World Hopping: Avenge Our Love
Translator: translationraven
First Published on Chaleuria
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Weibo was ablaze with comments.
“What the f*ck?! What’s wrong with this guy?”
“Damn, this guy is like a virus. I think I saw his comment ten times today.”
“I saw it 20 times.”
“So what the heck is this for? Picture Domain is a big corporation, so what’s up with this crap? Are they so poor that they can’t afford regular publicity?”
“Forget about that! Who the hell is this Xie Qianchen guy?”
“Wait, isn’t he that guy from two years ago? The one who pimped the award-winning actor Han Feiran? I saw the video from that time. How is he still working in the industry? What celebrity would still be brave enough to work with him?”
Xie Qianchen’s dark past was dug out again because of this but it was old news after all and soon died down after a short discussion. What the netizens could not stand was Song Yucheng’s shameless way of self-promotion.
Nobody expected, however, that Song Yucheng would even target the Weibo pages of celebrities from rival companies. He wasn’t flooding the page since it was just one line, but this one line was enough to drive people up the wall.
The fans of a budding celebrity were especially mad at this, and these fans were very protective of their idol too. When they saw this suspicious comment, which they took to be an insult to their idol, they swarmed to sting back.
The Weibo comments were pretty calm till that point. The vibe got foul in an instant, with insults being slung everywhere, people picking fights, people commenting on fights and so on. It was a free-for-all. There were some who couldn’t be stopped, even when the moderator stepped in.
System: Hahaha! Our advertisement is all over Weibo! I’m awesome, right? What do you think of my fast fingers, honed over 10,000 years of being single? [CatsTakingOverTheWord.jpg]
Song Yucheng: Yeah? I recall you claiming to be a minor.
System: _(:з」∠)_ Um, I’m still your lil’ bro?
Song Yucheng: Sure ^_^
Song Yucheng was expressionless as the System sent him a flood of angry puffer fish gifs. He calculated the time and picked up the phone to write a message, and sent it to the group chat with Director Yang and the participants of the short film project. ‘There is a limit to the budget, so the promotion method is a little primitive. Please go along with it.’
He then busied himself with other things. He was finished with the early-stage preparations for the short film, and all he had to do now was to get celebrities to join him.
Song Yucheng’s method of getting celebrities to go to him was quite different from how one would normally imagine it to be, however. Never mind that — the smile on Song Yucheng’s lips was full of mirth. It was good so long as he could reach his goal.
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Song Yucheng was always organised and decisive in doing things. He could carry his plans out step by step as he’d organised them. On Luo Tong’s end, he was blowing his top over what Song Yucheng did.
“He’s doing this on purpose! For sure! Is he taking the opportunity to run some scheme because our President Xiao is overseas?” The manager of a celebrity’s Weibo page which had been “hijacked” burst out in curses.
He wasn’t being petty. This matter would have been of no consequence, normally, but his celebrity was promoting a new song today. The manager had hired fake supporters to post positive comments and boost popularity, but this move of Song Yucheng’s had derailed his plan.
The comments under the song promotion post was filled with criticism and curses, and was such a collection of chaos that it made him despair. Most of the rabid fans were not seeing reason anymore and they ignored whatever the fan club president said. Practically everyone was busy critiquing Song Yucheng.
They were keyboard warriors!
Huh? Our idol promoting his song? What’s that? We’re not interested! We’re busy defending our idol’s honour! Let’s talk about that song promotion later!
This sort of situation was playing out not just on this young celebrity’s Weibo page, but on several other pages too. No matter what the original post was, about drama, advertisement, variety shows, hobbies… all the attention was on Xie Qianchen.
What’s more, some people did not feel satisfied scolding him on their idols’ Weibo pages so they went to his Weibo page to scold him some more.
Song Yucheng was pretty mean too. He’d put his Weibo page settings to only allow comments from followers. This was great. People watched as the number of followers on his Weibo page snowballed — he gained hundreds of thousands of followers in a few hours.
