Lin Qingyue's fingers, gripping the wine glass, froze in midair.
Listening to the three of them indulge in an increasingly absurd brain-storming frenzy, the veins on her forehead throbbed violently.
She curled her knuckles and tapped a crisp "knock knock" on the Azure Jade table.
"Dump all the trash in your minds into the sewer."
Lin Qingyue stood up and roughly dragged the trembling Celestial God from behind her, presenting her to the three women.
It was like displaying a rare drop.
"Let's get reacquainted."
Lin Qingyue pointed to Qingxuan's tear-streaked face.
"This is Celestial God Azure Dragon."
"At the same time, she's a severe writer's block sufferer who copes with loneliness by writing cross-species fanfiction."
"And finally, she's a severely socially anxious, failed author who was driven to a mental breakdown by a fanatical reader demanding updates."
"My current identity is her part-time web novel mentor."
Inside the empty Temple, the wind rustled through piles of waste paper.
Lin Xiyue, Su Wan, and Xia Lian stood with their mouths wide open.
The sheer amount of information in those few sentences caused their brains' processing centers to crash.
"A failed... author?"
Lin Xiyue dug at her ear, suspecting her eardrum had malfunctioned.
Xia Lian lowered the hand covering her face, her eyes wide and round.
"Cross-species... fanfiction?"
Su Wan's attention, however, was locked onto another term that clashed utterly with the concept of a "Celestial God."
"Driven to a mental breakdown by demands for updates?!"
Stared down by three pairs of burning, knowledge-hungry eyes, Qingxuan shrank back, her neck pulling into her shoulders.
She crossed her arms protectively over her chest, trying to hide back in the shadow of Lin Qingyue's oversized mage robes, her voice barely audible.
"Qing, Qingyue-laoshi..."
She said weakly:
"Do they have a prejudice against my work? If they think I write poorly, I can rewrite it..."
"They haven't even seen it, where would they get a prejudice from?"
Lin Qingyue snatched a parchment scroll covered in writing from the table.
With a flick of her wrist, the scroll unfurled in midair.
It was the first-edition manuscript of The Overbearing Vermilion Bird Falls in Love With Me.
"Come on, don't you three love to speculate wildly?"
"Appreciate this Celestial God's world-shaking masterpiece."
Lin Qingyue handed the scroll to Xia Lian, who was standing closest.
Xia Lian took the scroll with both hands, feeling the extremely faint yet pure ancient divine power flowing upon it.
Holding it in her hands, it felt as heavy as a thousand pounds.
This was text personally written by a God. If released to the outside world, it would be enough to spark a bloody and violent struggle.
She focused her gaze and began to read the words aloud in a low voice:
"The Vermilion Bird Sovereign's narrow, phoenix-like eyes narrowed slightly. In their depths lay three parts coldness, three parts mockery, and four parts indifference."
"She gripped the Black Tortoise's thick shell, her deep voice like the collision of ten-thousand-year-old profound ice: 'Woman, you have successfully caught my attention.'"
"Do not even dream of escaping my grasp. In these Nine Heavens and Ten Earths, no one can save you...'"
By the end of the reading, Xia Lian's vocal cords began to tremble.
Not just her vocal cords, but her entire body was shaking.
She looked up, her eyes filled with confusion and the daze of a severe shock.
"Captain... I am profoundly shaken."
"The Vermilion Bird Sovereign gripped the Black Tortoise's... shell?"
Xia Lian swallowed hard.
"The visual impact is too strong, I can't even begin to compose the scene."
Lin Xiyue craned her neck for a glance and immediately burst into laughter, clutching her stomach.
"What the hell is 'three parts coldness, three parts mockery, and four parts indifference'!"
"What, are we making a pie chart out of this to report to the boss?"
"And what kind of lethal setup is this 'shell play'?"
"Sis, is this the top disciple you personally taught?"
Su Wan snatched the scroll away and read it word for word.
The more she read, the more her elegant and refined face twisted.
"This is a linguistic disaster! A ruin of logic!"
Su Wan pointed to a line, her finger trembling.
"It says here, 'The Vermilion Bird shed a single tear, which turned into a sea of fire that burned down half the God Realm.'"
"And earlier it said, 'She looked at the Black Tortoise, her gaze so cold it could freeze time.'"
"Is she Fire Element or Ice Element? This elemental conflict completely violates the basic principles of magic!"
Hearing this academic critique of the work itself, Qingxuan found a sudden burst of courage from somewhere.
She leaned out from behind Lin Qingyue and retorted, raising her voice:
"That's literary exaggeration! You just don't understand!"
"The collision of emotions can pierce the barriers of elemental laws!"
