I suddenly had a little flash of inspiration.
A tiny one, not enough to sustain a standalone story.
So I decided to write a side story.
As a legal professional, Jiang Chiyan cared deeply about copyright protection. During his time as a visiting professor at a university, he had ruthlessly torn into every privileged child who tried to coast on his papers and projects, giving them a thorough dressing-down.
But.
Xiao Cheng was his exception.
Xiao Cheng disliked living off someone else, and he disliked relying on powerful connections even more. Though he and Jiang Chiyan had registered their marriage abroad years ago, he never threw his weight around using the Jiang Family's influence. Every day, he kept an extremely low profile, busy shooting one film, recording another wilderness survival show, or flying from place to place to perform on tour, rain or shine...
Yet Jiang Chiyan, who had fiercely condemned "academic overlords" one day, secretly added Xiao Cheng's name to several of his own projects the next.
Xiao Cheng knew nothing about it.
Until one day, Xiao Cheng received a call from a law professor in his seventies, who addressed him with one honorific after another and even offered such courtesies as "please do us the honor of attending an academic conference" and "your presence would grace our humble gathering; we would be deeply honored." Utterly bewildered, Xiao Cheng searched his own name on CNKI and in think tanks, only then realizing what had happened.
Xiao Cheng formally protested to Jiang Chiyan. He was a man who spent all day dealing with actors and singers; what was this about suddenly having his name on so many projects and becoming an academic Daji? How was he any different from an academic overlord? It was far too unfair to