After Finding an Internship, I Set Up Provincial Public Opinion Bureaus

[The serious version]

My name is Fang Yan, and I'm an unlucky college intern. After buying a string of prayer beads in Panjiayuan, my life underwent a terrifying transformation...

No, perhaps... it became what it was always meant to be. The ten ordinary years I stole must, in the end, be paid back.

[The silly version]

Fang Yan, a third-year journalism student, got rejected while looking for a job.

The reason: she's a Monkey, and her zodiac sign clashes with the boss's.

Fang Yan was furious but didn't dare say anything, so she went to Panjiayuan to pay her respects, hunt for a bargain, and clear her head. To her surprise, she really did find a string of pretty nice jadeite prayer beads. It's just...

Why do they look so much like the strange heirloom beads she'd thrown away herself many years ago?

The beads flashed: Hehe.

Fang Yan: "Holy crap! No wonder they seemed familiar! That old bastard's back!"

With the strange beads' return, Fang Yan finds more and more bizarre events happening around her: a twisted three-eyed fish monster, a roommate who suddenly vanishes, and...

An invitation from the newly established Jiuding Project Group of the Bureau of Folk Affairs.

Legend says Dayu cast nine cauldrons to protect the nine regions, but few know that the essence of the vanished cauldrons was long ago forged by the King of the Xia Dynasty into nine mysterious strings of prayer beads, each containing the fortune of heaven and earth.

Only when the century-old pact came due, strange visions appeared in the heavens, dragon shadows writhed in the rain at night, the Bureau of Folk Affairs reopened the case, and the Jiuding Project was launched, was this buried history dragged back into the light.

And so, young talents from every corner of the country gathered here, determined to protect China's national fortune together before the true resurgence of the uncanny and global ascension arrived.

Fang Yan: "...Wait, I'm all for protecting it, but how did I end up as the leader of the Bureau of Folk Affairs?!"

[The happiest thing in life is having a group of friends who'll wake up at three in the morning when you call. Whether it's the snowy mountains of Tibet, the Gobi Desert in Xinjiang, the waters of the Nansha Islands, or the tropical rainforests of Yunnan, they'll go with you.

Ready to leave at a moment's notice, without hesitation.]

[Traveling beyond the horizon, this body becomes one with the mountains and rivers. - Xu Xiake]

A college student looking for an internship gets swept into a thousand-year-old conspiracy and joins the Bureau of Folk Affairs, traveling around to deal with strange folk customs. It's a story about young people testing and helping one another, protecting the nation's fortune in the face of natural disasters and ancient, indescribable horrors. The story isn't told solely from the heroine's perspective: it uses multiple points of view. The main group consists of three girls and three boys, each with their own perspective and countless hidden secrets.

[There are two heroines, Fang Yan and Wu Wen. The author ships all six members of the main cast and is happy to pair them up in any combination, whether romantically or platonically. The focus is on friendship, mystery and comedy, folk-culture adventures like those in Daomu Biji, some events adapted from real experiences, supernatural powers, mysticism and the paranormal, an ensemble cast with strong bonds, protecting the nation's fortune, and provincial in-jokes.]

The plot and characters of the entire book come from the author's dreams. Lately, the author keeps dreaming of a very strange Chinese-style Lovecraftian world, and the dreams connect into a complete story. The theme is folk-culture adventures across the country's provinces and regions. For now, I'm planning to write whatever I dream about. Honestly, I don't even think of myself as the author, just someone who happened to record their stories.

The dream arcs so far include: the mackerel tomb in Quanzhou, Jinling lantern art, the Three Gorges in Chongqing, the snowy forests of the Greater Khingan Range, the Hundred Thousand Mountains...

The story of these young people.

Theme: I urge Heaven to renew itself, to send down talents of every kind.