World Hopping: Avenge Our Love
Translator: translationraven
First Published on Chaleuria
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Song Yucheng did not sit idly by while the paparazzi were being scared to death.
He was editing a Weibo post, and talking on the phone at the same time, and didn’t seem worried at all. There was something he wanted Yuan Yue to expose before the stroke of midnight, and he also had to handle the public relations for Picture Domain.
He was too busy to handle it himself, so he asked the System to handle the matter of the paparazzi. Computers were the System’s strong suit anyway, so sending an audio message via phone was no problem.
Even then, he still asked the System, “You can handle this, right?”
“For sure! For sure, and I did it really well too~” The System sounded especially pleased with itself, and even sent him a whole bunch of [ProudPuffedChest.jpg] stickers.
It really thought it was awesome, and it also felt that it was the only System in the entire agency which was so friendly and adorable.
“So what did you say to that paparazzi?” Song Yucheng saw its exuberance and was curious. The System’s response was quick.
“I said, ‘I’ll make you mad, make you mad, but I won’t let you post on Weibo’. [NaughtyShrimpInCircles.jpg]”
“Pfft! Yeah, keep annoying him. Ah, remember to cover your tracks. The police might trace it to us if they get involved.”
Song Yucheng couldn’t help laughing when he heard what the System said. It was his first time thinking that unleashing the unreliable System at the right time could prove to be very effective.
He had no clue that the System had used bloody text to harass the paparazzi — he thought it was just regular mischief. What he imagined in his head was the paparazzi jumping up and down in anger. He talked with the System for a bit, and busied himself with editing the long Weibo post again.
Hacking into the computers was just a small thing. The real move he was going to pull was this one.
When Song Yucheng had been a lawyer in the real world, he hated two types of people. The first was the sheeple — empty-headed people who were keyboard warriors, trying to claim the moral high ground while condemning others. The second type was the paparazzi who dug at secrets which would hurt others, and created fake news out of nothing for profit.
People like Luo Tong and this paparazzi, in particular, were bastards who were invading the privacy of a family, and threatening a man with his own child. They were the sort he loathed.
He checked the data he had one last time, and sent the long Weibo post he’d been working on to Yuan Yue and the Picture Domain public relations department.
He looked at the clock. It was 11:59pm.
The netizens, absorbed by the gossip, were in no hurry to go to bed. They gathered and waited for the paparazzi’s Weibo page to be updated.
The other smaller paparazzi units and gossip channels stared hard at the page. They were waiting for the news to be released so they could dig further into it. They couldn’t miss this window of opportunity.
On Xu Ziheng’s end, his heart was thumping hard. He was afraid that he would see bad news in the next second.
All this waiting, and all the expectation, were met with nothing come midnight.
“What’s going on? Why isn’t he posting it? Didn’t he say that he would reveal who it was at midnight?”
“Did he chicken out? What a lousy paparazzi. He has no professionalism at all.”
“Argh! He got paid off, didn’t he? Who knows, the rich actor could have paid him a handsome fee, so he made all that fuss and just left it.”
“How disgusting! The public should have the right to know. If everything can be settled by money, then there’s no need for there to be news reporters — they can just go around asking for hush money!”
Curses and insults flooded in. The keyboard warriors, out for blood, were so worked up they couldn’t sit still. This was such bullsh*t!
This dissatisfaction they had, and the feeling of being toyed with, fuelled their cursing. But no matter how anxious they were, or how much they cursed at him, the paparazzi had been scared out of his mind by the System and had lost his ability to post to Weibo. It was difficult to say if he would ever post to Weibo again.
Even the most steel-hearted of people would not be able to bear the sight of a room full of computer screens with bloody words and a bloody shrimp dancing on the screen.
Luo Tong, who had been waiting for the result, understood immediately that something must have happened when he saw the situation. He called the paparazzi right away, but it seemed there was no one on the line after it connected.
“Hello? Hello?” Luo Tong panicked. Right then, Yuan Yue and the others released news on Weibo, and what he read stunned him.
