Chapter 39: Rigging Votes in the Competition, What a Treacherous World…

In the back rows of the audience seats, as well as outside the stadium, all the Information Department employees who received the group message shuddered in awe.

One off-site employee suddenly shot to his feet, his voice filled with admiration. “As expected of our Little Young Master. This broad and loving heart of his is something we should all learn from!”

As he spoke, the employee seemed to suddenly remember something. He carefully glanced toward a corner nearby and cautiously lowered the volume on the rest of his words.

Another employee who had leaped up to fawn excessively saw this and immediately got the hint. His entire body language turned low-key as he ducked his head and got back to his own work.

Thanks to the Little Young Master, these ordinary departmental employees who normally never even got to see the boss had, in just these past few days, not only shown their faces in front of him but also gotten a rough idea of his family situation.

The boss seemed to have three younger brothers.

The minister had met the Little Young Master inside the stadium today and talked with him for quite a while.

Meanwhile, they had the honor of having the Third Young Master use their place as a temporary foothold.

However, as everyone knew, family relationships in this world came in many forms, and truly harmonious ones were extremely rare.

Until they figured out the Third Young Master’s attitude toward the Little Young Master, it was best for small fries like them to stay low-key.

After all, they knew nothing about the Little Young Master’s strength or personality, but this Third Young Master had, just an hour ago upon first meeting them, leaked so much power that they nearly thought they were going to die on the job.

Having figured this out, the employees exchanged a few glances with each other. For a moment, the only sounds in the entire office were the clacking of keyboards.

At that moment, the man in black lying on the office chair—who stood out so starkly from the office atmosphere—removed the baseball cap covering his face and asked belatedly, “What are you all doing here?”

Under the baseball cap was Su Jianglou’s face, no longer shrouded in black mist, now clear enough to make out his features.

Su Jianglou recalled that he had just heard someone mention the Little Young Master. Wasn’t that referring to Xibao?

The Third Young Master had lounged on the recliner for over an hour, yet he had no idea what they had been busy with earlier.

The employees present didn’t dare raise any objections.

The one closest to Su Jianglou immediately explained, “After the behind-the-scenes footage from Tonight’s Big Star aired, the Little Young Master received some attacks from certain netizens online. The boss couldn’t bear for the Little Young Master to suffer such grievances, so he had us use our special skills to clean up the negative comments about him online.”

“After resolving that, the third assistant from the President’s Office notified us to keep monitoring online public opinion at all times. We’re here this time because the trainees from Tonight’s Big Star are about to hold their grand performance. If the Little Young Master has any needs, we can handle them promptly.”

Although he couldn’t quite grasp the specifics of the relationships among the boss’s family members, since the Third Young Master had asked, he still answered truthfully.

Employee 7421, whose badge read 7421, had figured that after hearing his explanation, the most the Third Young Master—who clearly favored the Little Young Master—would do was share their outrage. After all, judging from how the Third Young Master had lain down on the chair the moment he arrived, he seemed to have a lazy personality.

Who would have thought that after he finished his last sentence, this seemingly lazy Third Young Master would suddenly ask in a grim, oppressively heavy tone, “Who?”

“‘Certain netizens’ you mentioned—who are they?”

Uh… uh?

Looking at the Third Young Master, who seemed ready to go kill someone the moment he gave a name or address, 7421 was at a loss for words.

It wasn’t that he felt sorry for those trolls. It was just that in those few days, to meet their quotas, they had caught quite a few Weird. Now, with the Third Young Master asking so abruptly, he couldn’t recall any specific troll for the moment.

Under the pressure, cold sweat instantly beaded on 7421’s forehead, but the more nervous he got, the less he could remember. As for the other Weird colleagues present, they had no sense of camaraderie at a time like this—they only played dead even harder, while inwardly reviewing the trolls they had caught, preparing just in case the Third Young Master asked them and they ended up as speechless as 7421.

Fortunately, at that moment, the work group chimed with a ding, rescuing the sweating 7421.

[Information Department Minister: @All Members, begin action. I’ve calculated that if we want to fulfill the Little Young Master’s wish, the employees here today aren’t enough. Immediately head to headquarters and call over another batch.]

Su Jianglou casually glanced at his phone screen and immediately noticed the words “Little Young Master’s wish,” as well as the mention that there weren’t enough employees.

“What action are you preparing?”

The action plan had just been drafted, so of course 7421 remembered it. He felt greatly relieved and explained without a single stutter, “Reporting to the Third Young Master! It’s like this. Through our minister’s conversation with the Little Young Master, we learned that over the past five days, the Little Young Master voted for every single trainee in the show.”

“So, no matter who gets eliminated among the trainees today, the Little Young Master will feel heartbroken.”

Not to mention eliminating over half of them at once.

At this point, Su Jianglou didn’t even need 7421 to repeat the action goal. He stated matter-of-factly, “Then keep them all.”

7421 immediately stood tall. “Reporting to the Third Young Master! That’s exactly what we thought too!”

The specific action plan was also very straightforward.

The Central Stadium had a total of twenty thousand audience seats. Fortunately, the Tonight’s Big Star production team was greedy for money and had only installed voting devices on the front row’s one thousand seats.

In other words, only the one thousand front-row VIP audience members had voting rights.

As long as they controlled those one thousand voting devices, they could naturally manipulate the trainees’ vote counts.

Of course, besides the plan to control the one thousand voting devices, they also had even more efficient options.

