After autumn set in, the temperature in River City dropped noticeably. The sun blazed down directly, but it no longer carried the scorching heat of summer; instead, it made one feel drowsy and sluggish.
At the edge of the main intersection stood a young man. Narrow waist, long legs.
He wore a black T-shirt, stretched a bit tight across his chest.
The man held a military-green duffel bag in one hand and had been standing there in silence for about half an hour.
Until a battered BYD pulled up in front of him: "Heading to Qiandi?"
The window rolled down, and in the driver's seat sat a man around fifty—an old hand at the wheel.
The man grunted in acknowledgment, tossed his luggage into the trunk, and slid into the car.
The street scenery receded behind him. Duan Yan gazed out the window, his thoughts drifting. He hadn't expected that the first thing he'd do after retiring from the military was to attend his mother's wedding in Qiandi.
He couldn't quite put a name to the feeling in his chest, though he did find himself missing his maternal grandfather, who had passed away two years earlier.
Duan Yan had been raised by his grandfather from a young age. His mother had given birth to him when she was very young, and unable to bear the responsibility—or face her family—she had left him at his grandfather's doorstep one rainy night and vanished without a trace.
In the eyes of outsiders, his grandfather was a stern soldier—rigid, conservative, even old-fashioned. Perhaps that was a major reason for his mother's rebellion.
As a boy, Duan Yan had once heard his grandfather sigh, lamenting that he hadn't raised and protected his daughter well enough, allowing her to ruin her life.
"The cost of a girl's mistake is too great."
"Xiao Yan, even though you're a boy, you must never become the kind of man who makes a girl make that mistake."
"You must have a sense of responsibility. You must learn to bear consequences. You can't chase momentary pleasure without thinking of the aftermath..."
Duan Yan recalled his grandfather's teachings in fragments.
Raised single-handedly by the old man, he had followed the same path into the military, and his personality mirrored his grandfather's—an inherited stubbornness, a matching rigidity...
"Son, it's a long way to Qiandi, and this weather makes you sleepy, so I'm going to put on an audiobook to keep myself alert," the driver said.
The driver's voice cut through Duan Yan's thoughts, and he pulled his gaze back from the window: "Go ahead."
With that, he closed his eyes.
Seeing no objection, the driver casually picked a popular book that had been pushed to him, and in a moment, the narrator's voice came through the speakers.
[《Hegemony in Chaotic Times》—Synopsis: The world is torn apart; war blazes on every front. Drought, blizzards, and plagues come one after another. In this land of chaos, watch how the protagonist turns the tide...]
Duan Yan had no interest in these stories. He rarely read web novels, and he barely used his phone unless absolutely necessary.
He was the kind of person who went to bed at ten and left his phone charging in the living room.
He knew his personality was probably dull and unremarkable, but to himself, his life wasn't bland. From a young age, he'd been interested in cooking, handicrafts, chemistry... things like that. So even as the train of the times raced forward and the internet exploded, he never became enamored with digital entertainment.
A friend had once told him he was a very old-fashioned person. Duan Yan knew that was likely just a polite way of saying he was quiet and boring.
At the moment, though he wasn't interested in the novel, the narrator's voice was far from quiet—it had a strong presence in the car—and having nothing else to do, the words of this novel called Hegemony in Chaotic Times slipped into his ears one by one.
The story began with an old minister of the Song family being framed by treacherous courtiers. The emperor, in his folly, trusted the slanderers, and the blameless Song family was stripped of all status and exiled.
What Duan Yan couldn't understand was this: if the theme edged toward "the world is about to descend into chaos," shouldn't the focus be on the minister's unyielding integrity, the villains' smug self-satisfaction, and the emperor's ineptitude?
Yet that portion of the plot was narrated with extreme flatness, glossed over in almost a single stroke. Instead, the pen veered unexpectedly to depict, in great detail, the young master of the Song family who was set to be exiled with his kin—merely his appearance took up roughly eight hundred characters!
Duan Yan paused. The entire first chapter was only two or three thousand characters.
Presumably this Song family young master was the novel's protagonist; giving him more ink made sense.
But something felt off. If this young Song master were the protagonist, shouldn't the story be writing about his endurance, his forbearance, his strength of character?
