Lü Chengan was delighted for a full day when he received the trial phone.
But when it came to actually filming something, he found himself at a loss.
He was a worker who washed and cared for felt carpets at the Seven Treasure Chamber of Commerce. He couldn't summon a Bone Dragon, and he couldn't swivel his hips and wave his hands at a camera. A few guards could step onto the grounds and run through a set of punches, and people below would cheer. When he stood in the courtyard, all he had at hand was a dirty carpet.
It had only just been returned from the warehouse.
Its surface was covered in a thick layer of brown mud, enough to make anyone reluctant to put a foot anywhere near it.
In yesterday's class, Young Master Lu had said that people could film things they knew how to do, too.
Lü Chengan thought it over, then propped his phone on the windowsill.
He had to do the work today anyway.
If the video turned out badly, he could simply choose not to post it.
He spread the carpet across the light-colored stone floor of the courtyard, picked up a long-handled scraper, and slowly pushed it from one end.
The scraper's edge lifted the thick mud, squeezing it into a curled strip that rolled forward half a foot before flopping down with a splat.
Lü Chengan didn't rush to pour water on the carpet. He first switched to a shovel and scraped the mud off the surface, bit by bit, piling it to one side.
With each stroke of the shovel, the pile of brown mud on the carpet grew smaller.
But the exposed patches were still gray-black. There was no telling what the carpet had originally looked like.
He was used to the work and saw nothing remarkable about it. Partway through, he looked up at the phone, confirmed it was still recording, and bent his head to carry on.
He added water and scrubbed.
The long brush swept across the carpet, and the suds churned up by the water and cleaning agent quickly turned gray-brown. The bristles rasped against the carpet, stroke after stroke, their sound clearer than the voices on the street nearby.
Then he pushed a wide scraper forward along it, squeezing the suds toward the edge and leaving a slightly clearer strip of carpet behind.
Gray on one side, black on the other.
But the black wasn't mud. It was the underlying pattern gradually emerging.
Lü Chengan shifted the scraper half a palm's width to the side of the strip he had just cleared.
The scraper came down.
A second clear track extended forward, joining the first.
That evening, Lu Ye returned from the Cloud Sound Workshop and casually opened the new video.
When the thick layer of mud appeared at the start, he thought someone had filmed a place where people wiped their shoes.
"What's this?"
He was about to swipe away when the scraper in the video pushed forward.
The brown mud curled up and rolled ahead.
Lu Ye's finger stopped.
Well, would you look at that.
What if he scraped it again?
Lü Chengan naturally couldn't hear him, but the man in the video happened to shift over and push the scraper along the adjacent strip.
A whole strip of filth lifted away, and the edge of the carpet finally came into view.
Lu Ye stared at the screen and, without realizing it, leaned back in his chair.
He had just thought there was nothing worth watching in the video. Now, when he saw mud still clinging beside a patch that had been scraped, that little bit seemed particularly unsightly.
Why not scrape that off while you're at it?
Come on, a little to the left.
As he watched, he couldn't help laughing at himself.
The man was washing a carpet, not working according to where he pointed.
He understood that perfectly well, yet his eyes refused to move away.
When it came to the scrubbing, the first layer of gray-brown suds was pushed away, faintly revealing several stripes. Lü Chengan changed the water, ran the brush back and forth several more times, then scraped again, but the water still came away gray.
Lu Ye had thought it was nearly clean, but when he saw that, he sat up a little straighter.
It still isn't clean?
He opened the comments, where someone had already said it for him.
"Didn't it look clean? How can he still scrape out so much?"
"Don't stop, there's another strip at the edge."
"I only wanted to watch him shovel off some mud. How did I end up following him this far into the washing?"
Lu Ye scrolled down and couldn't help laughing aloud.
"Master Lü, pull it back a little. I saw you missed a spot there."
"You're fussier than the steward hounding him."
In the next section, Lü Chengan rolled the carpet to one side and first cleaned the floor dirtied by the wastewater. The muddy water receded across the white stone, strip by strip, slowly revealing its original color.
Someone in the comments grew anxious again.
"Where's the carpet?"
"Why did he switch to cleaning somewhere else halfway through?"
"He has to clear the mud off the floor first, or it'll get dirty again when he spreads it out. He's not stupid."
