That evening, before going on stage, Lin Ran arrived at the theater to find that Zhang Yuetong had already arranged for someone to bring over a newly-made prop cabinet.
The cabinet was stuffed with various food props for Lin Ran to use.
This cabinet was quite different from ordinary ones, with multiple mechanisms that could be opened and closed.
Even someone who wasn’t a magician could guess some magic tricks just by looking at these mechanisms.
Lin Ran secretly stuffed the items into her qiankun bag when no one was watching.
At that moment, her phone chimed with a notification.
She checked it and saw it was a bank transfer notification, which surprised her a bit—last time, the payment hadn’t arrived this quickly.
When she glanced at the amount, Lin Ran was stunned.
It was over a hundred thousand yuan!
“Wow! I got nearly forty thousand! Is this real? I’ve never received so much before!” Qi Ruige exclaimed.
“This payment came through so fast! It’s both a lot and quick!”
Zhang Yupeng laughed and said, “The media has been coming for interviews these past two days, so I handed the task of dividing the money over to Tongtong. She’s definitely faster at it than I am.”
“It only took five minutes to calculate; the bank transfer just took a bit longer,” Zhang Yuetong said while looking at her tablet.
“That fast? Why does it take me two days to do it… You should have said something earlier. How about joining my magic troupe?”
Zhang Yuetong glanced at him, “Can you afford to hire me? Anyway, I’m going to watch the performance from the audience.”
With just a few minutes left before the show, Zhang Yupeng responded with an “Hmm,” then asked with some confusion, “Do you have a ticket?”
“Of course. How else would I watch the show?”
“But… the boss didn’t give out any tickets. How did you get one?”
“Through connections.”
“An… Anfei gave you a ticket?”
Zhang Yupeng was in disbelief that the cheapskate Anfei would give Zhang Yuetong a ticket.
“It wasn’t her. It was a junior who’s good with computers. He wrote a quick program to help me grab a ticket,” Zhang Yuetong shrugged.
“I was the president of Qingda University’s student council after all. We Qingda students never lack talent.”
The evening performance began, and most of the audience had come to see Lin Ran.
As soon as Lin Ran stepped onto the stage, the audience erupted in applause that didn’t seem to end.
Zhang Yuetong sat in the audience, her attention suddenly drawn to one particular spectator.
The person was sitting in the front row, scrutinizing the stage in a way that was very different from the enthusiastic audience around them.
Her expression immediately became cautious.
“Beauty, did you come alone? Can you change seats with me?”
Zhang Yuetong walked up to a girl next to the audience and pointed to a nearby spot.
“We are a couple, and we didn’t buy the tickets together.”
The girl took a look at the seat. It was not too far away from her own seat and was also in the front row, so she agreed and changed seats with her.
“Couple?” Zhang Yuetong frowned.
“You’re really quick with that lie.”
The man chuckled, “Our president is so busy, but still came to watch the show!”
“I had no choice but to come,” Zhang Yuetong said calmly.
“It’s Yu Shijia!” the man corrected.
“Alright, Yu Jiajia,” Zhang Yuetong absentmindedly glanced at her tablet, swiping a few times.
“Your Dream Magic Troupe just poached Cao Xinyu and Wang Xinuo, and now you have your sights set on my Lin Ran? Let me tell you, don’t even think about it!”
“Cao Xinyu and Wang Xinuo weren’t poached by me… I don’t even know why they suddenly came to me. I just kept them because their skills were decent,” Yu Shijia said, his eyes gleaming with a spark as he stared at Lin Ran on stage.
“Lin Ran… why is your magic troupe so lucky?”
On stage, Lin Ran had just conjured a frying pan and then produced some greens.
The audience’s excitement soared, and the applause hardly stopped.
Yu Shijia watched as Lin Ran started cooking with the ingredients she’d conjured.
His eyes were wide with disbelief.
“She can do that? How is she doing that…” Yu Shijia craned his neck, trying to figure out the trick.
“Your magicians like to imitate, right? I bet you’ll post an imitation video tonight,” Zhang Yuetong tapped her tablet a few times.
“Insulting my magician like this, do you think I don’t exist?”
She tossed the tablet to Yu Shijia, “I hope you don’t have a heart condition.”
Yu Shijia saw a newly posted video on the screen, uploaded by the official account of the Miracle Magic Troupe.
The video used advanced techniques to analyze a previous imitation video by a magician named “Ou Junzhe” and proved beyond doubt that Ou Junzhe’s magic involved a lot of camera tricks and edits, making it incomparable to Lin Ran’s magic and unworthy of being called magic at all.
The video also pointed out that Ou Junzhe was a magician from the Dream Magic Troupe, a rival of the Miracle Magic Troupe, and even dug up his past magic performance failures.
The video had just been posted but was already attracting a lot of attention, with views rapidly increasing and hundreds of comments pouring in within minutes.
[Dream Magic Troupe is so despicable! Are they making movies instead of magic?]
