A Proclamation and Cyberpunk

The three returned to the dormitory.

Only Liu Zhihong and Yang Hao were in the room, playing Chinese chess.

Xie Yang shoved his battered suitcase beneath his bed and asked the two roommates playing chess, "Where are the other three?"

"They went to the classroom to study," Liu Zhihong said, slamming down a piece. "A knight check from behind. Check!"

Yang Hao scratched his head in frustration.

Sitting on the edge of his bed and picking at his toes, Liu Zhihong smugly said, "Hand over your rook nicely so I can take it."

Chen Guiliang stood nearby, studying the two of them.

As he remembered it, Liu Zhihong and Yang Hao had become missing persons after graduating high school. He had completely lost track of them.

After watching for a while, Chen Guiliang took his clothes to shower. He felt grimy all over.

This shabby tube-shaped dorm building had no private bathrooms. Each floor shared one toilet and one shower room, which also doubled as a laundry room.

There was naturally no water heater or bathroom heater either. Students had to fetch hot water themselves from the boiler room.

Chen Guiliang did not even fetch hot water. He had showered in cold water throughout all three years of high school.

Even in freezing, snowy winters.

A pot of hot water cost twenty cents, and Chen Guiliang thought it was too wasteful.

Someone was doing laundry in the shower room and even greeted him first. "Taking a shower, Chen the Hero?"

"How did you do on the exam today?" Chen Guiliang had forgotten who the guy was, so he could only make meaningless small talk.

The guy rubbed soap over his clothes and scrubbed them. "Not bad."

Chen Guiliang set his bucket on the laundry counter and casually turned on the tap.

While waiting for the cold water to fill it, he took off all his clothes and gave his impressively magnificent dick a shake.

The student doing laundry happened to turn around and see it, instantly feeling inferior.

Once the bucket was more than half full, Chen Guiliang poured it straight over his head.

Hiss!

Tomorrow was the Start of Winter. Having cold water suddenly dumped over his head was truly exhilarating.

He had not done this in nearly twenty years, and Chen Guiliang found it strangely interesting.

He had not even bought shampoo. He rubbed a bar of soap all over his head, then scrubbed his hair for a while. By then, the second bucket of cold water was full.

Shivering, Chen Guiliang could not even be bothered to use the bucket this time. He simply stuck his head beneath the tap and rinsed himself directly.

By the time he finished bathing, his whole body was trembling.

Even catching a cold or running a fever did not matter. He could tough it out without medicine.

Left-behind children from the countryside had cheap lives, but tough ones too. Like weeds growing from cracks in stone, sunlight and water were luxuries to them, yet even the slightest chance was enough to let them live.

Stuffing his changed clothes into the bucket, Chen Guiliang shuffled back to the dormitory in slippers.

There was no hair dryer.

His dripping wet hair simply dried in the air.

Xie Yang was lying on his bed reading "Zi Chuan," while Xu Haibo reviewed the humanities exam he would take tomorrow.

Chen Guiliang took out paper and a pen, intending to write a submission for the competition.

Writing was something Chen Guiliang had always been good at.

He had majored in journalism at university and interned at a major southern newspaper while still in school. After graduation, he covered local news and worked for two years as an undercover reporter.

When an editor maliciously altered one of his articles to stir up social conflict, he quit in anger. A friend then introduced him to a magazine as an editor.

But the traditional media industry was in decline, and after only half a year as an editor, the magazine went bankrupt and shut down.

Next, Chen Guiliang joined a web portal.

But that portal also gradually declined. Left with no choice, Chen Guiliang switched to a game company.

The gaming industry in those days was like a wilderness full of rising warlords. If you did well, promotions came quickly. He started in marketing, then transferred to operations, becoming deputy operations director within three years.

A game company's operations department appeared to wield enormous authority, but in reality, it could not make decisions about anything. And whenever problems arose, it had to take the blame for the development and marketing departments!

Having grown into a veteran scapegoat, Chen Guiliang was eventually fired by his boss over one massive mess.

In middle age, he lost both his job and his marriage, suffering a double blow.

Giving up on himself, Chen Guiliang took his share of the marital assets and started a game business with three friends.

They were brimming with ambition.

Then they lost everything!

Just when they had run out of options, a friend working as a mid-level manager at Shanda asked whether they needed a legitimate license for Legend.

By paying Shanda 150,000 yuan every month, they could freely modify it into a browser game or mobile game. They could even legally run private servers, so long as their version did not surpass the official one.

Because they entered the Legend mobile-game market early, that lousy game somehow made them a fortune.

After that, they made reskinned browser games and mobile games for Middle Eastern tycoon markets—the sort of thing called "Sultan's XX."

Including Chen Guiliang, all four shareholders achieved financial freedom.

Once the business succeeded, infighting followed.

There was a mountain of stupid, messy bullshit. Chen Guiliang got so angry that he completely gave up, cultivated his body and mind, and picked up his literary dream again. He even went to Qidian and wrote two flop novels.

So what should he write for the competition submission?

The editors handling the rough preliminary review were all from Sprout Magazine.

There were too many submissions for them to read through, so an article had to grab attention from the very beginning.

