The progress bar for Main Character No.4 is 20% unlocked… How could all of this be related to that girl from just now.
Quentin did not immediately respond to the system notification in his mind, but instead replayed the entire short exchange with that girl calling him.
According to Yan Qiao, the charm on the girl’s bag was related merchandise of Cheng Shaozi, so this girl should be a fan of Cheng Shaozi.
Could Cheng Shaozi be the 4th main character in the original book?
Based on the progress bars of the protagonist group he had unlocked so far, number one was Yan Qiao, number two was Wen Xinyi, number three was Qi Yang. If number four was confirmed to be Cheng Shaozi, then only two spots remained out of the total six main characters.
In the original plot, the debut group had seven people. Except for Zhong Qu, the remaining six were all main characters. The original book was an ensemble novel centered around these six.
Quentin did some mental calculation and was a little confused; there were only two spots left… not enough to go around.
He originally thought that in this third public performance grouping, his group should be the entire protagonist group. If Cheng Shaozi was one of the main characters he had been overlooking, then among Xue Mingzhu, Cui Yan, and Fang Xu, who was not in the original novel’s protagonist group?
These thoughts only flashed by in an instant. Quentin did not think further, but directly had the system transmit the plot fragments for the main character No. 4 to him.
Compared to waiting until night to dream about the plot, an on-the-spot Q&A was certainly better. He did not have the patience to leave answers unanswered, keeping him in suspense until night and taking up his work time…he was very busy every night.
He suddenly remembered Yan Qiao was still beside him, so he asked the system, “By the way, watching the plot won’t take much time, right?”
The system replied, [Host, rest assured! It’s instantaneous!]
Quentin was about to nod, when the next second, a buzzing sound rang out in his mind, like a machine overheating and the processor smoking. Countless plot segments, some blurry and some clear, appeared simultaneously.
Yan Qiao, who had been talking slowly, glanced over unintentionally and noticed Quentin’s furrowed brow, as if he was enduring something, looking somewhat unhappy.
Yan Qiao paused in his speech, wondering if he was disturbing him.
But then again, so Quentin did have a temper after all… It was said that good-looking people frowning looked very different from others. Yan Qiao inexplicably thought of the popular online term “a beauty’s angry pout,” but he felt it was a bit strange to use the term “beauty” to describe Quentin.
In his view, Quentin was by no means an effeminately gentle and quiet male. Even though Quentin was currently young, still caught between adolescence and young adulthood, his features were delicate and pretty, not the handsome, vigorous, particularly masculine type.
But one could still see that years later, Quentin should have an extremely aggressive, extremely handsome and very gorgeous face.
…Wait, how did his attention turn back to Quentin’s face again.
Yan Qiao had always known he was a bit of a looks person, he liked interacting with good-looking people. But his standard for “good-looking” was quite high. Being simply better-looking than him was far from enough, so in BKL, no one had ever discovered his looks-obsessed trait.
After all, when the threshold is too high and no one around meets the standard, it’s equivalent to not being a looks-obsessed person.
However, in the show “NS,” the people who could meet Yan Qiao’s standards were not limited to Quentin. The first domestic boy group idol survival show had high standards. People like Wen Xinyi, Qi Yang, Cui Yan, etc., were all high-value handsome guys with their own strengths. They could be the visual/face of any boy group.
But still, Quentin’s face was indeed more to his aesthetic taste.
It was only after meeting Quentin that Yan Qiao realized he quite liked green eyes. Perhaps he could also try wearing colored contacts in his future styling choices?
Since he was not nearsighted, he had always been wary of putting foreign objects in his eyes.
The two young men carrying boxes and walking shoulder to shoulder on the way back were each lost in their own thoughts. Quentin was trying hard to digest the new plot he had just unlocked.
He first sorted out the timeline of the new plot.
Half a year after the survival boy group debuted, Zhong Qu’s incident implicated Yan Qiao, leading to a soft blacklisting. Two members of the seven-member group had “collapsed,” but the group’s popularity and fame remained high…after all, this was a protagonist group with both looks and talent.
And Cheng Shaozi’s crisis occurred on the first anniversary of the boy group’s debut.
It also began with a black trending topic that suddenly dropped to the number one spot. The hashtags “#Cheng Shaozi fan suspected of fraud#” and “#**** first anniversary#” rushed up the trending list one after another. The redacted name was naturally the boy group’s name, which Quentin currently had no way of knowing.
The two trending topics together at the same time were certainly eye-catching, but a year after debut, the boy group’s fandom was no longer what it used to be. Cheng Shaozi’s fan group’s anti-smear actions were very efficient. It was just a pity… low spears are easy to dodge, but hidden arrows are hard to defend against.
The fan on the trending topic had created multiple alt accounts, moved across many platforms, and used reselling tickets for the boy group’s concerts, fan meetings, music festivals, birthday parties, etc., as a method of fraud. She had been committing crimes continuously for a year, with over a hundred victims. She was a truly shameless repeat offender.
Those with ulterior motives who brought her to light emphasized one point… she was indeed a die-hard fan of Cheng Shaozi, and the tickets she grabbed were all real.
It was just that she had never thought of reselling them to others. The money she scammed was used to grab the next event’s album sales…
In short, this person used idol worship to scam money.
Even worse, this person specifically scammed her fellow fans.
When her fellow fans found out about this, they felt like the sky was falling!! Damn scammer, couldn’t you atleast scam the rival fans instead?!
