Chapter 14

Yue Kemeng pulled up a Marketing Account that broke the whole thing down from the beginning, and read through the full story.

From the boss Sang Yu's rant about Golden Legend, to the founding of Aurora Entertainment, to The Demolition Office project getting locked in, to the open casting call online — she read it all, equal parts thrilled and fascinated.

Thrilled because: with an operation this big, and someone this loaded — the guy was giving away ten million in a lottery — the odds of a custom commission being a scam dropped way down.

Maybe, just maybe, she really could walk away with over twenty thousand yuan in a month, or even less.

If this was a real opportunity, she couldn't hesitate — she had to grab it!

Yue Kemeng swallowed hard.

And then there was the curiosity — she was genuinely curious now about what The Demolition Office would look like, and when it would air.

She hadn't thought too hard about it before, but now it clicked.

Why was Aurora Entertainment commissioning spinoff fanfic?

Then she saw that this Sang Yu guy had previously bought fan-made illustrations and licensed the costume designs from them for the female lead to wear — and it hit her like a lightning bolt, the most logical reason:

Probably so they could use the fan content directly for promo after the show aired?

TV dramas — Yue Kemeng hadn't watched one in years, and hadn't paid for a single streaming subscription either.

Because she just wasn't interested.

Why not?

She always felt like modern dramas had this stiff, hollow, try-hard energy.

The xianxia shows she watched as a kid on TV had people flying all over the place, demons and monsters everywhere — but they never gave her that feeling.

Now? Nothing worked. Even watching clips of some shows online made her skin crawl, they were so bad.

Some shows had great cuts — looked amazing, felt electric — then you clicked into the actual episode and the whole illusion collapsed. Total bait-and-switch.

She'd been burned a few times before.

That's exactly why she'd gone and written fanfic herself — just to get the satisfaction she wanted.

But Aurora Entertainment pulling a move like this... if she ended up being a viewer too, she was actually curious to see the final product!

Yue Kemeng finished reading the whole story, felt reassured, and immediately splurged on a lawyer to review the contract.

Once she confirmed everything was clean, she signed her name and officially started the job!

The client's requirement: keeping the original novel's core structure mostly intact, write a spinoff with a female-A male-O vibe.

She could follow the main story, write bonus chapters, or go full AU.

Basically: go wild.

Yue Kemeng thought: this is my whole thing.

She had zero confidence she'd write something earth-shattering, but her wallet was bone-dry and she was more than ready to bend the knee for cash.

The original plan was to keep delivering food while pulling all-nighters to read the novel before the prepayment came through.

But the money landed in one day — well within the three business days.

Money cures everything. The number in her bank account didn't completely calm her down, but it took the edge off the anxiety that had been eating her alive lately.

Even her two grandparents were stunned.

They'd never known their granddaughter had a skill like this — and the old folks, who'd lived through most of a century, felt a quiet, private pride:

Back in their day, people who could earn money with a pen were educated people!

Good news lifts the spirit, and even her grandma's energy noticeably improved.

That positive feedback looped back to Yue Kemeng and fueled her even more.

She cut most of her delivery shifts without hesitation and threw herself into The Demolition Office, planning to start writing the moment she finished reading!

Once she started reading, she got completely sucked in.

The Demolition Office was an old-school power-fantasy novel — setting aside the romance, just the worldbuilding and the pacing of the plot were undeniably excellent.

The difficulty of writing a female-A male-O spinoff? Not just low — the creative soil was practically overflowing with nutrients.

Fanfic actually had a bar to clear: it wasn't just about the writer's skill — the source material itself had to be compelling enough to inspire the work.

That was the mysterious part.

So big hits almost always spawned fanfic communities, whether the buzz was positive or negative.

It just had to make people want to talk about it.

Yue Kemeng's biggest fear going in was that she wouldn't be able to get into the source material and would end up squeezing out the spinoff like pulling teeth.

Luckily, that wasn't the case!

The female lead in the novel was a detective — sharp-looking, righteous, brave, a solid fighter, dependable. Powerful.

The male lead was quick-witted, detail-oriented, razor-sharp logic, action-ready, also powerful.

And yet with character setups like that, the romance was a mess and the plot had gaps everywhere — which left plenty of room to play:

This was exactly the kind of foundation she was best at reworking, just like that one fanfic she'd written before.

Yue Kemeng let out a long breath of relief.

Her only worry had been taking the money and failing to deliver — now she had something solid to stand on.

A dual-powerhouse female-A male-O setup also hit every single one of Yue Kemeng's personal preferences dead-on...

Let's write!

·

All submissions would first go to the screenwriting team for an initial pass, then be discussed with the original author Chihong Chen to go over strengths and weaknesses.

In the end, three or four pieces were selected, annotated with notes, and presented to the boss Sang Yu for review.

Each writer brought something different to the table. Chihong Chen waited for Sang Yu to pick a direction so final revisions could begin.

Sang Yu read through everything, raised an eyebrow: 'Who said we can only pick one?'

Chihong Chen: 'Huh?'

Sang Yu: 'Overall, KM's is the most complete — but there are scenes in the others that are also really well done.'

He remembered this writer, KM.

One piece, and it felt like a consistent, stable performance. Pretty impressive.

Even as fanfic, the structural completeness of the story was ahead of everyone else's.

