Combined with the way he had previously stayed behind alone to cover the retreat and then returned just in time to save the day, his image became richer and more three-dimensional!
It also gave Qiji's character greater depth and appeal!
Seeing this, many viewers couldn't help recalling how, in the previous episode, Kamishiro Seian had called Yuejian "a leader who bears the bright moon on his shoulders and lights the road ahead"-
No matter how desperate the situation, as long as he appeared, he would surely shoulder everyone's hopes...
Wasn't that description just as fitting for Qiji right now?
As a result, the viewers couldn't help but begin to speculate:
Had Yuejian's early life followed the same path Qiji was walking now?
And what exactly had Yuejian gone through to become the man he was today?
These far-ranging theories and discussions sent Echo's popularity and its buzz soaring.
People kept posting comments to share their feelings and express their views.
For a time, the chat was abuzz.
But all that excitement came to an abrupt halt with the next shot!
Because-
Qiji took off his mask!
"!!!!!!"
The comments instantly reached their highest peak since the anime had begun airing!
Just as everyone stared at the screen, waiting to see Qiji's face beneath the mask...
Episode six ended.
In an instant, question marks filled the screen.
"???????"
"Fuck! You're ending it there?!"
"Damn those cliffhanger bastards!"
Countless viewers lingered even after the ending song had finished playing.
At that point, some "veteran viewers" who had been following Qiji's livestreams all along jumped in to show off.
"Hahaha! Want to see the face under Prisoner Ji's mask? We saw it on yesterday's livestream!"
"The livestream is ahead of the main show~~"
On hearing that, some people eagerly asked, "What does Qiji's face actually look like under the mask? Is he handsome?" Others promptly opened Qiji's personal channel to look for livestream replays.
Before this, the vast majority of viewers had preferred the carefully edited main show to waiting around for livestreams, since its effects and pacing were noticeably better.
But now, they suddenly realized that the livestreams seemed... not bad either?
They were essentially a "director's uncut version," with more story content and Easter eggs that hadn't appeared in the main show.
All at once, the number of viewers online and the traffic on Qiji's personal channel began to surge!
Huge numbers of viewers who had been "tortured" by the end of episode six flooded in, looking for the "complete" scene of Qiji taking off his mask or catching up on livestream highlights they had missed.
The analytics graph on Qiji's dashboard shot straight up!
His personal channel's popularity actually surpassed the main livestream channel's in a short span of time!
It climbed to the top of the popularity rankings for all channels!
And with Echo airing three episodes back-to-back in its second week, its popularity on Blue Star exploded once again!
As if riding a rocket, it leaped to first place among all the season's new anime in the combined rankings for discussion, views, and trending-search index!
That was partly because most of the other new anime that season were low-budget, small-scale productions that lacked competitiveness.
It was also because Echo itself was a top-quality production. Given time to build momentum, it was only natural for it to stand out.
Some veteran anime bloggers and media outlets had even started popping the champagne early.
They called it "this season's guaranteed top dog," "a potential dark horse of the year"...
All kinds of fanworks, compilation edits, anime recommendation videos, and character analysis posts sprang up across various platforms like mushrooms after rain.
[Ding!]
A pleasant system notification rang out in Qiji's mind at that moment.
[Echo episodes four, five, and six (main show) have finished airing. Overall settlement complete!] [Total Popularity Points earned: +199,991!]
Looking at the long string of digits before him, Qiji felt a pleasant flicker of surprise.
The Popularity Points earned from this week's broadcast were more than double what he had received last time!
Add to that the earnings from various fan videos, along with his share of the popularity from the "first-person battle edits" on his personal channel...
His total Popularity Points had reached a staggering 580,000!
He was already more than halfway to his first goal of a million!
At this rate, it wouldn't be long before he saved enough Popularity Points to buy the Concept Armament he had wanted for so long!
Just thinking about it made him a little impatient!
Chapter 53: The Echo Qiji Imprinted!
Qiji's Popularity Points had surged once again.
Having reached first place on the popularity rankings, he was undoubtedly the biggest winner from this broadcast.
But-
He wasn't the one whose popularity ranking had risen the most this time.
After all, he had only gone from second to first.
The biggest rise in the rankings belonged instead to Lao Yue's personal channel.
It had jumped from second to last all the way to fourth overall.
He had benefited enormously from the "battle effects."
