Novel Bin Chapter 1: Looking for Friends
Eve: I said I wouldn’t pick up another project, but I loved this novel too much, it haunted me. Unlike my past projects, I’ve finished reading this one. I can say that it’s 1v1, protagonist shou, and has a happy ending. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I do!
“Xiao Shaoye, we’ve arrived.”
Song Xuanhe had just woken up. While still in a daze, he heard these words and subconsciously replied, “Where are we?”
“The Qing City Orphanage. This is all the information on Xiao Yuanmu and the orphanage director.”
Someone placed a hard-covered folder by Song Xuanhe’s side. By coincidence, it bumped into his fingers that were hanging by his leg. The feeling of the hard plastic made him frown. He felt befuddled like he hadn’t yet fully woken up. Song Xuanhe rubbed his temples and finally opened his eyes.
After getting a clear view of his surroundings, Song Xuanhe subconsciously rubbed his eyes. He turned to face an elite-looking, unfamiliar man, who was sitting by his side. He felt even more absent-minded as if he was still in a dream.
Seeing Song Xuanhe furrowing his brows and rubbing at his temples, the man said with concern, “Xiao Shaoye, do you not feel well?”
Song Xuanhe had yet to understand what was happening. He was just about to ask who the man was, when an extremely boorish voice suddenly sounded in his head: 【Enthusiastically celebrating Host’s successful fusion with the character, Song Xuanhe, from 《The President and His Seven Boyfriends》. You don’t have to pay $998 or even $888, all you need to do is follow the plot and say your lines, and you can take home Death-Seeking System Z48!”】
The voice stopped. Words emerged in Song Xuanhe’s mind——【On the way to the orphanage Assistant Zhang Chao collated all of the information pertaining to Xiao Yuanmu and handed it over to Song Xuanhe.
Only, when he thought about this youth who had already revealed a great talent for business, Zhang Chao still couldn’t help but try and persuade him, “Xiao Shaoye, Xiao Yuanmu is unable to discern between what’s good for him and what’s bad for him. You don’t have to haggle with him. After some time, he’ll naturally accept you.”
Song Xuanhe laughed coldly. There was a determination to win in his voice, “I’m not patient enough to wait for him to accept. This time, he has no choice but to accept.”
When Zhang Chao heard this, he sighed inwardly over this young master. He only hoped that he would be a bit more sensible. Xiao Shaoye liked to play around a little too much and was the type to get tired of the old and enamoured with the new. 】
Song Xuanhe widened his eyes. He didn’t pay attention to the words in his mind. Instead, he was surprised by the sudden silence around him. The car that had just been steadily driven had paused its movement. However, looking into the rear mirror, he could see that the driver was still in a driving position. Outside, it looked like someone had pressed pause on the pedestrians’ actions. Even the unfamiliar man next to him was frozen, staring at him with a concerned expression.
At this moment, it was like time had stopped. There was a baffling, odd feeling as well as a feeling of having transmigrated.
“What’s happening?”
【It’s as you see it, brother. 】The System had a northeastern accent. It made its words sound warm like it already considered them friends:【I am System Z48. From now on, I will assist you in completing your mission. Right now, you’ve transmigrated into a book called 《The President and His Seven Boyfriends》. You’ve become Song Xuanhe, who has the same name as you. When you’ve finished your portion of the storyline, you can return to your own body.】
“Death-Seeking System…” Song Xuanhe repeated this once. There was dislike but also a sense of being at a loss in his tone, “You’re a Death-Seeking System named Death-Seeking?”
【You can change my name according to your tastes. Actually, my last host named me Er Shun, but I thought that it wasn’t dazzling enough, so I changed it into a name that had numbers and letters. Z48 not only suits my identity, but it also sounds very futuristic.】
There was too much wrong with these words. Song Xuanhe didn’t know from where he should start ridiculing it. Therefore, he just asked about proper matters, “Why did I transmigrate into this book? Also, why do I have to complete the mission you’ve given me?”
Transmigrating, or transmigrating into a book, wasn’t a new concept to Song Xuanhe, who often liked to read books in his spare time. From historical texts, to astronomy, to domestic and foreign classics, to even the multifarious types of online texts— he would not refuse to read any of them. So long as he had the time, it was fine.
However, he’d seen plots before where people had transmigrated because they had died in a car accident, jumped off a building and died, and all sorts of other reasons, but he never imagined that he would transmigrate after having just fallen asleep in a normal fashion.