Even his ranking on the celebrity popularity list had gone up by dozens of places. His rise in popularity was a lie, of course. The way he had achieved this feat of popularity was unprecedented.
The Double Universe managers could only laugh in their anger when they saw this. They felt like these few short hours were the most strenuous they’d experienced in their lives; they were wrung out by Song Yucheng, one after another. The poor managers were so tortured that they wished to end it all with a knife to their own throats.
“I’ve got to hand it to him. He’s an elite manager through and through. We can’t do anything to fight back though he’s pulling small tricks like this.”
Luo Tong, who’d been silent all this while, couldn’t help a scoff. “What tricks? This is an obvious move to humiliate us. You can’t even tell? How the hell are you still in this industry?”
“I cannot be compared to you, of course. But weren’t you also hit by this?” They’d been stewing over this the whole afternoon, and tempers were short. He was normally respectful towards Luo Tong as a senior manager, but he was not backing down now.
Luo Tong was taken aback by him, but he had no words to say in response. He scrolled through the Weibo pages and discovered that Song Yucheng had got the first comment spots for two more celebrities his company managed, and was so mad he could burst.
This way of getting the first comment must be through skill. Luo Tong couldn’t figure out what method Song Yucheng had used to do this, and so brilliantly too. Had he found some hacker to hack the Weibo system? Did he plant a programme in Weibo which automatically commented first on the pages of celebrities with minority ranking and up?
There was no way that this was possible for a human to do manually.
After a short while, a manager on good terms with Luo Tong asked him a question in a small voice, “So what do we do about this, Brother Luo?” The other managers looked at Luo Tong with expectant eyes.
They were not newbies in this line of work, but this was the first time they were facing something like this.
Song Yucheng was not doing things subtly or quietly anymore. He was going rogue, turning the heat up in public and not sparing any of their dignity. Objectively speaking though, Song Yucheng was not overdoing it. He only posted one comment on each page, and didn’t insult anyone or respond to anyone. It was a simple, straightforward advertisement. There wasn’t even anything particularly offensive about the comment, and this put pressure on the managers.
They would be seen as petty if they wrote any words of scolding, and just letting this go would make them want to choke with resentment. They were caught between a wall and a hard place.
“We can forbid our talents from posting on Weibo today!” Someone couldn’t take it anymore and suggested a bad idea.
“How can we do that? Sure, that will work for posts meant to entertain the fans, but we can’t stop them from posting things like official announcements and business posts!”
“Well it’s useless even if the celebrity is allowed to post. The post won’t gain popularity right now.” The managers argued over it, and the air of frustration in the office grew worse.
Luo Tong was annoyed by all of this. He slammed his hand on the table, and they all went silent. After a bit of quiet, Luo Tong decided to fight back. He was not going to let Song Yucheng go on like this.
“Those sheeple fans want a fight, right? Then let them fight! We can write that Xie Qianchen started all this with malicious intent, and get those little celebrities to call their fans to report him.”
“But Xie Qianchen insulted no one.”
“He didn’t, but his advertising was malicious. I also remember there being a strict rule on Weibo that an account will be suspended automatically if it receives a certain number of reports, right? If we can’t do anything about him, we can shut him down with numbers!”
“Yes, Brother Luo. We’ll do as you say.” The other managers reached a decision too. They went about contacting their celebrity fan club presidents and prepared to fight back.
They started with the young celebrity whose song promotion had been spoilt. The celebrity wrote a post crying about how his efforts in promoting the song had been overshadowed by Xie Qianchen’s actions, and voiced suspicions that this had been malicious rival marketing from Picture Domain.
Meanwhile, the fan club presidents, led by the various managers, got the attention of the easily-influenced fans and directed them to the ‘report’ button.
The counterattack from Double Universe had been quite quick. Luo Tong estimated that Xie Qianchen would be shut down in two hours, max.
Trying to gain popularity? In your dreams!
But Song Yucheng wouldn’t be Song Yucheng if things really progressed the way that Luo Tong expected.
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