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Zhao Yao's consciousness awoke to the feeling that he was in a pool of sweet cream. It smelled like vanilla and made him wonder how it will taste. He felt extremely comfortable in it.
But the feeling disappeared in an instant and then his awful headache started.
"Kid, what is it that made you want to die?"
He heard someone ask.
"Ehm. You look very similar to that little brat. You must be the descendant of him."
Zhao Yao couldn't see who was talking as he was surrounded by darkness.
"Oh, his soul is dying. It's like his consciousness had no will to live and chose death."
He kept hearing someone else talking. He lived alone, so it didn't make sense for Zhao Yao. He thought he must be dreaming.
"Another consciousness? His soul is very similar to that of the Zhao brat."
And he kept 'dreaming' for a long time.
When Zhao Yao woke up, he still had a splitting headache.
"What time is it?" He muttered as he slowly tried to open his eyes.
Zhao Yao found himself tired and exhausted. And, he had a strong urge to stay in his warm bed and continue to sleep.
'Wait.'
Zhao Yao's never kept his room this warm because of him trying to save money. Also, he clearly remembered that he never went to bed but instead slept in his chair. Then, how did he end up laying down?
He tried to force open his eyes. But before he could open his eyes and take a look, his splitting headache worsened. Many memories flashed before him, and he came to a realization.
"What?" He got up in surprise. "Did I transmigrate?"
He slowly tried to open his eyes again despite the lightheadedness. The sheer amount of memories were too much for him to handle.
'If I transmigrated, that means I have the Main character like abilities. Right?' He questioned himself before deciding to give it a shot.
"Stop memories. One by one."
And it worked. The memories that barraged Zhao Yao stopped, and like obedient servants, they lined up in chronological order.
Or, he thought it worked.
The lined-up memories then barged faster than before into his head, and just like a computer copying data from a memory card, he started feeding on them.
He started to understand the background of the body's original owner.
Similar to over 90% of the receiving body owners created in the novels, the owner of this particular body was also named with the same name as him, Zhao Yao.
"Huh."
The body owner was crippled too. Very cliche setup.
Bullied childhood - check.
Orphan - check.
Even though many-body owners have adopted fathers, it wasn't uncommon to be an orphan.
Childhood sweetheart - check.
Corrupt clan - check.
Evil relative - check.
Trap - check.
Broken marriage arrangement - check.
The more he integrated with the memories, the more Zhao Yao felt his original body owner's emotional pain. The trap made by Zhao Ping enraged him.
But he also found the body owner naive, weak, and soft willed.
Before he should try to make sense of someone else's memory, Zhao Yao decided to figure out how the hell he ended up here.
"Did I die? How?"
Zhao Yao didn't remember dying.
He was a writer on Earth. He didn't know whether web novelists can even be called writers. Most people didn't consider web novelists as proper writers, but he always liked to introduce himself as a writer instead of specifying that he wrote web novels.
Web novels need to be written as well to be made as stories, in fact, nobody can be called a writer in the tech age where everyone typed in their computers.
But, he was even a poorly average one in it, barely making his ends meet.
"How did I end up here?"
Zhao Yao could still remember, after writing till late at night, he was reading through some comments on his uploaded chapters. He made replies as the author and then fell asleep in his working chair due to exhaustion.
He loved creating stories so much and worked really hard every day, but he never made a successful novel. To become like other successful authors, he was willing to eat anything, whether it's 'tomatoes' or even bitter melon. To make it to the top, he didn't mind 'rowling' on the floor.
He did improve, but he never made it big. His writing skills never reached the level he hoped to achieve.
After more than a decade of tries, even though he didn't achieve a top seller, he figured out how to make a living out of web novels. He didn't mind using tricks if it meant he could survive.
Zhao Yao figured that people read his generic trash more than his experimental stories. Most readers are comfortable reading cliche stories, and adding little changes to these stories kept their interest and attention.
But, that wasn't enough to make the readers continue reading because most of them drop after hitting the paywall. Zhao Yao's novels were a form of wish fulfillment for him, just like his readers who read them.
The journey of an underestimated, mistreated teen who would turn into an unbeatable protagonist who face-slap others like an elder, going up the cultivation levels like he is taking an elevator, daring to court untouchable beauties and succeed in adding them to his collec...errhmm...harem.
Set in a world where the MC cultivate to prolong his life until achieving immortality, and finally beating all enemies to become the King of the World.
When the audience got tired of the harems, he added a long and deep romance to his new novel. When the audience got tired of the genre, he made a game like cultivation novel. Those slight changes helped him cope with the time and helped him survive.
So, it didn't take Zhao Yao long to identify similar losers like him. There were even some horny uncles who lurked around to see their wishes of harem and immortality get fulfilled. Zhao Yao made a new avatar to make them keep reading the novel. A female avatar.
He created an alternate account with a female ID and started flirting and tempting some starving men in his chat server. He took all these efforts just to make sure at least some of them stayed behind to pay his novels.
Zhao Yao worked all kinds of odd jobs before he earned his first income from novels. Even after becoming an earning novelist, he continued to work part-time to make his ends meet. He worked part-time during the day and wrote three novels at night for several years.
For untalented novelists like him, the higher number of chapters he wrote daily decided whether he pays his bills or not. His life went well despite his tight work schedule until a deadly fever struck his country.
The convenient store he worked closed down and made him jobless. The collapsed economy significantly reduced the amount of paying readers that supported him. For someone like him who lived on his present, there were no future savings.
But, Zhao Yao never gave up, he never will.
He made two more new novels, and start writing five novels daily. And now here he was in someone else's body without any idea of how he ended up here.
'At least I appear not to have any memory loss.'
He didn't feel exceptionally happy like he expected before. This was the fulfillment of the escapist dreams of people like him.
He didn't feel scared either. It was like his mind was prepared for this all along.
After he opens his eyes, what's in front of him should be an entirely new world and life.
He needed answers before that.
'How the hell did I end up here? Did I die, and transmigrated or some crazy force decided to place me in this world?'
He had a lot of questions.
'This body's original Zhao Yao jumped off a sure death cliff. How did this body survive?'
"Kid, if you don't open your eyes and search, how do you expect to find answers."
"WHAT THE...." Zhao Yao freaked out, hearing a voice right beside him. The sudden scare forced him to open his eyes on instinct. A man wearing a grey robe with shoulder-length hair and smooth skin sat beside him.
"You really did die before taking possession of this body."
The man's word made his heartbeat beat like drums.
"How? How did you...? You can read my mind? Who are you?" Zhao Yao was puzzled about how this person knew what he thought.
" It was me who saved you from your fall...Who am I?"
The handsome man then smiled.
"I am an 'old' friend of yours?"