Chapter 13

Aside from a few messages, the ones that followed were from the other side 'verifying their identity' — they looked real.

Yue Kemeng froze at the identity part.

Her fingertips went numb.

It took a raindrop falling straight into her eye to snap her back.

The order — right, she had to deliver the order first, or she'd be late!

As for that message, it was probably a prank.

Who would actually pay someone to write fanfic?

If she were a real author — the kind with a platform contract — she wouldn't be writing passion-project fanfic for free.

The kind that never sees the light of day.

Everything she'd ever come up with leaned on the source material. If someone asked her to write original work, she honestly didn't know if she could.

None of that mattered right now — the most baffling part was this: why would an entertainment company commission custom fiction?

That made zero sense.

If they wanted to adapt something, there were already published works on every major site, battle-tested by readers. Wasn't that way better than hiring someone to write from scratch?

Yue Kemeng blinked the rain out of her eyes.

She checked the time on her next order, pushed down the weird flutter in her chest, twisted the handlebar, and the e-bike shot forward.

...

Half an hour later.

Yue Kemeng opened that chat window again and read through it several more times. Drip — dirty water landed on her screen.

The rain hadn't stopped. She sat in a dim stairwell, soaked and wrecked.

There was a stretch of road near the entrance of one of the residential complexes painted with white paint — her wheel hit it and skidded. She'd gone down hard on a turn.

Every inch of her body hurt.

But there was nothing she could do.

The order was about to time out. Yue Kemeng gritted her teeth and climbed up, delivered the food to the sixth floor, and made it with barely a second to spare.

The order had soup in it — a whole bag had spilled. It was definitely inedible, so she proactively refunded the customer in full and apologized.

The customer cursed her out in a dialect with serious firepower. Strip away the profanity and it basically came down to: they'd waited forever and still didn't get to eat!

It took forever to calm them down. Yue Kemeng held back the pain and headed downstairs — the old walk-up had motion-sensor lights that barely worked.

Yue Kemeng's sharp intake of breath got swallowed by the dark, along with the rest of her, like she didn't exist. Nobody cared.

In that moment, the hurt hit like a wave.

Yue Kemeng steadied herself on the railing, made it downstairs, and sat on an abandoned little stool in the stairwell, unable to stop wiping her tears.

Ding.

Right then, the account labeled [Aurora Entertainment] sent another message.

Just asking again whether she could write the custom piece, and saying they looked forward to her reply.

Maybe it was a 'screw it, let's call their bluff' kind of impulse. Or maybe it was a tiny, fragile thread of hope. Either way, she replied.

[I'll take the commission. But I need a deposit — pay first, then I write.]

Yue Kemeng sent the message, felt like she'd done something shameful, and immediately backed out of the chat, flipping her phone face-down.

Screen off. Her head was a mess. She didn't know what she was doing — just nervously picking at the tear in her pants.

Her pants were soaked through, caked in dirty water, and the skin showing through that tear had been scraped raw. It stung like fire.

Ding.

Her phone screen lit up. Yue Kemeng's heart lurched. She didn't move. Then it lit up again, and again.

She gave herself a little pep talk, then flipped the phone over.

Several messages, all from [Aurora Entertainment].

[No problem on the deposit. Once you confirm you're taking the job, the company will have you sign a contract to protect your rights.]

·

The person replying on this account right now was one of Sang Yu's assistants — Cui Jin.

The contract included an NDA.

After all, some of what they'd pull from the 'writing submissions' might touch on unreleased script content — better to keep it under wraps.

It was safer for The Demolition Office, and it also protected the writers' rights.

That said, Cui Jin had already chatted up a bunch of writers, and more than half had backed out the moment they heard 'sign a contract.' Only a few showed interest once they heard the per-thousand-character rate.

Some of the writers were too young — he didn't want to involve their parents, so he let those go.

[KM-Always-CTX-Stuck] was one that the boss, Sang Yu, had specifically flagged, so Cui Jin had made up his mind: best to keep at it and wear her down if needed.

So Cui Jin came prepared.

He'd done some digging and had a rough picture of [KM-Always-Stuck]'s situation — also Yue Kemeng's situation — and went straight for the jugular:

[The company would like you to write a spinoff based on a novel called 'A Demolition Office Is Not Ordinary.']

[Have you read the original?]

[If you haven't, on top of the flat-rate price for the custom piece itself, we'll pay you a separate reading fee.]

[Since we need you to deliver within a set timeframe, there's a rush reading fee of twenty thousand yuan — that's for finishing the full novel within one week.]

[Also, the custom piece pays two hundred yuan per thousand characters, with a guaranteed minimum of thirty thousand characters. Write more, and there's no upper cap — as long as the overall quality holds up. The piece will go through a dedicated review. Chapters that don't pass get sent back, but anything that already cleared review still gets paid.]

[So — do these terms work for you? If you have other requests, we can negotiate and write them into the contract.]

Cui Jin thought: pretty obvious hint, right? It's fine if you haven't read it. Just take the reading fee first.

Two hundred yuan per thousand characters — in the web novel industry, especially for new writers, that was generous.

You could hire a decent ghostwriter for forty or fifty per thousand.

