Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation
Sherry, the President of the University of Iowa, announced the official start of the contest.
Soon, more than a dozen buses carrying all the participants drove to the competition venue.
It was already afternoon when they set off.
By the time they arrived, it was almost evening, and there was a slight rain.
It was fall, so the wind was chilly.
Compared to the downtown area where the University of Iowa was located, the place where they got off the bus was very quiet, or rather, it was a little eerie.
The contestants looked around warily.
They wanted to know what kind of place they were in.
Suddenly, a girl screamed, “There…there’s a ghost!”
All the contestants looked in the direction of the voice.
Everyone looked in the direction the girl pointed at, which was an arched tombstone with the face of the deceased carved on it.
An old man with a hunched back silently appeared behind the tombstone.
His face was wrinkled by the passage of time. What was even weirder was that it was almost the same face as the carving on the tombstone.
“Ahhhhh!”
Someone else screamed and there was a commotion among the participants who got off the bus.
“F*ck! Are we in the plot of a horror movie?”
“Can someone explain where the hell are we?!”
“Why is it so chilly? I suddenly feel so cold!”
“OMG…I wanna go home!”
Sherry put both hands up and signaled for everyone to calm down as she said. “Everyone! Calm down! This is the arena for the Fall Cup Creative Writing Workshop Competition, the Peace Cemetery. The person you saw just now is the groundskeeper here and not a ghost, so please don’t panic!”
“Why did you arrange a competition venue right next to the cemetery? It’s so creepy!”
“This is terrible! I don’t feel like writing anymore.”
“It’s a really strange venue…”
Sherry said, “The competition is held in a different place every year. The year before last, it was at the seaside, and last year’s competition was in the forest.”
“We chose the cemetery for this year’s Fall Cup because the theme this year would be based on the cemetery. We believe that a qualified writer should be able to write in any environment and maintain his writing state, which is a compulsory course for our profession.”
Since Sherry said so, there were no more objections from the audience.
When the crowd’s voices gradually died down, Sherry continued, “The organizer has booked a five-star hotel near the cemetery. All participants must write in isolation here. Meals and accommodations will be carried out in the hotel. Your submission must not be signed by your real names or past pseudonyms, nor should your real identity be revealed in your content. If discovered, you will be disqualified immediately. The competition will be held for 14 natural days starting today. These rules are the same as previous Fall Cups, however, it’s worth a reminder that there’s an additional rule this year. Each author will be accompanied by at least one mentor, who will provide guidance and confirm your identity beforehand. The author and the mentor could pair up on their own.”
As the competition was conducted anonymously and the entries submitted were all pseudonyms, it would be difficult to identify them.
Thus, Sherry specially added this mentor mechanism.
This allowed the novels produced in each competition to be traced back to the original author. Of course, this was only one aspect. More importantly, Sherry had hidden her motives in this competition.
She wanted to find out what was going on with this Chinese boy named Fang Yuan.
Would he be able to live up to his famous reputation?
“Alright, that’s all for the rules! We’ve arrived at the hotel, so please go to the front desk to get your room number. After confirming with your mentor, you can start writing. Best of luck, everyone!”
..
Fang Yuan got his room number at the front desk. This writing competition was very new to him.
To him, since it was a writing competition, they could very well just write from home and hand in their manuscripts.
It was a little strange to gather everyone so that all writers would eat and stay in the same place, then get someone to keep an eye on them.
Many authors had already found their own mentors.
Fang Yuan also saw Hades and Sakazaka Rion in the crowd.
However, he was not worried about landing a mentor.
Instead, he was more focused on the concept of the novel.
Since the competition venue was right next to the cemetery, with the latter location as the theme of the location, one would assume that their works would be centered on horror or the supernatural.
Most of the authors would have written similar content.
They would have made it more thrilling and visually impactful by describing gory or eerie details.
Fang Yuan was not the type to read horror novels in his previous life.
Even if he were to recall his memory, he would not be able to find anything.
This path definitely would not work. Thinking about it carefully, Fang Yuan wondered if it was necessary for the cemetery theme to be a horror novel that was as scary as possible.
Since everyone would probably be writing horror novels, was there any other way to break the situation?
While Fang Yuan was pondering, he saw a beautiful woman in a white chiffon shirt walking towards him.
When they passed by the corridor, everyone who saw her nodded and greeted. “Hello, President Sherry.”
“Sherry…Sherry…Sherry Young?”
‘Sherry…’ Upon hearing her name, Fang Yuan soon made a series of connections.
He suddenly thought of the most suitable title.
Fang Yuan thought that he would be the contemporary successor of traditional tomb culture and the strange novels of the founder of Chinese tomb-robbing novels from his previous life.
‘I got it! “Candle in the Tomb” is most suitable!’