November 7, 2026.
Hong Kong City.
"!"
Xu Shi suddenly jolted awake from a nightmare.
He looked up and instinctively glanced around.
He was in his room. The lighting was dim, and the computer screen before him shone with a harsh light, rows of densely packed text filling its e-ink display.
What was this?
Xu Shi raised his hands and spent a long time carefully examining his unharmed body.
He hadn't died.
He hadn't been in a car accident.
He hadn't met Wen Yu, Song Zhixing, Xia Shian...
"!"
He remembered.
This was a novel he had written.
He was its original author.
It had been serialized since last year and had remained very popular. In July, "Xia Shian," one of the novel's lead tops, had even ranked first on the list of most popular fictional characters.
There were hordes of men and women fantasizing about dating him.
Xu Shi couldn't stand it and had personally spent money boosting "Wen Yu" in the rankings.
He had given plenty of spotlight moments to the other lead tops and even indulged himself by adding a few scenes involving unrelated characters, reducing Xia Shian's presence until he might as well not have existed.
Unsurprisingly, this had upset the fans.
They had cursed him out for two straight months.
Xu Shi hadn't cared about any of that. The real problem was that the fans had later dug up proof that he really was indulging his personal whims.
His darling was a minor supporting character, Xie Yanci.
The only top-tier alpha in the novel, a golden boy whose appearance received three full pages of description whenever he appeared, and whose status and position surpassed those of every lead top.
At the time, readers had thought he was the hidden sixth top.
Then they discovered he