Age Of The Villainous Author:All Hell Leads To Webnovel-Chapter 31: The Royal Tutorial

The Warsaw Royal Castle at 3:33 PM was crowded with tourists.

I moved with the herd, through the opulent chambers, under crystal chandeliers. I felt like a ghost. The cold fire in my chest was a low, watchful ember.

Where are you?

I checked the calendar alert again. No room number. No instructions.

I found myself in the Marble Room. Portraits of old kings stared down. The crowd thinned here, moving towards the Throne Room.

The air in front of a massive landscape painting shimmered.

Not a heat haze. A literal distortion in reality, like a ripple on a pond’s surface. No one else seemed to notice.

A figure stepped through the painting.

He was Anville, but wrong. Same sharp features, same artfully messy hair. But where Anville’s clothes were crisp casual, this man wore a tailored black suit with a blood-red silk lining. His silver eyes didn’t just pierce; they swirled with chaotic, dark motes.

DeVille. The Wishshredder. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

He looked at me and smiled. It was all teeth.

"Punctual. I appreciate a protagonist who respects the inciting incident." His voice was Anville’s, but layered with a faint, harmonic dissonance. "Shall we skip the gallery? The curated collection is this way."

He gestured toward the solid wall next to the painting. It became a doorway of shifting violet light.

No one in the room reacted. A family walked right through the light’s edge, oblivious.

"This is a private tour," DeVille said, and stepped through.

I followed.

The Marble Room vanished. We stood in a space of pure abstraction.

It was neither dark nor light. Underfoot was a surface like smoked glass, stretching to infinity. Above, strings of multicolored light crisscrossed in a vast, three-dimensional web. Some strings were thick and golden, thrumming with energy. Others were thin, grey, and brittle. Many were tangled. A few were severed, their ends glowing faintly before fading to nothing.

"The Foundations," DeVille said, spreading his arms. "Not the boring dirt-and-stone kind. The real kind. The narrative substrate."

I stared, my mind struggling to parse the scale. "What are the strings?"

"Connections. Influence. Reader to author. Author to canon. Canon to culture. Desire to power." He pointed to a dense knot of vibrant gold and green strings nearby. "That’s your little node. Chronos Imperium. See how it feeds from those thin, hungry grey strings? Those are your readers’ wants. And see how it spits out that nice, fat gold one? That’s your contract power. Very efficient. Very... modern."

He sounded like a chef describing a particularly tasty cut of meat.

"You brought me here to show me a diagram?"

"To show you that you’re building on trends," he said, his smile vanishing. "On the shifting sands of algorithmic appetite. My brother’s boring little ’System’ just lets you tap into that sand and call it concrete." He snapped his fingers.

A section of the web near my node darkened. Several key grey strings, reader interest frayed and snapped. My golden output string flickered, dimming by half.

"A change in taste. A new platform policy. A scandal. Sand washes away." The web restored itself. "Foundations don’t."

"What’s the foundation?" I asked, my voice small in the vast space.

"Truth," he said, the word resonating in the emptiness. "Not factual truth. Narrative truth. The core, resonant lie that feels more real than reality. The myth that outlives empires. Your novelkiss has craft. It has hooks. It has a satisfying power curve. But does it have a truth? Or is it just a clever feeding mechanism?"

The critique cut deeper than any review. Because he wasn’t talking about prose. He was talking about my soul.

"Why do you care?"

"Because boring stories are a waste of good energy," he chuckled. "And because my brother’s betting on you. I want to see if you’re worth the ante. So here’s your lesson."

He walked over to a nearby, isolated string. It was thick, but its light was murky, conflicted. "Look at this one. A mid-list literary author. Writes beautiful, true sentences about despair. Sells nothing. The foundation is strong, but the connection to the sand is weak. He’ll be forgotten, his truth buried."

He plucked the string.

A vibration shot through the web. The murky light cleaned, becoming a sharp, brilliant blue. New, healthy grey strings began to attach to it from the "reader desire" section of the web.

"I just... clarified his truth. Made it resonate at a frequency the sand can feel. He’ll have a bestselling, critically-acclaimed masterpiece next year. A fluke, they’ll say."

He looked at me. "I didn’t change his story. I changed its foundation. I tuned it."

He stepped toward me. "Your foundation, Alex Thorn, is a screaming, empty hole where your self-worth used to be. You’re building a palace over a sinkhole. You can keep piling System rewards on top. It’ll get taller, faster. But the hole is still there. And one day..."

He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to.

"The lesson is: Build something that lasts, you have to fill the hole first. Or at least build around it with something real. Your revenge? That’s real. But it’s shallow. It’s not a foundation; it’s a flag you plant on stolen land."

He waved his hand. The infinite web began to fade. "The tour’s over. Homework is ongoing. I’ve adjusted your... perception. A little gift. Don’t thank me. It’ll hurt."

The Marble Room snapped back into place. I was standing alone before the landscape painting. My watch read 3:34 PM.

One minute.

My head was splitting with a new, permanent ache. Behind my eyes, the world had a faint, new layer.

I could see the sand.

And the holes.

//\\

To the authors who have stared at a blank cursor until it started to look like a heartbeat, this is for you.

​They told us we weren’t good enough. They sent those cold, automated rejections that read like a death warrant for our dreams.

"Not a fit." "Lacks marketability." Every time you see Alex Thorn crush an editor or company in this story, remember: this isn’t just fiction. This is the scream of every writer who stayed up until 3:00 AM pouring their soul into a document that the world ignored.

It is for everyone who has struggled with low reads, low reviews, and those stagnant collections that make you want to quit.

​The gatekeepers are human. They are flawed. And in this digital age, they are becoming obsolete.

They sit in comfortable chairs judging worlds they could never imagine, let alone build. They look at spreadsheets while we look at the stars. We don’t write for the approval of a corporate board in a glass office; we write for the person scrolling on their phone at a bus stop, looking for a world better than their own.

We write for the ones who need an escape from a life that feels like a dead end.

​If you have a manuscript sitting in a folder named "Draft 1" that you’re too afraid to post—post it right now.

Stop waiting for permission to exist. If you’ve been rejected ten times, go for the eleventh. Use their "No" as fuel for your fire.

Alex Thorn had to die to get his second chance. You don’t. You just have to keep typing until your fingers bleed and your vision blurs. The industry thinks they hold the keys, but they forgot that we are the ones who build the doors in the first place.

​Let them call us "cringe." Let them call us "amateurs." While they talk, we build. While they judge, we evolve into something they can’t control.

They fear the day we realize that their power is an illusion, a paper shield against a tidal wave of raw, unfiltered creativity. We are the architects of the impossible. We are the voices in the dark that refuse to be silenced by a "standardized" algorithm.

​The system is rigged to favor the safe, the bland, and the predictable. But the reader’s heart craves the wild, the broken, and the real. Every Chapter you finish is a middle finger to the status quo. Every "Publish" button you click is an act of war against the people who want to keep you in a box.

We are not just content creators; we are world-shapers. We are the nightmare that the ivory tower never saw coming.

​Current Motivation Level: 31%

Next Level: +1%

​If this Chapter resonated with you, drop a comment. Tell me about the time a gatekeeper told you "No." Let’s burn the old world down and write a new one together.

​ALL HELL FROM WEBNOVEL STARTS FROM YOU!

— A.T.