Translator: Xiaoxi
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Yu Yao was [Moonlight] magazine’s main editor, and it had been open for half a year. The contents from writers and artists weren’t consistent. The number of things that Yu Yao needed to attend to amounted to tens of millions; therefore, she couldn’t be as available as Old Miao. With her taking on the second proofreading of [The Book of the God Luohe] was something at the request of Zhou Chuan, and wasn’t something she could reject.
When this was compared to Old Miao, Yu Yao needed more time to finish the second proofreading. Therefore, once this matter was settled, she arranged for the first proofreading to be finalised by the end of Wednesday, with Chu Li. She would need to see the first proofreading document on her desk on Thursday morning.
Chu Li think too much about things before immediately agreeing. When she pleaded with Yu Yao on Friday night, she had already guaranteed that there would be no issues. On Saturday night, the main editor announcement for [The Book of the God Luohe] was made, and for the rest of the weekend, Old Miao’s shadow could not be seen. It was very quiet, and this quietness stayed until the regular meeting on Monday. He finally found the opportunity in the meeting room to catch Yu Yao, who was organising materials by herself.
Both people sat down to talk face-to-face.
When facing Old Miao, who had been suppressing his anger for a day, Yu Yao didn’t know what to say since she didn’t know how Old Miao had offended Zhou Chuan.
It was perhaps one sentence.
Maybe it was an expression.
Since Old Miao was the type of person….
“I don’t know why you are so persistent about [The Book of the God Luohe].”
“You really don’t know?” Old Miao laughed coldly. “This is Zhou Chuan we are talking about– did you think that writers are the only ones who need to have masterpieces? Where would the title of Golden Editor come from? At this moment, there is an excellent opportunity in front of me, but you have just snatched it from me.”
Yu Yao contemplated this for a moment.
“Old Miao, I told you very early on, Zhou Chuan and the author Nian Nian that you are working with now are not the same…
You need to be careful of those reputable young people; they are usually really hard to handle.”
Within the office, Yu Yao sat on the seat facing Old Miao, her figure full and round with a chubby face. Her eyes were round and short, making her look very astute. When she stared at people seriously, there was a sense that she could see beyond the surface. “With such a high and proud heart of a literati, did you only think that these are the only things that can be used to describe Lu Xun?” [footnote] TN: Lu Xun is a really reputable writer [/footnote]
Old Miao lowered his head in frustration: a proud literati? Doesn’t matter if that’s something that can be used to describe Zhou Chuan, the thing of being prideful, he would probably be placing first in his generation.
Zhou Chuan was so prideful that he could probably take a step and ascend to the heavens.
Old Miao: “So why did you think it would be a good idea to assign this book to a newbie editor then? The initial reason for why you hired her was already strange enough, we already had enough people….”
Yu Yao: “I already said this before, she was very enthusiastic.”
Old Miao let out a ridiculing laugh with a disregarding expression: “Enthusiasm! Who are you kidding? Who in this industry is not enthusiastic? Picking books, making books, selling books, how well the book sells, aren’t these things dependent on the author themselves working hard and the personnel themselves, like editors, this business of being enthusiastic, can you eat it as a meal?” [footnote] TN: Implies that enthusiasm isn’t something that can feed you [/footnote]
“Of course,” Yu Yao said casually, “is this a joke that in the blink of an eye, your little food bowl got smashed?” [footnote] TN: food bowl: implies that him losing his livelihood [/footnote]
“…..”
During the regular meeting, Old Miao spent the whole meeting with his resting bitch face on, especially when Yu Yao emphasised that Chu Li was the person responsible as the Main Editor for [The Book of the God Luohe], and this was an important task. Old Miao and Xiao Niao were both the same… with Yu Yao asking Chu Li to finish doing the first proofreading in three days before handing it over to her. Any other tasks relating to the new issue of the magazine were put on hold. Yu Yao’s own words were: “With Nian Nian as a consistent magazine writer, as well as A’Gui that Chu Li found, is enough.”
This suggested that there were three authors that Xiao Niao found, but she only had one. Chu Li was astonished: “Ai, Chief Editor, I actually can…”
Yu Yao glanced at her: “For the time being, given the amount of time you have had, you have only found this one person. Why waste time waiting for a miracle to happen? No need to force things.”
After Yu Yao finished saying this, she successfully revived Xiao Niao and Old Miao, whose faces were as black as the bottom of a pot. Especially when she mentioned [Hua Li], the book that was assigned to Xiao Niao. Her expression brightened.
Chu Li: “…..”
Chu Li didn’t know why she was randomly bitten for some reason, but she only knew that by the end of the meeting, the whole meeting room had the strange atmosphere of ‘Although I am not well off, you aren’t better off’. This gave off the feeling of almost….equality?
…..What the fuck is this type of equality?
At the end of the regular meeting, Chu Li was hugging a heavy stack of A3 photocopies, grabbing a red pen with her head buried and working hard.
Proofreading a novel that had 400,000 words that was getting close to 500,000 in three days, needed speed, but the quality of work couldn’t be bad either. This sort of task really was quite deadly, hoping to finish this task by working regular hours from morning until 5:30 was just a daydream.
Therefore, Chu Li couldn’t delay a thing and got started right away.
From the first page:
[Book of the God Luo He] was the story of a wild child who liked to collect pearls and wear white clothes next to the ocean, accidentally picking up a strange, magical book called [Book of the God Luo He]. The book was just like [Classic of Mountains and Seas], which recorded a time very, very long ago, before humans, when birds and beasts dominated this yellow land. The wild child found that he had incidentally used his own blood to summon a strange, wild beast from the book. The beast followed the child as it grew up to adulthood, while he used the other small monsters within the book to help him join the army and protect his nation from enemy countries. However, one day, the child became a big hero called the White Clothed General, and the wild beast became a handsome general too, telling the child: “Now you’re stupefied, huh? Within the human realm, there are only about nine creatures like me.”