[His long brows were like ink strokes, his vermilion lips like crabapple blossoms. His waist was slender and supple—a grown man could encircle it with one hand. His jade-white legs were flawless, untainted...]
???
What exactly was the genre of this novel?
Duan Yan knew he was being too nitpicky. Web novels weren't realistic literature; they couldn't withstand close scrutiny. They were just for passing the time.
So even though he felt a little uncomfortable, he didn't make a fuss. He simply shifted his body slightly to the side.
The story in the speakers continued to unfold.
The next few chapters were fairly normal—about some upheavals in the capital, and... the true protagonist, Qin Zhitian, making his appearance.
Duan Yan winced inwardly.
The plot crawled along at a snail's pace, and the story was as bland as boiled water, causing Duan Yan's attention to drift away from the novel.
But just then, the author's pen turned once more, landing again on the exiled Song family young master.
[Wealth and glory crumbled to dust. The past luxury of jade and silk felt like nothing but a dream; only the pain on his body was real.
Song Fengsui shed his brocades and silks, wearing rough homespun instead. Though his dress was plain, his stunning beauty diminished not one bit; if anything, it seemed purer, more pitiful, somehow easier to approach...
Especially how the coarse fabric rubbed painfully against this high-born young master's delicate body, raising rashes across the fair skin of his chest and collarbones.
Under the scorching sun, beads of sweat rolled down his neck, crystal-clear and glistening, sliding across the irritated reddened skin and slipping into the collar where no one could see.
The two burly escorts accompanying him grew parched and restless, wiping sweat from their brows repeatedly, barely able to hold back from wanting to throw him down right then and there, with the sky as their blanket and the earth as their bed, and have their way with him without mercy...]
Duan Yan tensed all over and snapped his eyes open.
He looked at the driver. The middle-aged man's expression was calm and unbothered, as if he didn't find anything wrong with the plot at all.
Duan Yan took a breath, opened his mouth as if to say something, but then thought—maybe it was just him being too uptight. If a straight-laced older guy in the car found nothing weird about it, why should a young man like him be so prissy?
So Duan Yan shifted his body again and closed his eyes.
On the matter of the Song family young master, the author went on for roughly forty thousand more characters.
Of those, the protagonist's appearance, attire, and figure took up about two thousand characters; the internal thoughts of characters like the guards, woodcutters, and hunters who laid eyes on this young master took up about ten thousand; and Song Fengsui's being harassed, groped, and his subsequent resistance took up another twenty thousand or so...
Whenever the author dove into these thunderous plot points, it was as if they'd completely abandoned all restraint.
The vocabulary flowed, the sentences conjured themselves, even the typos decreased! The plot developed its ups and downs, the characters shed their cardboard facades... and the comment sections were livelier than ever...
But the moment the plot returned to the main storyline, it immediately went limp again.
The author, apparently aware of their own strengths and shortcomings, would write a few chapters of the main plot, then swivel the pen and drag Song Fengsui out for a spin.
Essentially, they had written Song Fengsui as a frail, sickly beauty of a throwaway character, one specifically used for side-plot teasing to keep the readers hooked.
Duan Yan felt that the character had been written too bizarrely.
The readers were also cursing in the comment section, but while they cursed, they still kept reading, because the book's popularity only grew.
If it had started with just a bit of teasing, then later it outright devolved into smut.
The book described how Song Fengsui, after enduring countless hardships, dragged his ailing body to the barbarian exile grounds. He had barely enjoyed two peaceful days before an epidemic broke out locally. Of the Song family members who had survived the journey to the exile grounds, barely any remained, and now with the plague on top of it all, it was salt on an open wound.
At this point, Song Fengsui, in order to get medicine for his plague-infected family members, was set up by others and forcibly delivered to the bed of a local minor warlord.
[Song Fengsui watched the tall, stalwart young man approach the bed and realized what was about to happen. He struggled desperately, but his body felt feverish, his limbs weak and powerless.
Even if he could suppress that vile urge, his eyes were reddened by the drug, and his limp, boneless body was nothing short of an invitation to this robust man in front of him...
The man took a few heavy steps forward.
, Song Fengsui , rough , a pair of hands ."
savage , forceful .........]
"Master!"