For example, hack the vast majority of the voting devices and process them as abstentions. Then give each trainee just one or two votes.

But that would make the trainees’ vote counts look bad, which would indirectly mock their Little Young Master’s taste in talent.

So, that action plan was decisively scrapped.

As employees of the Su Consortium, when they did something, they did it the best!

Su Jianglou nodded, indicating he understood.

He would join their action.

The clock on the stadium stage’s large screen struck 8.

By now, night had fully fallen, and the lights on the stage became the stadium’s sole focus.

The mentors took the stage one after another.

Dance mentor Jason, vocal mentor Emily, creation mentor Zhao Yiming, resident mentor Bai Bo.

Just like during the initial rating, Bai Bo stood on stage with a microphone, still guest-hosting.

After a lengthy sponsor ad spiel, Bai Bo’s opening remarks finally reached their end. His voice rose with barely concealed excitement as he addressed the audience below. “Today! You are the masters here!”

“You will decide the fate of every trainee on stage, and what punishment the eliminated trainees will face.”

“Even we mentors only have the right to comment and suggest punishments.”

“Enjoy this delightful feast to the fullest~”

Down below, Su Ximu listened to that eerie voice and unconsciously rubbed his arm, his refined brows furrowing.

Until another hand brushed against his arm.

He heard a very gentle voice by his ear, confidently telling him, “Don’t be afraid. Nothing will happen tonight.”

Strangely, hearing the Blue 242 Leader say this calmed the restless feeling in his heart bit by bit.

In the time that followed, intentionally or not, their arms stayed pressed together.

As the mentors stepped down, the first group of trainees got ready backstage.

Wang Xingxing, who had received a B-rank in the initial rating, was the lead among the trainees queued up to perform.

The dance he and the other eighteen trainees performed together was called Love Ballet.

The stage was vast, large enough for every trainee to stand at the edges, facing the audience below and showing themselves to the fullest.

To play it safe, Rao Fei hadn’t positioned Bureau Chief Lin next to Wang Xingxing.

With Wang Xingxing’s professional performance as contrast, Bureau Chief Lin would seem too amateurish.

The Four-Protect-One Team’s five members dispersed to the stage’s southeast, southwest, northeast, and northwest directions.

The lights suddenly dimmed, and the nineteen trainees on stage quickly assumed their positions.

The lights came up, nineteen beams shining on each trainee.

They weren’t wearing traditional ballet attire but something more like dark-style stage costumes for a theatrical performance.

As the passionate cello music swelled, they executed the moves they had practiced countless times.

Even players who had never touched dance before became proficient in all sorts of moves under survival pressure.

The music surged passionately without end, only fast rhythms turning to even faster ones.

The trainees on stage kept darting, leaping, spinning across the stage…

Down below, this was the first time Su Ximu had seen the full version of this dance.

Amid the music, he inexplicably recalled a fairy tale from his childhood.

In the tale, to punish the wicked queen witch, people made her wear red dancing shoes.

The queen in the red dancing shoes could only dance endlessly, dancing until her feet bled through, until blood seeped from the soles, until she died.

As if to match his imagination, red bloodstains indeed overflowed from the trainees’ feet onstage, visible through their thin shoes and printing onto the stage.

Soon, the stage was covered in messy bloody footprints.

But this time, Su Ximu showed no unusual reaction, because he knew those were the blood packs inside the trainees’ shoes that had burst.

In the end, as the cello’s final resounding note rang out, the dancers on stage collapsed as one.

From a purely aesthetic appreciation of dance, it was performed very well.

Some trainees’ moves might not have been perfect, but any art form was ultimately a vessel for expressing emotion.

In their movements, that urgency, panic, and unease were portrayed vividly.

In the final freeze-frame pose, even Su Ximu couldn’t help widening his eyes and leaning forward slightly, as if wanting to catch the trainees who looked half-dead.

But the other audience members below didn’t seem captivated by the immersive dance.

They sniffed the air, their faces showing dissatisfaction.

When the voting device screens in front of some lit up, they even panted heavily through their noses, itching to slap huge, blood-red X’s on all nineteen lit-up headshots on the screen!

Some audience members grumbled that the dance wasn’t worth the ticket price and simply planned to abstain as a protest.

Others eyed the trainees onstage with malicious intent.

It was fine to slack off slyly now. Once they were eliminated…

Just as these thoughts crossed their minds, a hand suddenly shot out from the voting device screen, casting their precious vote at lightning speed before they could react.

Weaker audience members watched their voting devices sprout arms but stayed silent as statues. Because they judged that the Weird inside the voting device was stronger than them.

Of course, some self-assured audience members, upon noticing the hand emerging from the screen, reached out to stop it the next instant—only to have their wrists gripped in return, dragging them straight into the screen along with it.

With the dim lighting in the audience seats, this scene hadn’t caused much of a stir yet.

The audience member pulled into the screen reemerged in a blink from another computer’s screen at the other end.

Looking at the circle of Weird surrounding him—all with eight arms sprouting from their backs—and the overwhelmingly oppressive Weird in the center, the formerly arrogant audience member dropped to his knees with a thud, hugging the nearest eight-armed Weird. “Spare me, good sirs! Tell me which trainee you want to debut, and I’ll vote for them!”

“Whoever you say, I’ll vote for!”

He never imagined that a mere idol selection show would have a Weird gang rigging votes behind the scenes!

What a treacherous world.

Utterly treacherous!