"Who understands the Four Celestial Gods better, you or me?"
"Pierce my foot!"
Su Wan shot back mercilessly.
"Forcing the Vermilion Bird and the Black Tortoise into a relationship is one thing, but why is the Black Tortoise also a woman?"
"I've never met the Black Tortoise in person, but I've heard the Vermilion Bird mention that the Celestial God who governs the Northern Water Element is perhaps steady and rigid in character."
"How did she become a weak and powerless little wifey in your story?"
"Because readers love this kind of gap moe!" Qingxuan declared righteously, hands on her hips.
"What normal reader would read this kind of thing!"
"The High Priests of old read it! Not only did they read it, they even carved it on stone tablets and led the believers in collective readings every day!"
After Qingxuan shouted this, her confidence instantly vanished.
She deflated like a punctured ball.
She hugged her head again and crouched in a defensive position on the Azure Jade floor, letting out a miserable wail:
"But I really didn't want them to see these things!"
"They took this as an Oracle to contemplate, and as a result, they split into two factions and fought until their heads were bleeding over who was on top and who was on the bottom..."
"I'm such a failure as a Celestial God..."
Looking at the Celestial God who was hugging her head and crying in front of them, the three women fell into a dead silence.
The sound of common sense shattering echoed one after another in the Temple.
Lin Qingyue lifted her foot and kicked away the pile of waste paper on the ground.
She resettled herself on the large leather lounge chair, finding the perfect angle to lean back.
"Do you understand the situation now?"
"What Spirit of Pride, what Final BOSS, it's all because Lady Qingxuan couldn't write a satisfactory sequel."
"And she couldn't stand her believers' fanatical interpretations. This is the product of years of accumulated writer's block and social anxiety fusing together."
"So you mean the monster we were fighting desperately before was just a bunch of writer's block resentment?"
Lin Xiyue gripped the edge of her shield.
She felt like a clown after her previous life-and-death struggle.
"Exactly," Lin Qingyue nodded.
"Then what we need to do now isn't to defeat her, but..."
Xia Lian looked at the discarded drafts all over the floor, then at Qingxuan curled up in a ball.
"Help her write the book well, help her find a true readership, and help her establish a healthy creative mindset."
Lin Qingyue tapped the table.
"This is called emotional guidance."
"The Dungeon Rules state it clearly: non-violent non-cooperation."
"Against a God with such extremely sensitive emotions, swords and guns are useless."
"We have to cure her emptiness and anxiety from the root."
Su Wan rubbed her throbbing temples, forcing herself to digest this information.
"So you were sitting so close to her just now, discussing the plot?"
"Discussing revisions."
Lin Qingyue corrected.
"I am teaching her the most cutting-edge web novel assembly-line creation theories from Earth."
"The Broke-Fiancée trope, the Trash-to-Talent trope, the System trope. These are invincible formulas tested by ten million readers."
"It turns out the Celestial Gods have an extremely high tolerance threshold for these tropes."
Hearing this, Qingxuan forgot to wipe her tears and abruptly looked up.
Her eyes erupted with the fervent light of a seeker of knowledge.
"Yes! The Broke-Fiancée trope is absolutely brilliant!"
"I just tried to brainstorm a scene where a mortal is publicly dumped by his fiancée, then shouts, 'Thirty years east of the river, thirty years west of the river'!"
"The emotional impact of that is a hundred times more exciting than watching two ancient beasts brawl!"
This time, Lin Xiyue and Su Wan were speechless.
"Sis, what you're doing is a severe case of cultural invasion."
"Aren't you afraid she'll use her divine power to materialize these tropes and completely collapse the worldbuilding of this Dungeon?" Lin Xiyue's expression was complicated.
"What's there to be afraid of? The stuff she wrote before was so outrageous, yet it only managed to squeeze out a Spirit of Pride to stand guard?"
Lin Qingyue shrugged nonchalantly.
"As long as she's happy writing, the mission will progress."
"Instead of letting her continue writing things like The Overbearing Vermilion Bird, I'd rather let her write some power fantasies."
"At least power fantasies follow normal logic and have a proper narrative structure. Right, Qingxuan?"
"Right, right, right!" Qingxuan nodded frantically like a chicken pecking at rice, then scrambled to her feet and pounced on the desk.
She grabbed the Runic Pen.
"Teacher Qingyue, hurry!"
"Let's continue! How can we design the numerical panel for the 'System-genre' more reasonably?"
"The mechanism where the protagonist gets a reward for every completed task is something I'm all too familiar with."
"The Celestial God bestowing Divine Grace operates on this exact same logic!"