"By the way, what about the ending?" Meng Xinghe suddenly asked, flipping to the back of his notebook. "The whole thing is just setup. Even though you've set up seven dungeons, and the general backgrounds and NPCs for each dungeon, what about the ending? Did the protagonist defeat the final boss?"
Xiao Tangqiu thought hard: "The ending? I've forgotten it a long time ago... But generally speaking, the protagonist will defeat the final boss, right?"
"You guy... I just wrote something casually in a notebook, and you actually think it's a scam?" Meng Xinghe's mouth twitched. "There's obviously no text, just settings, and you can actually cheat a collection of settings!"
Xiao Tangqiu laughed dryly: "Generally speaking, once the setting is written, it's considered finished..."
Meng Xinghe rolled his eyes and turned back to rummaging through Xiao Tangqiu's bookcase. "Okay! Let me see if you've written any other novels. I'm bored right now, so I'll come and read your masterpiece!"
"Hey, do you really have to dig up my dark history like this?"
"What dark history? Don't you write novels for people to read?"
"Can't I just enjoy it myself?"
"Don't be shy, we're just friends!"
Xiao Tangqiu also rolled his eyes, but did not really stop Meng Xinghe. He picked up the notebook again and started flipping through it.
Although this was indeed something he wrote, he had almost no impression of it because it was written several years ago. It even felt strange, as if he was reading something written by someone else. Only when he saw the name "Shen Yuan" did he feel incomparably familiar, as if this person was by his side not long ago... as if this person was standing in front of him alive not long ago.
Xiao Tangqiu was in a trance again. He couldn't believe that his familiarity with "Shen Yuan" was just because an author should be familiar with the characters he created. But at this moment, "Shen Yuan" was indeed just a name and a symbol in his notebook.
Meng Xinghe flipped through several notebooks that Xiao Tangqiu had used to write novels. Although most of them were just collections of settings, there were also a few notebooks with a few lines of text written on them.
"It's all a trap! Don't you have a completed novel?" Meng Xinghe criticized Xiao Tangqiu in a condescending tone, "Young man, you can't do this! You'll never become a great writer like this!"
Without even looking up, Xiao Tangqiu said, "I never planned to become a great writer. I just wrote these novels for fun. I didn't plan to show them to anyone anyway, so it doesn't matter if I get ripped off."
Meng Xinghe looked up and was about to criticize Xiao Tangqiu for his half-hearted thinking, but he found Xiao Tangqiu still looking down at the notebook. He couldn't help but wonder: "Why are you still looking at that notebook? What are you studying?"
Xiao Tangqiu was silent for a moment before he spoke, "I'm wondering... could it be that Shen Yuan isn't actually a character I created, but a real person?"
Meng Xinghe was surprised. "What are you talking about in your sleep? Do you think the protagonist you wrote about is a real person? You don't want to become the sculptor who fell in love with his own sculpture, do you?"
"But I really feel that the name Shen Yuan is so familiar, just like I have heard people mention this name countless times, and even I have called this name countless times myself." Xiao Tangqiu looked dazed, "...This shouldn't be a dream. Can a dream be so real? I even remember that he had two cats..."
"One is called Apollo and the other is called Dionysus?" Meng Xinghe raised an eyebrow. "The sun god and the god of wine in Greek mythology, the two spirits that Nietzsche mentioned in The Birth of Tragedy that promoted the development of art... I remember we read this book together in junior high school."
Xiao Tangqiu was stunned: "Have we read this book together?"
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