Lin Qingyue sat cross-legged on the green jade floor.
A full five minutes passed.
The Celestial God in the pile of waste paper remained in the posture of clutching her head and crouching in defense, motionless.
She was planning to play dead to the very end.
The drama was over, and it was time to get down to business.
Lin Qingyue stood up and brushed off the scraps of paper clinging to her robes.
She stepped over the mess on the floor and stopped before the crumbling mountain of books.
With a slight flick of her toe, she kicked aside a copy of "The Pretty Little Deaf Man Is the White Tiger Marshal's Favorite" that was dangling off the edge.
Spy-Apparently its a BL Novel
"Alright, stop running away from reality."
Lin Qingyue looked down from above, staring at the pilled pajamas sticking out of the paper pile.
"I fully empathize with your terrible writing career."
"And your Epic Grade social death experience."
"But now we need to talk about serious matters."
The mountain of books swayed violently.
The Azure Dragon, her head covered in scraps of paper, slowly poked half her head out.
The way she looked at Lin Qingyue was exactly how one would look at a living Yama who specialized in tearing up authors' drafts.
Lin Qingyue automatically blocked out the resentful gaze.
The playfulness in her eyes quickly faded.
Her brilliant golden pupils returned to the Grandmaster's indifference.
"Now, let's get back to the main topic."
"Since there isn't even a single living person cleaning your temple."
"That giant beast outside, the one who constantly spouts 'perfection,' has arrogance carved into its very bones, and can even mutate to grow nine heads..."
"What kind of thing is it?"
Lin Qingyue leaned down.
The distance between them closed.
"What exactly is that so-called 'Spirit of Pride'?"
The Azure Dragon's dilated pupils constricted violently.
Lin Qingyue unhurriedly twisted the knife:
"Those lines are so cringeworthy you could dig a hole with your toes, and the power creep is just ridiculous."
"Azure Dragon, could this be a Mary Sue scrap project you secretly created to escape reality, which has now come to life as a spirit?"
This sentence stepped directly onto a landmine.
The Azure Dragon suddenly recoiled backward.
Her pale face, which had seen no sunlight for years, instantly flushed crimson.
Her hands gripped the scrap papers beneath her, her knuckles turning white with the force.
"N-No way, that's absolutely not true!"
The Celestial God who presided over Oriental Vitality now stumbled so badly she couldn't even say a complete sentence smoothly.
"Th-That was an accident! A completely insignificant little accident!"
Lin Qingyue straightened up, crossing her arms over her chest.
"A little accident?"
She drew out the last syllable.
"A super-monster that has completely mastered one of the Dungeon's underlying rules, 'Pride,' can perfectly replicate your Divine Body, and almost forced me to use my ultimate trump card."
"You call this a completely insignificant little accident?"
Lin Qingyue took a step forward.
"Your protagonist's power scale is too broken, Author-sama."
The Azure Dragon let out a distorted shriek.
She dove straight back into the pile of paper.
A textbook ostrich-burying-its-head defense.
"I can't hear you! I can't hear anything at all!"
A muffled protest echoed from beneath the heap of scrap paper.
A dead silence settled over the hall.
Lin Qingyue stopped in her tracks.
She didn't continue her mockery.
Her brilliant golden eyes gazed calmly at the trembling lump.
She fought the urge to give this completely reckless person a hard slap on the ass.
Against this kind of severe avoidance personality, applying silent pressure was far more effective than verbal coercion.
Time ticked by, second by second.
Amidst the scattered books on the floor, only Azure Dragon's suppressed sobs and heavy breathing could be heard.
The pressure continued to amplify within the Temple.
Finally, the defenses collapsed completely.
Azure Dragon slowly lifted her head.
Her black-rimmed glasses hung crookedly on the bridge of her nose.
A stray strand of messy hair clung to the damp corner of her eye.
Those bloodshot, dead-fish eyes were filled with the despair of having completely given up.
"Fine... I'll confess."
She muttered softly, her voice almost inaudible.