In tonight's episodes, Yuejian's Lineage Investiture, the God of the Moon Scroll, had made a spectacular debut, and his little fanboy Kamishiro Seian had led the praise in the show...
Lao Yue really had attracted quite a few fans.
They had even formed a fan club, and it was making quite a splash.
And since Qiji's popularity was currently the ceiling in Echo, he was a mountain they couldn't get around.
Among the viewers who liked Yuejian and wanted to help him rise, a small, more extreme group had actually started tearing Qiji down to hype Yuejian up.
Qiji had already come across similar flamebait posts more than once under his personal videos and in related discussion boards:
"A word of advice to the power-scalers: switch to Yuejian while you can! Qiji's just a masked gym bro. Six episodes in and he still hasn't used an Echo once. I bet he can't use one at all! He's no match for our darling Yue, who came out swinging with the God of the Moon Scroll, maxed out in both abilities and stats! Brat Qiji, get on your knees!"
"Exactly! What can Qiji do besides fight hand-to-hand? Look at episode five. How did the Moon God fight? Now that's style! That's what you call an Echoer!"
Qiji was a little surprised and amused as he read those comments.
He hadn't expected fan wars to start after the anime had only been airing for two weeks...
And the person going up against him was Lao Yue, of all people...
Still, Yuejian had only been in the spotlight for half an episode, so his fan base couldn't compare to Qiji's.
Before long, viewers who liked Qiji began to strike back:
"What a joke. How could Hajiyue's pathetic, feeble Echo compare to our Brother Ji's body, forged through endless training?!"
One side struck back, and the other quickly responded:
"Still going on about his body? You're killing me! Why don't you take a look at what this anime is called?"
"It's called 'Echo.' So what? Don't you know the later an Echo appears, the more badass it is? You'd better pray your Yuejian doesn't get killed off too soon. He looks like exactly the kind of character they'd kill off for emotional damage! Seriously, what a joke!"
As the two sides kept arguing, they only drove Echo's popularity higher.
Searches and discussions kept climbing.
Qiji wasn't all that surprised by Yuejian's sudden surge in popularity.
After all, Lao Yue's character model was only a notch below his own, and he himself was at a disadvantage because he wore a mask.
On top of that, a character who was "against the rat race" and "wanted to lie flat" naturally had plenty of appeal these days.
Given those conditions, once his combat stats and power were boosted, it was perfectly normal for him to win over a group of fans quickly.
Of course, the most important factor was that he had benefited from being the first person in the anime to use an Armament.
In all honesty, Yuejian's scenes fighting with an Echo were inherently far more dazzling and impressive than Qiji's, where he relied on his body alone.
Compared with Yuejian, Qiji's biggest disadvantage right now undoubtedly lay in the "special effects."
Thinking this, Qiji opened a clip from Yuejian's personal channel and made a decision-
He would spend the entire night studying Lao Yue's fights!
Learning from others' strengths to make up for his own shortcomings was another fine quality Qiji prided himself on.
He set himself a short-term goal, which was-
Learn Huomu's Flame Fist!
Awaken his own Echo!
Develop an Armament no less impressive than Lao Yue's!
He was going to become an all-around genius!
Just as Qiji was thinking this, the system interface before him flickered, and another notification popped up.
[Ding!] [System function update!] [Added: recording function and livestream mode optimization.]
"Hm? More new features?"
Qiji was taken aback.
The system had been updating a little frequently these past two days.
He casually opened the update notes.
After reading them, he discovered that unlike last night's "addition of the tipping function," this could be called a major underlying patch!
And with this patch going live, it also more or less resolved a problem that had been bothering Qiji for some time.
That was-
The difference in the flow of time between the anime world and Blue Star.
As everyone knew, Echo aired three episodes on Blue Star every other week.
During that time, the main characters in the anime also livestreamed in real time every day.
Neither of those things posed a problem on its own, but together they created an issue that didn't seem right no matter how he looked at it.
After all, constrained by the core framework of the "plot," the span of the anime world's story covered by "three episodes a week" on Blue Star couldn't possibly, and absolutely could not, be in perfect 1:1 sync with the real passage of time experienced by the characters through their "daily real-time livestreams" in the anime world.
Take next week, for example.
If the content Echo aired next week covered a span of several weeks or months in the anime world,
it was entirely possible that Qiji would have livestreamed for over a month while only a week had passed for the viewers on Blue Star, creating a contradiction...
And what the system had introduced in this update was a rather "clever" solution.
It had made the recording function available.