The light enveloped Lewis until he could no longer see. It was like in a video-game when you were hit by a flash bang. The light slowly started to fade. A voice resounded from all angles.
"Welcome to The Dao of Filler, young daoist!" It was definitely not the mysterious cultivator from earlier, as this voice sounded aged. Finally, the person behind the voice revealed themselves. An elderly man cloaked in brown robes that had several noticeable tears in them. Needless to say, the senior citizen did not look like someone who had mastered a Dao.
He then looked dead straight at Lewis and started reciting a few lines, as if he was a robot. "As an author, you must always be shameless. Exploit your viewers. Take advantage of their feeble minds. Reel them in like dumb fish. All of this can be accomplished and more easily."
Lewis was dumbfounded.
Lewis could accept the fact he was transported into a sort of book world, since he did meet some weird ghost in his bedroom, but seriously? The very book that man cherished and held dear held this sort of knowledge? It seemed it wasn't enough to just give Lewis a fright, but he also had to troll him too.
The elderly sage continued, "Your readers will read literally new chapter you make. Even if it's not relevant at all to the main story line. So it really doesn't matter if you make your story 90% filler, they'll still read it!" While Lewis was against this type of reasoning, he couldn't say it didn't make a little bit of sense. The amount of people who would read through a story on NovelWeb even if they didn't like how it was progressing was a lot.
Then something worse happened. The old man started to spit random nonsense like, "Make sure to vote for this story so it can get on the leaderboard!" and, "If you liked this chapter, wait for the next one!"
Overall it was a very weird experience, though reading some of the chapters Lewis did feel like he had learned a little bit. Eventually, Lewis started to want to get out of this weird book dimension. And there the elderly man was, still in the same place. The elderly man would occasionally spit some random sentences out before stopping for a while. Lewis then worked up the courage to ask the man if he could leave.
"Hey uh, I'm done reading for now, can you let me out of here?" Lewis asked the man. Suddenly, an exit button appeared in Lewis' vision. He then tried to tap on it, thinking it was like a video game and failed. He then thought of something crazy.
'What if I use my mind to press on that button?' Lewis thought to himself. He started to feel weird doing it, but eventually he managed and he pressed the button.
His mind was again, enveloped in that same blue and white light.
The first thing he saw when he woke up again, was the same narcissistic and shady cultivator from before.
"Okay. You have a lot of explaining to do."