Chapter 8 Crime and Punishment

When he first calculated this number, he didn't quite believe it. He checked it three times before confirming that it was the right amount.

Eighteen thousand yuan, a five-digit number, five syllables. When read out loud, it just contains the three front nasal vowels of the sound a. The rhythm is like Li Bai's ancient poetry.

Although Wang Zixu's goal has always been the Nobel Prize in Literature and the 600 million yuan in royalties, that goal has always been too far away for him, and he has not expected to receive this award in the first 30 years.

As for those nearby scenes, the few hundred yuan of royalties from Xihe Literature and Art were just the limit of his imagination. Even for authors of top literary journals, the royalties for an article were no more than a few thousand yuan, and it would take a long time to get them.

Zuo Ziliang's promise was equivalent to promising him 18,000 yuan in royalties every month. Wang Zixu could never have dreamed of such a good thing.

He hesitated for a long time before asking what he was most worried about: "You won't be unable to pay the manuscript fee, right?"

Zuo Ziliang was finally annoyed by him and said, "Go away, who am I to pay you? How about this, if you can produce two articles a day steadily, more than 60 articles a month, and the total word count exceeds 12 words, I will give you an additional 2000 yuan attendance bonus, is that okay with you?"

Wang Zixu was afraid that he would go back on his word, so he immediately said, "It's a deal."

Despite Zuo Ziliang's assurance, Wang Zixu was still worried about the decline in writing quality.

The goal is to be a Nobel Prize winner, so he must be responsible for every line he writes. But how could he not be moved by the 20,000 yuan in royalties? This amount of money can solve almost all the problems in his life. After experiencing a painful struggle between heaven and man, he made up his mind and thought, screw it, I can get paid even if I don’t write well. I’ll just write.

In order to prepare himself mentally before writing, he found Dostoyevsky's biography and read it again, smiling with satisfaction as he read it.

Dostoevsky is one of the writers he admires most. He has read The Brothers Karamazov many times, and each time he reads it, he feels a new surge of emotion. Although Dostoevsky did not win the Nobel Prize in Literature, that is obviously the problem of the Nobel Prize in Literature Committee, not Dostoevsky's problem, right?
The Nobel Prize review always has some shady elements. In order to attack ideology, they don't give prizes to the most important writers like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but give the prizes to less important authors like Bunin and Pasternak. In Wang Zixu's opinion, Dostoevsky's failure to win the prize does not damage his glory, but is a disgrace to the Nobel Prize.

However, even such a great writer had his share of debts. He gambled to pay off his debts, and thus incurred even more debts. A masterpiece like Crime and Punishment was written when he was in a lot of debt. This shows that financial pressure does not harm the creativity of writers, and speeding up the creation process does not necessarily mean that the quality of the work will be reduced.

The most important thing is, Zuo Ziliang himself has said that a decline in quality doesn’t matter, so why should he worry about it for his boss?

With this mentality, Wang Zixu began to type faster. After writing for about half an hour, he realized that he might have been controlled by Zuo Ziliang.

Given his personality, he simply couldn't lower the quality even if he was asked to do so. He would examine every line he wrote, and repeatedly refining the words had become his habit. He wouldn't be able to write without refining the words. In the past, he would write for three hours and then go to bed after get off work, but now he has to spend twice as much time to submit the manuscript on time. Not only is the quantity far greater than before, but the quality has not decreased at all.

However, he went to bed later and later, from going to bed on time before 11 o'clock to climbing into bed at 2 or 3 in the morning. After waking up his wife who was sleeping soundly many times, his angry wife kicked him out of the room and asked him to sleep in the small room on the grounds that it would affect his pregnancy preparations.

After a week like this, Wang Zixu got up at 8 o'clock every morning, with disheveled hair, crooked eyes and mouth, and dark circles under his eyes like the bottom of a pot that had been used for ten years. During a meeting, he fell asleep with his head tilted. If he hadn't been woken up by the person next to him, he would have almost had time to snore loudly in public. His colleagues at work were surprised to ask him what he did at night, but he could only keep silent. All the time outside of work, Wang Zixu was carving his own scripts. Whenever he had nothing to do, he would simulate all kinds of love words in his mind. When a female colleague talked to him, he blurted out a sentence, and he didn't even remember what he said after he finished speaking, but the other party was surprised and blushed, and kept saying that she didn't expect you to learn bad things. After get off work, she even came to ask him if he wanted to go drinking together in the evening.

Wang Zixu certainly didn't have the time to spend in America. He had already devoted himself to his writing career.

He moved his computer to the balcony of his home and turned on an LED light every night. Unknown insects would knock on the window glass with their heads and crickets would chirp outside the window. These sounds mixed with the roar of his computer case and the crisp sound of his keyboard, creating a harmonious late-night melody.

This intensity of writing not only tested his hand speed, but also squeezed his talent. In the first week, he was able to rely on past experience to create many wonderful scripts, but in the second week, he fell into decline. He felt like a squeezed sugarcane, which could no longer produce juice and could only squeeze out dry powder.

The time he was interrupted while creating was increasing. In between creations, he had to read more books to recharge himself. The task of writing drained him, and he drained others.

If Wang Zixu's reading in the past was to search for streams in the mountains, collect them carefully, and drink a cup of trickling water, now it is to go across the rivers and seas, regardless of whether the water is clear or turbid, and to drink the torrent water in a turbulent world.

Nietzsche said: Those who do not want to die of thirst among the people of the world must learn to drink from all cups. He drinks from all cups, as long as it is water.

He had already turned several books of Jun'ichi Watanabe into wrinkles. He could no longer squeeze out nutrition from this writer and had to turn to other people for help, including David Herbert Lawrence, Milan Kundera, Zhang Xianliang, Wang Xiaobo... These writers who seemed to be a bit rogue in the past now became Wang Zixu's nourishment.

He took the nutrients from the writings of these writers into his body, processed them in his unique way, and let them flow out from his fingertips. In this processing process, something was permanently retained.

He felt like a pure word processing machine, although he didn't know what he was producing. According to Zuo Ziliang's point of view, he was producing libido.

He felt that his writing skills were improving rapidly. Not just improving, but improving rapidly.

He now feels that his writing style was too immature in the past. For example, the metaphor of "Yangshao people and pottery" praised by Zuo Ziliang was not up to par. Now he can write better metaphors that are more precise, direct and shocking.

The rhythm of Wang Zengqi, the rhyme of Zha Liangzheng, the meticulous brushwork of Shen Congwen, the wonderful metaphors of Qian Zhongshu, the coldness of Lu Xun, and the playfulness of Wang Xiaobo... He swallowed them all into his body and transformed them into his own pure energy.

At night, a solitary lamp shines on the colorful window paper on the balcony, and poetic language flows naturally from his fingers. At this moment, the prince's hunched body is curled up in the abbot's room, but his soul stands tall above the earth, forming a new peak.

Neither Zuo Ziliang nor Wang Zixu had expected that the verbal promise they had made so easily would completely detonate the entire APP, causing an uproar in a place that they were unaware of.

(End of this chapter)

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