Gaining Followers

Shen Rui'an's expression was so vivid that he looked hilarious.

The people in the livestream couldn't see Shen Rui'an's expression, but judging by everyone else's faces, it wasn't hard to tell that Shen Rui'an had made them laugh. Their curiosity was killing them.

[What did Shen An'an do? Why is everyone else smiling at him so fondly?]

[I feel like I've been infected by them too. Seeing them smile makes the corners of my mouth lift on their own.]

[The atmosphere is so nice and relaxing!]

[No wonder he's my favorite streamer to watch while eating. So satisfying!]

[I'm dying of curiosity! Can the new guest show his face already?]

[Same! The suspense is killing me. Will I get to see the new guest's face in my lifetime? Even President Huo said he was good-looking—just how good-looking could he be...?]

[Show your face, show your face, show your face, show your face!!]

[Heh, I don't believe Su Tingbai hasn't seen you spamming this for so long. Let's be real, Shen An'an definitely doesn't look like that drawing. Maybe even the refrigerator screenshot was filtered. We'd be better off watching the others.]

[I don't understand why Tingbai is treating Shen An'an so exceptionally. I really think he's so pretentious. Is this some new way of building an account?]

[Honestly, I also think this feels like the new guest's publicity stunt. There are too many people who want to get famous now, and all kinds of ways to build accounts. I don't think Shen An'an is any exception. It feels like he's just riding Su Tingbai's popularity...]

[I'm dying. You say he's building an account, but he's appeared since the beginning of the month and no one's even managed to find his account.]

[True. If anyone else had his level of buzz, they'd have happily opened an account and proved it was really them already. But Shen An'an hasn't. That refrigerator-door photo topic has over a hundred million views. If he really wanted to build an account, he himself would draw the most traffic, instead of those influencers riding the hype.]

[What a joke. Xiao Xuan and the others already have millions of followers, and he himself has plenty of videos with millions of views. Who exactly is riding whose clout? Some people really need to stop embarrassing themselves.]

[? After all that digging, you only found a few accounts that might be his. You messaged several of them, and every one claimed to be him, yet not one could provide a photo when asked. Another one didn't respond at all. So who's building an account? And who's riding the traffic? All I know is that within one short hour after Sand's video blew up, several influencers rushed to cash in on the topic.]

[Little Xuan was the first one to ride the hype, and he's still trying to funnel traffic here. He's the one leeching off the trend!]

The livestream started arguing again. Neither side would back down. Several of the accounts netizens had dug up as possibly belonging to Shen Rui'an came out to ride the hype, but the account suspected to be Baisui remained completely silent.

Some netizens instinctively felt that this one was Shen Rui'an's account and quietly followed it. Its newest video had already received ten thousand likes, and the comments were all asking whether he was Shen An'an.

Shen Rui'an, immersed in eating fried chicken, had no idea that the direct messages in his Douyin backend had reached 99+, nor did he know that his account was gaining a thousand followers every hour. Without a sound, his account had gained a hundred thousand followers.

This made the influencers lurking in the shadows and watching the several accounts suspected to belong to Shen An'an grind their teeth.

A pretty face really was useful. The followers they had painstakingly built up were fewer than what someone else gained from one accidental face reveal.

And that face hadn't even been fully shown!

But as long as Shen An'an himself didn't come out and claim his identity, they could keep feeding off the traffic from the refrigerator magnet topic.

Little Xuan, who bore the brunt of it, saw his follower count rise by ten thousand every hour in the backend. He couldn't help touching his face and curling his lips into a smile.

His account had reached a bottleneck. Its traffic had nearly dried up, and this trend had given it a much-needed boost.

As long as Shen An'an didn't come forward now, he would get the lion's share of the traffic. After all, he had been the first to take a bite of the crab.

As the popularity of his refrigerator magnet photo grew, more and more people came to his comments because of the buzz.

Unlike Shen An'an, who kept his face partially hidden, Little Xuan showed his face both during livestreams and at offline events. There was no questioning his looks.

More and more people in the comments under his video began comparing him to Shen An'an and putting Shen An'an down.