Like he said, why, ah?
He, who was the youngest young master of the Song clan in his original world, had not lacked money nor power. He hadn’t been at the summit in terms of influence, but he also hadn’t been someone others dared to provoke without thinking it through. He lived freely, confident, and at ease. Only after eating until he burst would he have thought about switching lives.
【This is just the way it is, brother.】The System seemed to be taking the time to put its words together. Half a minute later, it continued speaking:【If you’re unwilling, I can send you back to your original world. However, you probably won’t live for more than half a year.】
“What do you mean?”
【Actually, this is also the reason why we looked for you. Do you remember your physical examination you did a while back? Right now, you probably haven’t gotten the results yet. However, I can directly inform you of your result. Your body’s condition is not good. Right now, you already have middle-late stage stomach cancer. The cancer cells have already shifted to other parts of your body. With the current level of medicine in your world, the chances of being cured are extremely small.】
Song Xuanhe was silent for a while. He listened to the System’s words. A normal person’s first reaction would be to not believe these words. However, he knew his own body. He had gone to have a physical examination done, because he could perceive that there had been changes in his body. Nonetheless, he didn’t expect it to really be stomach cancer. It had even progressed to the middle-late stage.
“If I complete the mission, is there a chance to be cured after going back?”
【Rather, I should say that as long as you complete the story line, your body will cure itself without needing treatment.】
Song Xuanhe didn’t speak for a long time. He then suddenly smiled, “OK. I agree.”
The System sighed in relief and said:【Since it’s like this, I’ll first send the information about this world to you and let you get an approximate understanding of it.】
A book very quickly appeared within Song Xuanhe’s mind. Probably because he was reading in his head, he finished flipping through the book in minutes. After finishing, his expression was complicated and difficult-to-express succinctly. He endured and endured, asking, “You want me to do everything the Song Xuanhe in the book did again?”
The System felt rather guilty:【Yes.】
“I choose to live for half a year. Take me back.”
【Don’t, ah! Big Brother! We can discuss this!】
Song Xuanhe sneered but didn’t say anything again. He only roughly skimmed through the contents of the book once more.
This book was called 《The President and His Seven Boyfriends》. The focus was indeed on the President and his seven boyfriends. Probably because the censors have been strict lately, although the name made it seem like it was a very sexually explicit novel, the contents were actually very pure and harmonious. Although the main character was indeed always hopelessly entangled with seven men, right until the author stopped writing midway, he hadn’t confirmed his relationship with any of them, let alone did anything really happen between him and them.
The male lead of this novel was named Xiao Yuanmu. Just from looking at his name, you would feel like he kind of seemed like a great male lead from a stallion novel. And in reality, this danmei novel’s protagonist was actually very much like those “Mr.Perfect” male leads in stallion novels.
Xiao Yuanmu was one of the successors to the Xiao Group, one of the eight great financial groups in this world. His aura was ice-cold and ascetic; his personality was frigid and gloomy; his methods were decisive and vicious; his talent in business was outstanding. Under his command, the Xiao Family became the number one financial group in the world, reaching the summit of the world in a single leap. Xiao Yuanmu himself also became an existence that even the head of state had to treat deferentially.
Xiao Yuanmu was different from the other black lotus protagonists, who would smile on the outside but were actually sons of b*tches on the inside. He was an exotic flower that grew out of the mud, covered in filth. He was petty and would not refrain from speaking of taboo topics. He had a good grasp on how to “make stocks drop beneath the horizon while chatting.” He was a classic example of someone who could destroy a group with just a word. No one who offended him ended up with a good ending.
Song Xuanhe had a strong suspicion that the reason the author had given up writing in the end had a lot to do with how Xiao Yuanmu was too much of a Gary Stu. After all, if you made your male lead too Gary Stu, don’t even mention the readers, not even the author, who created him, would be able to accept him being pressed under any of the seven boyfriends, who weren’t even better-looking, richer, or more influential than him.
Even so, none of this had anything to do with Song Xuanhe.
What concerned him was the original host, who had only appeared in less than ten chapters, despite the novel being over a million words long— Song Xuanhe.
Song Xuanhe was the youngest young master of the Song Group that reigned over Jiang City. After graduating, he came out of nowhere and became one of the Song Family’s Vice Presidents. As soon as he entered the company, he took a fancy to Xiao Yuanmu, who had begun working for the company not even a month ago. Since then, he had begun a vigorous pursuit of the other.
