"Foolish!"
"They're nothing but fair-weather drinking buddies! How could there be true brotherhood among gangsters? I'm your real brother!"
Jia Yanming scolded him harshly. As a businessman, he was well-accustomed to all kinds of dark dealings and sneered at Jia Yanyong's talk of brotherly loyalty.
"Bro, you don't need to meddle in my business."
"Didn't you want me to teach... uh... right, Lin Zheyu!"
"I'm free now. Give me two days to recover, and the day after tomorrow, I'll go beat him up for you. Don't worry, I'll go easy on him when the time comes," Jia Yanyong said with a chuckle.
***
Bidan Teahouse.
Lin Zheyu had promised Liang Song that he would tell a story about martial artists.
"It was an eventful autumn, and war raged across the realm. There was a dynasty called Song, surrounded on all sides by wolves..."
This was Old Master Jin's *The Legend of the Condor Heroes*, a story about how the greatest heroes serve the nation and its people.
Through their interactions over this period, Lin Zheyu had realized that although Liang Song seemed sloppy, wild, and uninhibited on the surface, he had a righteous heart within him.
Liang Song liked Yan Chixia's free-spirited nature, overflowing with righteousness as he roamed the world slaying demons and devils, and he liked Commander Zuo's upright character and moral courage.
Telling this story was far more troublesome than *Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio*. The dynastic background of *Strange Tales* was so vague that it barely existed.
*The Legend of the Condor Heroes*, however, was different; its historical background was extremely important.
Lin Zheyu made several edits, giving it a simplified alternate-history treatment.
"The vast Qiantang River surged on, day and night, flowing endlessly past Niujia Village outside Lin'an before running eastward into the sea."
"Along the riverbank stood a row of dozens..."
"..."
"...Now, after Bao Xiruo was rescued by that mysterious man who called himself Yan Lie, she wished to end her own life to follow her husband in death, but Yan Lie gently talked her out of it.
Coaxed by Yan Lie's fine clothes and delicacies, she muddleheadedly went along with his arrangements and followed him away from Lin'an."
Lin Zheyu spoke with ease and eloquence from the storyteller's platform.
This tale was long, and as he spoke, the plot gradually unfolded.
At first, the patrons were not used to it. The usual stories of scholars having romantic encounters were gone—how could this be!
They had all come specifically for those scholar romance tales!
Yet as they listened, they were gradually drawn in.
"Despicable!"
"How could this Bao Xiruo run off with that fellow? She's... she's truly shameless! Utterly unfaithful, completely devoid of..." someone shouted, slamming a hand onto a table.
It was a scholar whose face had flushed red with indignation.
"Don't make a racket! Quiet down and listen to Young Master Lin continue!"
Hearing the murmuring below, Lin Zheyu smiled faintly and slapped down his gavel. "If you want to know what happened next, listen to the next chapter!"
"..."
"Ah, it's over just like that?!"
"No way! Keep going, what happens next?"
"How can you stop halfway through? Continue, Young Master Lin!"
Seeing how stirred up the crowd was, Lin Zheyu slipped away in a hurry.
No joke—this was nothing like writing web novels in his past life.
Leaving off on a cliffhanger while writing a novel only earned you insults calling you a cliffhanger fiend.
Leaving off on a cliffhanger while storytelling risked being dragged right back onto the stage by an enraged mob of patrons to keep talking. Lin Zheyu had already had the privilege of experiencing that once before.
"The opening was quite good. Very exciting," Liang Song remarked.
Lin Zheyu said with a smile, "I'm glad you liked it, Master."
After chatting with Liang Song for a bit and asking about some doubts in his martial training, Lin Zheyu took his leave.
Stepping out the door, he walked some two hundred meters down Baiwei Street and turned into a restaurant.
He had arranged to meet someone here.
Lin Zheyu scanned the room and sat down at one of the tables.
"Gentlemen, have you given it some thought?"
Lin Zheyu looked at the three older scholars sitting before him.
The three men wore azure robes, sported beards, and had faces lined with weather-beaten wrinkles.
Their robes were washed out to a pale shade, with inconspicuous holes here and there. It was plain to see they lived rather modest, threadbare lives.
These were storytellers Lin Zheyu had sought out over the past few days. None had any backing, and all were struggling to get by in Songyi City.
"Can you guarantee the stories are just as exciting as the ones you tell at Bidan Teahouse?" the man on the left asked.
"The styles are different, so it's hard to say which is better, but they are certainly fresher and far more exciting than those worn-out, threadbare tales you've been telling!" Lin Zheyu said.
Competition in storytelling was fierce. Many scholars who had failed to attain official ranks and could not make a living had switched to working as storytellers.
With stale, cliché stories, mediocre storytelling technique, and weak emotional resonance, such storytellers simply could not attract customers.
The three storytellers Lin Zheyu had found all had decent delivery techniques and passable emotional expression; unfortunately, the stories they told were all too old, lacking any novelty.
This world was in dire need of good stories.
Or rather, good stories existed in this world, but because the circulation of written information was not very convenient, they only spread within small local areas.
The good stories circulating in Songyi City had been heard so many times that the locals had grown sick of them.
That was also why Lin Zheyu had been able to rise to popularity so quickly.
"Could you let us look over the content before we make a decision?" another man asked.
"Of course."
Lin Zheyu took several sheets of paper covered in dense handwriting from his breast pocket and handed one to each of them. All copies contained the same content.
"You can look it over first. If you use the scripts I provide for your storytelling, each chapter will cost eighty copper coins. If you agree, we will sign a contract," Lin Zheyu said.
This was the moneymaking path he had worked out earlier: partnering with others to tell stories.
However, in this era, there was no such thing as copyright for stories. Once spoken aloud and overheard, they belonged to whoever heard them.
Precisely because of this, it was difficult for Lin Zheyu to charge a high price.
An average storyteller earned a daily wage of seventy copper coins, which, along with tips and the like, could bring in around a hundred copper coins.
Lin Zheyu used that as a baseline to set his price at eighty copper coins.
After all, with a good story, the tips received would often far exceed the base wage.
"...This matter took place south of the West Four Archways, in Brick Pagoda Alley, where two brothers surnamed Ta lived. One was Ta Da, and the other was called Ta Er.
The younger brother served in the Provincial Commander's Yamen, while the elder brother was a cook..."
This was a classic tale that had circulated for a long time in his past life: *The Case of Nine Heads*.
The three men held the papers and began to read, their eyes brightening with every line.
Chapter 11