Luo Tong had not imagined that Song Yucheng would take such measures.
His face grew paler with every word he read of Yuan Yue’s latest article. He quickly contacted his connections to try to find himself a way out of this.
Xie Qianchen must have gone mad! He wasn’t after something as simple as revenge. He was trying to get everyone involved in the Lu Wenyuan and Han Feiran incident thrown behind bars!
And he, Luo Tong, was first on the list!
Luo Tong was scared out of his wits, and he had no time to bother about that paparazzi anymore. He was scrambling to keep himself afloat.
He had to save himself, or there was no saving him once this matter blew up tomorrow.
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However, the popcorn-eating netizens were receiving a greater shock than Luo Tong. This was probably their first time realising how their own curiosity could bring such great harm to people, and their families.
Song Yucheng had asked Yuan Yue to post a data report. It was statistics on the gossip topics released by paparazzi involving celebrities’ families.
There were those who had revealed the faces of their children from the beginning, and were used to it, but most of the ones in the statistical report were celebrities who wanted their children kept safe and out of the public eye.
The report covered a short span of five years, but there were more than 200 such cases. These cases, too, were the ones which had garnered a lot of attention. Articles which had not made a splash numbered higher.
So what? Being a celebrity was a service-type job, with high pay. They were supposed to entertain the masses, be consumed in the media, and have their life on display. Wasn’t this normal?
Many felt that Yuan Yue’s breaking news was a little strange. Some suspected that he was releasing this article because he was helping that unknown male celebrity clear his name.
However, what they read in the article made netizen’s disapproval disappear immediately, and their hearts were struck by a sharp stab of fear.
It was statistics on private criminal cases, and it showed just one specific type — kidnapping for extortion.
Five years, and more than a hundred cases. The people who filed the police reports were all celebrity families who had their children revealed by the paparazzi. All these cases had been resolved by the police, fortunately. However, information later obtained from interviews with the perpetrators raised a question — were these perpetrators part of some sort of syndicate? Every one of them mentioned the same line in the reasons for the kidnapping: I saw this child on TV / the internet, and I knew the parents are celebrities and rich, so…
“So all these children had these sort of thing happen to them because they were exposed to the public eye?” Some people felt that this was ridiculous. “Children can get lost. Isn’t it because those celebrities didn’t keep a proper eye on their children?”
“That’s right. Their livelihood depends on the support of the public. How can they complain that the public’s attention is the cause for their children to be kidnapped? You guys are too good at being hypocritical! It’s like they say — actors are heartless, and whores faithless. It really applies here.”
“Hey, those two commenters above me! Have some decency! Some of the blame can be on the parents for losing the child or resulting in the child being kidnapped, but those children did not go missing at home. Most of the kidnappings happened when the children were on their way back from school, or from kindergarten. The schools have to take some of the blame for cases like these, right? And there are those cases where the perpetrator sent stalker pictures of the celebrities’ children to threaten them with. Are these cases also the result of insufficient parental supervision? Can’t you be decent humans?”
A sensitive topic like this easily sparked a debate. Just as expected, Yuan Yue’s Weibo post caused a lot of online fights in minutes after it went live. The revelation of a statistical number later in the post, however, made all the fighting stop immediately.
The information was shocking, and terrifying.
The children of celebrities led way different lives from the lavishness of what the netizens had imagined. One of them was even a victim of violent bullying in school, and there were children with frightening experiences of being stalked.
There was a website mentioned too, and this website turned their views on the matter upside-down.
It was an overseas website which required VPN connection to access. The content of the website, however, were all related to child stars in China, or the children of celebrities in China.
The children with beautiful features, especially, were displayed on the website for all to admire. The messages left under those pictures though, were so vulgar it made hair stand on end.
Day X, Month X, Year X. I’ll wait for you.
What did this mean? Some people did not understand at first, but they checked the child’s birthday and understood right away.
No regular person would have imagined this if Yuan Yue had not exposed it. How could such dirty scumbags exist in this world?!
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