You Yu studied media in university, and after graduating, she found a job in film promotion.
Right after joining the company, she was assigned to a major theatrical film project.
Contrary to her naive assumption that everyone was just an ordinary worker, everyone in this industry was cultivating immortality!
Not a single one of them slept!
Overtime every day, overtime every day—one foot in the grave.
Just three days before she quit, she was still pulling all-nighters until 3 a.m.
She really couldn’t take it anymore!
The pay wasn’t great either—just enough to cover rent and food in this city.
She was truly shattered, broken in body and soul.
Every day she had to confirm countless plans and promotional materials with celebrities’ teams.
Many teams would ask her to submit proposals, then not like them after she did!
They kept making her revise them.
When she asked why they didn’t like the proposal, the reply was always the same: ”Sorry, it doesn’t quite match our artist’s image. Please revise it again.”
But they could never offer any specific suggestions for improvement! A thousand revisions, and it was the same script every time.
Shattered—the kind that can’t be glued back together…
And many of the artists had zero manners. She’d give them a script to study, and they’d be smoking and cursing up a storm.
Not professional in the slightest, yet their teams would still demand she film more footage of the artists being “dedicated.”
With artists of that caliber, what footage of dedication was she supposed to capture?
After a team rejected her proposal one day, You Yu exploded.
She resolutely quit.
After a month of unemployment, she compromised.
To keep working in this industry, you had to grind!
She found a similar job.
All she could say was that, as always, this industry didn’t disappoint her.
She got angry again and vowed never to set foot in media again.
That said, this job paid more than the last one, so she had some savings.
Even so, she ran her hand through her hair—dyed countless times yet still not frizzy—and fell silent…
She could live a hard life, but her hair couldn’t live without Tony.
Naturally, she thought of a part-time job she’d done in university—livestreaming.
You Yu came from a traditional family setup.
Simply put: a good-for-nothing father, a dissatisfied mother, a worthless son, and an unhappy daughter.
Before You Yu went to university, her life was filled with constant arguing. The only bright spot was that her grades were pretty good.
So when her college entrance exam results came out, she defied her parents’ wish for her to study medicine and resolutely chose a school in another province, majoring in media—a subject they weren’t happy with.
In a fit of rage, her parents cut off all her funding and told her never to come back.
You Yu had already mentally prepared for this. She had spent the three months of summer working part-time jobs like crazy and scraped together some money for school.
But it was obviously far from enough.
At the time, livestreaming was an emerging industry, and many people had made a lot of money from it.
Easy work, took up little time, and the money came in fast.
You Yu’s biggest advantage was that she was beautiful.
So the moment she tested the waters, she got a great response.
She quit all her miscellaneous part-time jobs.
She streamed full-time for a year and earned quite a bit—enough to get through four years of university with zero financial pressure, and she sent the leftover money to her parents.
Then, without any warning, she stopped streaming.
Her thinking back then had been simple: with money in hand, she wouldn’t need to stream anymore. She could focus on university, then find a proper, respectable job.
Looking back now, she really hadn’t thought it through.
At the time, everyone at the guild had urged her to keep streaming, but she refused. She hadn’t gone to college just to do a job that didn’t even require a degree—that would be throwing away her future.
Now, thinking about it, she’d just been too naive.
She had expected that a normal job would pay less, but she hadn’t expected this industry to demand no sleep at all.
If she kept at this line of work, not only would her body break down, even her hair would fall out.
That absolutely would not do. Her hair was her lifeline.
She didn’t have much desire for money—otherwise she wouldn’t have quit while her streaming career was on the rise.
Now, though, she figured she could give it another go.
But… how would she go back?
She remembered the guild she’d signed with when she first started—
She wondered if that person was still in the business.
She opened WeChat and found the contact she hadn’t spoken to in ages. The message history was completely blank.
She’d changed phones more than once over the years, so of course there were no chat records. The only question was whether the woman had deleted her.
With an anxious heart, she sent a message.
“Sister Lin, are you still with Seven Colors?”
Seven Colors was a guild on a streaming platform—one of the top guilds on that platform at the time.
She sent it, and the message went through normally. No red exclamation mark appeared, which meant Sister Lin hadn’t blocked her.
Thank goodness.
When Lin Yuanyuan received her message, she was browsing through various stream rooms, looking for promising newcomers who hadn’t signed with a guild yet.
She opened it and saw the note: You Yu.
She dug this person out from deep in her memory.
There might be others she couldn’t remember, but You Yu was impossible to forget.
The first time she visited her stream room, she herself had just entered the industry, doing her very first recruitment for the guild. The first thing she noticed was how pretty this girl was.
In the streaming industry, male streamers could make a living with a good tongue, but for female streamers to make a living, the most basic requirement was to be pretty.
She had coaxed and tricked her into signing with Seven Colors right then and there.
The girl streamed pretty well—mostly she was just lucky. Within days of starting, she’d gained quite a few fans.
Back then, it wasn’t yet the trend for one big spender to drop huge sums. It was all about harvesting leeks—small tips from many viewers, a yuan here, a yuan there, enough for the streamer to eat that day.
Even on the Star Talent channel, female streamers had to be good at chatting, but this girl wasn’t much of a talker, so she suggested she sing instead.
Who knew she’d end up unearthing her true potential.
Her voice was as crisp and clear as a little oriole. She’d been overjoyed at the time—it was like finding buried treasure.
Good luck, pretty face, and a lovely singing voice—few female streamers had such gifts.
Within a year her popularity soared. At its peak, her viewer count ranked in the top three on the entire channel, and the guild featured her on the front page several times in a row. All the resources were piled onto her. With a bit more cultivation, she’d be Seven Colors’ next top streamer.
After all, a female streamer could only harvest leeks for three or four years at most before quitting—she’d get tired of streaming, and viewers would get tired of watching. Once viewers got bored, tips dwindled, and without tips to maintain momentum, the audience would drain away fast.
What came next was even more unexpected: the girl stopped streaming.
Just like that, she quit.
The guild had signed her with no base salary and no required streaming hours—meaning that as long as she didn’t join another guild or stream on another platform, she could stop streaming anytime without paying any penalty.
She had planned to switch her to a new contract once she’d streamed for a full year, but she never expected the girl to pull a fast one on her.
No matter how she tried to persuade her, the girl remained firm: I need to focus on my studies, I’m quitting.
After all these years without contact, if she was coming to find her, it was most likely for one reason—she wanted to come back to streaming.
Normally, if a streamer came to her after four years away, she wouldn’t even give them the time of day. Female streamers live off their youth; if you’re too old, you’re basically done with the “female streamer” label, because big spenders don’t tip aunties—there’s simply no point in scouting them.
But she had looked at the girl’s contract when she signed it. She had just come of age back then, which meant she was only around 24 now.
That’s usually the age when people start streaming—but she had simply started early.
So her interest was piqued.
“What’s wrong?”