11. The Eleventh Day — I Never Expected It
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When Si Nian woke up the next morning, the hashtag “Murmur” was still trending.
Though it had slipped to the middle and lower ranks of the list, that alone was enough to prove that everything that had happened the night before had been real. She had truly made the trending searches.
The post she had uploaded the previous evening about heading home after work had already received more than five hundred thousand likes.
The homepages of every app were filled with posts from marketing accounts rounding up the overwhelmingly positive reception to the previous night’s MiniGiltz runway show. In the comments, nearly every thread had someone asking who the girl in the green shirt or the pink dress was.
After finally wrapping up the major show, Jiang Yihan at last had a few days off.
The moment she woke that morning, she went straight to Si Nian’s place to freeload a meal. While eating, she kept refreshing Si Nian’s social-media account, watching the follower count climb by the second, and clicked her tongue appreciatively.
“I told you,” she said. “As long as the internet users aren’t blind, there’s no way you’d only have ten thousand followers!”
Si Nian had not expected to gain so much from a single show. It seemed the results were even better than she had imagined—or rather, much better.
She had originally intended merely to ride the show’s publicity, show her face, and take whatever scraps came her way. Instead, a huge wave of attention seemed to be surging directly toward her.
In addition to the short video she had posted after work the previous night, her new followers had dug up the dozen or so posts she had shared before. The most popular was a behind-the-scenes snippet from when Si Nian had modeled wedding gowns for Mohe, which she had posted on her own social-media account.
Partly, it was because the photographs themselves were beautiful. But there was another reason: at the time, someone in the comments had not realized that the woman wearing the wedding dress was a model and had assumed she was getting married. “Murmur” had even appeared personally to reply to the comment asking whether she was married:
Work shoot. Not married. Single~
Hundreds of replies had now piled up beneath Si Nian’s response saying that she was unmarried and single:
[Ahhhhh, knowing she’s single puts my mind at ease.]
[Being single is wonderful, being single is marvelous, being single makes me want to sing!]
[I hereby declare that the three most beautiful words in the world are neither “I love you” nor “I do,” but “I’m single,” as told to me by Lady Murmur.]
[Good Lord, she looks insanely beautiful in a wedding dress. I want to marry her. orz]
[No wonder she looked so familiar when I saw her last night. I saved that Mohe sample shoot just a few days ago, planning to book one myself someday. Haha.]
[Beautiful women belong single and radiant!]
[Who said you were single? Weren’t you lying in my arms last night, promising to be my wife? Hmph. A woman who goes back on her word.]
[Woman, you were single before you met me. But after meeting me, you aren’t anymore. [clutching a rose] [spinning landing] [then a wickedly charming smile.jpg]]
Seeing the suddenly boisterous comments beneath her post, Si Nian felt her cheeks grow warm.
Still, she was neither a celebrity nor an idol. There was nothing terribly significant about making her relationship status public.
Jiang Yihan turned over on the sofa and had already begun thinking about how Si Nian could capitalize on this wave of attention.
Online popularity was like a gust of wind. Usually, it came quickly and vanished just as fast. Most trends were forgotten after two or three days. That was why, when people happened to strike it lucky with a burst of attention but had no way to replicate the content, they would often rush to monetize it, making a quick profit before the opportunity disappeared.
But with Si Nian, luck was clearly not the only factor. More importantly, the appeal came from Si Nian herself.
Otherwise, she would never have fought her way out of a trending list dominated by fan wars between celebrities.
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With her looks, figure, and stage presence, she had everything going for her. Rather than chase quick money by harvesting this wave of attention, she should cultivate herself over the long term. A steady stream of future work would bring an endless stream of financial returns.
Once she had traffic and followers, the rates for her commercial shoots would naturally rise. And these days, even influencers with only a modest following could make a considerable sum over the course of a year simply by occasionally posting an advertisement on their social-media accounts.
As for how to handle and sustain this wave of attention, Si Nian and Jiang Yihan were of one mind: they had no intention of chasing quick money.
Si Nian had left a work email in her profile biography. Now that she had suddenly become popular, her inbox was crammed with all kinds of business offers and invitations from talent agencies.
Even so, Si Nian still had no intention of signing with an agency. Jiang Yihan, meanwhile, was eager to work part-time as her manager, handling her jobs and splitting the future earnings with her.
Since they did not plan to make quick money, Si Nian’s immediate priority was not to accept commercial work at once. She needed to produce something else first, solidifying this wave of attention and the influx of new followers.
She looked at the twenty-eight thousand yuan that had been transferred to her account after the show. A little had been deducted for taxes, but the sum was still deeply reassuring.
Sure enough, every penny earned through her own labor was clear and tangible. Even if it was not a great deal, it was still far better than spending her days compromising herself and counting on a man’s breakup payment, as she had before.
