At the same time that Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal had climbed to the top of Man Ying's rankings for the second time.
On Xin Man Net's manga recommendation channel, the pirated-post thread about Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal had held the top spot on the channel's click-and-reply rankings for over a month. It was quickly updated with the story of Chapter Eight.
One after another, the manga fans online who had been eagerly waiting clicked into the thread.
Xin Man Net was, after all, a well-known 2D site in Dragon Country. Although its manga recommendation section was only a tiny channel, and not many people usually browsed it,
a thread that stayed on the front page day after day could attract a massive amount of traffic over time.
"So that's what's going on..."
"I knew it! In the last few chapters, whenever Teacher Shui Xin drew Xuedai Ba carrying a little knife, I felt something was off. After reading this chapter, it turns out she approached Kenshin with an ulterior motive. She was carrying the knife because she wanted to kill him, right?"
"Didn't this chapter show that Xuedai Ba left the knife she'd been carrying at home? That means she gave up on trying to assassinate Kenshin, right? And Kenshin knew all along that she was carrying a weapon, didn't he? In that case, I think there's practically no chance she'll try to kill him..."
"No, so where does the story go from here? Kenshin and Xuedai Ba reconcile, then live happily ever after together, shamelessly making out all the time? Or does Xuedai Ba eventually make her move against Kenshin, and the protagonist, Kenshin... dies, ending the story?"
"Who knows! Who knows what kind of ideas Teacher Shui Xin has in mind? Anyway, I'm a fan of Xuedai Ba now. She's my new goddess."
"I think it'd suit my tastes if they really got together in the end and had a few kids."
"Wouldn't that be a bit clichéd?"
After reading the latest chapter the original poster had uploaded, a crowd of people stayed in the thread, eagerly discussing the plot.
But at one point, when they refreshed the page,
the three digits 404 soon appeared before them.
"..."
"..."
"..."
When they returned to the manga recommendation section, they saw that all the new posts were discussions asking about the Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal serial-post thread.
"Boohoo, as expected, this series couldn't escape the dreaded 404."
"Forget it, we all saw this coming. The series is so popular, of course the manga company publishing it would notice the thread and report it..."
"So what do we do now? I finally found a series I liked after ages of having nothing to read, and now the serial-post thread's been taken down. Where am I supposed to read it? Man Ying's magazine from Luo Province isn't sold anywhere around here, and the manga company doesn't have an online store..."
"Forget it, an online store? A manga company around here once sold its magazines online to people in other provinces. It sold fewer than a thousand copies in a month, and they shut it down after just one month. In Dragon Country, every province is so protective of its own culture. Apart from companies like the Modu Seven Greats, which have used their massive resources, manpower, and top-quality works to force their way into nationwide distribution, I've barely heard of any small or medium-sized manga companies succeeding at cross-province sales. As soon as they try, companies from the two provinces start fighting, and in the end, both sides usually lose."
"Didn't someone recently say he'd opened a shop on Tianmao? What was his name—Ming City Old Wang? He said he had a way to get copies of Man Ying. Wasn't he willing to source them from Ming City and ship them to fans in other provinces? The manga company doesn't care about the handful of sales online, so they won't bother, but Comrade Old Wang doesn't seem to mind the trouble..."
Ming City Old Wang...
Many of the fans who saw the comment looked thoughtful.
That evening, Wang Ge Bi opened his Tianmao shop selling the Four Treasures of the Study, as usual.
Business was tough these days, and his bookstore's income had dropped quite a bit compared with a few years ago. So he'd started a Tianmao shop as a side business. But it was clearly struggling, with little traffic and miserable sales.
He'd been thinking that if things were still like this a few months from now, he might as well close the shop.
But when he logged into the store's seller dashboard today, the flood of private messages popping up on his screen left him dumbfounded.
"Old Wang, is that you? The thread's been taken down, so we're switching from pirated copies to the official version. Could you please update your shop and add Man Ying magazine as a product?"
"Old Wang, didn't you say we could come to you for Man Ying? How do we buy it? Your Tianmao shop doesn't have the magazine listed!"
