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2L: I saw it too—holy shit, this has crossed dimensions!

3L: So what if it crossed dimensions? As long as they're good-looking, dimensions aren't a problem, okay?!

13L: I mean, yeah, but they're pretty adorable together. Cross-dimensional, younger man, employee idol x boss—so many elements. It's absolutely delicious. I've already started devouring fanworks like crazy.

20L: Honestly, I started shipping them the day Meng Feixuan debuted. His face is seriously flawless, and his character model is insanely good. Standing next to Xie Ran, he doesn't look virtual at all. That launch event was practically the perfect template for an overbearing CEO personally backing a young idol's debut—and the young idol was even the top. So damn tasty! I've been unbelievably happy these past two days!

40L: A CP with basically no shared appearances or collaborative work suddenly blew up overnight. Why does this feel so heavily manufactured to me?

41L: 40L spotted the blind spot. I looked at the creators making fanworks, and most of them are new accounts. As for the content, with my palate as a ten-year veteran fanwork connoisseur, I can taste the artificial sweetness all over it. I don't believe nobody's pushing this behind the scenes.

47L: To be fair, they've crossed dimensions, for fuck's sake. How could it not be manufactured? Did anyone seriously expect real sugar?

77L: I know the answer to this one. Didn't a certain decade-old CP suddenly make a comeback and blow up recently? A friend of mine works in the entertainment industry, and she told me one side was doing bundled promotion. The other studio seemed pretty unhappy about it, so it's reasonable to suspect this 2D x 3D CP was cooked up by the other side to muddy the waters.

99L: 77L, who the fuck are you pretending to be a passerby for? You just want to say Fang Huiwang was clinging to someone, right? I've got gossip too. I heard that washed-up little idol demanded an outrageous price, and now nobody in the industry wants to take him on. He's probably afraid he'll be stuck with him, so he didn't hesitate to personally play the bottom and hype up the little idol again, hoping to sell him off for a good price.

100L: Stop spreading rumors upstairs. Everyone in the industry knows how Wangran made its comeback, but Xuanran climbed the search rankings naturally. No one knows why it suddenly got so popular, but one thing's certain: no marketing company has been involved so far.

137L: I don't know about anything else, but it's true that Meng Feixuan is about to become impossible to sell. I heard the offers from the industry aren't low, but Xie Ran just won't budge. He's seriously gotten too full of himself.

236L: Sheesh, fans from those two sides have mixed in again. This thread is done for. Standard ending.

Like other CPs that had exploded overnight in the past two years, Xuanran amassed an enormous volume of online discussion in only a short time. Fanworks sprang up like mushrooms after rain and swiftly climbed the trending charts of every major site, forcibly suppressing the recently surging Wangran.

CP fans had always been astonishingly quick to jump ship. Before the large wave of new Wangran fans had even settled in, they were rapidly drawn to the suddenly rising Xuanran.

For a time, nearly every entertainment website became a battlefield between the Wangran and Xuanran camps—not only over fans, but because both CPs included Xie Ran.

In other words, this was no longer simply a contest of popularity. It was a battle for honor. What was the difference between losing and having someone steal your wife?

Having your wife stolen in front of the entire internet, no less. It was simply the greatest humiliation in the CP world!

Yet to everyone's surprise, from almost the moment this battle was brought into the open, Xuanran had remained firmly above Wangran.

Wangran had no ability to fight back at all.

Wangran's longtime fans were anxious and furious, yet helpless.

Fang Huiwang's fans were even more impotently enraged. They might have hated Wangran, but Fang Huiwang losing this CP war and being mocked for being inferior even to a virtual character was another matter entirely.

Fang Huiwang looked at the Xuanran CP data sent over by the bot-farm company. His face darkened until it seemed ready to drip water, and he nearly crushed his phone.

Ambition Studio: [Which company did they hire to push this? Don't you claim to have the most marketing accounts on the entire internet? How can you not even out-promote a CP involving a fake person?]

Boss Duan of Yashen Internet Marketing: [That's unfair, Brother Fang. I've already investigated. No company is pushing this CP.]

Ambition Studio: [Wasn't Xie Ran promoting it?]

Boss Duan of Yashen Internet Marketing: [I asked around among our peers already. No one has taken an order from Xie Ran Studio. I checked all the accounts posting about it, including "Meng Feixuan Alt Account," the creator who first stirred up hype in the Xuanran community and produced the most fanworks. We confirmed they aren't from a marketing company—they're just ordinary user accounts.]

Boss Duan of Yashen Internet Marketing: [Brother Fang, you know how it is. We may have plenty of accounts and be able to steer the conversation, but if regular netizens really erupt, we definitely can't compete with them.]

Ambition Studio: [You mean there really are that many people shipping Meng Feixuan and Xie Ran?]

Boss Duan of Yashen Internet Marketing: [I can't guarantee it. This is genuinely a little strange. All I can tell you is that, based on what we've been able to investigate so far, no company is promoting this CP.]

This time, Fang Huiwang finally lost control and viciously hurled his phone away.

Xie Ran Studio.

Guan Shunan was equally puzzled. She had only just been worrying about Xie Ran being tied to Fang Huiwang with no way to break free, when Xuanran suddenly appeared out of nowhere and ruthlessly crushed Wangran's momentum.

For a CP to become hugely popular required the right time, place, and people. Meng Feixuan and Xie Ran barely had any shared appearances or interactions, so this level of popularity could only have been forcefully pushed by a company.

That was why Guan Shunan had been extremely nervous at first. The two people in the CP both belonged to Xie Ran Studio, yet their studio had done nothing. Could some other company really be doing charity work?

But that was the strange part. Behind Xuanran's meteoric rise, there was no trace of any marketing company. Although many of those fanwork creators were new accounts, they genuinely did not belong to any company.

Most importantly, marketing accounts had always relied on reposting other people's creations and publishing promotional press releases for celebrity collaborations to steer public opinion. No company had the ability to produce that many fanworks on its own.

And the wildest part was that some people had even translated them into foreign languages and posted them beyond the firewall.

"Right now, everyone in the industry is studying what's going on with your CP with Meng Feixuan. Your CP got popular too fast and too strangely—it's a completely new case," Guan Shunan said jokingly as she looked at Xie Ran. "Tell me honestly, was this your doing?"