Chapter 5#
Don’t Pigeon: “Looking at the current trend, this new book of yours is going to fly!”
Don’t Pigeon: “Keep a steady mind; the results after it’s listed will definitely not be bad. For a newcomer’s first book, persistence is victory!”
Don’t Pigeon: “You must stick to the outline! Whatever you do, don’t let yourself run wild!”
Early in the morning, the editor was excitedly sending him messages like crazy.
Qiao Jing’s train of thought was abruptly interrupted.
He stopped typing, looked at the flashing window on the computer, and let out a sigh.
For some reason, his editor seemed to always think that he would become mentally unstable because of a slight improvement in the book at hand.
While this was indeed a common problem for newcomer authors, Qiao Jing was a “great god” author who had been writing tirelessly for several years and had over a dozen published works under his belt.
This little bit of success wasn’t even as much as his pocket change back then.
Overexcited? Impossible.
“Don’t worry,” he replied, “I know what I’m doing.”
But just as he logged out of QQ and prepared to code in peace, 008, who was constantly monitoring the data for “Song of the Earth,” suddenly shouted: “Oh no, someone just reported your story!”
“Reported?” Qiao Jing frowned, clicked on Liuliu Web’s report self-check page, and found it was an anonymous report saying the data for his novel was fake and suspecting a studio of “brushing” points (artificially inflating stats).
But any anonymity was a paper tiger in front of 008. It said indignantly: “The reporter is an author from the same period as you; he’s just jealous!”
In short, because Qiao Jing’s performance as a newcomer on Liuliu Web was too good, it attracted envy from peers.
Anyway, anonymous reports don’t require responsibility. They report first without a second thought; it’s best if they can drag Qiao Jing down, and if they can’t… well, they haven’t lost anything.
This wasn’t the first time Qiao Jing had encountered such a thing.
Xingchen Web was massive, and this kind of peer infighting was a hundred times more severe than on Liuliu Web.
Like Sa’en back then—didn’t he openly hook up with the higher-ups, and his editor even personally stepped in to help him modify the data?
Having experienced great storms, he didn’t take this small matter to heart much. He simply clicked on the data self-check, briefly mentioned the matter to his editor, and went back to coding.
But Don’t Pigeon was worried to death.
As a newly hired editor, Qiao Jing could be considered the newcomer author with the most potential under him at the moment.
An author’s performance is tied to the editor’s results. Even if only for the year-end bonus, he had to help Qiao Jing handle this matter well!
Out of caution, he first carefully looked at the data for “Song of the Earth,” then had the website’s bot check it again, and finally read the first three chapters… and accidentally got hooked.
Fortunately, they were a novel website to begin with, and Qiao Jing was an author for Liuliu Web, so even if the boss saw him, Don’t Pigeon could confidently say he was working.
“It’s really well-written; no wonder it has such data.”
An excited smile flickered in his eyes. It seemed he had truly picked up a treasure this time!
Just as he was rejoicing, the boss, Liu Huayi, who sat in the front office, suddenly hurried over, covered his phone, and asked in a low voice: “That author under you called Yan Heqing—what on earth did he write?”
Don’t Pigeon was stunned: “Ah, what?”
Liu Huayi glared at him and handed over the phone: “You talk to him. Remember to be humble!”
Don’t Pigeon took the phone in a daze and instinctively said: “Hello?”
“Hello,” a voice came from the other end of the line—old but full of vigor. He asked very politely: “May I ask if ‘Yan Heqing’ is an author you’re responsible for?”
“Yes, yes, he is.”
Don’t Pigeon immediately became nervous. The call had gone all the way to the boss; could Yan Heqing have gotten into some kind of trouble?
But even if he had, unless there was something wrong with the content of the novel, it shouldn’t have anything to do with Liuliu Web.
Because the contract between the author and the website was an employment contract rather than a labor contract, the website didn’t have to pay social security and wasn’t responsible for the author’s own behavior.
Moreover, Don’t Pigeon had just read “Song of the Earth” and hadn’t found anything wrong.
“Then can you give me his contact information?” the other party asked again.
According to regulations, this was definitely not allowed, but because the website boss was standing right there, Don’t Pigeon had to grit his teeth, pull up the contract Qiao Jing had sent when he signed, and read out a series of numbers.
After hanging up, he immediately asked: “Boss, who is this person?”
Liu Huayi leaned against his workstation and said with a stiff expression: “Gao Xinglu.”
“Gao Xinglu?” Don’t Pigeon asked, puzzled. “Never heard of him.”
“You can search for him online.”
Half a minute later.
Don’t Pigeon: “…”
He slowly raised his head and asked with a stiff face: “Boss, is it too late for me to resign now?”
“Too late,” Liu Huayi twitched the corners of his mouth and patted his shoulder. “Remember to set Yan Heqing as a ‘special follow,’ pin him to the top of your list, and keep your phone on 24 hours a day. You can ignore your girlfriend’s messages, but you must reply to his within seconds, got it?”
It was only after Liu Huayi left that Don’t Pigeon realized—
“But boss, I don’t even have a girlfriend yet!”
On the other side.
