Chapter 3: How can a scholar’s affair be called plagiarism?
Nearly every director with any real reputation has a studio in the capital.
That was only natural. After all, the capital was the nation’s center of film and television culture.
But Shen Yan never got to meet Gong Ruofei.
He only met with the casting director, exchanged a few simple words, and was then told to head straight to the capital’s film and television base half a month later.
The production team would gather there.
The capital film and television base was, in fact, the Huairou Film and Television Base, along with the Xingmei Jinsheng Film City and the China Film Digital Base.
The filming base where Wang Baoqiang once played extra roles at the Beijing Film Studio was long gone.
At this stage, the capital had only two major film and television bases: Huairou and Bayi.
But those two bases were not places that posted recruitment notices.
Most people who claimed to be hiring under the banner of those bases were basically scammers, especially in Huairou, where scammers were everywhere.
Right now, the actors running around the capital mainly depended on their own channels and connections to find work every day.
For half a year, Shen Yan had not landed a single job, not even an audition notice.
He was not an insider, and he had no friends in the industry.
That was why breaking into show business was so hard.
A circle was a circle; it was always exclusionary.
Especially the film and television world.
Today, with a single sentence from his second uncle, he had secured the threshold to enter.
His second uncle had been right: if Shen Yan wanted to make a name for himself in the industry, he would have to clear the entrance examination for the arts.
Getting into one of the top three film academies was the ticket in.
Otherwise, he could only count as some fringe outsider drifting beyond the mainstream.
Still, Shen Yan had no such intention.
To be honest, he looked down a little on art-exam students.
After all, in his mind, so-called art-exam candidates were just people with poor grades, low intelligence, and good family backgrounds.
Besides, with the legacy he had inherited, he believed he could live very well in this life.
...
Back at his lodgings, he took stock of his startup funds.
Well, there were only 460 yuan left.
Later, after a meal, another 20 would be gone.
Fortunately, rent was nothing to worry about.
He had paid for half a year upfront.
In half a month, he would be joining the production team, so he did not need to rent a place for the moment.
Even if he did, he would not rent in the capital.
He still remembered how, the previous year, he had come to the capital with forty thousand yuan in his pocket, dreaming of a brilliant future, only to have rent chew through forty percent of his funds.
2,500 a month!
Who knew what that idiot was thinking? 2,500. Over half a year, that came to fifteen thousand.
How could he bear to spend it...
Were there not plenty of basement rooms he could live in?
How needlessly particular.
He still had a little over 400 on him; later he would withdraw another thousand, and then head to an internet cafe to copy books.
Yes, a plagiarist.
There was a saying that went very well: after being reborn, gold lay everywhere.
Use the information gap and rise smoothly to prominence.
Seize the pulse of the age and climb to the peak of life.
Heh. That sort of thing could only be fantasized about.
Shen Yan had no access to any of it at all.
Even if he knew Bitcoin would rise, even if he knew Tencent, Alibaba, and Apple stock would soar...
So what?
He did not even have the money to open a brokerage account.
As for the lottery...
Heh. In his last life, he did not even buy lottery tickets, so how could he possibly remember the winning numbers?
Better to settle down and be a plagiarist.
No, a creator. After all, how could a scholar’s business be called plagiarism?
In his last life, Shen Yan had been a textbook bookworm. He had read most of the famous web novels, of course from pirated sites, since as a food-delivery guy he had no money for official subscriptions.
After a simple lunch, he found an internet cafe.
He topped up one hundred yuan, got a machine, and then checked the rankings on Qidian.
If he was going to copy, he could not do it blindly. At the very least, he needed to understand the mainstream tastes of the present era.
To be honest, Shen Yan was also worried about colliding with other people’s ideas.
After browsing for a while, the top ten on the rankings included titles like Soul Land, Panlong, Struggle for Power in the World, Card Frenzy, and Embroidered Lands and Beautiful Colors.
Record of a Mortal’s Journey to Immortality had not yet reached its climax.
Yang God was still on the new-book list.
As for Chen Dong and Tian Can Tu Dou, the former was writing World of Longevity, while the latter was updating his first novel, Warcraft Sword Saint in the Otherworld.
Warcraft Sword Saint was one of the classic early fantasy light-novels before 2010. Its setting and worldview blended East and West, it went hard on the harem, and the depiction of male-female relationships was fairly bold. In essence, it was not much different from several of Tang Jia San Shao’s early novels.
