Yan Jingyu looked at the hot search trends, half of which were dominated by himself and Chi Dianqing, and his mouth twitched. Seeing this, Fan Rong, who was standing beside him, felt his heart pounding with fear.
“Brother, how about we stop looking at them?”
Yan Jingyu scrolled through the feed. Compared to these absurd trending topics, a hashtag like #YanJingyuSecretMeetingWithChiDianqing couldn’t even make it to the top ranks.
Generally speaking, as artists, they all had their fair share of malicious comments. Most people chose to stay out of sight, out of mind, and simply avoided reading them altogether. However, every single time, driven by his stubborn, rebellious nature, Yan Jingyu would not only read through the toxic comments to see just how vicious they could get, but he would even switch to his alt account to engage in full-blown keyboard combat with those hater anti-fans.
So, he casually tapped open one of the most outrageous topics.
#RivalsStaringAtEachOtherGivesOffLifelongTragicLoveVibes#
The picture featured in the pinned post turned out to be a photo of him and Chi Dianqing exchanging warning glares in the auditorium. However, someone had edited it with special effects, making them genuinely look like two star-crossed lovers separated by fate, sharing one final, distant gaze in the face of an irresistible life-or-death tragedy.
Down in the comments section, the fans’ style had already begun to veer completely off track; they had actually started shipping them as a couple (CP).
[Whoa! Help! Looking at these two like this, they actually have quite a bit of CP chemistry!]
Pah! CP my ass!
[Exactly! Especially when they look at each other across the crowd of people, with only each other in their eyes. Can’t some director give them a post-apocalyptic script to act in? I want to watch it so bad!]
Watch, watch, watch! You people want to watch everything!
[To be honest, if these two weren’t rivals, logically speaking, after guesting on so many variety shows together, they should already have a CP Super Topic community, right?]
[Fellow fan above me, actually, we’ve had a CP Super Topic for the two of them for a long time. It’s just that the battle between their main fandoms has always been intense, with smoke and flames everywhere. We could only survive secretly in the cracks, being even more cautious than rats in a sewer! (Crying bitterly)]
What kind of unholy cult nonsense is this!
[Begging for the Super Topic name! Say it quietly, I swear I won’t spread the word.]
Yan Jingyu narrowed his eyes slightly. After a moment of hesitation, he still tapped open that Super Topic named “Qing Qing Zi Jing.” To his utter shock, these people were actually able to take the scene of them clashing intensely at the venue entrance and consume it as romantic “sugar.” It seemed they were truly beyond saving.
After browsing for a while, he really lacked the courage to keep scrolling. But when he went to return to the previous page, his finger accidentally slipped, and he directly gave a like to a CP post.
!
Inside Yan Jingyu’s brain, apart from exclamation marks, there was a total blank. He hurriedly revoked the like, and only then did he exhale the breath that had been stuck in his chest.
“Brother, what’s wrong with you?” Fan Rong placed a glass of water on the table.
Yan Jingyu turned his head, his scalp feeling somewhat numb. “It’s nothing. You go ahead and get busy. If there’s nothing else, you can head back early.”
“Okay.” Fan Rong sized up his boss’s expression. He truly didn’t believe that nothing was wrong, so he decided to wait until “Chi Dianqing” went to sleep before leaving. Thus, he sat down on the sofa to the side and began scrolling through his phone.
Yan Jingyu exhaled another breath of murky air. When he looked at the phone again, he suddenly remembered that this was Chi Dianqing’s phone, and he hadn’t switched the Weibo account at all, so…
So the person who slipped up and hit “like” just now was Chi Dianqing! It wasn’t him!
Realizing this point, a bizarre smile crept onto Yan Jingyu’s face. But at the thought that what he had just liked was actually a CP post about himself and Chi Dianqing, that bizarre smile became even weirder.
“Ah!” Fan Rong didn’t know what happened, but he suddenly let out a loud shout and sprang up from the sofa like a corpse coming back to life, walking straight toward Yan Jingyu. Without a word, he snatched the phone out of his hand in one swift motion.