Little Xuan said nothing, but he allowed his fans to compare him to Shen An'an and disparage him. He even picked a few comments that weren't too obvious about it to like and reply to.

[Wow, babe, you're seriously so gorgeous. I think you're the best-looking person in this whole topic. Nobody else compares to you!]

Little Xuan liked it and replied: [Not at all, the other creators are very good-looking too!]

One comment said: [Isn't this imitating that screenshot from Sand's post? Aren't you going to tag the original creator?]

Little Xuan ignored it and scrolled to the next comment.

[Babe, you're so beautiful! You're the hottest person in this topic. Your status as the visual queen is beyond question!]

Little Xuan liked it.

[I'm dying. That certain guest on the food blogger's side still doesn't dare show his face, yet they have the nerve to call him a beauty. Our Little Xuan is still the prettiest!]

[They don't even dare come out and claim such ready-made attention. That shows that certain guest is only so-so. The food blogger's fans are still stubbornly denying it! It's obviously an overly edited screenshot—their online and offline looks are completely different, so they don't dare come out!]

[Maybe they're urgently editing photos right now. Don't rush that certain guest—give him time to "slap us in the face." Otherwise, wouldn't it be embarrassing if he can't compare to Little Xuan? laughing.jpg]

[No one's going to dispute that Little Xuan is the final boss of this topic, right?]

Little Xuan switched to an alt account and liked those comments.

Then he browsed through several suspicious bloggers whose accounts netizens believed might belong to Shen An'an. He checked them one by one. Several had come out to falsely claim the identity, and he disdainfully swiped past them. Finally, he stopped at a blogger with the ID Baisui Chang'an.

His instincts told him that this account was different.

Using his alt account, Little Xuan quietly inspected every video on the account. To an influencer like him, who carefully polished every video, the content was terrible. It was obvious that the owner posted them as casually as Moments updates.

As Little Xuan scrolled through the videos, his gaze fell on the hands appearing in several of them, and his eyes narrowed.

After a day of fermenting, Xu Shasha's video had overwhelmed all the others and become the clear leader in likes under the topic, receiving five hundred thousand more likes than Little Xuan's photo.

Passersby who learned about a person named Shen An'an from her video had initially assumed the drawing wasn't of a real person. But Xu Shasha replied that she had drawn it based on the screenshot and her imagination.

So there really was such a person!

The passersby who saw it had their curiosity ignited. Without exception, they all searched around, and once they learned he was Su Tingbai's new guest, they followed him.

Face enthusiasts were very simple. As long as someone was pretty enough, they could fall head over heels at once. In a short time, they had brought Shen Rui'an tens of thousands of fans drawn in by his looks.

Shen Rui'an was too mysterious, which instead made these face fans feel secure about stanning him. As long as he hadn't shown his face, everything else was empty speculation. Whatever the screenshot looked like, that was what he looked like.

Some people even believed Xu Shasha's drawing was what Shen Rui'an looked like in real life.

This brainwashed quite a few newly converted face fans, causing some fans in Su Tingbai's livestream to lose their tempers.

They directly mocked them for stanning a fake person, someone completely over-edited with zero natural beauty.

Shen Rui'an's new face fans weren't afraid. As face fans, they were best at determining whether a photo had been overly edited. Frankly speaking, some of them were photo-editing experts themselves, and they knew that aside from AI restoration, that screenshot hadn't been edited at all.

To slap the doubters in the face, some people also asked others who had screen recordings of the livestream to capture it frame by frame. They extracted every shot of Shen Rui'an from the refrigerator door and threw them in those people's faces. The evidence proved that aside from being a little blurry, the image hadn't been edited at all.

And even that blur couldn't hide his beautiful face. Wouldn't he be even more beautiful in high definition?

The more closely they examined it, the more certain they became that Shen Rui'an was a great beauty.

Then, using that hand and Baisui as leads, they concluded that the Baisui Chang'an account was most likely Shen Rui'an's, and another wave of people followed it.

When Shen Rui'an picked up his phone to scroll through videos, he discovered that his backend had quietly gained another two hundred thousand followers.

Shen Rui'an:?

What happened?