"Old Wang, I'm here to buy next issue's Man Ying. My address is *******. You can ship it here. I'll pay on delivery..."
What was this?
Wang Ge Bi stared at the messages for a long while before realizing that they'd been drawn in by his old comment on Xin Man Net.
But he'd only made that comment because he liked Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal himself, and because he'd assumed that not many people would switch from pirated copies to official ones after the thread was taken down.
After all, Xin Man Net had hosted plenty of pirated threads for popular manga before. They'd attracted a lot of readers while the series were being serialized, but once the threads were taken down, people went back to doing whatever they wanted. If it was gone, they simply stopped reading!
But what was going on with this series?
Wang Ge Bi checked the stats in his seller dashboard. Already, more than twenty thousand people had sent him messages saying they wanted to buy the next issue—the Man Ying issue starting with Chapter Nine of Rurouni Kenshin.
And while he sat there in a daze, the number of private messages kept rising.
That was a far cry from the few hundred sales he'd imagined when he made that comment!
What should he do?
Wang Ge Bi was in a bind.
A few hundred orders would have been manageable, but he didn't have enough people to handle tens of thousands of orders!
On second thought, though, he could solve the staffing problem by borrowing some help from friends who also ran online shops. He'd just have to pay them.
But how was he supposed to ask the publisher for tens of thousands of copies of a manga magazine? He was just a medium-sized bookstore in Ming City, asking Mo Yu for tens of thousands of copies?
Still...
Looking at the flood of private messages, Wang Ge Bi felt his heart start to race.
This was money—lots of money!
He certainly wasn't going to do all this for free. If that many people really placed orders, he'd charge a service fee.
Even if he charged just a few yuan per issue, that would still add up to tens of thousands—about as much as his bookstore made in two months!
He thought it over, then called his magazine supplier.
"Brother Luo, can I ask you something..."
"What is it, Old Wang?"
"I've got some friends who want to order Man Ying magazines. It's a pretty large quantity. Do you think you can get them?"
"Man Ying? Old Wang, after all these years in the business, do you really doubt what I can do?"
"Just tell me how many."
"About twenty or thirty thousand copies. But I'm not sure yet. I'll give you an exact number by next Tuesday. This issue comes out Friday, after all."
Wang Ge Bi didn't commit himself. He had no idea how many people would be willing to buy Man Ying online. Two thousand people had messaged him so far, but who knew how many there would be by tomorrow, or how many would actually pay when the time came?
He'd only know the real numbers after adding Man Ying to his Tianmao shop and seeing how many people paid and placed orders.
On the other end of the phone, Brother Luo was silent.
"Twenty or thirty thousand? Are you messing with me?"
"I'm serious."
"Fine. Give me the order quantity by next Tuesday. If you really want that many, I can definitely get them for you. But think it through first. Once you place the order and the stock arrives, whether it's your friends—or your 'friend' is really you—if you can't sell them, that's your problem... We're talking hundreds of thousands of Dragon Country Currency, you know. That's no small sum!"
At this point, Mo Yu and Chu Yu still had no idea that their work had quietly made a name for itself beyond its home base in Luo Province.
Even the senior staff at Mo Yu, who had once set up an online store selling to the whole country, wouldn't have believed it. Back then, the online sales channel they'd worked so hard to create hadn't made enough in a month to cover the wages of the people managing the store, and they'd abandoned it after a few months.
Now, the owner of a bookstore in Ming City had casually bragged online, and Man Ying's sales had suddenly jumped by tens of thousands.
(A lot of people have said the author's setup doesn't make sense. Why can't these manga companies expand beyond their own provinces? Why don't they sell online?
"Here's an example. Think of the distilleries in the cities and counties of your own province. Can their liquor be distributed nationwide? How far beyond their own city can they sell? Do they get high online sales? But, on the other hand, these local businesses can still sell just as well as the industry giants in their own territory.
"More importantly, the world in this book is fictional, so it's inevitable that some details won't be perfectly thought through. If you find a logical flaw, as long as it isn't too serious, just assume the author didn't know any better and have a laugh about it!")
Before you continue