“Cut!”
As the director’s voice rang out, Qin You’s shoulders finally relaxed. This was the first scene where Ling Yu appeared in her true form, and she had wanted to make it perfect. Delivering one perfect take for a relatively simple scene was manageable, but maintaining that perfection over several consecutive takes was exhausting, even for her.
Fortunately, the results were good.
“Sister Qin, you’re amazing!”
A young man about her height appeared in Qin You’s field of vision. His features were quite distinctive, carrying an air of naivety. He was looking at her with a smile, shallow dimples appearing on both cheeks.
Qin You remembered this young man. He was one of the few actors who would skyrocket to fame from this drama, *Vanity Fair*. His name was Wang Hexing.
He played Li Ruixi, the incredibly young founder and CEO of the company Mohe.
In the script, this young CEO was a tech genius but incredibly shy and bashful. He was easily swayed by others when it came to business decisions—a rare little lamb among a pack of wolves. However, this lamb was sitting on a gold mine, so the ferocious wolves had no choice but to revolve around him.
Mohe’s seed round had been funded by Tomorrow Capital back when it was still an obscure little startup. Two years ago, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of new companies offering cloud storage services. Tomorrow Capital had invested with a “casting a wide net” mentality, but Mohe quickly rose to prominence, becoming one of the most sought-after investment projects in recent years.
Wang Hexing was a perfect fit for the role. Currently only eighteen or nineteen, he was slender, showing no signs of heavy exercise or training. His face possessed a rare purity, making him ideal for the role of an innocent, worldly-unwise young CEO.
He would later become quite famous because of this role, attracting a horde of “mom fans” with an overwhelming desire to protect him. However, his success was also his downfall; his acting range became limited, and he spent his career stuck in similar roles, never finding a new breakthrough point.
The character Li Ruixi wasn’t scheduled to officially appear until the second episode, so Wang Hexing had only passed Director Wang’s audition a few days ago. Today was likely his first day on the film set.
Qin You watched as Wang Hexing looked at her with a face full of pure, innocent admiration.
Because she was wearing sky-high heels, she was slightly taller than him, forcing Wang Hexing to look at her with an upward gaze. This slight tilt of his head made his eyes appear even more innocent.
Qin You raised an eyebrow. No one knew her current reputation better than she did. Because of that reputation, almost no other actors had tried to get close to her during these days on set. While the staff members might not care, the actors had to consider their public image.
This Wang Hexing was either truly as simple-minded as the character he was about to play, or he was the complete opposite.
Regardless, what kind of person he was had nothing to do with her.
A shallow but polite smile touched Qin You’s lips as she nodded to him. Since they had many scenes together, she didn’t mind showing some goodwill.
A sincere smile blossomed on Wang Hexing’s face, but as soon as Director Wang appeared, he obediently retreated back into the shadows.
Actually, according to the script, the next segment should have been the meeting between Ling Yu and Li Ruixi. However, scripts were just scripts; most of the time on a film set, scenes were not shot in chronological order.
Most of the scenes between Li Ruixi and Ling Yu took place at the “Mohe Company” set. As a rising tech company, Mohe’s set design had to have a completely different style from the investment banks and venture capital firms. One side was cold and exquisite, while the other was casual and industrial. Therefore, the scenes between Li Ruixi and Ling Yu couldn’t be filmed on this floor; they were all being moved to a later schedule.
What Qin You had to film next were several scattered scenes of her returning to Tomorrow Capital after securing the Series A funding from Li Ruixi. These scenes were fragmented and didn’t seem like much, but they would still take several days to shoot.
Once she finished those scenes, the director distributed nearly eighty pages of the script to the relevant actors.
The reason Director Wang had abandoned his previous “squeezing toothpaste” habit and released a massive amount of script at once was because of the Mohe Company set.
For the Mohe Company scenes, Director Wang hadn’t chosen to build a set in a studio but had opted for location shooting instead. He had rented an office building on the edge of the suburbs that matched his vision. Because the location was poor, he hadn’t bought it but only rented it, necessitating that all shots for this location be completed in one go.
Director Wang had a bit of a perfectionist OCD. He wouldn’t release his work until the very last moment because he might still be revising words or phrases that seemed trivial to the audience even in the final minute. This was why everyone had previously been waiting for the second episode’s script as if it were being squeezed out of a tube. As for the fact that the actors’ preparation time was shortened, or that those with poor memories had to stay up all night memorizing lines, that was not within Director Wang’s considerations. He only required the actors to appear at the right time and deliver the most appropriate performance.
After Qin You received the script, she flipped through it. The pages sent this time basically covered all the scenes to be filmed at the Mohe Company location. Because the plot for the intervening scenes was missing, it felt a bit disjointed, but Qin You still couldn’t help reading it from beginning to end. In her previous life, she had watched *Vanity Fair* countless times; her mind automatically filled in the missing intermediate plot points as she read.
Episodes three and four mostly consisted of her scenes with the young CEO, Li Ruixi. In the second episode, Ling Yu had delivered a massive gift to Mohe in order to join Tomorrow Capital.
