Chapter 152-1: Story Reshaping, Great-race Strife (1) |
After detailed analysis, Qi Sheng saw the living being hiding at the end of the pitch-black space.
It was not composed of physical matter, but a mass of spiritual substance merged into the darkness.
With analysis activated, the other party’s information surfaced in his mind.
[Written Word]
Hunting level: demigod level
Target introduction: a consciousness lifeform that controls Book, Pen, and Wielder. It was originally the Heavenly Dao rules of the Written Word World. After that world collapsed, it descended into the Monster World.
—
Just as Guide had conjectured.
The so-called Written Word race is in fact a force composed of a single lifeform. It constructs worlds within the framework scene of the Book by writing stories, generating system-based troop types.
[Boss, there are other scene records inside the Book’s world.]
At these words, Qi Sheng’s consciousness turned toward the rule book floating in the scene.
His consciousness swept over it. The open pages recorded a total of five stories.
The first story depicts, on the Aistra Continent, a young boy named Leon who, harboring infinite longing to become a god, sets out on a journey to forge a legend. Starting as a lowly soldier, he establishes the legion Light of Dawn and ultimately rises to become the most powerful deity in the world.
But unlike the background synopsis, in the middle of this story an external force (an invading power) interfered.
According to the background text automatically appended by the story, this force was precisely the Black Tide.
When his consciousness tried to make contact with this story, a mass of pitch-black pollutants filled his vision, and countless images rushed through the mottled blackness.
What appeared in Qi Sheng’s mind was a scene on the verge of collapse: the Black Tide sweeping through, Evil Entities rampant, the scene covered in spatial cracks and nearly about to be completely devoured by the Black Tide.
All living beings in the scene were dead and all things withered.
By parsing the complex text on the book, it could be seen that the power of the Black Tide continually seeped into the Book World, pushing the predetermined story background in an uncontrollable direction.
In other words, the terrifying Black Tide smashed one of the story systems created by Written Word. The protagonist ultimately failed to grow into a deity and was strangled in the cradle by the suddenly descended Black Tide Archdemon.
This also made Written Word completely halt updates and abandon the depiction of this story, because the main storyline had already collapsed.
But the words in this story were still being generated automatically.
Black Tide devours… Black Tide devours… Black Tide devours… The story was describing the process of the terrifying Black Tide devouring and digesting the scene.
It can be seen that the Book’s framework world is not completely ruled by these three rule powers, Wielder, Pen, and Book.
Any external object entering the Book World can also influence the direction of the Book World’s plot, and the only thing the behind-the-scenes Written Word does is attempt to change the plot direction by consuming Ink Power.
But such consumption is not without limit.
Ink Power is the energy that weaves the Book World’s plot. Every type of rewrite consumes Ink Power; the stronger the rewrite, the more Ink Power it consumes.
For example, if one wants a warrior to gain power comparable to a deity.
Then that single stroke of depiction would consume an extremely vast amount of Ink Power, already beyond the limits of what the stored Ink Power in this space can accomplish, making it fundamentally impossible to generate the corresponding plot.
Even when it comes to modifying scene rules, the Blue Lantern race favored by Ecstasy, which controls the Rule Divine Lamp, is clearly far stronger than Written Word.
By comparison, the only advantage of the rule power Written Word wields is plasticity.
The world created by combining Wielder, Pen, and Book can generate all kinds of system-based troop types.
And in the first story, Written Word’s last stroke left only one line:
The story collapses; self-devouring feedback.
The first half of this sentence can be understood as, the story was written to collapse, and updates are halted.
The second half is an order, intending to reclaim the Ink Power composing the Book World, but this order clearly did not succeed.
According to the parsed reading, the Book World scene of the first story was frozen by the Evil Moon. This is a scene-constructing force far stronger than the Rule Book, causing the Book World to be unrecoverable by any external force.
One can understand a scene under the Evil Moon’s illumination as a scene framework of higher strength than the Book scene.
Written Word issued an order demanding that the Book World framework self-dissolve and revert to Ink Power for recall, but after the Evil Moon appeared, it reinforced the entire scene into a brand-new scene.
It forcibly kept the Book World’s framework in existence, and during this process the Black Tide devoured all of the Book World composed of Ink Power, converting it into Black Tide energy.
After the Black Tide Archdemon appeared, the first story completely ended in a botched finale. The scene’s main protagonist had already been killed and would soon be sealed as a book and vanish.
Below this story was the second story Written Word wrote.
The background of the story: the world enters an entirely new technological era.
In this era, AI intelligence and the wisdom of living beings are deeply fused. Quantum computing drives data processing speeds to unprecedented heights, and interstellar exploration becomes the shared dream of living beings across the world.
In this rapidly advancing age of technology, there is a city called Evolution Metropolis, the world’s center for technological innovation. It gathers top scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs from all over the world, who together promote the development of world civilization.
The protagonist Hei Ri Daxing’s parents are scientists. From a young age he was filled with curiosity and love for technology. His parents fully supported his interests and helped Hei Ri Daxing grow into a god of technology.
But this story likewise did not develop along the predetermined direction.