The others weren't bad either.

Everyone wrote the romance dynamics differently — some had flashes of inspiration that just felt right the moment you read them.

Sang Yu: 'Can't we use more than one? Weave them in logically, or swap certain parts in.'

He read through everything once more and decided to bring KM onto the screenwriting team to help Chihong Chen with detailed script revisions.

As for the others — if he wanted to use their ideas or bits, paying for them was obviously the cleanest move. What if they wouldn't sell...

Would they?

They would. Just add money.

Once you had money you floated above it all — worrying about cost-effectiveness was such a hassle. Throwing more cash at something was the fastest way to get things done.

Sang Yu: 'I'll have Cui Jin handle it later. Let's get The Demolition Office into production as soon as possible.'

Right — Cui Jin had mentioned KM's home situation wasn't great. Cut her some slack.

Let people work without having to worry.

The pre-production phase before a crew actually got moving was way too long, and Sang Yu's patience was getting thinner by the day.

Normally he couldn't even sit through the thirty-second ads on casual mobile games — he always bought the membership to skip.

Let alone months.

— He'd thought he could wait before, but that had changed.

Chihong Chen's eyes went wide.

The whole 'pick the best one' mindset — no, scratch that, 'take all of them' — was his thinking really that rigid, that narrow-minded?!

·

Yao Yingbo found out about the boss Sang Yu's targeted 'submission drive,' and his expression went complicated.

Not because of some reckless decision from Sang Yu — after a short period of observation, something felt off.

This whole crew was seriously weird.

Yao Yingbo had always assumed The Demolition Office was just some rich person's quirky 'emotional value' purchase — a novelty project to keep themselves entertained.

The subject matter was a disaster. Sure, ancient romance dramas got dragged online from January to December, but people still actually paid to watch them.

The Demolition Office was too rebellious.

The cast couldn't carry a drama — worse, they were basically ghosts in Domestic Entertainment. Nobody knew them.

The crew was also... baffling.

Logically speaking, Domestic Entertainment was a tight circle. Sang Yu had stepped in by stepping on Huang Yunwen, which meant he'd made enemies not just with Huang Yunwen but with the whole crowd behind Golden Legend.

Anyone with connections wouldn't touch this.

Yao Yingbo had been in the industry long enough to eat at everyone's table — he had projects with all three major TV networks, which was exactly why he could afford to follow the money.

It also meant Sang Yu could keep throwing cash at people like him: unaffiliated with any faction, but experienced.

And yet the crew had almost no familiar faces. Most of them were young women and young men with zero experience.

Yao Yingbo had found it strange for a while, but once he'd made up his mind, he figured he'd just coast through the shoot.

— He'd taken the job partly because The Demolition Office looked so unofficial at first glance that if it flopped, there were plenty of directions to point the blame.

As long as some of the shots held up in quality, he wouldn't tank his reputation, and he'd pocket some cash plus an original film credit.

Throw a little Marketing Account spend at it when the time came — 'even directors have their rough gigs' — and the internet would laugh it off and move on.

A decent deal.

The drama itself, aside from a bit of online buzz, had nothing else going for it — no way to prop up the ratings.

He'd looked at the main cast and the person with the most fans was — honestly, a little embarrassing.

He couldn't help but look down on it a little.

The Demolition Office wasn't an S-tier ancient romance. It didn't carry that kind of weight.

On top of that, The Demolition Office hadn't given him much time upfront to design storyboards, so he had every reason to offload some of the work.

So for the pre-production stuff — coordinating with the cinematographer, the art director, locking in the shooting schedule, scouting locations — he could get away with phoning it in.

But then the script landed in his hands...

Something felt off.

The most direct indicator of a drama's baseline quality was the script.

And that was a point where the industry ecosystem was genuinely warped:

Either they outsourced layer by layer, hunting for cheap ghostwriters from schools or the industry, or they brought in outsiders with a resume to polish.

Actually professional scripts were rare.

Most scripts couldn't even fully apply the basic writing techniques taught in nine years of compulsory education.

S-tier productions were the same.

As a director, Yao Yingbo knew this better than anyone — which was exactly why one look at The Demolition Office script made him feel like something supernatural was going on.

During pre-production, every face he met when coordinating with the team was unfamiliar and young.

But they got things done. Every single person worked with the kind of focus that looked like they'd been hexed.

Unlike any crew he'd worked with before — the efficiency was almost unsettling.

Yao Yingbo was genuinely shaken. The casual, 'just get through it and collect the check' attitude he'd walked in with was being forced to shift.

He couldn't help himself. He pulled an all-nighter drawing storyboards.

...He had no choice!

He was the only one slacking — it felt wrong!

But honestly, the real reason — the one Yao Yingbo wouldn't admit out loud — was that he'd started to see The Demolition Office's potential.

Actual potential.

He'd sat in on the screenwriting team's online meeting earlier — directors could attend, since they needed to know about any changes in order to design the storyboards accordingly.

Every revision, every discussion — it almost all generated visuals in his head automatically.

The feeling was... like he'd need to bring out his real skills. And maybe, down the line, it could actually be used in his promo reel.

Career ambition, yes — but he also saw the upside.

On that basis, as long as he performed even a little above his baseline, he'd genuinely benefit.

So why wouldn't he?