Chương 55: Who the Hell Wrote This Garbage?

The Legend of the Nameless Hero, Volume 1, black leather cover stamped with a hollow circle ⭕, sat squarely on the oak table. Evelyn dipped a quill in red ink and slashed decisive diagonal lines across page after page. The nib tore across the parchment — schhk... schhk... — sharp and clinical as a surgeon's scalpel. Lucian sat across from her, hands laced together under the table, knuckles white. His herbal tea had long since gone cold. SLAM!

Evelyn brought her palm down hard on page thirty-two and pushed her glasses up her nose.

"Look at this!" Evelyn slammed her finger onto the page.

"Twelve assassins surround him. Twelve. And this guy responds by doing three flips in the air before cutting down a monster." She pushed her glasses up.

"Where is the logic? Where is the footing? Where is the actual physical explanation?" She stared at the book like it had personally offended her.

"Did this author fight physics and somehow lose?" She flipped to the next page, circling a bolded line of dialogue in red.

"And this line!

'I walk in darkness so the world may keep one final light...' God, that's cheesy! It's so cheesy it could rupture an eardrum! On Earth, only a sixth-grader in the terminal stage of a power fantasy phase could write something like this!" Ting! A dim black Unified System v2. 0 notification appeared in front of Lucian. [WARNING: HOST DETECTED UNDER HIGH-INTENSITY PSYCHIC DAMAGE.] ['Mental Resistance' stat (286, 440) auto-triggering an unconscious defense response!] The corner of Lucian's mouth twitched twice.

He fought to keep his face as flat as granite, swallowing hard.

"Ah... yeah... gotta admit... it's pretty bad... ha ha...""'Bad' is an understatement!" Evelyn flipped to chapter fifteen, tapping the page loudly.

"The whole plot's stitched together out of three garbage tropes: hiding your true strength, being underestimated, jumping into a chasm to find a secret manual, then rescuing a beauty and playing it cool afterward. Whoever wrote this thing is a shameless con artist, shamelessly milking readers for cash!" Lucian bit down on his lower lip, nails digging into his palm. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

He remembered sitting hunched over that scene at ten at night, getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, just trying to farm his Old Elvish word count. Every criticism hit harder than Lucian expected. Not because she was wrong. That was the worst part. If Evelyn had misunderstood the story, he could have argued. If she had hated the characters for no reason, he could have defended them. But she was pointing directly at every embarrassing weakness he had secretly known about since the day he wrote it. Click.

A thick stack of ancient-language documents dropped onto the table beside the book. Sylvia stepped out from the shelves behind them, her silver beast ears pinned flat against her head. She slapped down a Grand Library staff badge, her sapphire eyes locked on Evelyn, voice ice-cold.

"Lady Wright. This work is a masterpiece that saved the souls of millions of soldiers on the front lines, giving hope to those staring death in the face. Please show some respect for the legacy of this great author." Evelyn looked up at Sylvia's ears, standing rigid with anger, and let out a mocking smirk.

"Sweetie, you've been played. Soldiers on the front lines going crazy for this book is just proof of how starved your entire culture is for stories — ten thousand years of nothing but genealogies and scripture, so of course they treat this garbage like gold. But from a pure literary-structure and academic-logic standpoint, this is an absolute disaster of a manuscript!"

"That's the art of abstracting reality," Sylvia said, gripping her badge tighter, not backing down an inch.

"Someone without any compassion could never understand the depth of silence this author is expressing." Evelyn shook her head, exasperated, and turned to look at Lucian, sitting silently across from her. Seeing the ten-year-old's stone-faced, unmoving expression, eyes fixed on some indeterminate point in space, Evelyn let out a satisfied breath and reached over, clapping him on the shoulder.

"See, Lucian? Thank god there's at least one person in this school with the same taste as me. Everyone here worships this book like scripture, and you're the only one keeping a clear head about how much of a mess it actually is!" Lucian sat rigid in his chair, shoulders stiffening under Evelyn's hand. He forced out the most strained smile of his entire life.

"Thanks... your praise really... warms my heart." Evelyn packed up her red quill and metallurgy documents into her leather satchel, stood, and adjusted her glasses.

"Anyway, enough about that garbage. Get ready for tomorrow — first period is Frontline Military Tactics, taught personally by General Vormund out on the training grounds. I hear the old man's brutal." With that, she picked up her bag and strode out of the fourth floor. Sylvia cradled The Nameless Hero against her chest, carefully wiping the red ink stains off the cover with a handkerchief, then turned to Lucian with eyes full of admiration.

"Master..." Sylvia looked at him with complete admiration.

"Even after hearing someone insult your life's work like that, you didn't become angry. You simply accepted her criticism." She placed a hand over her chest.

"Such restraint... such humility..." Lucian slowly turned his head. Inside, he was screaming. Outside, he was too exhausted to correct her. Lucian slowly rose from his chair. The ten-year-old's legs trembled. He braced a hand against the edge of the table to keep his balance, staggering toward the elevator doors, eyes glassy, staring blankly up at the ceiling.

"Every word she said was right... I couldn't argue with a single one of them..."