Lu Ye read the comments, his smile growing wider.
No one had struck anyone, and no one had split a mountain apart. An ordinary worker had spent half a day working in a courtyard, and somehow the people outside the screen had busied themselves along with him for half a day.
And they had been quite happy doing it.
Once the carpet was spread out again, the scrubbing and scraping away of suds didn't end all at once, either. Lü Chengan worked without rushing, and with every pass of the scraper, the carpet he left behind became a little clearer.
Only after he finally rinsed along the edges did the dark gray base and its intersecting white lines emerge in full.
The light-colored stone floor beside it had also been cleaned.
That great expanse of mud really had come off the carpet before him.
When Lu Ye finished watching, he let out a long breath.
That felt good.
But when the video returned to the beginning, the brown mud appeared before his eyes again, and his finger paused once more.
How did he get something this dirty clean, bit by bit?
"What am I doing this for?"
Lu Ye shook his head with a smile, but still didn't swipe away immediately.
Compared with those videos where people casually waved the camera at their faces a couple of times, a carpet-washing video like this was actually better at keeping people watching.
He watched the beginning and end again, tapped the heart, then opened the backend and gave the video a bit more promotion.
"Since people like watching it, let's show it to more of them."
After finishing work, Lü Chengan cut a few pauses out of the cleaning footage and posted it, then went back to tidying the courtyard.
By the time he picked up his phone again, numbers were already popping up continuously in the notifications tab.
He thought the chamber of commerce was looking for him and hurriedly opened it.
It wasn't.
They had all come for that old carpet.
Some asked when he would wash the next one, some asked just how thick that initial layer had been, and someone even asked him to film the other corner he hadn't finished recording.
Lü Chengan stared for a long while, then couldn't help looking down at his damp cuffs.
He had been doing this work for more than ten years.
In the past, customers had only asked when they could collect their carpets and paid him when they were clean. Who would have watched his every brushstroke?
Now, through a phone, so many people were waiting for him to make another stroke.
Another worker in the courtyard saw him standing still and casually asked him a question.
"Pressuring you to deliver again?"
"No."
Lü Chengan turned the screen toward him, finding it funny himself.
"They're pressuring me to keep washing."
Meanwhile, at a workshop outside the city, Han Chi was also looking at his newly increased follower count.
The excitement brought by the cargo-hauling video hadn't died down yet, and his follower count had already passed two hundred.
A new notification popped up.
"Your follower count has surpassed two hundred. You are now eligible to open a product showcase, through which you can sell your products to other users. Please explore its specific functions yourself."
Seeing the notification on the screen, Han Chi, who was already excited, became even more excited in an instant.
"Can I already use the product showcase Young Master Lu mentioned last night?"
With that question in mind, he immediately began looking and soon found the product showcase.
"Could I really sell things through the phone?"
"Then I'll give it a try."
He read through the instructions. For now, it only accepted small finished products that could be transported, and naturally, unfinished items couldn't be put up for sale in advance.
Han Chi casually picked up a small hammer used for fine work from the table and first selected the option to deposit a physical item.
After he pressed confirm, the hammer vanished right before his eyes, leaving him staring in astonishment.
He even reached out and felt around on the table, then looked on the floor.
It really was gone.
Following the instructions again, he set an extremely low price, wrote a brief description, and officially listed the little hammer for sale.
Less than two minutes later, another notification popped up.
"User Shao Ping purchased your product."
After it came a notification of the payment credited to his account after the platform deducted its service fee.
Seeing the notification, Han Chi froze on the spot.
"It really sold! Douyin is this magical?"
"In that case, I might as well list all those small items that didn't sell before in the showcase."
Just as Han Chi was delighting in the showcase's powerful functions, in a forge on the other side of Heaven Dou City, a young man was staring in equal shock at the little hammer that had appeared out of thin air in his hand.
This young man was none other than Shao Ping, who had just placed an order in Han Chi's showcase.
"This... this is incredible! Master Han's workshop is still outside the city, and I only just placed the order. The hammer has already appeared in front of me."
"If that's the case, can we put the things from our forge up for sale on Douyin too?"
Realizing this, Shao Ping was overjoyed and hurriedly ran toward the back courtyard.
"Master! Good news, great news! I've thought of a way to sell the things we haven't been able to move!"