34 The Path of Stairs

If Xiao Ying was to enter the palace of Concubine Jing still as a regular human being, then he would have to enter through the front door, walk into the entrance, take the stairs onto the first floor, and then take a secret passage to a different part of the same floor, then take the stairs onto the next floor, take another secret passage to find himself on a different part of the third floor, walk down to the second floor, then take another secret passage which involved a staircase within itself, and then a final staircase up to her room.

Xiao Ying instead, rather than doing all of that, walked straight through the front door and climbed up the first set of stairs, stopping in front of the wall that bisected one corridor into two.

There were two other such walls, splitting the entire floor into three separate segments, and Xiao Ying, staring down that giant barrier of wood and brick, clenched his eyes shut and threw himself through it.

He gasped as the cold sensation of suddenly detaching himself from the world took over, rushing through his like a cold gust of wind, rattling his bones and freezing his blood momentarily.

He opened his eyes, and rested his hands on some other wall at the side, heavily leaning on what he found was the wall to a different room on the floor, reading the notice that had been stuck to the door to find out that the room in question was a meeting room that was out of order due to the window being apparently blown inwards due to a storm.

Xiao Ying gritted his teeth and looked downwards, onto the floor, before pushing his body off the side of the room and began making his way to the next wall in his way to get to Concubine Jing's room.

He knew all too well that the blown in window was his once shit attempt at trying to establish some sort of mystery element in his writing, hoping to attract back readers that he had already lost from his shitty writing, only he hadn't realised at the time that any new potential readers would have to read his story all the way from the beginning again to reach the mystery, and would most likely give up before even getting to the parts that he had recently written, and that if he had wanted to grab any readers, then he would have to either go back and massively overhaul what he had already written, or he would have to scrap the entire story to begin anew and have the mystery as the opening system.

Looking back on his younger self, Xiao Ying realised that if the thought had occurred to him, then he would have mostly likely have done nothing, too protective and ignorant of the obvious and glaring flaws in his writing - both in terms of grammar, punctuation, and spelling, as well as the content of the text - to delete his work, yet too lazy to go back and fix any of it.

To the younger him, going back and having to fix something so blatantly and inarguably bad would have felt like he was making some sort of concession to the one, singular critic, who in one paragraph comment, only one time as well, had told him to stop, go back, and fix at least some of the mistakes that he had made.

His cheeks would have reddened and he would have pouted the entire time, like the ambitious and arrogant child he was at the time.

He had barely reached the age of thirteen after all, and despite the awful quality and the almost unbearable reading that his work was, there was a twisted sort of pride within Xiao Ying that he had still managed to create something.

The plot did run on bullshit and clichés that would make any newbie into the genre roll their eyes at, and the characters were so paper thin and without motivation that would serve incredibly well as tracing paper, riddled with archetypes that Xiao Ying had once thought were musts and necessary for a good story, because all the ones that he had read contained them.

Qi Qing was a tsundere.

Qi Tao was a hyper active idiot.

Wang Yuan was the weird silent child.

Lan Chang was the serious action girl.

Ming Cheng was the studious and perfect child that any parent would want.

...

There was nothing redeemable about his novel really, but now, looking back, Xiao Ying wondered just how he had managed to scrounge up so much time, investment, and motivation into his writing, and how, even after all the non existent reception it had received, he had managed to keep writing, and writing, and writing.

He wanted that drive now.

He wanted the ambition and determination that his younger self had, sitting quietly and alone for hours upon hours on end, in that empty apartment, listening to his next door neighbour for inspirations and ideas.

He wanted the creativity that he had once clung to, drawing maps, upon maps, upon maps for hours, trying to figure out all the territories of his imaginary world, all the resources that they would all have, the geographies, the armies, their skills, and whatever else was needed for an empire to form.

The buildings and each of their floor maps had been so intricate, each one detailed with each and every room marked out, the rotas throughout the days for the workers, and the purpose for the building and it's importance in the towns.

Xiao Ying had once created a sprawling world, governed by the rules of juvenile idiocy and hope, and had butchered what little semblance of it that could be squeezed into the chapters.

There was at least one supposedly mystical swamp, that contained magical muds which could take years of whoever's face that it had been applied to, unfortunately relegated into a single item on a list mentioned off screen and never shown, when the physician had been mentioned in passing as doing inventory on his stock at one point within Ming Cheng's reign.

He wanted that energy.

He really did.