The room was quiet. Chu Yu could even hear his own breathing, and he couldn't help feeling nervous.
Zhao Qinyin was just as tense. As a manga assistant, she had no reason to care so much about the results, but she couldn't help herself. Her heart was racing.
Sister Su opened the text message and read it in silence for a long time.
"What's going on?" Zhao Qinyin asked cautiously.
"It's probably higher than last issue's eleventh place. Either way, this is a turning point in the story... I think it should be in the top ten at least!"
Sister Su still said nothing.
"Could it... be lower than eleventh place last issue?"
Zhao Qinyin took a deep breath.
That would be a problem. In her eyes, Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal was undoubtedly an excellent work, but that was just the way the manga industry worked. If readers didn't buy into it, there was nothing they could do.
There was no question that the story was good. She had enough discernment to tell that much. But the reason Zhao Qinyin and the others were still worried about this excellent story was its premise.
RB people, RB Island, and RB history from over a hundred years ago. Mo Yu's editor could accept a premise like that, and Zhao Qinyin didn't think it was a big deal either, but it was hard to say whether readers would be able to accept it.
There had been precedents in the Dragon Kingdom's manga industry. Ten years ago, a popular romance manga had suffered a catastrophic drop in popularity because the author liked happy endings and paired up the second female lead, who had been rejected by the protagonist, with the second male lead, who had been rejected by the heroine. Nothing they tried later could save it! Its popularity remained low, and it was axed not long afterward.
But before that chapter was published, everyone from the author to the editor had thought it wouldn't be a big problem.
It would be a shame if Rurouni Kenshin also lost popularity for the same reason.
But the premise couldn't be changed. If it were, could the story still be this good?
"What's going on?" Chu Yu was just as worried.
Were the results really worse? That couldn't be right!
Just last week, he'd said he was going to top the rankings in Man Ying. Was he going to have his words thrown back in his face after just one week?
If it really ranked lower than eleventh among Man Ying's twenty works... what then?
He could work harder and try to climb all the way to the bottom of the rankings. Would that count as making good on what he'd said?
Chu Yu shook his head, banishing the jumble of thoughts from his mind.
"Just tell me, Sister Su! I can take it." Chu Yu took a deep breath and looked at Sister Su.
Sister Su glanced at her phone, then at Chu Yu and Zhao Qinyin.
"Fourth!" she said bluntly.
"Tenth?" Zhao Qinyin's tense expression suddenly relaxed.
"That's still better than last issue, isn't it?"
"It's not tenth..."
"It's fourth!" Sister Su held up four fingers!
At the same time, Sister Su turned her phone around so the two of them could see the text message.
The message was simple.
The first line read: "Man Ying Issue 721: Reader Poll Results for Serialized Manga."
First place, Magic Realm, 34,626 votes.
Second place, Secret Girl, 33,977 votes.
Third place, Tian Shu, 28,403 votes.
Fourth place, Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal, 14,703 votes.
Fifth place, Monster Academy, 8,413 votes.
Twentieth place, My Husky Became a Spirit, 761 votes.
Readers could vote for multiple works in Man Ying's serialized issues. So even though the works listed above had tens of thousands or thousands of votes, of the more than three hundred thousand people who bought Man Ying, probably only forty or fifty thousand logged onto the website to vote for their favorite manga after reading.
"Fourth? And it's already passed ten thousand votes..." Zhao Qinyin sounded unsettled.
Unlike Chu Yu, who had only joined Mo Yu a few months ago, she understood what this result meant.
The important thing wasn't fourth place. It was that the vote count had passed ten thousand.
Any manga author who could consistently maintain more than ten thousand votes while their series was running had already reached the top of Luo Province's manga industry.
"Fourth?" Chu Yu let out a breath of relief when he saw the results. At least things weren't heading toward a reverse climb to the top.
But then he sighed.
"Fourth..."
He looked at his own tally of over ten thousand votes, then at the first-place work's tally of over thirty thousand, and felt there was a huge gap between his work and everyone else's.
"Chu Yu, why do you sound a little disappointed?" Sister Su asked.
Sister Su herself felt light-headed too. Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal's results had stunned her.
Whether the work would succeed hinged on whether manga fans in Luo Province could accept a protagonist who was an RB person.
Some people might think it didn't matter as long as the story was good. But imagine if, in Hong Kong's Mr. Jin's Eight Dragons, Duan Yu were changed into the son of a daimyo from some country on RB Island, Qiao Feng became the leader of the RB Island Beggar Gang, and Xu Zhu became a monk at a temple on RB Island where the monks were allowed to marry, drink alcohol, and eat meat. If everything else in the story stayed the same, would readers still connect with it the same way? Would it still be so well-known in the Dragon Kingdom?
On the other hand, if readers could accept the premise, then Sister Su believed Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal's story was good enough to make it famous in Luo Province.
Sister Su had thought it might take several issues to see how things would go, but she had never imagined this.
After only two chapters, Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal had leaped from eleventh place last issue to fourth place.
And its vote count had broken through the ten-thousand mark.
More than ten thousand votes was a remarkable achievement, not just at Mo Yu. Even among the other two manga companies in Luo Province at the same level—or across the whole province—fewer than ten serialized works could reach that level.
Before Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal and Secret Girl began serialization, only two ongoing works had received more than ten thousand votes on Man Ying.
Magic Realm and Tian Shu. Both had far surpassed ten thousand, receiving around thirty thousand votes each.
That was precisely why their authors were known as Mo Yu Manga Company's two pillars. The entire company's resources were devoted to them.
Last issue, after Secret Girl began serialization, its very first chapter received enough votes to nearly overtake Magic Realm, which had held first place for a year, pushing Tian Shu down to third.
For the past week, everyone at the manga company had marveled at how many fans Dong Yun had and how impressive her work was. Magic Realm and Tian Shu had both been running for more than three years, after all. The fact that a work with only one chapter could catch up with the fanbase they had built over all that time was astonishing.
It was clear just how many fans Dong Yun already had, and how good her work was.
But today, Sister Su had witnessed something even more shocking than Dong Yun's debut performance the week before.
The second chapter of Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal had passed ten thousand votes!
Before Rurouni Kenshin was published, Chu Yu had only had one modestly popular work, The Garden of Words. He didn't have the fanbase Dong Yun had built over seven years as a manga artist. Yet even so, with just two chapters, he had attracted more than ten thousand votes.
In Sister Su's eyes, Chu Yu's achievement had been far harder to attain than Dong Yun's.
She could even imagine how shocked the other editors at Mo Yu Manga Company must be when they saw the results.
Sister Su looked at Chu Yu and remembered what he'd said last week about reaching the top. Now, she really felt... that it might be possible.
Seeing Chu Yu's expression, still not quite satisfied with fourth place, a thought crossed Sister Su's mind... A genius? No, monster seemed like a more fitting word.
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