The Li Yinan incident continued to escalate, the trending couldn’t be suppressed, and it even dragged several other Enyao artists into the mess.
Seeing that the situation was about to turn into a wildfire spreading through a chain of camps, Enyao Entertainment decisively abandoned Li Yinan to extricate themselves from the quagmire.
As the one being sacrificed, Li Yinan was naturally unwilling to accept it.
He had been hiding in his apartment all this time, waiting for news from his agent.
And after all that waiting, this was the result.
“You caused all these messes. Which one didn’t the company clean up for you?” Agent Qin Xu answered his call and couldn’t help but laugh at his accusations. “You can’t control your mouth, you can’t control your hands, you can’t control your temper, and you can’t control what’s below the waist. The company has done more than enough for you.”
Li Yinan’s face darkened. “In the beginning, you told me that in this industry, who can stay completely clean? You said those little things didn’t matter. Now you’re telling me it’s all my fault?”
Qin Xu was fed up with him too. “Whether it’s your fault or not doesn’t even matter anymore. Making mistakes isn’t always the problem—the real problem is that you don’t know how to cover your tracks. Someone wants to take you down now, and every single one of those tracks is a knife you handed them.”
After a pause, the agent spoke again. “The company isn’t a charity. This has already spiraled out of control.”
The call ended. The phone screen automatically closed the call log and returned to the contacts list.
The room was quiet. And empty.
…
On an early morning in late summer, a group of vibrant young people in relaxed, loose-fitting athletic wear jogged along the walking path of a nature park.
Ying Shi, mixed into the loose, scattered group, silently complained in her mind as she ran: why did N University have to have this once-a-week long-distance running check-in activity?
One that counted toward academic credits, no less!
As the target distance grew shorter, she felt like this body of hers was no longer her own.
When they finally reached the check-in point, a bunch of swaying, staggering college students pulled out their phones. After completing the check-in, they dispersed into small groups of three or five.
Ying Shi belonged to Dorm 306. The four of them shuffled along slowly, making their way to a nearby noodle shop.
It was already past the time when office workers had headed to work, so the noodle shop had plenty of empty seats. The four claimed a spot by the glass window and each placed their order.
Ying Shi ordered a bowl of small wontons—an extra-large portion, one and a half times the usual amount.
“Loss of appetite?” Wen Jiming heard her order and couldn’t help but ask, “That’s all you’re eating?”
“I just finished running…” Ying Shi sighed.
Wen Jiming joked, “Don’t go turning into one of those novel characters who can’t eat properly every day!”
As everyone knew, CEOs always had bad stomachs.
【Li Yinan went to the Enyao building and stabbed his agent in front of it.】
Ying Shi had just swallowed a small wonton when the mechanical voice rang out in her mind. Fortunately, she had already swallowed it, so the news didn’t make her choke.
【Someone caught it on camera. It’s on the Weibo Hot Search, and the heat is currently rising.】
Ying Shi casually picked up her phone as if nothing was wrong and opened Weibo.
#LiYinanAssault#
The materials she had gathered before could only block Li Yinan’s career in entertainment. After all, they were mostly personal moral flaws. The only thing that could have been dug deeper was him privately messaging fans and having relations with them.
But who could have imagined that Li Yinan would go and do something that forcefully moved himself from the entertainment news section to the social news section?
“Fresh trending topic—Li Yinan stabbed someone at Enyao Entertainment,” Ying Shi told her roommates.
All of them looked shocked and picked up their phones to scroll through the news.
Wen Jiming frowned. “What is wrong with these people? Stabbing someone over every little disagreement?”
“So scary. No wonder they say fans mirror their idol…” Xu Jinxi said with a shudder.
“It’s likely because his company abandoned him, causing his mentality to collapse. Plus, he was never really stable to begin with,” Jiang Nian concluded.
Ying Shi agreed with her. She nodded while refreshing the comment section.
[I feel like both he and his fans are a bit unhinged…]
[You’d better shut up. The fans will be here any second. I just said he might not be stable, and his fans were already swarming me. They’re saying Enyao is a den of scum, full of toxic people, and when things go wrong, they just push someone out to take the fall. They claim Li Yinan was oppressed and couldn’t fight back, so this was his last-ditch effort… I honestly laughed.]
[They sure can spin a story. The fans should write a drama for Li Yinan—it would definitely get high ratings.]
[Locusts really are pests.]
[Even if Enyao isn’t exactly a good company, they’ve been more than decent to Li Yinan. Not just the resources they fed him, but look at the disgusting things he’s done—bullying and humiliating junior colleagues, groping people during recordings. They suppressed all those scandals for him.]
[That person who was bullied into terminating their contract is the real victim. They had some buzz from an ancient costume drama, and then they just vanished.]
[He wasn’t wrong when he called his fans dogs. The guy went from being a scandal-ridden idol to an outright criminal, and they’re still licking his boots.]
[What did dogs ever do wrong? Why insult dogs?!]
Ying Shi put down her phone and focused on eating her breakfast.
This calm, peaceful state lasted until she returned to school, when she answered a call from Song Zhizhi.
“Boss Ying, I’ve finished the first twenty episodes of the script for ‘The Legend of Medicine Maiden.’ Would you like to take a look?”
There was an unmistakable excitement in her voice that she couldn’t quite hide.
Ying Shi thought for a moment. If she remembered correctly, ‘The Legend of Medicine Maiden’ was planned to be forty episodes?
In the blink of an eye, half the script was already written?