"How many!?"
With a swish, Shen Miaomiao pulled her legs down from the desk.
She looked at Chu Qingzhou in shock.
"Four... four hundred and twenty-eighth."
Chu Qingzhou repeated herself.
Shen Miaomiao was dumbfounded.
Wait, what?
"I remember there were fewer than six hundred entries in total, right?" Shen Miaomiao asked.
Chu Qingzhou nodded. "A total of 582 games participated in the event."
"We ranked 428th?" Shen Miaomiao found it unbelievable.
Yet Chu Qingzhou nodded again with absolute certainty.
Hiss—
Shen Miaomiao could not help drawing a sharp breath inward.
Logically speaking, upon hearing such a "delightful" garbage result, her first reaction should have been hell yeah!
After all, the voting results were theoretically tied directly to future sales.
Such a disastrous near-bottom ranking meant that their sales would inevitably suffer a crushing defeat afterward.
But!
Shen Miaomiao instinctively felt that something was wrong.
After all.
During this period, she had been keeping an eye on Vampire Survivors' popularity among players.
Given the current situation, with streamers driving interest and players voluntarily recommending it, their game's first-round vote count absolutely should not have been this low.
Claiming it was guaranteed to take first place might have been a little exaggerated.
But breaking into the top ten in votes should have been no problem at all, as far as Shen Miaomiao was concerned.
"Four hundred and something..."
Shen Miaomiao's brows furrowed slightly as she looked at Chu Qingzhou.
"Are these numbers correct?"
"Hard to say, boss."
Chu Qingzhou shook her head.
"Our backend doesn't show the daily vote totals, so there's no way to verify it."
"However..."
Then, Chu Qingzhou changed tack.
"There's another issue that does have evidence behind it."
"Go on."
Shen Miaomiao straightened up and waved for Chu Qingzhou to sit down and explain slowly.
This was where Chu Qingzhou's professionalism as a mature, top-tier assistant had to be mentioned.
During this period, she had compiled and tracked data on Vampire Survivors every day.
This included the number of reports from major gaming media outlets, how often players mentioned the game on forums,
and how many times it appeared on the front page of Yiyou Platform's random rankings during each time slot.
"There's a problem with Yiyou's random ranking refreshes,"
Chu Qingzhou said.
"According to Yiyou Platform's official announcement,"
"the game rankings for this Development Festival used a pseudo-random format, with fifty games per page and a random refresh every hour,"
"in an effort to ensure that every game received equal exposure,"
"thereby guaranteeing fairness in game promotion."
Hearing this, Shen Miaomiao nodded. "I know that."
She had actually considered pulling some stunt before, wondering whether she could contact someone at Yiyou Platform and have them hide her game.
Play hide-and-seek with the players on purpose, reduce exposure, and lower sales.
But that thought had only flashed through her mind.
After all, Yiyou seemed very determined to ensure fairness.
Shen Miaomiao was afraid of making things worse.
"However,"
at this point, Chu Qingzhou changed tack again and opened her laptop.
"Based on my records, over the past week,"
"our game, Vampire Survivors, appeared in the top ten on the first page of the random rankings zero times,"
"appeared on the first page of the rankings 0 times,"
"appeared within the first five pages of the rankings 0 times,"
"appeared on the ninth page 130 times,"
"appeared on the tenth page 30 times,"
"and appeared on the final page 6 times."
Having said that!
Chu Qingzhou looked at Shen Miaomiao.
"The rankings refresh once every hour—twenty-four times per day, 168 times per week."
Shen Miaomiao's face visibly darkened.
"So out of those 168 refreshes, forget the first page—"
"we didn't even make it into the first five pages a single time, is that right?"
Gulp.
Seeing Shen Miaomiao's dark expression, Chu Qingzhou could not help swallowing.
She had never seen the young miss look this awful before!
She nodded. "Uh... yes."
"Heh."
Shen Miaomiao nodded.
She pulled open her desk drawer, unwrapped a lollipop, and put it in her mouth, seemingly trying her best to suppress her emotions.
"Let's assume this is a system bug in the random rankings,"
"then how did this 428th-place voting rank come about? Another bug?"
"I've been watching the discussion around our game these past few days."
"One out of every ten posts discusses it, nearly half the streamers across the three major streaming platforms have streamed it, and it has a 98% positive rating."
"They're obviously rigging things right under my nose?"
That was right!
Shen Miaomiao was a slacker, and she had always taken becoming a top-tier slacker as her life's dream.
But that only meant she was lazy!
It did not mean she was stupid!
She had majored in financial engineering at a top university, and her father's conglomerate spanned more than a dozen industries. Having grown up surrounded by all that, how could she possibly be an idiot!
She immediately concluded that there was definitely something wrong with the rankings!
Shen Miaomiao's anger flared up at once!
You dare mess with me?!
You people must still be dreaming?!
Not only did you deliberately suppress my random ranking, you fucking dare swallow my votes too?
Yes, I wanted to be a slacker, a hands-off boss, and make deliberately failed investments my mission.
But that was Grandma's own choice!
Shen Miaomiao's life motto was—I can choose to be useless, but you don't get to treat me like I'm useless or think I'm easy to bully!
You think you can squeeze Grandma like a soft persimmon?
Are you fucking tired of living?!
"You stupid bastards..."
Crunch! Shen Miaomiao bit the lollipop to pieces.
"You really don't know that Lord Ma has a third eye."
As she spoke, Shen Miaomiao waved her hand. "Go book the tickets. We're going to Zhongjing. I'm going to ask Yiyou face-to-face what the hell they think they're doing."
Binjiang was not far from Zhongjing. The high-speed rail took forty minutes.
"But..."
Seeing that the young miss was truly furious, Chu Qingzhou grimaced and carefully reminded her.
"CEO Shen, the random ranking issue is one thing, but the voting rankings..."
"We don't have concrete evidence proving that they swallowed our votes."
Chu Qingzhou's concern was perfectly reasonable.
Under normal logic, if you accused an organizer of lacking transparency, you had to produce solid proof.
Yet Shen Miaomiao merely sneered at that!
She pulled the lollipop stick from her mouth and flicked it into the trash can. A cold glint flashed in her eyes!
"I'm Shen Wanlin's daughter. Do I need evidence to say they cheated?"
The moment those words came out, Chu Qingzhou shuddered!
That was right.
In the past, Shen Miaomiao had always looked like a slacker girl, lazy and carefree all day, greeting everyone with a gentle smile.
She seemed entirely like an adorable little girl with a touch of willfulness.
It almost made people forget that, besides being a slacker girl,
she was also Shen Wanlin's daughter—the man who ruled the business world, commanded astronomical amounts of capital, and was known for his iron-fisted, ruthless methods.
To outsiders, Shen Miaomiao's words might have sounded outrageously arrogant.
But Chu Qingzhou, whom Old Shen had personally assigned to her, knew better.
Forget Yiyou Platform—even Yiyou's parent company would have to replace its board by tomorrow if it truly angered Old Shen!
"Book the tickets!"
Shen Miaomiao stopped wasting words and tossed Chu Qingzhou a lollipop.
Chu Qingzhou caught it and made an OK gesture.
"Right away!"
Tsk tsk. As she booked the tickets, Chu Qingzhou clicked her tongue inwardly.
Someone had kicked an iron plate now!
Before you continue