"The one outside... that Spirit of Pride."
Azure Dragon awkwardly straightened her glasses.
Her gaze wandered across the bookshelves on the wall, the scattered scrolls, and the empty ink bottles.
Only, she dared not look into Lin Qingyue's eyes.
This state of hers was the polar opposite of that insufferable Spirit of Pride outside.
"It really does have something to do with me."
Azure Dragon's Adam's apple bobbed as she swallowed hard.
"It... is a part of me."
Lin Qingyue raised an eyebrow and lifted her chin slightly, signaling for her to elaborate.
"It is the negative emotions I stripped away from myself."
Azure Dragon's voice was thick with intense shame.
"To be precise, it's blind arrogance, an overinflated ego, and... a perfectionism that can't tolerate the slightest flaw."
She hugged her knees tightly, curling herself into an even more withdrawn ball.
"I'm just a piece of trash!"
She suddenly raised her voice, launching into a furious self-criticism.
"I stayed up for several all-nighters, consulted countless ancient texts, and yet the plot I designed always comes out like a pile of mud!"
Azure Dragon's eyes reddened again.
"I wrote it so poorly, yet those brain-dead priests still treated it as the Oracle of Creation and framed it!"
"They're analyzing it word by word, sentence by sentence!"
"They fanatically worship the melodramatic scripts I just threw together!"
She shoved all ten fingers into her nest-like hair.
"Do you know how that feels? Everyone praises you as a once-in-a-generation genius, but you know exactly how trashy your writing really is!"
Azure Dragon's voice was hoarse, now tinged with a sob.
"I was so stuck on my novel I wanted to die!"
"The characters are flat! The plot only moves forward through forced twists! The romance is so stilted it hurts!"
"Even I despise these rough drafts, so how am I supposed to face those delusional readers outside?"
The image of a god shattered completely at this moment.
All that remained was a miserable author driven to a nervous breakdown by update demands and writer's block.
"I felt it was too embarrassing."
"A Celestial God shouldn't be producing this kind of unwatchable, industrial-grade fluff!"
"I hate myself for not being able to write anything good! I can't stand the imperfections in the plot!"
Azure Dragon's shoulders shook as tears streamed down her face.
"So I took action."
"I stripped away all that restlessness, the pathological pursuit of perfection, and every last bit of writing anxiety, and tore them out of myself!"
Lin Qingyue remained speechless for a long time.
What the fuck kind of insane setup was this?
Her mind replayed the fierce battle she'd just fought against the "Spirit of Pride."
That behemoth controlling the law of "Pride"...
That mass of arrogant Black Sludge...
That epic-grade boss that transformed into a nine-headed dragon, prepared to perish with them...
So all this time...
This thing was actually just the collective "writer's rage" of some failed author?!
This... this was beyond absurd!
Lin Qingyue felt her worldview being completely wiped clean once again.
So that heart-stopping battle we just had, the kind where we would've been wiped out if we hadn't used our trump cards...
Was just a tantrum thrown by this shut-in girl because she thought her fanfic was too crappy?
The "perfection" the Spirit of Pride kept droning on about wasn't some lofty pursuit of divinity.
It was just an author's pathological obsession with writing a masterpiece!
It wasn't even a decent substitute.
At most, it was just a stray thought that this "God of Waste Drafts" had stripped away!
A mass of anxiety born from writer's block, which, after being forcibly expelled, had actually absorbed the Spiritual Energy of heaven and earth to evolve into a monstrous creature.
The logic all fit perfectly.
The Dungeon Rule about extreme emotional sensitivity aligned with this perfectly.
No wonder it had suffered a mental breakdown and gone berserk on the spot after seeing the scars on its body and its broken dragon horns.
Because any "flaw" was the greatest trigger for this mass of "writing anxiety."
Lin Qingyue looked at the Celestial God curled into a ball before her, continuously shedding tears.
The "troll" gene inside her body jammed.
She even felt a strange sense of sympathy.