Writing My Way to Godhood Among the Stars

Web novelist Ye Ran transmigrates to the interstellar era and starts out with a classic mountain of debt.

Ye Ran: I know what to do! This interstellar era must be a wasteland for web novels, just waiting for me to shock the whole universe with angsty, melodramatic romance!

Then she opens the bestseller list:

"He Regretted It After I Faked My Death"

"The Fake Heiress Ran Off While Pregnant and Became Everyone's Darling"

Ye Ran: ...

Everyone across the stars is following her path, leaving her nowhere to go...

Not a chance!

This is an era before protagonists shout, "My fate is mine to control, not Heaven's!" and "Don't bully a poor young man!" She can write those stories too!

So one day, when interstellar readers open a website, ready to randomly pick a lucky bedtime read from among stories about divorce, breakups, faking one's death, and running away while pregnant, what greets them is...

The good-for-nothing protagonist's broken-engagement story!

At first, readers are all yelling in the comments: The guy's having a great time breaking off the engagement now, but later he'll chase his wife all the way to the crematorium, hehehe.

Later, readers are all seeing red in the comments: Aaaaah, sis, get him! Kick his ass! I'll kill him, kill him, kill him!

When the novel ends, readers eagerly await the author's new work. But Ye Ran has already happily put on another secret identity and started writing a traditional cultivation-and-leveling story.

Gradually, more and more quirky novels appear on the interstellar web, which had once been dominated by romance stories. There are tales of good-for-nothings making a comeback, urban immortals, and Dragon Kings returning...

The interstellar folk have never seen anything like it. For the first time, they experience the head-spinning thrill of reading a novel.

But the several big-name authors they follow all keep taking breaks at different times. Today one posts a short chapter, tomorrow another goes missing, leaving their eager readers heartbroken.

Later, Ye Ran, who's having too much fun writing under different secret identities, accidentally reveals who she is. The whole interstellar world is shocked, then goes wild.

"Aaaaaah, so you weren't updating because you were off raising other readers! We're not your precious babies anymore!"

"Author, come back! Do you remember the second part of By the Blue Star River?"

"People only have so much energy, so, author, stop being a person and become an octopus!"

Caught in the middle of this mess, Ye Ran thinks: Using secret identities is fun for a while, but then you end up at the crematorium. How did I still not escape crematorium literature?!

Reader's Guide:

1. Updates promptly at six every evening. All stories within the novel are made up. Any resemblance is purely a trope.

2. The female lead only writes novels told from a woman's point of view.

3. The male lead is a fan of the female lead's books. They are both virgins, and theirs is a pure romance.

Here's an upcoming story: "What's Wrong with Wanting to Be a Background Character?"

Ye Cen unexpectedly awakens to discover that she's the designated background character in three hit shonen manga.

In the action manga about supernatural powers, she's the background character who explains everyone's moves while the main cast fights and throws in a mass-produced "How terrifying!" for good measure.

In the cyberpunk wasteland manga, the author is too lazy to change character models, so she keeps getting reused as the prosthetics, bar, fencing, and smuggling boss who sells the protagonist his gear.

In the urban supernatural manga, she runs wherever ghosts show up, serving as the one and only source of information to tell the protagonist, "It's dangerous here" and "They say people died here."

Ye Cen plays her background roles conscientiously and is very satisfied with them. She has absolutely no desire to join the main cast or become a popular villain on her own.

Popular characters with big moments in the manga are too dangerous. As a frequently reused background character, she can drop in at the edge of the plot to watch the action while staying far away from danger. Neither she nor the friends and family around her will be sacrificed. What's not to love?

Until one day, she sees herself in the manga...

She has been shaded in heavily by the artist, rarely shown full-face, and given the aura of a final boss who dominates every scene.

The protagonists and villains all look at her with wariness or awe. They call her the wielder of all-knowing powers, the CFO commanding a vast business empire in a cyberpunk metropolis, and the guide who is always on hand wherever a new ghost realm appears.

Ye Cen: ...Me?

She just wants to be a background character. Stop adding settings to her character at random!

Manga readers: Aaaaaah, we love how Sister Cen wanders past every major plotline, casually calls out the villain's moves, then insists she's just an ordinary person!

Theme: A renaissance in the web-novel world.