In the mid-to-late stages of the story, the Black Tide Archdemon descended once more, causing the story to collapse again.
The protagonist Hei Ri Daxing commanded a mechanical army to resist the Black Tide invasion, only to be killed without suspense by the Evil Spirit controlling the Black Tide. Bereft of its main protagonist, the story completely lost its main plot.
At the end of the story, Written Word tried to salvage the collapsed narrative but still could not stop the Black Tide from devouring the Ink Power in the scene.
The third story, the fourth story… these two stories, though not visited by the Black Tide, were both invaded and ruined by external forces, causing the plots to collapse and end in a botched finale.
And the fifth story is one with a swords-and-magic background framework.
Which was the frozen scene Qi Sheng had seen earlier.
This story was still in its starting phase, but a large amount of Ink Power had already been injected to construct the story scene.
After reading the story, Qi Sheng was curious.
“Guide, what is the conversion rate of Ink Power production?”
In response to the inquiry, Guide fell briefly silent, then spoke.
[According to analysis, after each war ends, the Book World devours all matter in the scene that is not within the story framework. The conversion ratio is 29.83 percent. Although it cannot compare with the terrifying Black Tide, it is still quite good. However, devouring and converting through war is not the core way to obtain Ink Power.]
[I examined this spatial scene in detail and found that there are 320,000 projections present. These projections produce Ink Power every moment.]
“What do you mean, this scene can also automatically generate resources?”
[Boss, many rule powers can produce rule resources through specific means. For example, Battle Soul produces Battle Soul power through one-on-one combat. The Anti-Tide Legion’s War God Seal obtains the power of war through warfare. The Evil Moon rules autonomously generate energy by shrouding a scene. These rules can all autonomously generate energy through specific methods. The paper, pen, and book controlled by Written Word are the same.]
[Written Word connects to countless small worlds by way of consciousness projections, gifting its stories to authors of small worlds through inspiration, dream visitation, and other means. The authors of the small worlds then record the stories Written Word composed and spread them. Every reader’s reading of the story generates Ink Power, which then feeds back into the world composed of Wielder, Pen, and Book.]
[So many writers in small worlds think they are creating stories from their own inspiration, but in fact what they write are stories created by Written Word, then disseminated by the pens of small world authors.]
[To explain using the era before you transmigrated, Boss: a writer suddenly gains inspiration and writes a story titled The Deification Chronicle of Hei Ri Daxing, making the protagonist’s name Hei Ri Daxing. He turns his inspiration into a story and posts it on online. As many readers click to read, that brings Ink Power revenue to Written Word. The better the book performs and the more readers it has, the more Ink Power it produces.]
[This is the core of Ink Power production. Devouring comes second. Therefore the quality of a story affects Ink Power output. If one can write a smash hit pursued by readers across countless worlds, the output of Ink Power will be very considerable, which in turn allows the story scene to develop in a better direction. If a story has no readers’ attention, then it proves the story has no potential and will be forcibly ended by Written Word, because it simply does not produce Ink Power.]
[You can understand it as each story being able to nurture a mine that continually produces resources. A good story can even become a timeless classic in many small worlds and bring Written Word a continuous supply of Ink Power over the long years to come.]
[This is also why Written Word needs to structure stories and compose systems, rather than directly modifying scene rules like the Blue Lantern race. In comparison, the Blue Lantern race’s rule-modification ability is far stronger than the scene world Written Word constructs with Wielder, Pen, and Book, but which method of resource acquisition is stronger is not yet clear.]
Guide’s explanation vividly illustrated the ability Written Word controls and its two ways of acquiring resources.
At this moment, Qi Sheng’s consciousness swept toward those projection nodes.
A torrent of information immediately flooded into his mind.
“You promised daily updates of ten thousand words and to never give up, and what did we get instead? You hit us with a sudden halt and a botched finale. This maneuver is even more blindsiding than the twist in the story.”
“You wrote the beginning just fine, then later suddenly dropped a god-tier Black Tide Archdemon out of nowhere. What kind of melodramatic plot is that? The protagonist is dead. Author, what were you thinking with that pig brain of yours? You really deserve to be scolded.”
“Your halting updates and botched ending is like building a skyscraper and, after the framework is up, leaving us with a bare-shell construction. My enthusiasm for following the story is like the Flaming Mountain doused with a bucket of cold water, instantly stone-cold. You said we would go together all the way, and then you jumped off halfway through, even wrote the protagonist to death. Disgusting, utterly disgusting.”
“What I thought would be a wonderful feast turned into you halting updates and botching the ending, like taking away the dishes halfway through the banquet and then blowing up the venue, throwing in a bunch of nauseating stuff. I want to ask, Author, are you colluding with the villains in the novel, here to torture us readers on purpose? Ptui.”
—
The botched finales of the first four stories filled the projection feedback with readers’ resentment.
Fortunately, each of Written Word’s stories is written by different authors in small worlds under countless pen names, otherwise the intensity of the flaming would have gone up several more levels.
Even so, though four stories had already ended badly, readers were still reading them and still producing Ink Power.
It was just that the Ink Power produced by botched stories was extremely sparse.
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