Once you read up to here, you might think that Song Xuanhe was one of Xiao Yuanmu’s boyfriends. But actually, he wasn’t. This was because most of his scenes occurred before the male lead was reborn, and this book was mostly about what happened after Xiao Yuanmu was reborn. That meant it had nothing to do with Song Xuanhe.
If you really had to describe their relationship, then it would probably be: Xiao Yuanmu would still find it difficult to ease his hate for Song Xuanhe even after turning him to dust.
That’s right, 《The President and His Seven Boyfriends》was a rebirth story. Before his rebirth, Xiao Yuanmu had been an orphan, dependent on the orphanage director while growing up. Although he had been adopted several times because of his exquisitely good looks, he was always sent back to the orphanage in the end.
So long as there were other people around, there would be strife, especially in such a barren place like the orphanage.
Xiao Yuanmu was handsome, intelligent, and sensible. He was always the first pick of people who were coming to adopt. The other young children naturally rejected and isolated him because of this. They would even frame him for crimes he didn’t do and slander him.
It was because he had grown up in such circumstances that Xiao Yuanmu had become reclusive and cold. He had become expressionless at a young age and would be completely indifferent to everything and everyone else. Nonetheless, it was fortunate that he had the Director’s fine teaching. Therefore, even under such circumstances, there was a type of kindness that only young people would have still in Xiao Yuanmu’s heart.
However, this rare kindness was thoroughly destroyed by Song Xuanhe.
As soon as he entered the company, Song Xuanhe began to court Xiao Yuanmu. However, Xiao Yuanmu hadn’t liked him and would not accept him. Therefore, Song Xuanhe used the orphanage director to force Xiao Yuanmu to compromise.
After the two of them got together, it wasn’t long before Song Xuanhe became fed up with Xiao Yuanmu’s constant expressionless and frigid appearance. Even so, he hadn’t broken up with him. Instead, he had begun to torment Xiao Yuanmu for fun. He would willfully order him about, and tease him, and humiliate him in public. He even let his friends make fun of him and play tricks on him.
Afterwards, at a banquet, Song Xuanhe directly gave Xiao Yuanmu to a greasy-haired, big-eared, sadistic businessman as a gift. And, it was precisely this that led to Xiao Yuanmu’s death.
——When he was on the way to the hotel with the businessman, the car Xiao Yuanmu was in crashed into a truck head-first. He died on the spot.
Xiao Yuanmu, after being reborn, naturally hated Song Xuanhe to the bone. However, he was extremely calm. After laying low for a while, he once again gathered all the evidence of the Song Family’s lawbreaking that he had found before. He then dumped it all in front of Song Xuanhe, threatened him thoroughly, and then left. He made use of his knowledge of the past to buy a lottery ticket worth 5 million and then left the city, heading for Hai City.
Afterwards, Xiao Yuanmu went to work for the country’s biggest stock exchange. After working for some time, he spent his time learning and also used the five million he won to practice under a different identity. His gaze was precise, and in just half a year, that five million grew more than twenty-fold. He had accumulated nearly 100 million in capital.
And, it was in that moment that Xiao Yuanmu’s biological parents found him. They allowed him to leap from his status as an orphan to one of the successors of the Xiao Group, one of the great eight financial groups in the world. “Reaching Heaven in a single bound” was not even adequate enough to describe it.
In the Capital, the Song Family had both estates and connections. However, compared to a giant like the Xiao Family, they were nothing but an ant. They could not be mentioned on equal terms.
Therefore, Song Xuanhe’s fate could be imagined—after the Song Group went bankrupt, Song Xuanhe somehow became impotent. He was unable to recover from this one setback and was tricked into drug addiction while he had been drowning his worries in alcohol. In order to support his drug addiction, he had laid beneath all sorts of men, jumping from bed to bed. In the end, because those people had grown tired of playing with him, they threw him into the forest, where he was torn apart by ferocious wolves. He died without an intact corpse.
When he saw this, Song Xuanhe didn’t know if it was worse to help the original host walk down the plot, dying without a complete corpse, or go back to live a confident and easy life for half a year before dying of cancer.
Eve: For now, updates will be once a week, Sunday. I want to take some time to stock up and gauge my workload. Hoping to make this twice a week soon~
Anyway, this story is super cute with some thorns. It’s also a very long slow burn with lots of UST.