Reputation

"How is it?" Chu Yu asked.

"Third!" Su Ruo said.

She really wanted to act calm. After all, she was the oldest person present and should be composed and unfazed.

However, the tremor in her voice betrayed her. Regardless, before meeting Chu Yu, she had edited several serialized works on Man Ying, but most of them were canceled due to low popularity. Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal was the first time one of her works had broken into the top ten.

Now, it had actually broken into the top three.

For a moment, she forgot her anger at Chu Yu for gifting her a scale. Her mind was in turmoil.

But the one most shocked was undoubtedly Zhao Qinyin.

After all, Su Ruo was just an editor. She hadn't drawn the characters and backgrounds stroke by stroke herself, nor had she painstakingly applied screentones and inked the manga draft paper herself...

Indeed, the creator of this manga was Chu Yu, but at this moment, as his assistant, she also found her emotions hard to express, feeling a strange sense of moving.

Su Ruo handed her phone to the two of them.

Just like the previous issue, the first and second places were still Magic Realm and Secret Girl, with little change in their vote counts.

Only the third place had changed from Tian Shu to Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal, and the number of votes had once again leaped forward.

It had broken through 30,000 votes for the first time, to be precise, 31,512 votes.

The gap between it and the second-place Secret Girl was only a little over 3,000 votes, and it had surpassed the fourth-place Tian Shu by over 1,000 votes.

"It wasn't easy!" Chu Yu let out a long sigh.

"In the fifth serialization issue, it's finally third!"

Zhao Qinyin and Su Ruo nodded subconsciously.

But immediately, they both reacted.

What wasn't easy!

As a newcomer manga artist, you've broken into the top three on Man Ying in five issues, what more do you want?

But seeing the calmness on Chu Yu's face, they recalled what Chu Yu had said.

First...

Man Ying's first...

Until that goal is reached, such a phased victory wouldn't cause him excessive emotional fluctuations.

First place!

Su Ruo recalled what Chu Yu had said to the two of them in this very spot a month ago.

She truly hadn't expected...

That in just one month, he would be qualified to covet that position.

Ink Fish Manga Company. Although it was already night, Editor-in-Chief Pang Feng had not yet left work.

He was using his computer to log into Man Ying's voting page, viewing the voting data with backend staff privileges.

"Amazing!" Pang Feng's gaze fixed on the name "Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal" in third place.

Whether it was Magic Realm or Secret Girl, in Pang Feng's decade-plus career as a manga editor, he had encountered several works of this caliber.

But only Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal, its serialization progress was simply astounding to everyone in the know.

Without any promotion, and with the author being a newcomer with no traffic, It had taken five weeks to reach this point.

Pang Feng understood that the extraordinary popularity trend of this work indicated that compared to it, the other works on Man Ying were too mediocre.

It was truly a shame for this work to be serialized on Man Ying.

But even such a work had been treated unfairly on Man Ying.

Pang Feng was powerless to do anything about it.

Although he was the editor-in-chief, he was essentially just a senior employee of this manga company.

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

Pang Feng understood that those people were just there to gain experience before eventually returning to Modu.

After all, just as the Modu Seven Greats wouldn't easily serialize works by newcomer manga artists, they wouldn't easily deploy newcomer manga editors.

Thus, medium-sized manga companies like Ink Fish became places for those people to pad their resumes. They would come for a year or two, use their connections to promote a few works under their wing, and upon returning to Modu, their resumes would list them as senior manga editors.

But in reality? Were their connections useful in Luo Province? And back in Modu? Everyone had their own connections and positions of power; in the end, it all came down to strength.

Anyway, Pang Feng had never heard of any of these people who had been sent down discovering any good works before they left.

But they left, and gradually corrupted the atmosphere at Ink Fish. In recent years, many editors in the company, unable to tolerate these favored individuals, had left Ink Fish one after another.

Li Xi, Sun Mo, Xie Yutong... all the subordinates Pang Feng had back then had left. Instead, some of these people had even found better development after leaving Ink Fish.

Even Su Ruo, if she hadn't met Shui Xin and encountered the work Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal, Pang Feng felt she would have left Ink Fish by now.

As for Pang Feng, if he didn't have three children studying at home, he would also want to leave Mo Yu. Being an editor-in-chief is indeed not easy.

After pondering for a long time, Pang Feng took out his phone and dialed a number.

"Hello, is this Director Liu from the Operations Department? It's Pang Feng from the Editorial Department... Yes, you should know the voting results from today, right? I wanted to ask if we could invest some promotional resources into the work Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal starting next week. For example, putting up character posters at subway stations, on buses, and in bookstores. We could also feature the characters from this work on the cover of the manga journal..."

"What do you mean Deputy Editor-in-Chief Song said... I'm the editor-in-chief, listen to me, and everything will be fine..."

Pang Feng hung up the phone and sighed.

This was all the help he could offer, though it was insignificant...

Xin Man Net, Manga Recommendation Section.

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

This was extremely rare on Xin Man Net, indicating the immense popularity of this work on the website.

Two million clicks and nearly a hundred thousand comments.

All of this also suggested that the lifespan of this post was likely not long.

Although Xin Man Net was the largest gathering place for the domestic two-dimensional community and a legitimate website, it couldn't change the fact that the so-called manga recommendations in its Manga Recommendation Section were essentially pirated copies taken with phone cameras and uploaded online.

If a post didn't have high traffic, the manga company whose work was pirated wouldn't be interested in pursuing it, as it would be too much effort, expense, and time.

But if a recommendation post for a certain work had high traffic, like the one for Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal... then as long as the manga company reported it, it would inevitably be taken down. (Those who can't grasp the logic can refer to the past situation with pirated novels on Baidu Tieba. It was repeatedly taken down before it was basically controlled. But Baidu is also a very legitimate website!)

In the evening, a large number of manga fans from other provinces crowded into this post, constantly refreshing it, wanting to see if the poster had updated the latest chapter of Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal.

Finally, at a certain moment, the poster updated the fifth chapter of Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal.

The familiar low-quality phone camera pixels were still there, but after a few weeks, everyone had gotten too lazy to complain.

A crowd of people waiting for the update was refreshing this post almost constantly during that time, causing the post to lag severely.

The plot of the fifth chapter happened to be about the Shinsengumi attacking the organization Kenshin belonged to, and it cut off just as Kenshin was pulling Xuedai Ba's hand, preparing to leave.

Battle was imminent. What would happen to the two of them next?

Another familiar cliffhanger.

After reading, the manga fans once again cursed the author as a cliffhanger dog in the comments section.

Despite the scolding, they understood.

The anticipation of a week had ended like this, and they had to wait another week.

The subsequent replies began with plot discussions.

However, at this moment, one person's reply sparked widespread discussion!

"Given Xin Man Net's usual behavior, with the traffic this post has, it'll probably be taken down before long! What will everyone do then? Give up on this work? Or seek other methods."