In truth, both Li Wei, the producer, and Vina, who worked behind the scenes, had vastly underestimated the impact of this "utterly terrible film" in their eyes.
Many people living at the very bottom of society had never even seen a stage play. That was a luxurious entertainment only nobles had the money and leisure to enjoy.
At most, they had listened to wandering bards briefly lingering at street corners tell the same old, worn-out tales of heroic adventure.
Yet even those clichéd, clumsy adventure stories were a ray of sunlight brightening their dreary lives. Though they were often beaten viciously by their parents and employers for lingering in the streets to hear them, they never tired of it.
The light-and-shadow drama opened with a shot of Dragon Avenue in Water-Drawing City. Coriander, the protagonist, rode her alchemical bicycle home from school, only to see a classmate being picked up by a steam car halfway there. Her eyes filled with envy and inferiority.
That scene drew looks of deep empathy from countless ordinary people.
Over these brief two weeks, the alchemical bicycles and steam cars produced by Hogg Workshop had long since ceased to be unfamiliar things. Some nobles with money to spare had successively purchased alchemical bicycles and steam cars, and they had even become a new arena for aristocratic one-upmanship.
But for ordinary people, even the cheapest alchemical bicycle remained a luxury purchase that required them to grit their teeth before making up their minds.
Before long, they were drawn in by the fantastical plot that transcended reality. Coriander Koulande, an ordinary northern girl, arrived at Zelan, that super magic academy, carrying her parents' dream that she would fly to the mountaintop and become a Silver Dragon. Then, standing up for friendship, she became entangled in a web