“We’re dead, dead, dead…” Fan Rong kept mumbling under his breath while his hand rapidly tapped on the phone screen. “Oh no, this is totally ruined!”
“What’s wrong? Are you possessed by a ghost?” Yan Jingyu couldn’t help flinching backward.
“Brother, you…” Fan Rong looked at him with a contorted face. “How could you just like something so casually?”
Only then did Yan Jingyu realize that the news of his accidental like must have already spread across the internet.
“And… and don’t you usually never scroll through Weibo at all? How come the one time you do browse it, you even liked a post? And it’s a CP post with that stinky brat Yan Jingyu!” Fan Rong’s voice carried a crying tone, looking like a picture of utter helplessness.
“What are you crying for?” Yan Jingyu asked, puzzled.
Fan Rong raised his sleeve to wipe away his tears. “In a moment, Brother Ding is going to come over. As soon as he arrives, I’m dead meat. I’m definitely going to get fired.”
Yan Jingyu was thoroughly annoyed by his crying and frowned, saying, “Stop crying first. I guarantee you won’t get fired. As for this matter, just leave it to Ding Zhi to handle. Anyway, in the eyes of the fans, someone like Chi… someone like me wouldn’t scroll through Weibo, much less go and like a CP post. Wouldn’t just issuing an explanation statement settle it?”
This kind of incident was nothing unusual in the entertainment industry, though it happening to Chi Dianqing was indeed a little strange. However, with Ding Zhi’s swift and resolute methods along with his PR capabilities, handling something like this should take no more than a flick of his wrist.
In the very next moment, before Ding Zhi could even arrive, the phone began to ring. Seeing that long string of remarks on the screen, Fan Rong abruptly raised his head and asked, “Brother, who is this… ‘Universe’s Super Ultimate Matchless Handsome Guy’?”
Yan Jingyu snatched the phone back from his hand, gave a casual perfunctory response, turned around, and walked toward the study.
As soon as he answered the call, he heard his own voice coming through the receiver.
“What on earth are you trying to do?”
“Hey, hey, hey, calm down a bit.” Yan Jingyu pulled the phone a little further away. “My voice is very precious. You’d better not speak with such a full-throated, forceful voice. It will put the vocal cords in a state of…”
“Don’t play dumb with me,” Chi Dianqing interrupted him immediately, demanding, “Why don’t you explain to me what this whole liking-a-CP-post thing is all about?”
“I just had a slip of the finger while scrolling through Weibo. It’s not like I did it on purpose. Besides, Ding Zhi will handle this properly,” Yan Jingyu said.
“Hmph.” Chi Dianqing sneered. “Why didn’t you use your own account to scroll through Weibo? And also, are you sick in the head? What were you doing reading CP posts?”
“I…” Yan Jingyu was momentarily at a loss for words, unable to find a suitable excuse to explain why he was browsing the CP Super Topic for himself and Chi Dianqing. However, he still stubbornly argued, “I just saw a really absurd trending topic and wanted to click in to see how ridiculous it could get. But the problem is, I didn’t expect the two of us to actually have a CP Super Topic… So I just…”
“Yan Jingyu, before this, I merely thought you were a simple-minded eye-candy flower vase. But now, I think you really should go get your brain checked in neurology. You must have some congenital illness, or your brain simply never developed at all!”
It was rare for Chi Dianqing to throw such a massive temper. “I’m telling you, Yan Jingyu, if this matter isn’t handled well, you just wait to get blacklisted by the entire internet.”
“Hey hey hey, I already said this will be taken care of. Why are you so stubborn and refusal-hardened, not listening to what people say?” Seeing that Chi Dianqing was about to get real with his anger, Yan Jingyu felt a bit panicked.
“Even if this matter gets resolved, if you ever dare to do such a braindead thing again next time, I’ll hand your phone directly over to the paparazzi,” Chi Dianqing threatened.
Without waiting for Yan Jingyu to say anything further, Chi Dianqing directly hung up the phone.
Yan Jingyu was so furious that he kicked the leg of the desk, but he forgot that he was still wearing slippers. Before he could even pull his foot back, his big toe hit the desk leg in a suicidal collision, causing him to tear up from the sharp pain.
