Chapter 25 Part 2

She pulled up the saved photo to show Xiao Yao, whose eyes widened instantly.

Sometimes, you could tell the quality of an item just from a photo.

Xiao Yao muttered to herself that with Gu Liuguang’s looks, no wonder people kept lining up to give her these gems.

If she had money, she’d give Gu Liuguang even pricier ones.

Gu Liuguang silenced her phone and, for once, spoke her true feelings. Like a girl in love, she shyly asked: “If she wants to date me, should I say yes?”

Since it wasn’t her getting the gifts, Xiao Yao stayed rational. She calmly advised: “…Calm down. Maybe she embezzled company funds to buy them. Or they could be fakes.”

There were A-goods and B-goods out there. Photos not matching the real thing wasn’t impossible.

She’d just said it offhand, but once she thought about it, it seemed plausible. Seeing Gu Liuguang dazed, like she was lost in love, Xiao Yao swallowed her words.

Once the earrings arrived, they’d know if they were real.

Xiao Yao’s gaze swept over the necklace at Gu Liuguang’s neck. Suddenly remembering something: “You don’t think those earrings are from the same batch of material as the blue sapphire on your neck, do you?”

Gu Liuguang paused, then decisively shook her head after hesitating: “Probably not.”

The blue sapphire on her neck had been clearly introduced by the auction host as from an exhausted mine.

Any later popular blue sapphires on the market were from other sources.

But Xiao Yao mentioning it made Gu Liuguang unsure. She pulled up the photo, and the two studied it for a long time. Neither knew much about blue sapphires, and a photo alone didn’t reveal much.

Finally, Xiao Yao said: “Maybe like your necklace, it comes with a certificate. Or you can ask your sis later.”

They hadn’t chatted long before starting to edit the afternoon shoot photos. To maintain and develop new bosses, they had to manage their personal Douyin accounts too.

Streamers from girl and boy groups loved to socialize. After streams, they often hit nearby bars, expanding networks and sometimes landing store promo gigs.

Gu Liuguang had checked Xiao Yao’s personal profile; comments often had likes from other group members.

As for Gu Liuguang, after her last photo and video post, her fans grew daily.

Perhaps because they did girl group lives, no one really approached her for ads. Relying on that bit of traffic to monetize wasn’t as profitable as the account she ran that only posted about Lin Shixia.

She couldn’t resist the operations team constantly urging her in the group chat to post videos, so Gu Liuguang simply uploaded the photos she had just taken that afternoon.

Compared to the others, what Gu Liuguang posted was already the least.

The others sometimes shot dance videos or group photos with other members from the group for traffic, essentially mutual promotion.

But generally, most posts were solo. Group videos often led to situations where “one of the two people was really pretty,” so if they posted group photos or videos together, it meant they had a very good relationship.

Even with a very good relationship, they still asked permission first.

Gu Liuguang knew about this. Xiao Yao had specifically reminded her that she could post a video before going live, which would get more gifts from viewers later.

To solidify her status as a top fan in Lin Shixia’s fanbase, Gu Liuguang had put a lot of thought into making her photos and videos look better. Setting aside the System’s photo-editing abilities, she was also an expert at video editing.

She had asked Xiao Yao, who didn’t mind her posting their group photos and even kindly asked if she wanted to check with Tiantian and the others.

Although anyone in the same frame as Gu Liuguang would be completely overshadowed, there was also a benefit—filming with a beautiful person made everyone else look better too.

Plus, Gu Liuguang had huge traffic. As long as the video mentioned the others a bit or the group live, their individual live streams that day would see massive traffic.

It was just a bit strange. The videos that had previously blown up weren’t doing as well lately in terms of views. Xiao Yao had even asked Gu Liuguang if she was being throttled, but Gu Liuguang didn’t seem too concerned.

Since she herself didn’t care, Xiao Yao and the others couldn’t help much. And since Gu Liuguang had no intention of switching groups or going solo, whether the video traffic was throttled or not didn’t really matter.

With Xiao Yao saying that, Gu Liuguang got up and asked the others who were getting styled. Almost all of them agreed to let her post.

They even said that if convenient, she should @mention them in the caption.

Gu Liuguang didn’t care about sharing her traffic. Although it was for her own account, including Xiao Yao and the others naturally made her put more effort into it than just posting solo photos.

She had originally planned to spend points to have the System edit the photos, but the System said that fans these days were sharp and could identify alternate accounts from photo styles.

If it edited the photos, Lin Shixia’s fans might dig up her real identity.

