Nine Years Ago, Writing *The Grave Robbers' Chronicles*, How Could He Have Imagined Any of This? | 100 People With Ideas

Has the world of serialized web fiction changed? No — what has changed is everything about how good content gets run. On that, "Nanpai Sanshu" may be one of the people best qualified to speak.

On Qidian, Nanpai Sanshu's fans were getting anxious.

His new book, The Brave's Great Adventure, was meant to update daily. It went silent on November 23. Nearly a week later Sanshu posted a chapter, in his own unhurried time, then vanished again.

It is an adventure story much like his earlier The Grave Robbers' Chronicles — inventive, full of thrills. From October 20, readers got two thousand new words a day. In the comments they said they knew this would be another pit like The Grave Robbers' Chronicles (a story laid so thick with suspense that a reader cannot stop), and they jumped in anyway.

The readers who still follow Nanpai Sanshu have more patience and tolerance than most. They call themselves "Daomi," rice grains, and some of them lived through several sizeable rows involving this novelist, who got his start on Baidu Tieba. Yet at a fan meet-up on November 13 they printed a long string of questions on A4 paper and, in tones of enormous excitement, cautiously probed: "Sanshu, do you still have three chins? Have you kept up with the gym?"

Sanshu

Chen Wen, an old friend of Nanpai Sanshu's and a colleague from his early studio Comic Factory, says that once Sanshu starts writing he does not leave the house. He is afraid of getting tired, his mind never stops turning, and typing at home in his underwear is probably the state he finds most comfortable. When the way ahead closes up, he gets to his feet and walks circles around the room.

"He is simply too clever," Chen Wen says.

Nine years ago this clever man had a sudden run of luck: inspiration came to him. Like many people, Nanpai Sanshu was struck by a tomb-raiding novel called Ghost Blows Out the Light, then being serialized on Qidian. It was widely credited with inventing a whole new kind of novel, and its careful workmanship made that new tomb-raiding world solid enough to believe in. Nanpai Sanshu registered the ID 218.109.112 and began another tomb-raiding story, The Grave Robbers' Chronicles, on Baidu Tieba. The series picked up steam and was soon serialized on Qidian as well.

By the time the series ended in 2011, it had been published as nine printed volumes. That year Nanpai Sanshu collected 15.8 million yuan in royalties, second on that year's China Writers Rich List, behind only Guo Jingming.

Plenty of people think Nanpai Sanshu has something in common with Guo Jingming — not in the writing, but in that both know how to look after their fans. "I read what the fans write in the comments, and I use some of the funny phrases they come up with in the next installment," Nanpai Sanshu said in an interview in November. In that same interview he stressed that he neither agrees with nor understands positioning a book to play up homoerotic subtext; yet at signings mobbed by fans, Sanshu was still happy to write a few suggestive lines on the title page of a new book, to please the women in the queue.

In the end, the fans' influence slipped out of control. After the web drama of The Grave Robbers' Chronicles aired this June, Nanpai Sanshu first joked that "my first reaction after watching it was to move house" — he worried that fans who hated the adaptation might do something irrational. But he later not only spoke well of the show, he became friends with Li Yifeng, one of its actors.

The readers devoted to the novel began to turn on him, accusing Nanpai Sanshu in fierce language of failing his own work — which was also the work they loved. Around the same time others stepped forward to say they had long since had enough of his willfulness on the page: he had buried too many plot threads and could not, however hard he pushed, make them add up. On social media they shouted, "Long live quitting the pit."

The Baidu Index for the phrase "The Grave Robbers' Chronicles" climbed to 2.4 million, nearly 20 times what it was when Nanpai Sanshu made the Writers Rich List.

"Even the Creator runs into people building a Tower of Babel." Talking about this, Nanpai Sanshu reached for Sherlock Holmes: Conan Doyle lost patience with writing him and decided to send Holmes over a waterfall, and readers across Britain rioted, mailing razor blades and bullets to Conan Doyle's house and cursing the novelist to be buried alongside the character he had made. "Readers mailing you razor blades — that is the highest level of it. And you still have to grit your teeth and hold on," Nanpai Sanshu said. "That is the state I am in now."

Some of the Daomi stopped honoring old loyalties too, and looked ready to have it out with Sanshu — at least that is how they came across on social media.

Xu Lei

Nanpai Sanshu's name is Xu Lei. Whenever that name starts coming up often, it means Nanpai Sanshu's standing as a writer is in danger.

"Xu Lei is just a businessman" has become something close to a password on social media. Say it, and people can list, step by step, how the writer behind the pen name made his "not entirely dignified" march down the broad road of commercialization. Even Conan Doyle, when he ran short of money, chose to bow to public demand and let Holmes go on living.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. "I'm the textbook case of getting attacked over commercialization," Xu Lei concluded, without waiting for us to ask. He had said as much in 2014, during a copyright dispute with Qidian and Shanghai Tongshi: "I am a businessman," he wrote in a long open letter.

This businessman is "a skilled operator," says a Zhihu user named Cheng Feng — and it is precisely because of that, he says, that Xu Lei has "taken back a good many rights and gained a freer hand over how the IP is developed."

IP is short for the English term Intelligence Property, meaning intellectual property. The owner of an IP can reissue a work or adapt it into other media. The Grave Robbers' Chronicles, which Xu Lei wrote under the pen name Nanpai Sanshu, is one of the most successful and most profitable works in Chinese web fiction. It is a big IP.

