Chapter 249 - 214: Let’s Do It

Chapter 249: Chapter 214: Let’s Do It

By the time they had finished discussing the details, it was already four in the morning.

After splashing his face with water again, Xu An tucked a can of Red Bull into his coat and rode his small tricycle toward Xu Family Village. He had said he’d be back before eight, but he had already broken his promise...

Just as the tricycle reached the village entrance, Xu An saw a tall, dark figure step out from behind the large banyan tree and walk toward him at an extremely fast pace.

It was five o’clock. The streetlights had gone out, and not a hint of light had appeared on the horizon; it was the darkest hour of the day. Xu An’s right hand reached for the thick tree branch he kept in the back of his cart for self-defense, his eyes warily fixed on the approaching shadow...

"Anzi, why are you back so late!" His Second Grandpa’s familiar voice rang out, tinged with a hint of blame. "Look at the time! Are you trying to work yourself to death just to make money?"

"Second Grandpa?" Xu An looked at the man in surprise and asked, puzzled, "Second Grandpa, why are you up so early? Did you need me for something urgent?"

"Nothing urgent, just wanted to check on you. You should take it easy and rest at home for the next couple of days, alright?" Second Grandpa patted Xu An’s shoulder and rambled on, "I already heard about what happened tonight. It’s okay. It’s only early September. If the restaurant business doesn’t work out, you can just go back to school and repeat the year. You’ve earned a good bit of money these past two months, enough for four years of college tuition plus living expenses for the family. And even if it’s not enough, you’ve invested so much in the village’s collective enterprise, you’ll get dividends from that later..."

He didn’t quite grasp the first couple of sentences, but as he listened on, Xu An didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

"It’s okay, Second Grandpa. I have security cameras in the shop. I already checked, and there’s nothing wrong. All the ingredients were bought through proper channels, and there were no issues with receiving or inspecting them. It must have been some jealous son of a bitch who saw how good my business was and reported me out of spite..."

"As long as you know what you’re doing," Second Grandpa said with a smile. "Hurry back and get some rest. You’ll need your strength to deal with all this."

After watching Xu An open the courtyard gate and move the tricycle inside, Second Grandpa quickened his pace back to his own yard. The moment his door closed, a crowd of people surrounded him, chattering all at once. "How did it go? What did Anzi say? Is he going to stay in the village and help you with the tidal flat aquaculture, or is he going back to high school to repeat the year?"

Second Grandpa turned to look at the crowd with a disgusted expression, waving his hands to shoo them away. "The results aren’t even out yet! What’s there to choose from? Go on, all of you, go back home! Even if you don’t need to rest, this old man does..."

「In Yu Liang’s home.」

Although the three consecutive posts he made when the Xu’s Braised Shop incident broke had gained him a huge amount of traffic, it was followed by a flood of verbal abuse. Before the incident, most of his new followers had called him an "indie news reporter." Afterward, he was branded an accomplice to Xu’s Braised Shop...

He considered deleting all his posts about Xu’s Braised Shop, but seeing the continuously climbing numbers, he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.

The internet has a short memory. In a couple of days, some other news would break, people’s attention would shift, and the whole Xu’s Braised Shop affair would become insignificant.

In the end, Yu Liang couldn’t do it. He chose the "out of sight, out of mind" approach, logging out of the app, turning off his internet, and crawling into bed, hoping to heal his wounded soul with sweet, sweet sleep.

But as he lay in bed, his mind filled with the various stats from his account, he tossed and turned for a long time. Just as a hint of drowsiness finally came, his phone suddenly rang.

RING-RING— RING-RING—

Shit! The drowsiness he’d worked so hard to find vanished without a trace.

"Who is it?!" Yu Liang growled into the phone as he answered the completely unfamiliar number. His tone was extremely aggressive.

"This is Xu An, the owner of Xu’s Catering. Are you interested in making a big splash?"

Even though the man’s voice was extremely hoarse, Yu Liang instantly confirmed it was the owner of Xu’s Braised Shop. He had met him several times; there was no mistaking it!

After the call, Yu Liang quickly added Xu An on QQ and received a document from him. The document’s title was—"Friends, I’m Going to Expose the True Face of the Xu’s Catering Owner!"

It was just past four o’clock. If he went back to bed, he could still get another three hours of sleep. But after reading the contents of the document, Yu Liang was completely wired. Not only was he not sleepy, but the fatigue from his sleepless night had vanished.

’This idea is absolutely brilliant! I don’t have to defend Xu’s Braised Shop, nor do I have to attack it. I just have to tell everyone the facts. Most importantly, in this script, I’ll appear as a victim! That will naturally resonate with the netizens!’

’It’s truly, absolutely perfect!’

Just looking at the script in his hands, Yu Liang could already imagine it: after this video went live, the stats on his account would skyrocket again, and sponsors would be waving cash at him to promote their products...

’Let’s do it!’

Yu Liang did a kip-up, springing out of bed. He hadn’t washed his face or brushed his teeth, and combined with the dark circles and sallow skin from his all-nighter, he perfectly fit the image of a victim.

Setting up his camera equipment, Yu Liang sat right in the center of the frame and began to speak with righteous indignation, spittle flying through the air.