Thinking that she had wasted five years of her life over a breakup settlement as absurdly small as a carrot dangled before a donkey, Si Nian felt nothing but regret. After being busy for so many days, she had finally found herself thinking of Lu Shuyan.
She wondered what he was doing now.
But whatever he was doing had nothing to do with her.
The moment Lu Shuyan came to mind, Si Nian rarely allowed herself a curse.
That bastard. He owed her the years of her youth. He owed her the chance to live with her dignity intact.
…
The sky was cloudless that day.
Sunlight poured through the glass curtain wall of the skyscraper, then fell softly over the lush greenery.
Rongsheng Headquarters, the president’s office.
Zhao Chao was inside.
Perhaps it was only his imagination, but every time Zhao Chao entered the president’s office that day, he felt that the man seemed distracted.
It was rare to see him lost in thought.
“President Lu?” Zhao Chao had just finished conveying the message that the chairman of Lihe had called to express his hope of meeting President Lu the following weekend. He cautiously addressed the man seated behind the desk. “What would you like to do?”
Hearing himself addressed, Lu Shuyan returned to the present.
He looked at Zhao Chao, who was waiting for his reply, recalled what he had just said about the chairman of Lihe’s invitation, and answered with a quiet “All right,” accepting it.
Only then did Zhao Chao leave the president’s office.
As the door closed, Lu Shuyan stared at the solid-wood surface of his desk. In the end, he simply set aside the work at hand.
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His mind was still filled with the sight of Si Nian walking the runway the night before, the social-media account certified under the name “Murmur” as a model, and the sample wedding photographs used to promote the photography studio.
Lu Shuyan had known that Si Nian had worked as a model before.
When they had first met and begun dating, he had known her as a student supposedly busy supporting herself through part-time work and study. According to her own account, she had worked as a tutor, a print model, an etiquette hostess, and a restaurant server—any lawful job that paid. Her family had been struggling, she had said, and she wanted to earn more money to send home.
At the time, unwilling to seem overly calculating where their relationship was concerned, he had nevertheless sent someone to make a simple investigation. The results had confirmed that what she said was true.
Until the previous night.
Lu Shuyan remembered the spirited, self-assured look Si Nian had worn on the runway—a pose so mischievous and confident that even he, who had once been intimately familiar with her body, had nearly failed to recognize her.
At least based on what he had known of Si Nian’s previous work as a print model, he had never imagined she could be so professional.
He had always assumed that her modeling jobs consisted of the occasional online-shop shoot, or paid fittings for students at fashion colleges—small, simple jobs not much different from working as an etiquette hostess or tutor.
Whatever the case, there was absolutely no way he could have imagined that, not long after their separation, she would be able to walk a runway with such effortless poise and composure, or work with a male model in a wedding-gown shoot with such consummate professionalism that she could single-handedly bring a photography studio into the spotlight.
A suffocating pressure gradually tightened across his chest.
Just as it had that night, the feeling of having been deceived began to creep over him once again.
Feeling the constriction come in waves, Lu Shuyan pressed his lips into a thin line, his eyes darkening. He knew that Si Nian had probably deceived him again.
Not only had she deceived him by spending five years with him solely for the sake of a ridiculous breakup settlement based on hearsay—she had also deceived him from the very beginning, when she had presented herself as a simple, innocent girl struggling to make money and support her studies through every odd job she could find.
Perhaps even the timid, fearful way she had behaved over the past several years, always seeming inexperienced and nervous wherever they went, had all been an act to deceive him.
Lu Shuyan tossed aside a discarded sheet of paper from the desk.
Suppressing the restlessness that seemed ready to burst from his chest, he picked up his phone again and irritably swiped across the screen. His fingertip accidentally touched the app.
The connection was so fast that he did not even have time to close it.
The first item the algorithm recommended to him that day was a girl in a wedding dress, accompanied by lighthearted music. During a break in the shoot, she sat on a folding chair with the glow of sunset and jagged mountain ridges behind her, wrinkled her nose playfully at the phone, and filmed a live-photo selfie.
Because of the sudden surge in attention, the video—which had originally been posted more than half a month ago and then fallen silent—had been picked up by the system again and pushed to users who might enjoy it and might be inclined to like it.
Lu Shuyan had been classified as one of those potential users most likely to enjoy the video and possibly leave it a like.
The man’s lips tightened once more.
He stared intently at the figure on the screen. Then he saw the top comment: a reply from the girl to a fan asking whether wearing a wedding dress meant she had gotten married. The response had inspired countless cheers and celebrations and received tens of thousands of likes:
“Work shoot. Not married. Single~”
At that moment, Lu Shuyan felt that he ought to do something.
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