In order to snatch his notebook, Xiao Tangqiu had already hung his whole body on Meng Xinghe, but Meng Xinghe was taller and taller than him, so he couldn't get it after trying for a long time.

In a fit of anger, he was about to reach out and tickle Meng Xinghe, but when he heard Meng Xinghe's voice, he suddenly froze.

"...Shen Yuan?"

"That name is so perfunctory," Meng Xinghe continued to grumble with a smile. "Although I've known for a long time that you're not good at naming, this one is really too casual. And this witch's name, Lili Marlene... Isn't that the movie we watched together in junior high?"

Xiao Tangqiu couldn't help but look dazed.

"And what about Maria, Laura, and Veronica? Isn't that a Fassbinder trilogy? Even though it's hard to come up with foreign names, can't you come up with a nicer one yourself? ...What's wrong with you? Why do you look so dreamy again?"

Xiao Tangqiu hesitated for a moment before speaking, "Why do I feel like... I seem to have met someone named Shen Yuan?"

"Oh? When?" Meng Xinghe casually flipped through Xiao Tangqiu's setting collection with a nonchalant look on his face.

"It should be... not long ago..." Xiao Tangqiu couldn't help but look dazed. "It seems like a lot of things happened between us before... a lot... but I can't remember anything now..."

"Have you seen this person in real life?" Meng Xinghe raised his eyebrows.

Xiao Tangqiu looked bewildered: "In reality...it seems not."

Meng Xinghe touched his chin: "Is this another dream?"

Xiao Tangqiu frowned slightly. "But that feeling was so real... It was as if I had really stood face to face with him... It was so real, as real as the car accident yesterday..."

Here, he suddenly stopped talking and did not continue.

"The car accident yesterday?" Meng Xinghe raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean?"

Xiao Tangqiu pursed his lips. The name "Shen Yuan" was as real to him as that car accident—the car accident that should have caused Meng Xinghe's death, the car accident that happened in his dream.

He must have had a dream like this, in which Meng Xinghe died in a car accident, and he met a man named "Shen Yuan" in the future.

But...was it really just a dream?

"Okay, stop imagining things. Isn't this Shen Yuan a character you wrote? If you feel familiar with him, that's perfectly normal. After all, you carefully conceived of this person, shaping his personality and characterization like a true writer, even planning his fate and life..." Meng Xinghe smiled softly. "For a writer, isn't the protagonist his or her most familiar friend?"

Xiao Tangqiu pondered for a moment: "It seems to make sense... Let me see my notebook."

Meng Xinghe handed the notebook to Xiao Tangqiu with a smile. Xiao Tangqiu took it and looked at it. It was indeed his handwriting from junior high school. It was immature and childish, and there was some sloppiness that deliberately imitated the writing of adults. He flipped through it casually, and a strange yet familiar feeling suddenly came over him, as if he had met an old friend he hadn't seen for a long time.

"Shen Yuan..." He softly pronounced the name, but the scene of him biting the pen and struggling to come up with the name of the protagonist emerged in his mind.

...What should the protagonist be called?

...can’t be too ordinary, it needs to have depth and connotation!

...I can't believe it! I can't believe it!

…Forget it, let’s just call him Shen Yuan! It sounds very profound, and it’s a homophone of abyss!

...Just call him Shen Yuan!

At the same time, other images flashed through his mind quickly, but before Xiao Tangqiu could capture them carefully, those images disappeared in a flash.