World Hopping: Avenge Our Love
Translator: translationraven
First Published on Chaleuria
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The netizens on Weibo grew excited as soon as the headlines came out. Click! Woah! It really wasn’t just clickbait!
The screenshot pictures, hospital, location of the club, the time the ambulance was called… everything was as clear as day. Even the angles of those few photographs were done quite craftily. Insiders in the industry could tell that they had been edited, and it wasn’t necessarily taken the actual angle that was shown. It was possible that the photos had been edited after they were taken in secret, but who the heck cared so long as the contents were true?
The rest of the spectators were even more carefree about it.
The headline moved one spot up on the trending terms list in just a few minutes. When morning came around, it sat very nicely at the top spot, far above the other search terms. It was definitely number one hot gossip, and even the big news about Celebrity X hiding his marriage was pushed down — it was no competition.
In a certain unnamed paparazzi office, the boss and his subordinates held a meeting. The expressions on all their faces were terrible, and they looked embarrassed, like they’d been slapped.
It was all because the big news that they had laboured to get their hands on had not made a splash as anticipated. Not only that, the online discussion of their news was also rather small, given how they had also paid for it to be put up in the hot trending lists. What was even more humiliating was that the news which had overshadowed theirs wasn’t even something that was bigger news in the entertainment industry — it had been about a bottle of menthol balm.
“This ain’t right. It’s just about some rich heir who got menthol oil on his junk, so why is it so popular? It didn’t drop from the trending list overnight but got more widespread and went up to national level instead. Can someone explain this to me? What’s there to discuss about this?”
“What’s so interesting about this?!”
“Isn’t it just a livestream of some dumbasses?” The boss of the company felt like crying. The news of the celebrity hiding his marriage they’d worked so hard to uncover had not made a ripple in the news at all.
The employees were even more depressed about it than the boss was. They had put in all that effort, suffered so much to get their hands on this big news, and they’d thought that they would have a hit on their hands and become one of the big dogs in the paparazzi circles… but they had lost to a bottle of menthol balm.
“Damn it. Who the hell is this heir? He’s sick in the head!” The group mumbled dejected curses.
One of them abruptly stopped his cursing, because he had suddenly realised that the belt in the picture was very familiar. It sort of looked like… Xiao Lun?
“Holy shit! It can’t be! This heir in the picture is Xiao Lun, the boss of Double Universe Entertainment!”
“What did you say?” The boss of the paparazzi company grew excited when he heard that. The person pointed out a few more details. The depressed people in the room became excited right away, and every one of their faces said the same thing: BIG NEWS!
Meanwhile, they were not the only ones with such thoughts. In fact, many others had the same thought. Xiao Lun’s name was revealed not five minutes after the headline reached the top in the trending terms list. Some deep digging was done, and Xiao Lun’s itinerary for the night was investigated in detail.
According to the netizen witnesses, Xiao Lun had indeed gone to the Lucky Cauldron last night, and it was also true that an ambulance had come to the doors of the club.
“No more! I’m gonna go blind! Isn’t Xiao Lun the most upright of the bosses in the entertainment industry? I can understand him calling a money boy into the club, but playing with menthol balm is just too much, right?”
“Well, they say that you never know what a person’s true face is like. I thought he was a cool guy to look up to, but that image I have of him is shattered now.”
“Why is it shattered? I still think Xiao Lun’s a poster boy. A poster boy for dying!”
Weibo was also full of discussions on Xiao Lun. People were surprised, saddened, and some were devastated when it was revealed that Xiao Lun was not who he claimed to be in public.
As for those heirs who’d been so full of mirth that night and had gotten up late the next day because of it, the situation had become too big for them to suppress by the time they were fully awake and saw what was happening on Weibo.
Xiao Lun’s good name, previously a name linked to prestige and the elite of the entertainment industry, was now linked to tags such as ‘menthol balm man’, ‘iron cock’, and ‘u ded bro?’ and these tags couldn’t be erased now. Plus, Xiao Lun’s profile page on Baidu was also edited by someone, and the line ‘partied at night in the club with a money boy and went to hospital for menthol balm play’ was added.
Xiao Lun’s Weibo wall had a whole bunch of visits from people too, and the top comments were along the lines of: Bruh. You died, man! Is yer cock okay?
This incident had really blown up. Xiao Lun’s image had been ruined not just in the industry, but at the national level!
Yan Qi and the others in the group grew pale immediately when they saw that. Xiao Lun was incensed.
He’d been lying in the hospital ward, and was still there now, unable to move. His area down below didn’t transmit any feeling to him other than pain.
