Growing Followers

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

The viewers in the livestream couldn't see Shen Rui'an's expression, but judging from 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 looking at him so indulgently?]

[I feel like I've been infected by them too. Seeing them smile made me grin without realizing it.]

[This atmosphere is so nice and relaxing!]

[As expected of my favorite streamer to watch while eating. So satisfying!]

[My curiosity is killing me! Can the new guest please show his face?]

[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!!]

[Heh, I don't believe Su Tingbai hasn't seen you spamming this for so long. Let's be real, Shen An'an probably doesn't look anything like that drawing. Maybe that refrigerator screenshot was filtered too. I'd rather look at the others.]

[I don't get why Brother Tingbai treats Shen An'an so differently. I really think he's so pretentious. Is this some new way to build an account?]

[Honestly, I also think this new guest is just using hype to promote himself. There are too many people who want to get famous these days, and all kinds of account-building tactics exist. Shen An'an is probably no exception. It feels like he's just riding Su Tingbai's popularity...]

[This is hilarious. You're saying he's building an account, but he first appeared at the beginning of the month, and nobody has even found his account yet.]

[Exactly. If anyone else had this much buzz, they would've happily opened an account to prove it was them. But Shen An'an hasn't. That refrigerator-door photo topic has over a hundred million views already. If he really wanted to build an account, he'd be the biggest draw, not those influencers piggybacking on the hype.]

[What a joke. Xiao Xuan already has over a million followers, and he has plenty of videos with millions of views himself. Who exactly is riding whose hype? Some people are seriously too funny.]

[? After all that digging, you found several accounts suspected to be his. You messaged several of them, and every one claimed to be him, but not a single one could provide a photo when asked. Another 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 Teacher Sand's video blew up, several influencers were already hopping on the topic.]

[Xiao Xuan was the first one riding the hype, and he's still funneling traffic here. He's the one clout-chasing!]

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

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

Shen Rui'an, who was engrossed in eating fried chicken, had no idea that his Douyin inbox had already hit 99+, nor did he know that his account was gaining another thousand followers every hour. His account had quietly gained a hundred thousand followers.

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

A pretty face really was useful. The followers they had painstakingly built up couldn't compare to what someone else gained from a single accidental face reveal.

And that face hadn't even been fully revealed!

Still, as long as Shen An'an himself didn't come forward to confirm his identity, they could continue feeding off the traffic from this refrigerator magnet topic.

Xiao Xuan, who was benefiting the most, saw his follower count rise by ten thousand every hour and couldn't help touching his face with a curl of his lips.

His account had reached a bottleneck. Its traffic was nearly dead, and this wave had given it a much-needed boost.

As long as Shen An'an didn't come out right now, he would be the one getting the lion's share of the traffic. After all, he had been the first to take the risk.

As the popularity of his refrigerator magnet photo rose, more and more people came to his comments after hearing about it.

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

More and more people in the comments under his video began putting Shen An'an down to praise Xiao Xuan.

Xiao Xuan said nothing, but he allowed his fans to compare him to Shen An'an and insult Shen An'an. He even liked and replied to a few comments whose comparisons weren't too obvious.

[Wow, baby, you're so beautiful! I think you're the best-looking person in this whole topic. The others can't compare to you at all!]

Xiao Xuan liked it and replied: [Not really, the other creators are good-looking too!]

One comment said: [Isn't this copying Teacher Sand's screenshot? Aren't you going to tag the original creator?]

Xiao Xuan ignored it and scrolled to the next comment.

[Baby, you're so gorgeous! You're the most popular person in this topic, and your status as the beauty king is beyond doubt!]

Xiao Xuan liked it.

[I'm dying. A certain guest over at that food blogger's stream still doesn't dare show his face, yet they have the nerve to call him a beauty. Our Xiao Xuan is still the prettiest!]

[He doesn't even dare claim such ready-made hype, which shows that a certain guest is nothing special. That food blogger's fans are still stubbornly defending him! It's obviously an over-edited screenshot. He looks completely different online and offline, so he doesn't dare come out!]

[Maybe he's urgently editing his pictures right now. Don't rush him—give that guest some time to "prove everyone wrong," okay? Otherwise, wouldn't it be embarrassing if he couldn't compare to Xiao Xuan? sneaky-laugh.jpg.]

[No one's going to dispute me if I say Xiao Xuan is the final boss of this topic, right?]

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

Then he browsed through several suspicious bloggers whom netizens believed might be Shen An'an. One by one, he looked through them. Several had come out to falsely claim the identity, and he scrolled past with a look of disdain. Finally, he stopped on a blogger with the ID Baisui Chang'an.

His intuition told him that this account was different.

Using his alt, Xiao Xuan stalked every video on the account. To an influencer like him, who meticulously polished every video, the content was incredibly poor. It was obvious the account owner posted them like Moments updates.

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

After a day of buildup, Xu Shasha's video had overwhelmingly become the topic's clear leader in likes, with five hundred thousand more likes than Xiao Xuan's photo.

Passersby who had learned about Shen An'an from her video had initially assumed the painting wasn't of a real person. Then 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 as well. Without exception, they searched for more information, and when they learned he was Su Tingbai's new guest, they followed him.

Looks fans were very simple-minded. As long as the face was good enough, they were ready to kiss it. In a short time, they had somehow brought Shen Rui'an tens of thousands of new fans obsessed with his looks.

Shen Rui'an's mystery instead made those looks fans feel secure. As long as he hadn't shown his face, everything else was empty speculation. Whatever the screenshot looked like was what he looked like.

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

As a result, quite a few newly recruited looks fans were thoroughly convinced, which made some fans in Su Tingbai's livestream furious.

They directly mocked them for stanning a fake person, saying the screenshot was heavily edited and had zero natural beauty.

Shen Rui'an's newly acquired looks fans weren't afraid. As looks fans, they were best at determining whether photos had been heavily edited. Frankly speaking, some of them were photo-editing experts themselves, and they knew that aside from AI enhancement, the screenshot hadn't been edited at all.

To slap the doubters in the face, some people even asked others who had livestream recordings to extract screenshots frame by frame. They took every shot of Shen Rui'an visible in the refrigerator door and threw them in the doubters' faces. The evidence proved that other than being blurry, the image hadn't been edited at all.

And even that blur couldn't conceal his beautiful face. Wouldn't the high-definition version be even more stunning?

The more closely they examined it, the more certain they became that Shen Rui'an had to be a breathtaking beauty.

Then, using that hand and Baisui as clues, they compared everything and concluded that the Baisui Chang'an account was most likely Shen Rui'an's. So it received another wave of follows.

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

Shen Rui'an:?

What happened?