Mohe’s main product was a cloud storage service software. Their software had reached a million downloads within a year of its release, instantly grabbing the attention of all venture capitalists. It could be said that everyone was currently rushing to give them money.
However, while they had risen to fame and grown rapidly in the short term, their market was temporarily concentrated on individual users. In more professional terms, they currently only had a ToC (To Customer) product and had to earn money from individual users. Mohe’s ambition naturally didn’t stop there; they had already developed a corresponding ToB (To Business) product. After all, if they could capture the enterprise user market, Mohe would truly take off. Large corporations were usually wealthy and couldn’t use pirated software, which could effectively drive up their profits. But enterprise users weren’t as easy to win over as individual users. A product with good technology and usability might expand rapidly among individuals, but enterprise users were different.
A large corporation was like a giant. Whether it was turning around, bending over, or any other movement, it was much slower than a person of normal size.
Furthermore, there was already a player in the field of enterprise cloud storage services—the company owned by the father of Fang Ziyu’s boyfriend. It had an extremely high market share, looming over Mohe like a giant dragon.
Fang Ziyu’s noble aloofness was mostly reflected here. That dragon, Kunlun Technology, was intending to conduct an IPO.
The founder of Kunlun Technology, who was also the father of Fang Ziyu’s boyfriend Xie Chu, was Xie Xingbang. He was a ruthless man with absolute control over the company. Because Kunlun Technology was developing well and had never lacked money, he had consistently stated over the years that he had no intention of an IPO.
It wasn’t until this year that he finally relented.
In an era where investment bankers were many and projects were few, a tech company with the potential to become a giant was finally going public. The investment banks were like vultures scenting a corpse, swarming toward it.
If Fang Ziyu were willing to reveal her identity, her road of leveling up in the investment world would be at least ninety percent easier. She wouldn’t even need to actually speak to Xie Xingbang; as long as that connection existed, the investment bank wouldn’t mind shifting some resources her way. It wasn’t much trouble anyway—they were just hiring someone to work, so why not her?
Xie Xingbang had worked as an executive at other companies before starting his own business, so he was already quite old when he founded it and was now over fifty. Consequently, he intended to groom his son, Xie Chu. He had Xie Chu take charge of the contract signing for one of their clients for the upcoming year. This wasn’t a particularly difficult task; it was just for him to practice. Xie Xingbang never expected his son to be such a “noob” that he would actually suffer a setback over such a small matter.
But by the time he discovered it, it was already too late. The “great gift” Ling Yu delivered to Mohe consisted of some details of that contract, including what service upgrades Kunlun Technology would provide this year, what the parameters were, and what the prices would be.
It is difficult to fight when you know nothing about your opponent, but fighting with a “cheat code” is much simpler. Mohe already knew what kind of services Kunlun could provide to that client. As long as they could do better and cheaper, then even if the client trusted their long-term partner more than Mohe—a new company that had only been around for two or three years and seemed like a joke—they would still inevitably consider the offer.
The gift Ling Yu brought was irresistible to Mohe. She not only secured the Series A funding rights for Tomorrow Capital but even obtained a small portion of shares for herself as an individual investor.
That was the story of the second episode. In episodes three and four, Ling Yu represented Tomorrow Capital, the largest investor, in managing Mohe’s company affairs.
The same story, when told from different perspectives, is presented in entirely different ways.
Since Director Wang came from the investment industry, these two episodes were told more from Ling Yu’s perspective. They depicted how Ling Yu molded Li Ruixi into what a mature CEO should be—strictly professional, decisive, and neat.
If he had written it as a startup story instead, he probably would have written about a young CEO battling a “long-armed” investor who interfered too much.
However, this was an ensemble drama after all. Director Wang didn’t show too much bias in his focus on characters, allowing the audience to empathize with either side; it wasn’t entirely seen through Ling Yu’s eyes. Qin You remembered that when the third episode of *Vanity Fair* aired, a massive debate erupted among viewers who favored Li Ruixi—was Ling Yu “meticulously helping” or “over-interfering” with Mohe? Should Li Ruixi be wary of Ling Yu?
Some viewers felt that Ling Yu seemed like the new protagonist and that Mohe was just a project for her to rise through the ranks, so there was no need to worry about Mohe’s development. After all, if Ling Yu was the protagonist, Mohe was the badge of honor on her shoulder, and a badge of honor had to be perfect and beautiful. But others felt the former group was too naive; they had initially thought Fang Ziyu was the protagonist, only for the original protagonist to become a warning tale in the blink of an eye. Who knew if there would be another reversal with Ling Yu…
While the audience maintained some level of rationality, the Li Ruixi in the drama was completely blinded by Ling Yu’s meticulous help. Ling Yu didn’t cater to him in every way; she even occasionally spoke words that pierced the heart. But the more she acted this way, the more Li Ruixi felt she was truly being sincere and doing what was best for him, to the point that he even invited her to jump ship and join Mohe.
By the end of the fourth episode, a new name had been added to Mohe’s Board of Directors—Ling Yu.
Mohe’s Board of Directors increased from four seats to five. Li Ruixi held two seats, Tomorrow Capital held two, and Ling Yu held one.
The audience’s hearts were instantly raised to their throats.