The Buzz Around It

"How was it?" Chu Yu asked.

"Third!" Su Ruo said.

She really wanted to act calm. After all, she was the oldest person there, and she wanted to appear composed and unruffled.

But the tremor in her voice gave her away. Before meeting Chu Yu, she had worked on several series published in Man Ying, but most of them had been canceled because of low popularity. Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal was the first series under her care to break into the top ten.

And now, it had made the top three.

In an instant, she forgot all about being angry at Chu Yu for giving her a bathroom scale. Now, she was too excited to sit still.

But the person who was most shaken was undoubtedly Zhao Qinyin.

After all, Su Ruo was only an editor. She hadn't drawn those characters and backgrounds herself, stroke by stroke, or personally worked on the manga pages, applying screentones and inking them bit by bit...

Chu Yu was indeed the creator of the manga, but at that moment, even she, as his assistant, was at a loss for words. She felt inexplicably moved.

Su Ruo handed her phone to the two of them.

Just like last week, Magic Realm and Secret Girl were still in first and second place, and their vote counts had barely changed.

But the third-place spot, previously held by Tian Shu, now belonged to Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal. Its votes had also surged once again.

For the first time, it had broken thirty thousand votes—to be exact, 31,512.

It was just over three thousand votes behind Secret Girl in second place, and it had overtaken Tian Shu in fourth place by more than a thousand.

"That wasn't easy!" Chu Yu let out a long breath.

"After five weeks of serialization, we're finally third!"

Zhao Qinyin and Su Ruo nodded instinctively.

But they quickly realized what he'd said.

What do you mean, "wasn't easy"?

You're a new manga artist, and after just five chapters, your series has made the top three on Man Ying. What more could you want?

But seeing how calm Chu Yu looked, they remembered what he'd said before.

First place...

Number one on Man Ying...

Until he reached that goal, this kind of milestone victory wouldn't stir up much emotion in him.

First place!

Su Ruo recalled what Chu Yu had said to them right there, a month ago.

She'd never expected...

Just one month later, he would be in a position to reach for that spot.

At Mo Yu Manga Company, it was already nighttime, but Editor-in-Chief Pang Feng still hadn't left work.

He logged into Man Ying's voting page on his computer and viewed the voting data with his staff privileges.

"Impressive!" Pang Feng's gaze settled on the name of the series in third place: Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal.

Over the course of his more than ten years as a manga editor, he had worked with several series on the level of Magic Realm and Secret Girl.

But Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal was the only one whose trajectory had left everyone in the know utterly stunned.

It had reached this point in just five weeks, with no publicity and a debut author who had no following at all.

Pang Feng understood that the series' extraordinary rise in popularity showed just how mediocre the other works on Man Ying were by comparison.

It was a shame to have a series like this running on Man Ying.

Even so, it had been treated unfairly on the platform.

There was nothing Pang Feng could do about it.

Although he was the editor-in-chief, he was really just a senior wage earner at the company.

Ever since the company's owner accepted investment from Modu a few years ago, the position of deputy editor-in-chief had always been filled by someone sent over from Modu.

Pang Feng understood that those people had only come to build up their résumés, and would eventually return to Modu.

After all, just as the Modu Seven didn't readily serialize works by new manga artists, they weren't likely to put inexperienced manga editors in important positions either.

So mid-sized manga companies like Mo Yu became places for those people to pad their résumés. They would spend a year or two there, use their connections to promote a few works under their own names, then return to Modu with "experienced manga editor" on their résumés.

But in reality, what use were their connections in Luo Province? And back in Modu, wasn't everyone well-connected and powerful? In the end, it still came down to ability.

As for those parachuted-in editors who eventually went back, Pang Feng had never heard of any of them discovering a truly good series.

They had left, but they had gradually poisoned the atmosphere at Mo Yu. Over the past few years, quite a few editors had quit because they couldn't stand those nepotism hires.

Li Xi, Sun Mo, Xie Yutong... All of Pang Feng's former subordinates had left. Some of them had even done better after leaving Mo Yu.

Even Su Ruo, Pang Feng thought, would probably have left Mo Yu by now if she hadn't met Shui Xin and come across Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal.

As for Pang Feng, if he didn't have three children in school, he would have wanted to leave Mo Yu too. Being editor-in-chief here really wasn't easy.

After a long pause, Pang Feng took out his phone and dialed a number.

"Hello, Director Liu from the Operations Department? This is Pang Feng from the Editorial Department... Yes, you should know today's voting results by now, right? I wanted to ask if we could start putting some of our promotional resources behind Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal next week. For example, we could put up character posters in subway stations, on buses, and in bookstores. We could also feature the series on a manga magazine cover, or at least give one of its characters a cameo..."

"What? Deputy Editor-in-Chief Song said... I'm the editor-in-chief. Listen to me. It'll be fine..."

Pang Feng hung up and sighed.

That was about all he could do, even if it wouldn't make much of a difference...

The manga recommendation section of Xin Man Net.

The post about Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal was still the number-one post on the homepage.

That was extremely rare on Xin Man Net, and it showed just how popular the series was on the site.

It had two million views and nearly a hundred thousand comments.

All of this suggested that the post probably wouldn't last much longer.

Although Xin Man Net was the country's largest gathering place for 2D fans and a legitimate website, that didn't change the fact that the so-called manga recommendations in its manga recommendation section were, at heart, pirated uploads of manga photographed on phones.

If a post didn't attract much attention, the manga company whose work had been stolen wouldn't bother pursuing it. After all, that took time and effort.

But if a recommendation post for a certain series got a lot of attention—like the one for Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal—then once the manga company reported it, the post was practically guaranteed to be taken down. (If you're wondering about the logic, think of how novels used to be pirated on Baidu Tieba. Posts had to be taken down again and again before the problem was mostly brought under control. And Baidu was a perfectly legitimate website too!)

That night, a flood of manga fans from other provinces poured into the post, refreshing it again and again to see if the original poster had uploaded the latest chapter of Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal.

At last, the original poster uploaded chapter five.

The images were still as blurry as ever, taken with a lousy phone camera, but after a few weeks, everyone had stopped complaining about it.

A crowd of readers waiting for the update all refreshed the post around the same time, and it promptly crashed under the load.

Chapter five reached the point where the Shinsengumi were about to attack the group Kenshin belonged to. It ended just as Kenshin took Xuedai Ba by the hand, ready to leave.

The battle was about to begin. What would the two of them do next?

Another familiar cliffhanger.

After finishing the chapter, the fans cursed the author in the comments, calling him a cliffhanger dog.

They grumbled, but they understood.

A week's worth of anticipation had come to an end, and now they had to wait another week.

The replies soon turned to discussing the plot.

But then one person's comment sparked a heated discussion!

"Going by Xin Man Net's usual habits, with this post getting so much attention, it'll be taken down before long, right? What are we going to do then? Give up on the series, or find another way?"