“Supervisor, it’s a defunct number.” Ding Qi’s senior put down the phone. “What should we do? Do I need to find someone to keep investigating?”
Gao Xinglu was silent for a moment and shook his head.
“No need,” he sighed. “This result is somewhat expected. Little Ding, help me register an account on Liuliu Web too. I’ll chat with him in the comment section.”
Ding Qi hurriedly said: “Okay, Supervisor.”
But as he took his supervisor’s phone, Ding Qi was still clicking his tongue in his heart. He hadn’t expected that his supervisor would also have a day when he’d follow a novel online just like him.
After the student finished registering the account, Gao Xinglu didn’t post a comment immediately. Instead, he seriously read the synopsis of “Song of the Earth” and the author’s own column. He found that the other party basically used the website’s default avatar and cover and also basically didn’t reply to reader comments.
“Supervisor, here is the printout you wanted.”
Ding Qi’s senior had printed all those chapters on A4 paper and handed them to Gao Xinglu.
“Good.” He took them.
Due to his age and years of working at a desk, Gao Xinglu’s eyesight had declined rapidly. Even with reading glasses, reading on a phone was a bit difficult. Therefore, he hadn’t finished the novel while in the car.
However, just the parts Ding Qi had shown him were enough to shock Gao Xinglu.
After he finished reading it all, the old man gasped and suddenly stood up from his seat.
The several students nearby were all startled.
“Super… Supervisor? Are you okay?”
Due to being overly excited, Gao Xinglu’s face was a bit flushed, his chest was heaving up and down, and his breathing was as rapid as if he had just finished a marathon.
The students present had never seen him show such a lost composure.
The old man clutched that stack of printed papers tightly with his aged right hand, barely managed to compose himself, and said in a deep voice: “Gather everyone, prepare all the materials, contact the Institute of Plasma Physics, and start the 1,084th simulation experiment immediately!”
Gao Xinglu had long thrown the previous thousand-plus failures to the back of his mind. If their research results were published, he could even imagine what kind of shock it would cause in the field of physics!
Of course, he was only thinking about it.
Because for something involving the country’s highest-secret technology, public publication was basically impossible.
Controlled nuclear fusion, simply put, is an artificial sun, representing an energy source entirely different from traditional ones—clean, efficient, and very cheap.
Gao Xinglu had dedicated his life to research in this area, so he recognized the value of the relevant theories in “Song of the Earth” at a glance—
The transformation it would bring would not only affect energy, the military industry, and aerospace but could even influence the international situation and determine the future development direction of humanity!
The energy released by nuclear fusion far exceeds that of nuclear fission, but it has stopped at laboratory models due to safety issues. Currently, all nuclear reactors used for electricity or military purposes worldwide are based on nuclear fission. If there were a lightweight and safe nuclear fusion drive device to replace traditional chemical fuels, in the field of space exploration alone, humanity would go further than in the previous several centuries!
Let alone the nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines the country has been striving to develop, Gao Xinglu thought excitedly, even “helicarriers” that only appear in Western superhero movies would no longer be a fantasy!
After waking up in the morning, Qiao Jing checked the comment section as usual and found that besides the enthusiastic reader who wrote him the writing guide last time, there was another long review in his comment section.
Reader ID: Road to Travel is Hard (Xinglu Nan).
“So long?” He looked at the text, which didn’t even reach the bottom after a full page, and felt a bit of a headache.
Looking at the content, this person should be studying a related major.
But Qiao Jing frowned and looked for a long time, only to find…
He couldn’t understand basically 98% of it.
He wasn’t a nuclear physics student after all; he had just copied the theories from 008’s database while writing the plot.
And because he had consulted too much material, Qiao Jing almost couldn’t distinguish which technologies were already in use and which were still unsolved problems worldwide.
But seeing how serious the other party was, in the spirit of being responsible, Qiao Jing also pulled himself together and prepared to reply properly.
He barely managed to extract the key content from the two full pages of long reviews and found that this reader was discussing a technical problem regarding nuclear fusion with him. So he simply took a shortcut and had 008 find a relevant formula directly from the database and dumped it all to the other party.
Gao Xinglu, who was wearing reading glasses and looking at his phone: !!!!
He looked at that formula and the annotations given by the author below the formula repeatedly for a full eight or nine times. In the end, his hand holding the phone couldn’t help but tremble. His whole being was in a state of thinking where madness and reason coexisted. The expression on his face changed every few seconds like a face-changing performer—one moment it was incredulity, the next it was sudden realization, and then it was something like crying and laughing at the same time.
“Supervisor, what’s wrong with you?” his students asked cautiously, fearing their supervisor might have a sudden stroke from being too excited.
It couldn’t be helped; Gao Xinglu looked way too scary!
Gao Xinglu only then came to his senses. He immediately took a screenshot of the formula to save it and had a student quickly call Liu Huayi, asking the website to “harmonize” (censor) this life-threatening author’s comment.
This formula, no matter which country in the world it was placed in, was absolutely a secret among secrets! It was also a great achievement enough to make any scientist go down in history!
—Big shot, is it really okay for you to just casually post it on a novel website like that?
At this moment, Academician Gao’s train of thought actually synchronized strangely with his student Ding Qi’s.