Entertainment: 1990

Chapter 2: The Great Detective Returns for a Limited Time

That night.

In the tenement building that the newspaper office built a few years ago, Zhang Yan lay on a wire folding bed, tossing and turning, unable to fall asleep.

Then, from behind the curtain came her father's scolding voice: "If you don't shut up, believe me, I'll beat you!"

Zhang Yan then stopped rolling around, staring wide-eyed at the roof.

His father and Zhou Nan's father joined the newspaper in the same year, and he and Zhou Nan were born in the same year. When they were young, for some well-known reasons, Zhou Nan stayed at the Zhang family's house intermittently for two years. So the two can be considered childhood sweethearts.

From childhood to adulthood, Zhou Nan was the most unique among the children of newspaper employees. She was beautiful, lively, and opinionated. When she was in elementary school, the teacher asked everyone what they wanted to be in the future. While everyone else gave conventional answers, she alone kept saying that she wanted to be a movie star.

Keep in mind that this was the 70s!

Later, following her parents' wishes, she was admitted to Handan Teachers College. After graduating last year, she was assigned to Hengjiang Middle School as an English teacher. Everyone thought she had given up her dream.

Who knew that Zhou Nan would suddenly leave a note and run away last night, saying that she didn't want to live an ordinary life and wanted to go to Beijing to pursue her dream of becoming a star.

This woman is really...

Don't you even check the almanac before you go out? You should at least wait until after Qingming Festival to leave!

"Brother, there are plenty of fish in the sea, why look for one right next to you?"

Just as he was mentally promoting feudal superstition, he suddenly heard his younger sister Zhang Fang's voice, which startled Zhang Yan so much that he snapped, "Are you a ghost? You walk without making a sound!"

Zhang Fang squatted in front of the wire bed, rested her chin on her hands and chuckled, "I'm just concerned about you—I think that reporter Feng from this morning is quite nice."

Get out of here!

Zhang Yan instinctively wanted to turn over and turn the back of his head toward his sister, but remembering his father's warning, he held back.

Zhang Fang pouted and said, "Why are you taking it out on me? If you're so capable, go to the capital and bring him back!"

Zhang Yan scoffed at this: "Easy for you to say. Do you think the capital is the Ganges? How am I supposed to find it?! Besides..."

Besides, even if we find him, so what? Are we supposed to tell Zhou Nan: "Don't be a star anymore, I'll make money off the dead to support you"?
Thinking about this, Zhang Yan felt even more frustrated.

Zhang Fang saw through her brother's thoughts and half-jokingly encouraged him, "Why don't you try to become a celebrity too? She can be a movie star, and you can be a famous reporter or writer. Wouldn't that make you a perfect match?"

"You make it sound so easy. I don't even have a press card! As for being a writer... writing a novel isn't that easy."

"But your writing is quite good, and you're even a special commentator for the newspaper!"

"This is different..."

"Are you two going to sleep or not?!"

The brother and sister talked louder and louder, which soon drew a scolding from their father: "It's all one-sided enthusiasm from the start. I think it's better that Zhou Nan left, so you won't waste your time!"

Zhang Fang stuck out her tongue at her brother, slipped on her slippers, and shrank back into the single bed behind another curtain.

There were too many monks and not enough porridge in the tenement building, so the Zhang family of four were divided into a small room of about ten square meters, which could only be separated by a cloth curtain at night.

At the end of last year, Zhang Yan took on the job of selling ghost money despite the ridicule and sarcasm of others, hoping to change his predicament through his own efforts.

Of course, deep down he also harbored the fantasy that if he bought a big house, he could perhaps marry Zhou Nan.

But now it seems that this is completely counterproductive.

Writing commentaries for the Hengjiang Daily doesn't earn you any money, and the seniority system is very strict. Even if your commentary is better, it often won't get published.

As for novels, Zhang Yan has tried his hand at them, including pure literature, popular literature, and even children's literature.

But this is not the same as criticizing current affairs. Aside from his excellent writing style, he lacks depth of thought, life experience, and storytelling ability. Sigh~
If only I could get a better grasp of these things.

…………

Filled with melancholy and confusion, Zhang Yan finally fell asleep around 1 a.m., and then he had a strange dream.