Xu Lei makes no secret of wanting his work adapted, and thinks having a novel turned into film or television is an "honor" for a writer. It always has been. "Nobody can turn that honor down and say I don't want it, don't film it, I'm just here to write the thing — right?"

As Xu Lei sees it, most IP needs other media to lengthen its life. It is because of the television series, the films and the flood of Grave Robbers' material online that a novel now 10 years old is still talked about, and that a large crowd made a pilgrimage to Changbai Mountain on August 15, 2015 to welcome one of the book's male leads, Zhang Qiling.

In 2014 Xu Lei set up Nanpai Film & Television Investment Management. The company handles the film, television and game adaptation rights and other derivative rights to Nanpai Sanshu's novels The Grave Robbers' Chronicles, The Mystic Nine, Tibetan Sea Flower and Sand Sea. It was also this company that worked with Huanrui Century and iQiyi this June to release the web drama of The Grave Robbers' Chronicles. Reviews were poor, but by the time the last of its 12 episodes went up the series had 2.5 billion views.

Nanpai Investment also announced this September that it had closed a Series A+ round jointly invested by Xiaomi, Shunwei Capital (where Lei Jun is founding partner) and LeEco. It had earlier raised a Series A round from LeEco; the two rounds together came to nearly 100 million yuan.

"That 100 million yuan is already gone," Xu Lei says. They put it into film and television investments, hoping a bigger check would buy a bigger say. It is a question of how to turn value into money, and also of the reputation of a clever man, not merely a writer:

"A lot of people's understanding of The Grave Robbers' Chronicles is very shallow and very crude. They say it's a thing women who like boys' love enjoy, so it has to play up the homoerotic angle. When I hear that my head explodes. If you make it that way — The Grave Robbers' Chronicles still has 60% male readers, what do you plan to do about them? When your share of the investment is large enough, you can say

'

No!' I decide. But if you are only a writer, all you can do is watch, because every bit of blame lands on you."

The Architect

Readers of adventure novels and players of games picture "the brave one" differently.

In a novel he will usually be in some dim place, take a few clean strikes and finish the enemy. In game animation, players want saturation at full blast: better if the brave one lands a punch, a beam of light flashes, and under all that light and shadow sparks burst off the other man's body.

Nanpai Sanshu did not understand this at first, but he believed he could always find the right way to work with people.

In 2014 he signed a game contract with Tencent in his own name. The game was based on an idea of his called "Broken Chapter," an idea still a long way from a finished novel, when Tencent and Pixel Technology came to him with The Brave's Great Adventure. Tencent wanted to grow it into a brand carried across several media, and they needed someone who could tell an adventure story to build the core of that image: the story.

Nanpai Sanshu was that storyteller, and a clever man too. "I can say it straight out: I can't write any newer tombs. It's very hard," he said. He then thought up a brand-new adventure story that runs all over the world, meaning at first to give himself to finishing it, as the first of his novels to be translated and published in English. Now he has realized that "the English-language novel can still happen … but a lot of things have to come first, have to come first."

He decided to realize the "Broken Chapter" idea inside The Brave's Great Adventure, and became the IP's "architect of the world." He and his team are responsible for making sure everything in the story hangs together, and to that end they made a booklet called the "IP Bible." It sets out what exists in that invented world and the rules it runs on — much as "Wudang" and "Shaolin" carry their own images, or the tomb-raiding vocabulary Ghost Blows Out the Light coined from nothing.

This was a risky step. This time the novel, the animation and the game have to move at once — everything gets its final check from the architect, so there is none of the old trouble of "novel first, adaptation later," but everything will be the team's work in the end.

The compromises came earlier, and yet Nanpai Sanshu thinks he has thought harder about them. "Adaptation is always a pain. Say the word 'adaptation' about any IP now and everyone hates it, everyone's eyes fill up. Adaptation is always a pain," he said. Better, he said, to sit down and talk before the IP is even made.

In meetings with Tencent and Pixel Technology, Nanpai Sanshu always stood. A team of hundreds took turns appearing at those meetings; they sat, and the architect walked circles around the room. The architect has plenty of ideas. He began learning the rules of film, television and games — which picture the brave one differently — and soon accepted that ashes go to ashes and dust to dust.

He has even accepted, with some gratitude, the team calling a halt now and then. He says that in the past, writing The Grave Robbers' Chronicles, he fell into a state of fighting alone with nobody at his back, grinding away the hours: "Open your eyes, four walls; close your eyes, four walls. You take something from 90 points up to 95, but there's nobody there to call a halt, so you keep working on it, and it may drop to 70. At 70 points, you can feel that the more you touch it the worse it gets."

In late November, The Brave's Great Adventure fell behind on Qidian. By Nanpai Sanshu's account he was reworking the structure and revising and adding to the existing 38 chapters, because readers said the new book was getting harder and harder to follow — like The Grave Robbers' Chronicles, too much suspense, plot threads buried too deep.

Still, this novelist who writes online says he is not as miserable as he used to be. The Brave's Great Adventure: Notes from the Yellow Springs has gone from daily updates to weekly, and the team calls a halt when Nanpai Sanshu's writing reaches about 80 points.

"I want 100 points," Nanpai Sanshu says. "But the 100 points you have in mind are your 100 points. They are not anyone else's." The old doubts about writing and commerce are still there, but this time he sets the questions as well as answering them. He is an architect.