a detailed outline based on the television drama's plot, he felt that if he wrote one or two hundred thousand characters, there did not seem to be much room for padding.

The television version of Lurk had added far too much plot content compared with the novel version of Lurk.

Moreover, the television version's character portrayals left Li Ye with three-dimensional impressions. He could clearly grasp the direction for depicting the characters' personas, making the writing easier and more precise.

Character personas were a hurdle no novel could avoid. They were the soul of a book.

Now, whenever Li Ye wrote Yu Zecheng in Lurk, Sun Honglei's image would surely fill his mind.

Perhaps Sun Honglei's performance had not entirely followed the novel's character, but without question, he—Yu Zecheng—had been a success. Li Ye only needed to peel off the skin.

But put it the other way around: what if Li Ye had to create a Yu Zecheng from nothing, on a blank sheet of paper?

Then Li Ye would have to keep thinking, stroke by stroke, filling out the protagonist. If anything unexpected happened midway, he would have to revise him again and again.

One was peeling an existing skin, while the other was building something entirely new. The difference in difficulty was far more than a mere few times over.

That was also one reason why fanfiction webnovels in later generations were easier to begin but harder to break through with.

For example, the Siheyuan novels that had suddenly exploded in popularity and drawn countless writers into the same crowded lane were a typical case.

In the era of precision short-video recommendations, many readers had watched the television drama's most memorable clips. They more or less remembered Qin Huairu's seductive gaze, as well as those scenes where Sha Zhu was both shrewd and XX.

As long as one wrote a Siheyuan novel, just a few hundred words at the beginning could achieve, or even surpass, the effect of more than a hundred thousand words in other webnovels.

Qin Huairu: a shrewd little widow, a vampire latched onto Sha Zhu. She had hooked Sha Zhu so thoroughly that his soul had flown away, and he willingly supported Qin Huairu, her son, her daughter, and her mother-in-law from her first marriage.

Sha Zhu was unmarried, a Sixth-grade worker whose monthly salary plus side income came to over sixty yuan. He lived alone in three rooms... Qin Huairu was remarried, bringing three children and a mother-in-law with her, and as a second-grade worker, her monthly salary was only a little over twenty yuan.

Yet several old men in the Siheyuan desperately tried to match the two together, even persuading Sha Zhu not to miss out on such a huge bargain.

After reading that passage, and combining it with the television scenes in their minds, readers would clearly understand what kind of green-tea bitch character the author was describing.

But what if there were no television drama?

If the author wanted to build Qin Huairu's image in the readers' minds, stroke by stroke through words alone, it would take more time, more writing, and more painstaking effort.

And in that process, the Qin Huairu the author sketched might not necessarily become the dazzling Qin Huairu from the television drama. Perhaps the portrayal would veer eighteen li off course before the author realized in dismay, What the hell is this thing I wrote?

But if an excellent actor in the author's mind had already performed a character image that was deeply rooted in people's hearts and recognized by the public, would that not save the author a great deal of effort?

Of course, the difficult part of fanfiction was that it was hard to break through. The original character template was already there, after all. If you wanted to change it, the difficulties would be as numerous as a thousand mountains and ten thousand rivers.

In 1981, there was no television drama Lurk, but Li Ye had countless vivid and successful character images in his mind. Wasn't that the what-and-what, and the what-what?

Li Ye felt that he was simply too clever. He had saved himself so much effort that no one could even see through it.

He spread out a stack of letter paper, threw himself into it heart and soul, and began writing the first chapter of Lurk.

Yu Zecheng was in charge of wiretapping, and he deeply agreed with the content of the progressives' conversation.

As Li Ye wrote, he vaguely noticed that his little-spy deskmate had habitually craned her neck to peek at what he was writing.

He really was writing a novel?

Wen Leyu immediately felt full of admiration for Li Ye. Although she still did not know how well he would write, in 1981, merely daring to write a novel already put him ahead of countless boys his age.

But before long, Wen Leyu became startled. Then she frowned tightly, seeming very displeased.

Why did he write about a damn spy?