(A place to park your brain)
(Some of my added details are a little weird)
My name is Sima Zhenglong. I'm an adult, and I'm currently staying in a suite at a luxury hotel in Tokyo, feeling conflicted.
It's a long story, but unfortunately, I can't make it short.
Before I reincarnated, I was working overtime at my company. Blessed with the fruits of labor, I couldn't fight back against life's beatings, so all I could do was ask Gongjin—no, wait, all I could do was lie down and enjoy it.
But with layoffs looming, I had no choice but to start competing with everyone else. Sometimes, all it took to give birth to a scab was for things to be that simple.
It wasn't until I, a workhorse who had never drunk coffee before, foolishly tried to harness coffee's power to make it through a second all-nighter that my heart began racing wildly. I shut my eyes in agony.
When I woke up, I discovered I'd gotten a fresh start!
The revival process was simple. In this life, I was still a boy from the Dragon Kingdom; only the world had changed a little. Not that much, though.
My family background was excellent, too. You could truly call us a family of scholars—or, to put it another way, an academic dynasty.
I had an older brother and an older sister. They'd both been selected for a special program for gifted youths. One had chosen biology, which was known as a dead end, while the other had chosen physics, which was regarded as the field of hope.
As for me, I wasn't all that interested in science and engineering. Mostly, my previous life's job had worn down my edges and drained away my enthusiasm. Choosing the humanities was one way for me to enjoy life.
I'd thought the humanities might be a little dull, but my uncles and older cousins turned out to be far more interested in me than I was in becoming a writer.
After all, these days, there were very few young people willing to pursue traditional literature.
The changes to this world's setting showed up in this area, too. After my uncles and older cousins took turns teaching me, I discovered that this world had a slightly enormous gap in its literary scene.
And the "system" that had appeared along with my reincarnation changed into the "Literary Master Transporter System" after I chose my future path. It seemed my system didn't think I could become a literary master in this world through my own efforts. What a shame.
I'd meant to get along with everyone as an ordinary reincarnator and work my way toward a life of doing nothing.
But I hadn't expected this heaven-sent system to make my already comfortable life feel a little suffocating.
At first, I thought the Literary Master Transporter System could be my "hard work and sweat," but I never figured out how to activate it.
For all those years, with no outside help to rely on, I could only follow my elders, build up my knowledge, and learn to write.
Fortunately, I turned out to have a little talent for literature. Even without my elders' help, the several short stories I published online were very well received. In terms of quantity, they kept pace with the short stories I'd published in magazines with their help. That also gave my social media account a small following.
When it came to writing, inspiration mattered, but so did building up experience.
I felt like going to middle school was optional, so I applied to skip straight to my third year, then took a leave of absence to travel.
After traveling around the country, it was time to go abroad. Traveling was fun once, but traveling all the time was even better.
Unfortunately, I hit the biggest setback of my life on my very first stop abroad.
Japan was a fascinating country. I'd come here because I wanted to visit the Sendai Lu Xun Memorial and Research Association in Sendai.
Then my elders asked me to visit Professor Takahashi at Tokyo University while I was there and, if possible, bring back a few more bottles of plum wine.
Only after I visited the professor did I learn that this plum wine had quite a history. It was made with Sendai Lu Xun Plum, and a single tree could produce fewer than thirty bottles at a time.
In the end, I had to trade the draft of one of my future articles to get fifteen bottles of plum wine and fifteen bottles of juice.
After asking the professor to send ten bottles of wine back home for me, I took only one bottle of juice and a letter with me. The rest of the juice and wine stayed there until my next visit.
Since I was paying with a future manuscript, it was fine if I skimmed a little off the top, right?
Besides, it was also a way to vent my frustration, because that letter had me feeling deeply uneasy.
When I opened it, my first thought was that this world was at least relatively normal. My second was to mourn my high school years.
To put it simply, my elders thought I'd spent too much time having fun over the past few years and needed to settle down. And since I'd traveled to so many places during that time, I must have gathered plenty of experience. So they'd asked this professor to find me a full-boarding school in Japan and enroll me there. I was to spend three years in seclusion, writing a book.
It wasn't until I finished reading the letter that I understood why the professor had proposed that trade. He'd come prepared!
Being locked up in a full-boarding school for three years wasn't exactly good news. But when I took the invitation from the envelope, my system reacted for the first time.
Advanced Nurturing High School. What could I say? I recognized the name. In my previous life, I'd gone through a pretty "otaku" phase, and the most popular anime back then was this one.
After watching a few episodes, I'd gone out of my way to read the original novels. Don't get me wrong. It wasn't because I was interested in the novels or the anime. I was interested in Kinugasa.
Guard of the Dawn, Memoirs—Kinugasa's notorious reputation had stuck with me! He'd never once managed to keep a story from falling apart halfway through! When the plot derailed, I wanted to yell, "Can't you think of something, Rail?"
As for my system, it reacted to the school and let me access its interface for the first time.
Its function was very simple. However many private points I earned at Advanced Nurturing High School, I'd have the same amount in my system. I could spend those points in the system shop to buy famous works that hadn't been published in this world.
Of course, exploiting bugs wasn't allowed. The system would strictly judge any points I earned at Advanced Nurturing High School. If I hired someone and repeatedly traded points with them, that would only count once. Put simply, it only counted point earnings withdrawn from the school—not like GDP.
After that, I continued traveling around Japan. I didn't return to Tokyo until about three months before enrollment, when I rented a hotel suite and started sorting through the material I'd collected during my travels.
It was important stuff. Without those manuscripts to back me up, I'd have one less card to play if anyone suspected I'd hired a ghostwriter.
Besides, it was a habit I'd developed in this life. My main motivation was what my elders had told me: once I—or the book I wrote—became famous, all of this could fetch a high price and be used to curry favor.
One day, when I went to a nearby department store to buy ingredients for dinner, which I planned to cook myself, I couldn't help thinking that Japan was a small place.
I saw a girl with light pink hair standing in front of a display window. Her eyes kept wandering between the store employees, the customers, and the hair clip in the window.
I'd only gone out to buy groceries, and I'd run into a character from the story—at a time like this, no less.
After briefly weighing the pros and cons, I went over, took out the hair clip, bought it, and told a little lie as I "gave" it to Ichinose.
It wasn't expensive anyway. Converted into my currency, it cost less than a thousand. If I ended up in Class B after enrolling, this would give me a foundation to coast on, wouldn't it?
As for whether Ichinose might have ended up in Class A if she hadn't had this black mark, all I could say was that Nagumo didn't seem to have any black marks either, yet he was still placed in Class B. If Classes A and B were going to compete, both classes needed a leader.
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