Of course, considering that Tu Dou probably had not even been an adult when he started the book, his writing was a little immature. Although he won the Newcomer King award with it, the gap compared with his second book, Battle Through the Heavens, was rather large.
Yes, Tu Dou won Newcomer King at eighteen.
He was the only one on Qidian to do that.
Once Battle Through the Heavens appeared, everyone would know what true terror meant.
Shen Yan had never read Battle Through the Heavens.
In his last life, he only started reading web fiction after 2020, so Battle Through the Heavens counted as ancient web fiction to him, and he simply was not interested.
What he had read were things like Lord of Mysteries, Nightwatch Under a Thousand Gates, and My Senior Brother Is Too Steady.
He had not even read the must-copy novels of the rebirth genre, Immortal Execution and Sword Snow Stride.
After thinking it over, he still decided to write Lord of the Mysteries.
Shen Yan loved that book: In this life of mine, I ask neither of the past nor of the next; I seek only to blaze magnificently, to settle grudges with pleasure, to defeat the heroes of every race, and to laugh proudly at the gods and devils of the six realms.
What he remembered most vividly was the protagonist, clad in fine robes and mounted on a swift horse, sword in hand, riding eastward and charging toward the battle for the human rankings.
It captured the spirit and swagger of youth, painting a grand martial world in which, among all the heroes of the age, only those of the present truly mattered.
And its early setting, leaning toward an infinite-flow style, would also be easier to get past review.
The sky was washed clean, blue and pure and crystal-clear, not a single white cloud in sight.
What fine weather it is... When Meng Qi opened his eyes, this beautiful scene came into view, and he immediately felt as though he had just woken from a great dream, reluctant to leave the soft warmth of the bed.
He wrote for nearly four hours and finished two chapters, six thousand five hundred words in all.
After reviewing it, he concluded that this efficiency was not good enough.
Rumor had it that Old Eagle Eats Little Chick had a typing speed of five to six thousand words an hour.
That was already impressive.
In fact, within the web-fiction world, when it came purely to typing speed, there were still people who could keep pace with him to some extent.
It was within the range ordinary people could understand.
Then there was Feng Hui Xiao’s Genius Doctor of Urban Medicine and Broken Sword’s I Am a Divine Calculation in a Fantasy World, both of whom were the kind of people who could go head-to-head with Old Eagle in updates and win. They could write twenty thousand words in a little over two hours, and even while posting forty thousand words a day, they still had saved-up drafts. It was a bit terrifying.
But it was still acceptable.
What truly defied understanding was an author named Shitian Feng, with In the Hidden Leaf Anbu, Torturing a Ninja...
Eighteen thousand words an hour, and in order to fight for the rankings, he would directly post eighty thousand words a day, then come complain that the Qidian battle-power leaderboard only counted eighty thousand words per day, so there was no way to update more.
Damn it, he wrote faster than ordinary readers could even read.
Of course, Old Eagle was a tentacle monster plus a top-tier master, and no one could compare to that...
More importantly, his stamina was unmatched: what was most terrifying about Old Eagle was not that he could post twenty thousand words a day, but that every single one of his books maintained that pace throughout serialization. Add in his results, and one could see how rare and precious that truly was.
And that was with Shen Yan having the advantage of memory...
It seemed that, as a web novelist, he really did not have much talent.
If he copied a few books, that should be enough to get his starting capital, and then he would stop writing...
Register a pen name, Fried Husky, upload the work, and wait for the signing text message.
Then he looked into magazine submissions.
Magazine submission fees might take at most a month to arrive. The martial-arts edition of the Ancient and Modern Legends magazine could be worth a try.
The Flower Pavilion Tower, Young Traveler, and Young White Horse Drunken Spring Breeze were all pretty good martial-arts novels.
Shen Yan had read a few books in the martial-arts edition because he liked Jiangnan. Someone on the forum had recommended Spring Breeze and Willow Branches on the Plain...
The heroine was raped to death, and the supporting female character was gang-raped by the villain...
Damn it, it almost shattered his martial-arts dream.
Later he read Nine Provinces: Assassin Dynasty and then realized that Jiangnan was entirely a tragicist of the crotch, using the portrayal of the heroine being violated to express the author’s reflections...