An even more painful and embarrassing problem was with his balls. The doctor had told him that emergency treatment had not been done well, so complications had arisen. He had signs of testicular ulceration, with redness and seeping from the wound area.
Just listening to the report made Xiao Lun feel like he had become an eunuch. Reading the headlines on Weibo and the comments people left on his Weibo wall made him so angry he almost spit blood.
“Are you f*ckers all walking corpses, huh?! Why haven’t you done anything to keep this under wraps before it got to this point? What the hell are you guys doing? You get all anxious and worried for the little celebrities you manage. I AM YOUR BOSS! How can you pretend not to notice when your boss has become the laughingstock of the nation?”
“Trash, all of you! Get the f*ck out!” Xiao Lun unleashed his anger for a bit, then barely contained it. He took a deep breath and called his subordinate in.
“Did you find out who did it?”
“Yes, sir. The culprit did not hide his trail, but we…” The secretary hesitated for a bit, unable to find the right words to describe it.
“What is wrong with you? Spit it out!”
“We can’t touch him. The person who put up the first headline was Yuan Yue. The video and photographs also came from him. But you know about Yuan Yue too. He doesn’t really have a background, but he has too much dirt on us. If we put pressure on him, he could lose his temper and reveal all the dirt he has on us. Double Universe Entertainment would become the greatest sinner in the entertainment industry.”
“…”
Xiao Lun was stunned when he heard Yuan Yue’s name and he didn’t speak for a while.
He knew him. Yuan Yue could be considered one of the most famous of the paparazzi. He’d been a hard worker in his younger days, and buried many a celebrity. More importantly, this guy was Xie Qianchen’s senior. He had been pulled into the matter concerning the best actor that year, and was able to withdraw from it whole because he had a lot of big files on him. This was also why Xiao Lun had been forced to let him go, though many others had been pulled into it, to keep the balance in the industry. Plus, there was that Xie Qianchen, who had played tricks on him.
It looked like these two had come to get revenge on him.
“Ha. Revenge is a dish best served cold, huh!” The tone of his voice was gentle, but the subordinates familiar with his personality had goosebumps. The calm Xiao Lun was the truly vicious one. The secretary could tell that Xiao Lun was losing it.
Xiao Lun did not even twitch when the secretary reported that the money that Yuan Yue had used to buy the trending term spot on Weibo was all from Cao Kun.
“Enough. I get it now. You guys can go back to your posts!” Xiao Lun’s voice was calm. He was completely different from how he had behaved earlier. He waved his hand to tell his secretary to get out, and was lost in thought.
He’d thought that it was Xie Qianchen taking the opportunity to have his revenge when he’d started raging, but how that he calmed down and thought about it, the mastermind behind this was Cao Kun. After all, Cao Kun had been the one to start this, and he had also been the one to call Xie Qianchen over. The money which had gone into pushing the news into the online headlines had also come from him.
Looking at it this way, the truth was obvious.
“You vicious bastard, Cao Kun!” Xiao Lun took a deep breath to calm himself. He quickly moved on to think about how he was going to make Cao Kun become a national laughingstock like himself.
Xiao Lun wanted immediate revenge. Cao Kun wanted to see him become a joke? Well then, he was going to have to be part of the joke too!
He thought about it some more, and made a call to his public relations department. He got them to look for a guy like Yuan Yue, who was also someone famous in the paparazzi circles, and bought a certain piece of information from that person.
——————————————————————————————————————————-
Today was definitely a memorable day for the millions of users on Weibo. There was gossip every day, and the headlines varied, but the top two trending search terms today were surely the most interesting in the past three years. It was also the type that you would bust your gut laughing if you talked about it.
The first needed no further mention — it was about Xiao Lun and menthol balm. The other was a little risque.
# The Entertainment Industry’s Big Player Cao Kun gets cucked. Small-time Newbie Model said: He is impotent but still wanted a threesome and couldn’t get hard even with viagra. #
“Woah! Holy shit! What’s going on here?!”
“Damn, is today the day for entertainment industry bosses to be dragged through the mud or something?”
“Upvote this before reading. If this is from some clickbait blogger, then I’ll curse him to never have the seasoning packet in his instant noodles.”
This headline was sent out to the entire network. The title was spicy, and the content promised to be spicier — the number of views exceeded 200,000 in under five minutes. The actual content invoked wild and fanciful thoughts.
If those photos of Xiao Lun had been eye-opening, then this news about Cao Kun was even more shocking than that.
The content of the post was not at the level of photographs anymore. It was even more explicit than that — an audio recording.
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