Duan Yan, who had long since lost any curiosity for web novels and had nearly dozed off in the warm carriage, was jolted straight into a red-faced panic by the bold, unbridled words repeatedly sneaking into his ears.
"......How about you turn that volume down a bit."
The old driver was startled by Duan Yan's sudden shout and nearly jumped. Duan Yan had been so quiet that the driver, absorbed in the audiobook, had completely forgotten there was anyone else in the car.
Now, upon hearing Duan Yan's words, the driver couldn't help but feel a bit awkward. "Alright."
But an old driver was an old driver, still calm and collected, slowly reaching over to adjust the volume, only for his pinky finger to hook the wrong control and accidentally jack the volume to maximum.
The entire car suddenly blared with compromising sounds:
[The man panted , : "You little twink, , but old man here just loves that kind! ! Watch me you......"]
The old driver tried adjusting the volume again, only to find he couldn't change it at all. He furrowed his brows and slapped the audio device hard a couple of times, which finally brought silence back to the car.
["Don't ~ Let me go........ the more you resist, the more I get off!"
", !"]
The audio device suddenly burst out again like a broken speaker, this time giving a full-on blast audible even outside the car.
People in nearby vehicles kept glancing over, and even the old driver began to grow restless. Seeing he couldn't tame the audio device, he hurriedly fumbled for his phone, the screen already showing several lines of glitching on the electronic device, completely unresponsive as well.
"Dammit, what's going on! Can't lower the volume, and can't even turn it off!"
The old driver fumbled around in a sweat, and Duan Yan watched as the man's hands left the steering wheel entirely.
But a frantic honking from a nearby car came first, followed by a violent burst of sound from a crash...
Everything happened too fast—so fast that Duan Yan, realizing something was wrong, lunged forward to grab the wheel, only to be thrown back by the massive impact the moment his fingers touched it.
The world spun, and it was almost instant.
Duan Yan felt himself sink into an unprecedented darkness.
A sharp, piercing pain hit his head first, slowly shifting into a drowsy numbness, and his briefly lost consciousness seemed to rally back.
He suddenly heard a voice beside him, both unfamiliar and strangely known:
"Brother Duan, how was the liquor for the young lads today? We brothers all owe you a debt of gratitude for your care."
"Sir, save a bit of that drink for later and head back to your room to rest early. We lower brothers have other respects to pay."
As the voice spoke, the sound of a door opening followed, and the speech turning into an ambiguous low chuckle.
Then the door closed, and the air fell still.
In Duan Yan's mind, a mess of memories both his own and seemingly not his own fought a brief war, eventually settling into calm along with the outer silence.
As his consciousness gradually returned, he found himself standing in a rather antiquated bedroom under dim, soft light.
A few oil lamps with shades bathed the entire room in a warm, yellow glow. When he looked up, he saw a not-very-wide bed in front of him, and within the faint, plain-colored gauze curtains, there seemed to be a figure.
Based on all of Duan Yan's upbringing, he would never casually step into a bedroom with a bed, let alone a bedroom whose occupant's gender was unknown.
But here he was, in an occupied bedroom—not only failing to back out immediately, but instead walking steadily toward that ancient bed draped in curtains, as if driven by some inexplicable force.
A suspicion was building in his mind, and he was eager to confirm it.
He slowly drew back the gauze curtains, and a light, hurried wheezing drifted out.
On the bare wooden bed without any bedding lay a rough-clothed youth, bound hand and foot.
Perhaps having struggled for some time, the youth's long hair, reaching his waist, spread out like a dark lotus. The pale skin revealed at his collar was flush with a faint pink, and the androgynous face above was even more vibrant with color.
A hurried flush threatened to engulf the youth's ice-cold, startled eyes, thickly drowning those phoenix-shaped eyes; it hadn't fully overcome his reason, but it forced the tips of his eyes into a painful red...
Duan Yan's mind exploded like fireworks—this scene was way too familiar!
It took him a moment to gather himself. "You're Song..."
Before he could even finish saying "Fengsui," he felt his nose begin to tickle.
He instinctively raised a hand and touched it.
???
A nosebleed?!
Warm blood, shocking red.
Duan Yan's eyes flew open, and he quickly pinched his nose shut.
So... he had actually ended up inside that novel, Dominating the Chaos?!