Right at that moment, the door to the study was pushed open from the outside, and the person who walked in was none other than Ding Zhi. Ding Zhi, who originally had a face full of murder and hostility, froze with a look of astonishment when he saw Chi Dianqing sitting on the floor, holding his foot and shedding tears.
“What are you doing…”
Yan Jingyu’s foot hurt terribly, and he had no time to explain to him, simply saying, “Regarding that, it was entirely because my finger slipped. Just handle it for me.”
This matter was not difficult for Ding Zhi to handle, but the problem was that it happened to Chi Dianqing, which was deeply perplexing.
“Before I handle it, can you explain to me why you were looking at CP posts of you and Yan Jingyu?” Ding Zhi asked.
“You’re just responsible for solving the problem. As for this matter, no comment.” The expression on Yan Jingyu’s face had already become exceedingly irritated.
“Fine, if you don’t want to talk about it, I won’t force you. But as your manager, and also as a friend of your older brother, I still have the right to ask about your current life condition, don’t I?”
Ding Zhi’s tone softened. “Your state has been a bit off these past two days. If it really doesn’t work out, we can pause your work for a while and take a good rest to recover.”
As far as Yan Jingyu knew, for someone at Chi Dianqing’s level in the industry, his schedule should be jam-packed. Basically, as soon as one job ended, he would immediately have to rush to the next announcement. Where would he find any time to rest?
The slip-up with the like was indeed his fault. As compensation, he decided to ask Chi Dianqing about it first. “Then let me think about it.”
Ding Zhi didn’t say anything more. He turned around, walked out of the study, gave a few instructions to Fan Rong, who was waiting outside the door, and then left.
Once his foot pain subsided enough, Yan Jingyu switched to his alt account and went onto Weibo again to take a look. Unexpectedly, the number of people shipping their CP on the internet was actually growing larger and larger, and things were developing in an even more ridiculous direction. Even the CP fans of Chi Dianqing and the entertainment industry’s “white moonlight” Chu Tianyi, as well as the CP fans of himself and Chu Tianyi, got dragged into the mix.
Three factions of CP fans, plus the solo fans of all three of them, alongside various drama-watching bystanders, turned the entire Weibo platform into a complete chaotic stew, making it extraordinarily lively.
The CP fans of Yan Jingyu and Chi Dianqing, who originally acted “like rats in a sewer”, saw their ranks gradually expand, now backed by the endorsement of the real person’s actual like. Their backs straightened up, and even their confidence when speaking grew immensely stronger.
[We ship our own, you ship yours! On what authority do you get to police us? Neither of them has ever admitted to having any relationship with Chu Tianyi, so what on earth are you guys so confident about?]
[Exactly! Plus, we’re officially stamped and certified by the real person himself! After tonight, the top spot on the domestic entertainment CP leaderboard might just change hands.]
[Never thought that one day, we’d get to enjoy such overwhelming, overflowing riches and prosperity.]
Seeing how arrogant the CP fans had become, the solo fans on both sides couldn’t sit still anymore either.
[Stop pairing our Film Emperor with a talentless eye-candy flower vase into a CP! It’s an insult, a total insult!]
[Oh, acting so arrogant now? Didn’t your Film Emperor greet our side in such a clingy way today? Usually, he’s always subtly mocking and looking down on people who pander to fans, isn’t he? How come he’s the one pandering first today? And pandering to us, no less!]
[Isn’t that right? Today, Old Chi’s full-face greasy smirk honestly grossed me out so much that I still can’t eat my meal even now. It made my Yuyu not even greet us today! Chi Dianqing, I’ll hater-blacklist you for the rest of my life!]
Originally, the incident of Chi Dianqing greeting Yan Jingyu’s fans today had already made it onto the hot search, and fans from both sides had argued back and forth until the topic dropped off. Now, leveraging the hashtag #ChiDianqingLikesAUserCPPostWithYanJingyu, the fire was reignited.
This time, the fans on Chi Dianqing’s side already had a stomach full of pent-up rage. Now, being so blatantly insulted by Yan Jingyu’s fans, they blew their tempers entirely.