Back to 2008: Becoming a Beauty and a Manga Artist

“Isn’t this just face customization in real life?”

Everything began with an offhand remark from Yu Shu.

Who would have thought the comic artist System would actually send her back to her second year of middle school? Back then, she was only a little chubby, her family was harmonious, and her childhood friend was by her side.

The System tailored achievement rewards just for her: appearance stat points.

At first, Yu Shu only wanted to show off in front of other people. But who knew she would get hooked on it?

On the surface, she was a beautiful, unruffled top student and a genius comic artist, casually waving a hand as if nothing could trouble her.

In reality, she was working herself to the bone in the System's space every day, squeezing three days' worth of work into one. You might think she was resting with her eyes closed, but she was actually drawing like crazy, grinding through practice problems, and more...

From serializing shoujo manga to making a guest appearance as a beloved empress, from a talent-show manga to an apocalypse manga...

An old newspaper bore the earliest trace of her fame: “Yu Shu, the fourteen-year-old genius girl who burst onto the scene.”

: The heroine was a couch potato in her previous life. After being reborn, she's a little lazy and loves showing off, and she's a total pretty-face lover.

: Mindless feel-good fun with sweetness.

: The heroine starts drawing from scratch. She's talented, but more than that, she keeps at it day after day.

: There's romance, with both mutual and one-sided feelings. All in all, it's a little Mary Sue.

My new novel, "Mary Sue Casts Her Net Wide in Dreams," is now available. If you're interested, give it a try! Shui Qiao is silly and spoiled. She gets a dream-entry manual, but her talent is poor, and she doesn't even realize anything is wrong when the manual turns out to be incomplete.

She loves making friends and acting cute. Deep down, she longs for love and tight embraces.

But she's so oblivious that she doesn't know hugs depend on who you're hugging, or that holding hands depends on gender.

One day,

She thinks she's been abandoned, so she decides to cast her net wide.

[The Young Master Who Forgot Her: Shui Qiao once served as the sidekick to an arrogant young master who barely spoke. It was only for a short time, but surely he couldn't have forgotten her.

She thinks of his name, and somehow wanders into a dream from twenty years ago.

In the dream, she becomes an illiterate girl, and she and the young master, now a wage laborer, are childhood sweethearts who marry young. She chooses a tragic ending for her husband.

When she dies, the young master turns white-haired in an instant.

In a daze, she realizes the dream wasn't just a few fleeting moments, as she'd thought. The young master really did spend a long time working on an assembly line in the dream, and suffered terribly.

But... she never experienced any of it! After she wakes up, the young master finds her.]

The young master seems like a pretty decent guy, so Shui Qiao decides to be his good friend. They did kiss in the dream, but that's normal between friends, right?

Since they're friends, Shui Qiao figures it's perfectly normal to use her friend's luxury car and mansion to launch her influencer career, too.

To boost her influencer career, Shui Qiao decides to cover all her bases.

But why are her dreams getting more and more out of control...

: “Average beauty” means an ordinary-looking beauty. Calling the heroine a “little beauty” in the title sounds like the voice of a capsule toy machine, so weird :)

: The manual is gradually being revealed. The heroine's limited talent is the main thing keeping her from reading the whole thing.

: A reverse harem, male leads are virgins, and they appear one after another.

: No logic.

Theme: Strive for your ideals.