Issuing the First Task

The first questions were still pretty normal:

[How many hours do you dedicate to writing daily / weekly / monthly?]

[What have you written so far?]

[What is the average rating of your stories?]

[What were the readers' reactions?]

[Which part of your stories got the best / most / worst / fewest reactions/ratings?]

[Which part of your stories took you the shortest / longest amount of time to write?]

There were several more questions and they got a little more detailed the further he got but after twenty or so questions the content suddenly got … strange.

[Have you had a crush on someone? If yes, what was that person like? If no, what kind of person would you fall in love with?]

[Have you ever kissed someone? If yes, what kind of kiss did you share?]

[Have you been in a relationship? If yes, for how long? And how far have you gone?]

[Have you ever had sex? Were you on top or —]

Su Yan instantly stopped reading. By now, his whole face was red. Who would ask such questions when trying to set up a test for writing?!

One might suspect that this was the doing of a certain fujoshi in the headquarters of Heaven Corporation and, in fact, that wasn't totally wrong. It was just that Official Lu Shen hadn't set this up consciously. The problem was rather that she had written into the application form that the system was meant to help Su Yan further his skills and experiences. For a system related to an occupation, furthering skills would have been enough.

Now, with the addition of furthering experiences, the system had to somehow interpret this. And what were experiences related to being an author of bl stories? With the suggested prerequisite of only writing what you knew as long as you weren't an old-stager in the business, the Lovely Writing System had set 'experiencing everything related to bl' as one of the requirements for Su Yan's journey to success.

Ah, what one thoughtless entry of an official could cause …

Thankfully, Su Yan knew nothing of the inner workings of either the Heaven Corporation or the Lovely Writing System. He could only see the rather strange questions in front of him.

He seriously began to wonder if this thing was really something dirty and was just disguised as a tool to help writers. He looked over to Nie Chang and wanted to ask what he thought but finally decided against it. Nie Chang loved to tease people. If he showed him, he'd probably have to answer all these questions. Where would his face be then?

Nah, let's just answer it in case it's really something related to writing. And it's Nie Chang's notebook anyway. If something happens he can just repair it again. Yes, Su Yan had complete trust in Nie Chang's skills and didn't mind giving him a bit more to do.

He started answering the questions with a serious attitude. Who knew? It might have something to do with writing romance subplots or something like that. Unfortunately, Su Yan had to admit that he might really need some help with that. He actually had to answer most of the questions with a decisive no.

Finally, he answered the last question. He sighed with relief. Any more and he wouldn't be able to take it anymore. What was it with women nowadays? He had a stable job and, if he might say so himself, he wasn't bad-looking. Why none of them take him into consideration?

The Lovely Writing System didn't pay any attention to Su Yan's inner turmoil and just started to work:

[Processing data.]

[Setting up test.]

[Issuing task.]

The [Getting started] task was checked and a new line appeared below: [Read the following web novel and write one new scene of no more than 2000 words that features a romantic encounter.]

Su Yan's face lit up. So that strange test had really been to find out where his problems lay! Maybe romance was something a lot of people had problems with so it was one of the possible first tests? And if he had answered yes everywhere then he probably would have gotten some additional questions to figure out if he had other areas he was bad at.

Su Yan had managed to explain to himself what all this was about. It seemed perfectly normal to him but he was in for a surprise.

He opened the web novel the Lovely Writing System had provided and started with chapter 1. He didn't even read the synopsis. After all, a story chosen by this awesome program that was supposed to help him become a better author should be a great work of fiction, no?

Thus, he started reading right off the bat and tried to take note of every possible pairing. After some chapters, he began to frown. This was somehow … strange? This was obviously a romance web novel but … Why did it seem like the main pairing were two men?

The poor Su Yan who had never even heard of bl novels before was suddenly confronted with something like this. He really couldn't understand. Thus, he just read further. Maybe there would be some great revelation that that supposed 'crown prince' was, in fact, a crown princess. Hadn't he heard of that somewhere? What did they call it? Gender bender or something like that? It seemed one of his co-workers had mentioned that once. He hadn't really paid attention, though. It just wasn't the kind of story he would like.

But the web novel suggested by the system seemed to lean toward the funny side anyway so maybe the author had thought that would get a few good laughs from the readers? Su Yan read chapter after chapter until he hit the end of volume 1 but the big revelation never came.

Frowning, he went back to the front page and had a look at the tags. There were some and most of them weren't anything he knew. What was that 'yaoi' and what did the acronym 'bl' mean?

Su Yan opened Baidu and typed that strange acronym in. Then, he got the second shock that night. He had clicked on the images and videos since he thought he might get it faster that way. Indeed he did. There were actually quite a few search results and all of them had one thing in common: They showed two men. And they were doing it with each other.

Su Yan forcefully closed the notebook. Somehow, he felt corrupted now.