Chen Guiliang sat at the desk and thought carefully. Then his gaze suddenly swept over the newspaper's contents. It was an old newspaper from half a year ago, spread across the desk by the window as a tablecloth.

The front-page headline read: America Invades Iraq!

Inspiration struck instantly.

Xu Haibo sat on the other side of the desk, originally reviewing for tomorrow's exam. When he suddenly heard Chen Guiliang writing nonstop, he curiously got up and went over to look.

The more he read, the more astonished he became, until he was utterly dumbfounded.

But he did not dare interrupt Chen Guiliang's writing. Only after the article was finished did Xu Haibo suddenly shout, "Come look, everyone! Chen the Hero's article is fucking amazing!"

"What the hell are you making a fuss about?"

Xie Yang, who had been happily reading his novel, cursed Xu Haibo first before slowly coming over and reading aloud:

"'A Proclamation Against America's Invasion of Iraq.' George W. Bush, ruler of America, is cruel by nature and violent in deed. In the past, he relied on strength to oppress the weak; today, he stirs disaster to bring calamity upon the people. He conceals schemes for oil and stealthily wields power over the world. Outwardly he invokes freedom; inwardly he harbors the greed of a glutton..."

"'Iraq, ancient land between two rivers, old nation of the crescent... Yet the clowns of the White House fabricated false evidence of chemical weapons and spread hollow lies of uranium bombs... A hundred thousand living souls became new ghosts, while millennia of civilization fell into the nine abyssal depths...'"

"'In ancient days, Shang's tyrant was overthrown at Muye; when the Nazis ran rampant, Berlin fell. Today, American imperial tyranny exceeds even Jie and Zhou, while its cunning surpasses that of the Axis...'"

"'All who possess blood and breath cannot help but rage. Those who retain a conscience—how can they stand idly by?... Blood stains the dollar, and it will one day devour its maker; lies woven into crowns will surely fall into filth. In the setting sun over the White House, the fading shadow of an empire has appeared; when the Stars and Stripes fall, justice shall be gloriously revealed! Let this proclamation spread throughout the world, so all may know of it.'"

This sort of article was not particularly unusual.

Anyone with a decent foundation in classical Chinese could write one.

But in the eyes of a group of high school students, it was a dazzling masterpiece of astonishing talent.

After Xie Yang finished reading, he actually forgot to toss his hair in a showy pose. He stood stunned for several seconds before saying, "Holy shit, how did you write something this awesome?"

Liu Zhihong snatched the article and read it again. After going through it twice, he said, "Fuck, no wonder you always got full marks in essays."

Yang Hao was rather introverted. After racking his brains for a long while, he gave Chen Guiliang a thumbs-up and said, "Chen the Hero wrote it so well. You'll definitely win first prize. You're basically our school's second Guo Xiaosi!"

The second Guo Xiaosi...

Chen Guiliang felt deeply uncomfortable hearing that. It somehow felt like he had been insulted.

"I'm copying this down!" Xu Haibo looked worshipful, as though he wanted to take the article around the entire school to promote it.

High school students were still rather simple. As long as you truly had ability, they would wholeheartedly admire you.

Chen Guiliang ignored his roommates' flattery and sat there, beginning to plan his second submission.

He had bought four copies of Sprout Magazine. He could cut out the submission pages and submit four different articles.

It was best not to touch essays, especially those that ran contrary to mainstream intellectual trends.

Who knew what sort of people the editors were?

Even those famous writers serving as final-round judges had, to varying degrees, been influenced by neoliberalism.

It would be going too far to call them all traitors, but they had long been subtly shaped by it. The limitations of their era were right there. Hadn't that little dog Yu praised Mo Yan's Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out to the skies back then?

Chen Guiliang had no interest in arguing with them. He only wanted to enter a prestigious university through the New Concept Competition.

Arguing was useless anyway. It would only waste ink.

Chen Guiliang had worked in southern media for several years. He knew all too well what those people were like. He himself had once been one of them, only coming to his senses after an article of his was maliciously altered, and hurriedly jumping out of that cesspit.

Once China's economy took off and the West started falling behind, most people would naturally change their views.

As for those who stubbornly refused to change, just treat them as traitors and kick them twice.

Chen Guiliang glanced at Xie Yang, who was currently trying to quit the internet, then put pen to paper and wrote his second submission: "My Cyber Home."

It was a cyberpunk short story of only around five thousand words, one that could be expanded into a novel at any time.

(Collecting signatures to protest the school could make someone excited, but carrying bamboo shoots into town to sell made someone feel ashamed. The two were very different. Both were Old Wang's personal experiences. Sadly, when old classmates reunited more than a decade later and brought up the signatures they had collected to demand computer fees back then, most of them no longer remembered it.)

(Many of the events in this book's first hundred thousand words came from Old Wang's own experiences, though the timeline was deliberately moved two or three years earlier. Some details were exaggerated while writing. Others were deliberately toned down, because reality was too absurd to pass review.)

(Thanks to Immortal Exile Qitian and Xuanyuan Qinghuan for their Alliance Leader donations.)