That evening, Father Wang had his regular meeting with his editor Lie Mengmeng, and they discussed the setting for the next character. None of the characters in his novel were redundant. Whether it was the villain, the protagonist, or a minor role, they each had their own wonderful story and character setting, so it was especially important to determine how the characters would be positioned in the overall story.

　　The two men were on a video call that evening. These days, Lie Mengmeng seldom came by to press Father Wang for the manuscript, mainly because the website had recently been doing a strict audit of their novels. This was the law of nature, the survival of the fittest – authors who couldn’t do it would be 404’ed.

　　It might sound a little cruel, but this was reality.

　　Thus, the literary website’s entire editorial department had been working overtime recently as they carried out manual checks to prevent works from touching on taboo issues. For minor infractions, it was enough to censor chapters or keywords, but for serious infractions, the entire book might be taken down, and if it was even more serious, the authors’ pen names might be banned!

　　Lie Mengmeng had inspected roughly several thousand books today, before taking some time out to analyze Father Wang’s new characters. “Fleecing… You really keep up with the times. I also read the news. Supposedly, that live streamer is still unconvinced, and is saying that the fruit farmer was hyping himself up.”

　　“There’s nothing to be unconvinced about. I have some information here which says that this fruit farmer was part of an aid initiative for the poor… No sooner had his hometown helped him open an online store to lift him out of poverty, the website got complaints the next day and closed it down. I heard that the village chief was shocked!”

　　Lie Mengmeng was surprised. “Is that so…”

　　“But it’s too sensitive an issue to write about, so I think that it’s better to focus on parodying that unscrupulous live streamer.” Father Wang said, “I already have an idea about the character setting. The protagonist is just about to run into an old enemy, who sends out this subordinate, who’s very good at scamming people, to tangle with the protagonist. His ability is ‘Scam.’”

　　“Go on…”

　　“I haven’t come up with the specific details of the ability yet, but this is roughly what I think: In any case, the main point is this ‘Scam.’ The new villain has the codename Lu RenA, and is related to Grandpa Lu whom I wrote about before in the book. He’s Grandpa Lu’s grandson. He’s skilled at using the Internet, and inherits from Grandpa Lu a system which shares fake coupons.”

　　Father Wang said, “This fake coupon system takes advantage of people’s inner greed for small gains, and generates countless coupon links to entice cultivators to click on them. As long as cultivators click on them, they’ll be robbed of part of their cultivation, which will then converge in the system’s host.”

　　“Wouldn’t that be too big a bug…”

　　“In any case, our protagonist is invincible, and will always have a way to fix the situation.” Father Wang said, “When they click on the coupon links, they’ll be automatically drained of their cultivation, but if they continue forwarding the links, their cultivation will come back to them. The more they share, the more of their cultivation that will return. But at the same time, this also leads to the worldwide spread of these fake coupons, which causes a huge crisis…”

　　“…”

　　Hearing this, Lie Mengmeng couldn’t help taking a deep breath.

　　This viral spread of links suddenly reminded him of the dread of being overwhelmed by Pinxixi¹‘s coupon links in WeChat Moments, especially when 11/11² came around every year. That was clearly a day for Taobao events, but Pinxixi also butted in, and would flood chat groups with all sorts of links practically every day.

　　The scariest thing was that there would always be friends who would ask you to help click on the links.

　　Trying to get a bargain during normal times was already frightening enough.

　　As expected, source material came from real life…

　　Lie Mengmeng marveled at Father Wang’s imagination.

　　“Given this viral spread, wouldn’t the villain become very strong?”

　　“Not really.” Father Wang said, “While many people are greedy for petty gains, there has to be gains offered in the first place before the scammers can swindle them. If the links are fake, online users will definitely complain on a large scale. The people who posted these links will thus be arrested by the Internet police the next day, and won’t cause too much harm.”

　　“There’s still this sort of operation…” Lie Mengmeng wiped at his sweat. This kind of absurd humor was Father Wang’s typical way of dealing with things. Sometimes it didn’t need to especially make sense – as long as it was funny and preposterous enough, it was fine to view it as an interlude.

　　This style also reminded Lie Mengmeng of a talk show comedian called Soy Egg. For example, there had been a marvelous debate recently on whether to save “a cat” or “a famous painting” if a museum was on fire¹

　　…

　　Thursday, November 13th.

　　Tomorrow was the day they would set out for Jinghua city. In the morning, Headmaster Chen gave everyone their round-trip tickets to the city. According to the competition schedule, they would arrive at the designated base on Friday evening to report in, and the competition would officially begin on Saturday, where everyone would participate in the body technique survival contest on Nine Dragon Mountain for eight days.

　　They weren’t allowed to take any magic treasures, talismans, food or daily necessities with them for the competition. Multiple inspections would be carried out prior to entry, and if someone was detected secretly smuggling something in, they would be immediately disqualified.

　　After all, this was a national competition, and the rules seemed stricter than for typical body technique exchange meets – the truth, however, was that there was a deliberate loophole.

　　Headmaster Chen had explained this loophole to everyone that morning. “In theory, you aren’t allowed to take anything inside, but the truth is that there’ll definitely be some people who’ll take the risk and muddle their way through the inspections.”

　　“Can they?”

　　“Most of those who have this intent will be extremely confident in their abilities.” Headmaster Chen said, “In the national competition this time, the rules only apply to the inspections – in other words, if you can muddle your way through the inspections and successfully take something in, it won’t be considered cheating if you use it openly during the competition. This will depend on how the students of each school deal with this.”

　　“It’s too hard.” Hero Guo said, “I have an uncle who participated in activities like this when he was a student. At that time, there were already space detection devices during the entry inspections. Storage space magic treasures like storage rings and storage bags can be detected with a simple sweep, and can’t be taken inside.”

　　Hearing this, Headmaster Chen fell silent.

　　He knew that this was a loophole that the Alliance of Ten Thousand Schools had deliberately set up to test the students’ ability to respond to it.

　　Thus, “secret smuggling” this time could only be considered an opportunity and not cheating, and couldn’t be dealt with under the rules for “cheating”; the Alliance of Ten Thousand School was playing a good word game this time.

　　If this “secret smuggling” was detected at entry inspections, it would be unilaterally deemed a “violation.”

　　The word “violation” was easier on the ears than “cheating”– even if a student was caught and disqualified, there wouldn’t be a record of it on file.

　　Although San Yuan predicted that No. 60 High would make it into the top eight, Headmaster Chen wanted to play it safe.

　　Since the Alliance of Ten Thousand School had created such an opportune loophole, there naturally was no reason not to take full advantage of it.