[After watching his imitation video, I thought Lin Ran’s magic was ordinary, something any magician could do. Turns out it was all edited?]
[Wow, editing? If editing counts, who can’t be a magician? Do they think they’re making stop-motion animation?]
[Is this the dirty side of business competition? Scary…]
…
Yu Shijia was dumbfounded.
“You did this?”
“Of course not. I don’t study this stuff,” Zhang Yuetong took back the tablet.
“A junior helped with it. Don’t underestimate the connections of a student council president.”
“Heh…” Yu Shijia wasn’t angry at all.
“I don’t have connections like yours, but… I have my own skills.”
“Well then… Let’s wait and see!” Zhang Yuetong turned her gaze back to the stage, where Lin Ran had just finished making a plate of egg fried rice.
Li Xing’Ao was carrying the plate off the stage, handing out disposable spoons to the audience to share the fried rice with them.
“Only one bite per person!” Li Xing’Ao firmly pushed away someone who wanted a second bite.
“I know my sister’s cooking is delicious, but seriously, just one bite per person!”
As Li Xing’Ao spoke, he walked over to Zhang Yuetong and handed her a small disposable spoon.
“Sister Tongtong, thank you for the red envelope.”
He was referring to the large red envelope of 10,000 yuan that Zhang Yuetong had given him after he assisted in Lin Ran’s performance last time.
Since he wasn’t a member of the magic troupe but still participated in the performance, Zhang Yuetong decided to give him a special bonus.
This money didn’t come out of the actors’ share but directly from Zhang Yupeng’s account.
Unfortunately, out of that money, only 100 yuan ended up in his hands, while the rest was taken by his mother to be saved for when he grows up and needs to buy a house. The source of this chapter is g.com.
For a five-year-old child, 100 yuan was already a huge sum, enough to buy lots of tasty treats.
There was only a small amount of egg fried rice left on the plate, so Li Xing’Ao gave all of it to Zhang Yuetong before running back to the stage.
Zhang Yuetong’s phone beeped.
She picked it up and saw a message.
The sender was named Lu Lanxiao, and the message was brief: “Have the Miracle Magic Troupe perform at the company.”
Zhang Yuetong immediately replied: “Two million.”
Lu Lanxiao: “Deal.”
…
As soon as Lin Ran stepped off the stage, she saw Zhang Yupeng holding up his phone and calling out to her, “Ah Ran, you’re trending again!”
Lin Ran casually acknowledged with an “Oh,” and picked up her phone to check.
The trending topic: [Lin Ran, Ou Junzhe]
Lin Ran was puzzled about who Ou Junzhe was.
After thinking for a while, she remembered he was the magician who imitated her magic last time.
The Miracle Magic Troupe’s video account had posted an exposé video, proving that Ou Junzhe’s imitation magic was edited, with some shots using special angles.
Lin Ran’s performance tonight brought her a lot of attention.
Lin Ran’s performance had already been recorded and uploaded to video platforms, sparking discussions among professional magicians about her magic techniques.
Netizens were still very curious about the level of Lin Ran’s magic.
The fact that a professional magician had to use editing and camera angles to replicate her magic was enough to prove that her magic was extremely difficult to imitate.
In their minds, difficult to imitate = high-level skill.
At the same time, some netizens noticed that Cao Xinyu and Wang Xinuo’s photos appeared on the Dream Magic Troupe’s promotional posters.
These two magicians originally belonged to the Miracle Magic Troupe but suddenly appeared with the Dream Magic Troupe, leading many to suspect something fishy was going on.
As a result, the Dream Magic Troupe faced a torrent of online criticism.
[The Dream Magic Troupe not only edits magic videos but also poaches magicians from the Miracle Magic Troupe. How shameless!]
[I used to enjoy their performances, but how could they do this?]
[Say no to unfair business competition!]
[Refund my ticket! I’m not watching anymore!]
The Dream Magic Troupe’s female host, Cui Qianqian, had to start a live stream to explain, “It’s not like that; we didn’t poach anyone—they came to us on their own!”
“They terminated their contracts and approached our boss Yu to sign with us. We really didn’t reach out to them first!”
“As for the edited magic video… I asked Ou Junzhe, and he said it wasn’t edited. It was just that a few frames were accidentally lost during filming—technical issues. A lot of people have seen Ou Junzhe’s magic, and it’s fantastic. I believe he can fully replicate Lin Ran’s magic.”
“To replicate Lin Ran’s magic? And do it in one continuous shot with multiple cameras… Well, you see, the design of magic tricks is considered personal intellectual property, and we can’t infringe on that. So the previous imitation video has been deleted, and we won’t casually imitate again in the future.”
Netizens weren’t convinced at all.
[If you can’t imitate it, just admit it. Why didn’t you worry about infringement before?]
[Poor Cui Qianqian, desperately trying to cover for her incompetent teammates.]
[So basically, you’ve done nothing wrong, huh? The problem is with the world, right?]
…