This book is more grounded in society, sure, but you really don’t need to take every detail that seriously.

Back when I wrote about taekwondo, some readers left comments arguing about what taekwondo is really like, or listing its pros and cons. When I wrote hacker stuff, some people questioned whether it was accurate, saying certain techniques had been outdated for years.

For example, if I write that a bus announces, “XX Residential Complex, now arriving,” some readers will object and say the buses where they live don’t announce stops like that. If I write about criminal forces on campus, someone will question how a school could possibly have people like that. If I write about son preference, someone will question that too.

It’s been almost half a year now. Every time I get questions like these, I honestly don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I never know how to reply.

A novel will always have some exaggerated descriptions here and there. The protagonist, Yi Yao, has studied taekwondo for seven or eight years. That’s just a setting. The setting is simply that Yi Yao kept training in martial arts, so she’s stronger than the average person.

Same with the hacker stuff. Yi Yao has memories from another world, which gives her computer knowledge ten years ahead of this era. That’s a setting too. We don’t need to know exactly what algorithms, code, or tools would be required to reach that level.

And we also don’t need to know the details of taekwondo forms, or all its rules, or what kind of real combat ability a second-degree black belt would actually have. You really don’t need to take it that seriously...

It’s like reading some underworld novel where the protagonist becomes invincible because he learned taekwondo, then going to learn it yourself in real life, earning a black belt, picking a fight, getting beaten into the hospital, and coming back to demand why you can’t take on a hundred people like the guy in the book. That’s not a responsibility an author can bear.

Some comments also questioned the line about a problem being so hard that even a computer research institute couldn’t answer it, so let me explain that too... That sentence was just an exaggeration. What I originally meant was, “This kind of question might be something even college students or graduate students couldn’t necessarily answer.”

To borrow one reader’s comparison, “It’s probably like running the 100 meters in 9.6 seconds. That’s already getting close to the limit of humanity.” So let me rephrase it: “Wow! He runs so fast. At that speed, maybe even Bolt might not be able to run that fast, right?”

Doesn’t that sound a little less awkward?

Exaggerated lines like that are only there to highlight that someone is really strong. You really don’t need to start researching how fast Bolt actually is, or what the human limit really is. No need to be that serious.

Like before, I had a reader who saw that I wrote the sun setting over Shangjing City at 6 p.m., then used the month mentioned in the story to calculate Shangjing City’s latitude and longitude... and concluded that Shangjing wasn’t a southern city.

_(:зゝ∠)_

It’s like table tennis. If an author says something like, “A ping-pong ball is square,” then yes, please point out that kind of basic factual mistake. But if I use different ways to describe ping-pong as “fast, precise, ruthless,” and then someone insists on digging for loopholes, applying everything to real life, and concluding the author is just making things up, or if the city or school in the book doesn’t match the one they live in and they find that unbelievable and insist it must be wrong... that really isn’t necessary. Onegaishimasu...

Different places have different cultures. In one area, one qian might buy one baozi, while somewhere else it might buy two. You can’t just say people from the first city are making things up because of that. If you really can’t accept it, then just treat Shangjing City as a special case. Everything there is special. That might make it easier to read.

Or just treat this whole book as a surreal parallel world. If transmigration exists, and if something as unbelievable as the Card Clan exists—a group that slices liquor bottles with playing cards—then there’s really no need to force every scene in the story onto real life... The city in the book is Shangjing City, Yixian Province. It’s a fictional city.

And I also want to apologize to everyone here. My skills are limited. I can’t cover every field, and my writing may be pretty rough too, which may have made for an awkward reading experience. I’m truly sorry. I’ll keep working hard to improve. *bows*

—This book is fiction. Any resemblance is purely coincidental.