"Friends, I am truly shocked, angry, helpless, and worried. As you all know, I staked out the front of Xu’s Braised Shop for seven whole days. In those seven days, I ate no less than eleven pounds of their braised food! And now there’s a food safety scandal? I just can’t accept it."

Yu Liang held his phone up to the camera, making sure to show the time on the screen.

"It’s now past four in the morning. I’ve been tossing and turning all night, unable to sleep. The only thing on my mind is when the test results will finally come out."

Switching his phone’s screen to a browser search page, Yu Liang continued.

"I searched online, and official tests take three days at the fastest, or up to seven days at the slowest. That’s too long! I don’t want to wait! I want to know the results today! Friends, especially my friends here in Hai City, please contact me. If you won any unopened food from Xu’s Braised Shop in the lottery, give them to me. I’ll take them to a private lab for testing!"

His tone shifted, becoming slightly more relaxed.

"Of course, I’m not just taking the food from you for free. I’ll buy it from you directly at the prices Boss Xu set. Cash on delivery, no tricks! To make the test results more accurate, I plan to collect ten different items. You can DM me with your contact information, and I’ll come to your door to pick them up myself!"

"..."

After delivering the pre-planned speech in one breath, Yu Liang watched the clip from beginning to end, a satisfied smile spreading across his face.

’The improvised lines were pretty good, and the bed head, dark circles, and sallow skin from tonight really sell it. Add in this ghastly lighting... anyone who sees this will think I’m a victim!’

He imported the video into his computer’s software, quickly trimmed the unnecessary parts, tweaked the audio quality a bit, added subtitles, and then posted the video to [KuZi Video]. He then shared the link to his Weibo account.

Even though it was just a little past five in the morning, the world is always full of unlucky souls who ate something bad and spent the entire night with diarrhea. One of Yu Liang’s followers happened to be one of them.

That night, he had to run to the bathroom a total of eight times! And each time, the urge hit just as he was about to fall asleep. Twice, he almost didn’t make it out of bed in time!

After his eighth trip at three o’clock, he managed a rare two-hour stretch of sleep. He thought his bout of diarrhea was finally over, but at five, a sharp pain in his stomach woke him up. Without even opening his eyes, he grabbed the phone from his pillow and bolted for the toilet, making it safely to the porcelain throne just in the nick of time.

’It’s already past five! I’ve been in and out of the bathroom all night. There’s no way I can go to work today!’

The netizen cheerfully lit up his phone screen, planning to text his boss that he was taking a sick day!

The moment the screen lit up, a notification for a Weibo update appeared. He looked closer—it was from the vlogger he’d been following closely for his reports on Xu’s Braised Shop. ’Did I forget to unfollow him?’

He tapped the notification, intending to go into the app and unfollow Yu Liang. The phone screen instantly switched to a new post, which, for the first time ever, included a video.

’Is it an apology? I’ve got to see this!’

The next second, Yu Liang’s voice filled the small, steamy bathroom. The netizen’s expression changed from curiosity to approval, and by the end, he was so impressed he wanted to slap his thigh and cheer.

’He’s collecting food from Xu’s Braised Shop, is he? I won two whole portions! And they’re different items, too!’

Without hesitation, the netizen opened a direct message and sent Yu Liang his contact information, telling him to come and pick up the items.

This netizen was fast, but there were even faster night owls out there. Less than five minutes after the post went live, three people had already contacted Yu Liang. The aforementioned netizen was the fourth.

The ten portions of braised food he thought would take hours to gather were collected in less than ten minutes. He even had one extra offer. At that moment, it wasn’t even six o’clock, and the sun was just beginning to rise.

Faced with the choice of going back to bed for a bit or rushing to get his hands on the ten portions before nine o’clock, Yu Liang chose the latter. He left home with a hand-held tripod, hailed a taxi, and zipped across Hai City, arriving at a private testing center at 9:10 AM.

The testing fees were not cheap, and the rush fee was even higher, but Yu Liang didn’t care in the slightest. This time, Xu An was footing the bill.

From collecting the braised food from the netizens, to handing it over to the lab technicians at the testing center, to the technicians taking the food into the workroom—the entire process was filmed without interruption.

Perhaps because the rush fee was high enough, the test results were actually ready by one o’clock.

With the results in hand, he first took a photo and sent it to Xu An, then rushed home without stopping to start editing the video.

Speeding up what needed to be sped up, blurring what needed to be blurred, and censoring what needed to be censored—even though Yu Liang was a skilled editor, the video was too long to be cut down significantly. It took him a full two hours to condense five hours of footage into a fifteen-minute video without compromising the viewer’s experience.

He quickly uploaded the video to [KuZi Video], linked it to his Weibo account, wrote the post’s text, hit publish, confirmed, and—video successfully posted!

Only then did Yu Liang have a moment to check the stats on the post he had published at 5 AM: 150,000 views, 8,000 reposts, 12,000 comments, 70,000 likes, and his follower count had reached 69,000!

Aside from his follower count, the other stats were good enough to crush some popular celebrities!

"Holy crap, I’ve hit the jackpot! I’m gonna be a major influencer now! I’ve made it, I’ve made it! Boss of Xu’s Catering, I love you!"