In my dream, a middle-aged man wearing glasses was using a futuristic computer to create a fan fiction novel called "The Great Detective of the Dream of the Red Chamber" [PS: Fan fiction of the Dream of the Red Chamber existed as early as the Qing Dynasty, so it's not new].

Zhang Yan himself seemed to be inside the man's eyes, watching him type lines of text on the screen, sometimes fast, sometimes slow.

Because he was fully aware that he was dreaming, Zhang Yan initially found it a bit strange, but simply assumed it was just a dream about what he had been thinking about during the day.

The problem was that the length of this dream far exceeded his expectations.

He 'accompanied' the author through repeated revisions of the first draft, and submitted the manuscript through something called email, continuously updating it at a rate of 4000-5000 words per day on a website called Qidian.

He watched as the protagonist, Sun Shaozong, relied on his knowledge and experience as a criminal police captain before his transmigration, as well as his martial prowess like a reincarnation of a tyrant, to solve numerous strange cases and achieve remarkable feats, gradually making a name for himself in the world of Dream of the Red Chamber.

He followed in the author's footsteps as he searched for information, roaming the internet of the future, witnessing countless bizarre and wonderful scenes, and learning a lot of random knowledge.

During this period, Zhang Yan gradually summarized some patterns.

First, according to the time displayed in the lower right corner of the screen, the initial time in the dream was 2017, which is 27 years later. No wonder there were so many novel things.

Secondly, his perspective seemed to be locked to the computer screen, and he could only see some things around the screen at most.

Then, in his dream, he could only see text images but could not hear any sound. Before each writing session, the author would open a software called QQ Music, but Zhang Yan could only look at the song titles and singers in the catalog and let his imagination run wild.

Furthermore, this dream was not continuous. Every few hours, or after he finished writing two chapters, his vision would suddenly go black, and then quickly return to light. At the same time, the time in the lower right corner would change to the next day.

Putting all these factors together, Zhang Yan was terrified, wondering if he was already dead and his spirit was haunting him, possessing an author 27 years later.

Otherwise, how could a dream last so long?!

But that doesn't make sense. He just had insomnia, how could he have died so mysteriously?!

Zhang Yan also tried to change the status quo, attempting to wake up from the dream, or even to fight for control of his body, but ultimately to no avail. So he had no choice but to focus his attention back on the novel itself.

After all, this was the only pastime he could have in his dreams.

Well, the author's writing is so-so, the story's beginning and turning points are reasonably reasonable, the character development is barely vivid, and the imagination, judged by 1990 standards, can be described as wildly imaginative and unconventional.

If it were Zhang Yan himself, he probably would never have imagined in his entire life that a crime drama could be related to Dream of the Red Chamber, and that most of the cases could be related to the Rong and Ning mansions, the Xue family, the Wang family, and the Shi family.

What Zhang Yan admires most is the author's ability to connect seemingly absurd and bizarre plots, making sure that the story is coherent and logical.

Through continuous observation and contemplation, Zhang Yan gradually grasped the knack of writing novels.

Unfortunately, this novel was so long, totaling 250 million words, that the author ran out of ideas in the later stages. The detective storyline was difficult to innovate, and the author could only focus more on suggestive descriptions of sex.

Although the interactions between the protagonist Sun Shaozong and various female characters are always exciting, it's ultimately a case of walking with one leg crippled, and the overall excitement level is far less than that of the first and second half.

Later on, due to the website tightening its standards, even this last leg became lame, and past chapters were blocked and deleted in various ways.

Seeing that the author could only hastily wrap things up, he wrote the three big words "The End" with mixed emotions, thus ending this novel that he had been writing on and off for several years.

Zhang Yan felt a pang of loss and couldn't help but sigh, "What a pity."

Before he could finish speaking, Zhang Fang's voice rang in his ears: "Brother, what did you say was a pity? Get up quickly, Dad specially bought your favorite fried frogs!"

As his sister urged him on, the scene shifted from black to white again, but this time, what appeared before Zhang Yan was no longer a computer screen full of futuristic technology, but the gray roof of a tenement building.

(End of this chapter)