The wild child was truly astonished, and from then on, it opened up a new door to a new world.
Back then, when he went to fight a battle, it was with humans. Now that his wild beast had transformed into a human, it had not told him the truth that there would be more strange things occurring in his world now. His goals in battle moved from fighting humans to fighting beasts.
The book was quite good.
Chu Li ate her food while she did the editing, with one hand holding chopsticks and the other flipping pages. Even in her breaks, she had it perched on her knees with her head slowly slipping down as she fought her sleepiness.
While she was at the breakroom reheating milk, she was looking at it.
While standing outside the toilet door and waiting for a cubicle, she was looking at it.
When she finished work, she shoved it into a cloth bag before carrying it home to keep looking.
When sleeping, she couldn’t help but wish she could sleepwalk and crawl over to look over it for wrong words.
Within those moments, that proofreading book became Chu Li’s baby, one that she would carry to the heavens or down to hell, while she ate, shat and slept. If she could, she would have showered with it covered in cling wrap to look at two more lines.
Thankfully, Chu Li was a big fan of Zhou Chuan’s writing; if this was writing she didn’t like, she would not have made it past Tuesday afternoon before wanting to throw herself off the building.
As time went on, Chu Li found out that the issues of ‘dry and dull’ along with ‘time is tight’ were not the key issues. The main issue was within the editing period. If she encountered any ambiguous sentences that she couldn’t solve herself and needed to find Zhou Chuan for an explanation, the other party’s reaction allowed her to verify her previous guess. Zhou Chuan was the type of person who would be considered the worst and most notorious bastard of the ‘whatever’ author group.
Round 1:
Chu Li: “Laoshi, I just wanted to ask, your main part is based on the fighting of beasts. In the start you said Lao Da was a Bird, Lao Er was a Turtle, Lao San was a White Tiger, and Lao Si was a Dragon….how is it that Boss 3 has become a Nine Coloured Deer? Is it a White Tiger or Nine Coloured Deer?” [footnote] TN: refers to their respective oldest, second, third and fourth oldest.[/footnote]
Zhou Chuan: “Whatever, whichever bit has more and is harder to change, just keep it, and change the other parts.”
Chu Li: “…..”
Zhou Chuan: “Witty, no?”
Round 2:
Chu Li: “Laoshi ah, didn’t you say the male leads’ mum died of illness? Why did she show up later?”
Zhou Chuan: “If you deleted the bit that said his mum died, wouldn’t that fix things?”
Chu Li: “……..”
Round Three:
Chu Li: “Laoshi, could you use fewer dashes?”
Zhou Chuan: “No.”
Chu Li: “……”
Round 4:
Chu Li: “Laoshi, there is still this issue. In the beginning, you spent almost three thousand words talking about how Lao Si (4) and Lao Ba (8) fought when transformed into Godly Beasts…I’m not going to bother about whether they were the heroes of the Qing Dynasty. Why is it that Lao Si (4) beat Lao Ba (8) half dead, but then it was said in a rumour that Lao Ba (8) beat Lao Si (4) half dead?”
Zhou Chuan: “Go find somewhere and just say, ‘the main lead thought to himself: these people cannot tell the truth from a lie, they actually flipped the truth, clearly it was Lao Si who beat up Lao Ba half dead, why were they all so stupid?”
Chu Li: “…………………….add where?”
Zhou Chuan: “Wherever.”
Round 5:
Chu Li: “Laoshi, you said that the protagonist was a very alert person, the room is fully enclosed except for the door, how would he have lost sleep over staring out the window at the moon?
Zhou Chuan: “You could pick out this sort of detail?”
Chu Li: “…I am a professional proofreader.”
Zhou Chuan: “But readers aren’t.”
Chu Li: “…….”
Round 6:
Chu Li: “Laoshi, did you know that the intonation for ‘de’ in the three words is different?”
Zhou Chuan: “??? Are you suspecting my literary ability?”
Chu Li: “….I don’t dare, I was wrong.” (As she spoke, she used a red pen to circle the ‘de’ word harshly, and added a question mark to the other ‘de’)
Round 7:
Chu Li: “Laoshi, the idiom ‘wind comes from an empty hole’, high school teachers highlighted this as a main point that is a phrase used to describe the cause of things, and thus named as such….not ‘fabricated out of thin air’.” [footnote] TN:空穴来风原指有因有据，凭空捏造则完全虚构，现常被误用为毫无根据。Explanation from Google, which says that 1. Is based on evidence, 2. Is based off nothing and no evidence [/footnote]
Zhou Chuan: [Baidu Screenshot] ‘Wind comes from an empty hole’, idiom, term used when wind comes in through a hole (Song Yu’s Feng Fu), [footnote] TN: famous book by author [/footnote]. The following metaphor suggests that news and rumours are not entirely without basis. It is now mostly used to refer to news and rumours that are completely unfounded (Modern Chinese Dictionary, 6th edition, 2012, p. 742, 517th printing, January 2015).
Zhou Chuan: “Where did you study Grade 12?”
Chu Li: “………..”
Chu Li: “I’m sorry, I didn’t keep pace with the times.”
Up until this point, it has been like this for a while.
When the proofreading reached the second day, and she had finished about half the book, Chu Li felt that being a fan of Zhou Chuan’s books was making her blind. Based on the writers’ working on the fly attitude, to be a ‘writer’ in this industry that had to crawl to today’s position, this is truly fucking the situation of: ‘nobleman of fate, and the ancestors rewarding the meals’. Who knew which temple was burning incense? [footnote] TN: basically saying he got hand-held up to it, and was helped [/footnote]
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