At the rate he was offering [KM-Always-Stuck], writing three thousand characters a day meant six hundred yuan a day.

Three thousand characters a day, steady monthly income of twenty thousand — that was solidly above average in the web novel world.

As for why he was offering such good terms... it was partly his own call, but still within the range Sang Yu had given him.

— The other writers asked for less, so couldn't that budget just be moved over here?

Cui Jin was this flexible partly out of professional instinct, and partly because he'd leveled up.

As the old saying goes: find the right boss to work for.

[Has money], [respects labor law], [isn't stubborn] — a boss like that is a dream to work for.

Honestly, it was like Sang Yu was reading his ID card out loud!

Cui Jin benefited too.

The only downside...

He was just one of the attendants in the inner circle, nowhere near the level of head assistant Cao Siyi.

The trust Sang Yu placed in him, and the annual salary that came with it, weren't there yet — otherwise Cui Jin would've been set a long time ago.

Grind hard. Grind toward the top.

So for anything Sang Yu handed down, Cui Jin was determined to do it as well as possible, and he waited in real time for the other side's response.

·

Yue Kemeng stared at the screen.

Her head buzzed.

Yue Kemeng had looked into signing with a major web novel platform before — she'd wanted to become a contracted author.

She'd tried it too: building a story from scratch took more than just imagination, and her skill level wasn't enough to get signed.

While asking veterans for advice on author forums, she'd also picked up some industry basics — being able to consistently hit forty or fifty yuan per thousand characters meant you could actually live off writing.

A writer at that level wouldn't stop at three thousand characters a day. Six thousand, ten thousand, even more.

Two hundred per thousand, and they only wanted thirty thousand characters minimum — add the reading fee, and she could walk away with twenty-six thousand!

Yue Kemeng wasn't a fast typist — a thousand characters an hour — but that meant she might be earning two hundred yuan an hour. How could she not be excited?!

These terms were too good.

Almost too good to believe.

Maybe good things like this existed in the world — but would one ever land in front of her?

Under her fanfics, readers would comment 'queen, you're amazing' and 'I'm deceased' — that was the biggest reward she'd ever gotten.

Now someone wanted to pay her to write, and there was even a reading fee...

It was suspiciously good.

What if this was some new kind of scam...

Throw out a big number to lower your guard, then ask for a security deposit, taxes, processing fees, and vanish with the cash.

But...

She needed the money.

She really did.

After a brief internal war, Yue Kemeng downloaded a business registry app and searched 'Aurora Entertainment.'

Under normal circumstances, Yue Kemeng would've already known the drama around The Demolition Office from Douyin.

But she hadn't had a second to scroll her phone lately, so she had zero idea about the wildest, funniest internet storm currently happening in Domestic Entertainment.

...She searched.

Yue Kemeng's heart dropped.

Something heavy lifted — but something else churned at the back of her throat.

She'd never believed in windfalls, not since she was little, because luck had never once found her.

She completely forgot about the possibility of 'what if I can't write it' — her whole brain was locked onto the contract, the deposit, making it real.

She drafted her reply carefully, typing word by word, quietly worrying the whole time whether her message would come across as unprofessional, too unsure of herself.

·

Cui Jin was afraid she wouldn't ask.

If there was room to negotiate, then everything was good!

His fingers flew across the keyboard.

[Actually, legally, a deposit can't exceed 20% of the total payment — that's a pretty tight limit for you. Maybe you'd be open to a prepayment model instead?]

The total word count wasn't confirmed yet, so the contract was based on the minimum.

Thirty thousand characters at six thousand yuan, plus twenty thousand for the reading fee.

Multiply by 20%...

Too little.

[For example, we could treat the reading fee as the prepayment and transfer it to your account within three business days of the contract taking effect.]

Custom commissions weren't like regular web novels —

Regular web novels depended on reader subscriptions;

A custom piece was created for one specific party — once it was done, if they didn't want it, it was nearly impossible to sell to anyone else.

The prepayment model essentially split the creative risk and upfront costs between both parties in the contract.

That showed good faith, right?

Cui Jin was also pretty happy to negotiate deals like this — he had more leverage, and didn't need to worry about risk to the company.

...

Yue Kemeng chewed on the dry skin of her lip and typed: [Is there a contract? I want a lawyer to look it over first.]

The unspoken message: don't try to scam me.

[Of course. If you agree to the prepayment model, we'll revise the contract according to your requirements and send it over.]

[Okay, I agree.]

[Great, after that...]

...

Yue Kemeng sat in the stairwell, listening to the rain outside, her ears pounding like there was a heartbeat inside them.

She didn't know how long had passed. No new messages from the other side for now.

Yue Kemeng was restless but didn't know what to do with herself, so she decided to look up that novel first — what was it called again?

A Demolition Office Is Not Ordinary.

She searched the title and a flood of related results poured out — like a whole other world.

#Ranking the glow-up moments of y_03's legendary account#

#Billionaire drops millions just to name his company#

#Aurora Entertainment about to drop its first drama#

#The Demolition Office male lead has been cast#

#Domestic Entertainment's hottest name this month#

...

Yue Kemeng was completely lost.