Ma Yuanyuan turned off her phone screen.
Then turned it on again.
Three videos. Over a million followers.
Those numbers kept circling in her head. She couldn't shake them.
Was she jealous?
Yes.
She didn't want to admit it, but that feeling pressed against her chest, leaving a breath she couldn't swallow. How long had she, Ma Yuanyuan, been at this? How much footage had she shot, editing and revising until three in the morning? She had painstakingly worked on them one by one, gaining followers as slowly as squeezing toothpaste from a tube. She had ground out over a hundred videos before one went viral, and that one-she had still used his proposal, merely adding an ending where Li Le saved his mother.
And him?
Three.
Three were enough.
She wasn't jealous of that number. She was jealous of that brain.
A scholar's robe, a calligraphy brush, soy sauce, grilled chicken wings. With those things laid out in front of them, who would think to put them together? Movie scenes could be imitated. Online formulas could be copied.
But that contrast created by his brush calligraphy-who could pull that off?
Wang Xiaoliang could.
Ma Yuanyuan closed her eyes, and that agreement surfaced again. Ten percent. Back then, she had felt manipulated, bled dry. Now, looking at it the other way-trading ten percent for a brain that could take off with just three videos, what a bargain. She held twenty percent, and Li Le held seventy. Wasn't Li Le's share hers too? They could take ninety percent.
Was there something wrong with her head?
At the time, she had been fixated on having to speak up, having to take back control. She hadn't thought through her change to the profit split he had proposed, hadn't even calculated that ten percent