Forget fellow fans or rival fans, the whole pot of porridge was being dragged down and ruined by one piece of rat shit! This was the rhythm of being nailed to the pillar of shame of fandom!! How could they hold their heads up in future fan wars?!
It was hard to describe the feelings of Cheng Shaozi’s fans. They were busy with anti-smear efforts, repeatedly clarifying under the trending black posts that the fan’s personal actions should not reflect on the idol, while also trying to restrain themselves from lashing out at the sarcastic fans of fellow group members.
That would have been fine, but many foolish fellow fans were groveling under the black posts, apologizing for the scammer, not daring to talk back even when insulted directly, only knowing how to apologize and confess guilt over and over.
Cheng family fans: …Damn it, we want to fight!
Who asked you to apologize? You are also a victim, okay?!
Xiao Cheng was unlucky enough for eight generations to end up with such a scammer fan, and we were also unlucky enough for eight generations to have this kind of person as a fellow fan! Can you just stand tall and be strong, little sister!!!
In reality, the fermentation of this black trending topic had almost reached its peak. Regardless of which idol’s fan the scammer was, in the end, it had to be handed over to the law. No matter how much public opinion debated, it couldn’t really affect Cheng Shaozi’s career.
However, this premeditated framing went far beyond that.
A couple suddenly posted online, publicly accusing Cheng Shaozi of causing their daughter’s death.
The post contained dozens of photos. The photos showed a girl’s fangirling diary.
The naive strokes described her longing and yearning feelings word by word. Everyone who saw the diary could imagine how much this girl adored her idol.
But at the end of the photos, the poster said that their daughter had disappeared the day after returning from a concert, leaving behind only a suicide note that seemed to say “disappointed in the world,” and then disappeared with no trace.
It was only recently that they learned their daughter had jumped into a lake and committed suicide a year earlier.
When Quentin reached this point, he understood the connection between the “daughter” in the plot and that girl from just now.
But, jumping into a lake to commit suicide?
In Quentin’s view, although that girl was in a bad mood, from the subsequent conversation, one could see that she had not reached the point of being so pessimistic as to jump into a lake to commit suicide just because of the ticket issue. Unless something else happened later.
He didn’t have time to dwell on it; the plot continued.
The person behind the scenes scheming against Cheng Shaozi was vicious enough. Not only did they push the couple’s post to the trending topics, but they also “uniquely” designed a highly controversial trending hashtag.
——#Teenage Girl Obsessed Fan Dies for Fandom#
Quentin: “…”
Was this kind of plot serious? He thought Yan Qiao’s tragic ending of being implicated by his online-sex-content-creator teammate doing homoerotic was already outrageous enough, but Cheng Shaozi’s side could be even more ridiculous?
He did not even need to read further to guess how things would develop.
Without even thinking, this kind of malicious trending topic that played with biased words would definitely distort the facts, guide public sentiment, and forcibly tie the fangirl’s suicide and the fan fraud together onto Cheng Shaozi.
The people behind the scenes exploited the public’s prejudice against fangirls, exploited netizens’ malice toward celebrities, and also exploited the boy group’s chaotic fandom (it was said that in the original novel, the protagonist group’s groupfans were an endangered species…), successfully making Cheng Shaozi sink deeper and deeper into this chaotic mire.
And according to the plot design of a tragedy-focused novel, Cheng Shaozi was most likely a “perfect victim” of false accusations, just like Yan Qiao before.
Quentin did not think the girl who jumped into the lake in the original book ended her life for Cheng Shaozi. In fact… he somewhat doubted the authenticity of the post posted by the girl’s parents.
If the “fangirling diary” in those photos was real, then the girl should have been deeply devoted to Cheng Shaozi. How could it be the same person who declared she was jumping ship just because of a few words from him earlier.
Switching biases in just a few minutes, no matter how he looked at it, did not seem like the behavior of a die-hard fan, right?
Quentin carefully pondered the girl’s state of mind. He suspected that idol worship was just a way for the girl to escape reality and gain positive emotions. Her choice to take her own life in the original book might have had no direct connection to idol worship.
“System, do me a favor.”
He thought, “Help me search online for the photo of that girl and me from just now… If you don’t find it within an hour, remember to remind me.”
The system did not understand why, but immediately responded, [Received!]
Quentin did not relax his guard just because he had received 20% progress. This 20% represented Cheng Shaozi’s redemption progress, not that girl’s progress. He had no way to determine whether the tragedy in the original book would still occur or not.
Were his few words just now enough to win back a person’s heart that had given up on life?
Quentin wanted to find that girl not only to prevent the tragedy in the original novel but also to seize the scammer’s tail by this opportunity.
Clearly, this “fellow online fan” who deceived the girl this time was the future repeat scammer. Moreover, this girl might be the only fellow fan the scammer had ever scammed.
This kind of real-world example was rare, and only in a novel could there be such interlocking coincidences.
Quentin hoped the girl would post the photo online. If she did not post it, then he did not know how he would find a needle in a haystack…
He had just thought this far, not yet having time to consider the hypothesis that the photo was not posted, when he heard the system announce enthusiastically, [Host! Found it! It was posted two minutes ago!]
Quentin: …o_o?
Two minutes ago…wasn’t that as soon as they had parted ways, the little girl posted it online?
That… went so smoothly.
