After figuring out the methods for exiting a work, Zhao Youyue felt far more at ease inside the Dimension Gate. At the worst, if she ever got tired of staying in a particular story world, she could just quietly commit suicide and exit. She could even throw money around in the real world and make the author directly botch the ending. Some shameless authors would definitely do that if the price was right.
But right now, she was living quite comfortably in the world of Pure Love. It was basically letting her indulge in the thrill of being a super top student. She could study her notes while also watching the drama unfold, looking at the male lead and the girls interacting with what she thought of as a "caring for the intellectually challenged" gaze. It was awkward and hilarious at the same time.
As everyone knew, characters in manga tended to act in extremely exaggerated ways. Sometimes their bodies would even shrink into stubby chibi forms during a comedic argument. When you read manga in real life, that kind of thing felt fun. But once you actually crossed into a manga world and watched those interactions in person, all the exaggerated movements, loud dialogue, and dramatic tones became painfully awkward. The worst part was that every passerby treated it as completely normal and blended in perfectly. She alone felt like the only sober person in a room full of drunks.
Still, it didn't really matter. She enjoyed being a background prop anyway, and it eased the pressure she felt from studying in real life. That junior high math question from the placement test at the start of term had been solved in one go thanks entirely to the effort she put in within the dimensional world. Otherwise, she would have definitely embarrassed herself in front of the whole class.
Since her phone had been confiscated, Zhao Youyue naturally failed to tip the work. Later that same day, she spent eight thousand yuan on the newly released Fruit Eight phone, feeling the cool glass and sleek edges in her hand, but afterward, she started feeling the sting of the price. There were still more than twenty days left in the month. If she kept spending like this, she was going to crash and burn into a dirt-eating girl, which was very bad news for her social life.
She had thought she was rich, but once she actually started spending money, she realized you could never have too much of it. If only she had the ability to earn money herself. Spending her parents' money made her feel inexplicably uncomfortable, as if she were a parasite.
In the end, she just went to a manga bookstore, the aisles smelling of fresh ink and glossy paper, and bought four tankōbon volumes of Pure Love as a form of support for the creator.
Patiently, she sat at her desk and read through all the serialized content bit by bit. When she saw "Xu Jing," the character she was playing, appear in the manga as a silent background prop, the feeling was surprisingly amusing.
Still, sometimes she couldn't help fantasizing. If she really became a major character in the manga, what kind of scene would that be in the real-world version of the work?
To be honest, if she hadn't entered the world of this story, she would have never read it in the first place, even though the art style was very much to her taste. She was, after all, a looks-focused person who appreciated clean lines and attractive character designs.
As for the rest of the plot and characters, she found them hard to stomach. First, she personally disliked harem manga. She preferred single-pairing stories, or even ones with no romantic pairing at all. Second, the useless male leads in harem stories were unbearable.
Why did a male lead whose biggest virtue was being "gentle" get the love of so many beautiful girls? Why could he be so blatantly ambiguous and unfaithful? Finally, there was his indecisiveness. Even at the very end of the story, he couldn't choose his true love, let alone take things further. He was a completely impotent herbivore man.
Zhao Youyue would rather read harem manga with a real scumbag male lead like Makoto Itou, who pushed down every girl he met and then got "nice boated" in the end. That bloody finale was incredibly satisfying in its justice.
Suddenly, a bold idea occurred to her. Could she actively stir up trouble and turn the protagonist of Pure Love, Yang Ming, into a scumbag who pushed down every girl he met? Then, at the end, have him get nice boated by one of the harem members. Wouldn't that be perfect?
The moment this bold thought arose, her already trouble-craving heart began to itch with anticipation.
She instantly lost all interest in doing homework. She put down her black gel pen and took out her newly bought Fruit Eight phone. The first thing she did was search online to see whether School Days existed in this world, or more precisely, whether the classic trope of a harem male lead getting nice boated had ever appeared. If it had, she felt there was no need to stir things up. Readers had already experienced that kind of shock once. Repeating a similar plot wouldn't mean much.
This world was a parallel one, but some works still existed. She had heard familiar old songs on the radio before. While browsing Qidian Manga over the past few days, she had even accidentally seen a Japanese vassal state mangaka named Masashi Kishimoto accept a Sanjiang interview. He said his new work would be a ninja-themed series, debuting simultaneously on Qidian Manga and Weekly Shonen Manga.
That shonen magazine was extremely impressive. It was the best-selling manga magazine in all of East Asia. Whether Chinese, Japanese, or Korean vassal state mangaka, all considered it an honor to serialize there. Every issue was translated into multiple languages and distributed worldwide.
If Zhao Youyue had been a plagiarism-based web novelist protagonist, she would have probably had a headache. Who knew whether the work she planned to copy would suddenly pop up on its own?
But she didn't need to worry about that at all. On the contrary, she was looking forward to this world's Naruto. Maybe when it started serializing, she would enter through the Dimension Gate to stir up trouble. Should she directly play Hinata, or become Naruto's mother, Kushina, for once? Or maybe she could just bribe Masashi Kishimoto in the real world to draw a female extra with only a name, then enter and possess her, giving herself some overpowered bloodline limit or Mystic Eyes of Death Perception and go all out?
Unfortunately, Naruto was a high-energy tier work. If she wanted to enter it to cause trouble, she still needed to accumulate wish power.
That was getting off track. What she needed to find right now was whether any works featuring a "scumbag bulldozer male lead getting nice boated" actually existed. After confirming that none had appeared, a delighted smile spread across her face. Perhaps she could turn the formulaic campus harem manga Pure Love into a classic that countless readers would never forget.
Zhao Youyue was not in a hurry at all. She was more worried that her abnormal actions in the manga might be noticed by the author. Everything had to happen naturally. Even if she failed to turn Pure Love into School Days, she wouldn't lose out. She had only ever wanted to be a passerby obsessed with studying anyway.
But if one day the author lost their mind and suddenly decided to have the male lead try to pursue her, disrupting her studies, then she couldn't be blamed for going all out. That would be a tragedy born from the pursuit of learning.