Thinking about it that way, Gu Liuguang gave up. Fortunately, she knew how to edit videos, and her aesthetics were on point.

She dawdled a bit and finally finished editing the video just before going live, uploading it to her homepage in the nick of time.

As soon as she posted it, fans liked it. It was even more popular than she had imagined, as if she had die-hard fans.

The System said this was still under its self-imposed throttling—not only did fans see it, but passersby did too.

The most obvious sign was Gu Liuguang’s follower count, which was about to break a million just from the photos.

The System sighed: 【If it hits Weibo Hot Search again, my influence over this world will keep weakening.】

This was the first time Gu Liuguang heard the System say it had influence over this world. But from the tone, it didn’t seem like a big deal, so she casually asked: 【What kind of influence?】

System: 【Permissions, basically. For example, if I want to throttle your Douyin account, the greater your influence in this world, the weaker mine becomes.】

Gu Liuguang paused, finding the words a bit odd. Just as she was about to ask how it measured her influence in this world, Zhang Ze started urging them to prepare for the live stream.

The account had already started streaming, and even before they reached the camera, the live room had thirty thousand viewers online.

The screen was flooded with fan comments. Even though Douyin had set up different lanes for comments to slow the spam, they still scrolled so fast it was hard to read.

Zhang Ze started playing music. He had gone from excited over tens of thousands online to completely unfazed now, professionally warming up the crowd and greeting the thirty thousand fans.

He didn’t really read the comments—couldn’t anyway—and went straight into greetings, red packets, the whole package, while buttering up the top gifters like Big Sis and the big brothers.

By the time Gu Liuguang and the others walked into frame, the viewer count surged by another twenty thousand and kept skyrocketing, instantly hitting third on the popularity list.

The live room equipment had been upgraded long ago. Unlike before when they had to follow Zhang Ze’s rhythm, now there was a big screen nearby showing the live room stats—as long as you weren’t nearsighted, you could see.

Unfortunately, the comments scrolled too fast to read clearly, only catching glimpses of “Little Light” and “wife” dominating the screen.

Even with passphrase lucky bags, those words couldn’t be brushed away.

After a few days of streaming, Gu Liuguang was very familiar with the format. She didn’t need to look at the screen—just wait for the music to switch to her part, step to center stage, and dance.

Today was the same. Normally, Zhang Ze had them ease in first before starting the gift-for-dance segment.

Gu Liuguang had checked other groups; they went the boutique route. Without gifts, they held fixed poses.

Those with stools were fine; without, they stood for hours. Their room was the same at first—Gu Liuguang couldn’t handle it, unsure if it was her stamina or what.

Several times, she wanted to quit. The latter half of streams required the System to coax her just to finish.

Sometimes, when fans gifted to make her dance later in the stream, she’d play cute and stall—whining about being tired one moment, needing the bathroom the next.

The group indulged her. In a one-hour stream, she’d slack for fifteen minutes, yet still struggled to stand.

Finally, operations came up with a solution: put her on the side with a stool.

She was the only one who insisted on sitting.

Later, she felt awkward being the only one with a stool. The others just sat on the floor, so operations prepared stools for everyone to spare her embarrassment.

Zhang Ze hyped things up for a bit, but gifts hadn’t stopped since the stream started. Operations had added gift effects to the screen, specially setting Gu Liuguang’s at one hundred yuan.

Newbie groups usually set cheap gifts—one mao or one yuan. Slightly popular ones maxed at ten yuan.

For fancier rooms, thirty yuan was impressive. The others in her group got 29.9 yuan gifts thanks to Gu Liuguang’s traffic.

Only hers was set at one hundred.

Even so, the one-hundred-yuan gift effects never stopped, and cheaper ones kept coming nonstop.

With so many viewers and effects, even good equipment lagged. They had to disable gift effects for the stream to smooth out.

The warm-up barely lasted; after a few pleasantries, fans spammed for Gu Liuguang to dance. Hitting “x999” on the one-hundred-yuan gifts was ridiculous.

Even if he wanted to stall, Zhang Ze had to prompt Gu Liuguang to dance. He actually wanted her to rest more.

But because he’d skipped her dances a few times, he was getting flamed hard on Douyin—accused of targeting her, maybe dating someone else in the group.

His feed was full of hate, @mentioning their company to fire him and swap hosts.

Luckily, whenever he shared Douyin posts in the work group, Gu Liuguang would comfort him with one sentence. That single comfort made the hate feel like bliss. Bring on the storm!