Chapter 14: Chapter Fourteen: It Blew Up

“Wake up, ancestor, breakfast is ready.” Luo Quan returned home, placed half the breakfast beside Wen Xia’s pillow, and ate while speaking.

“Smells so good…” Wen Xia opened her eyes, reached into the bag, pulled out a sushi, and devoured it in large bites.

“How are the records selling?” Wen Xia finished one sushi, sat up on the tatami, and asked Luo Quan.

Luo Quan thought for a moment, then nodded. “Not bad—at least someone’s buying.”

Wen Xia laughed. “Your standards are way too low. This is Asia’s largest record market—release a single and you can easily sell fifty to sixty thousand copies.”

Luo Quan retorted, “Then how many did you sell in Japan?”

Wen Xia recalled, “Over the past two years, we released two albums and seven singles—total sales were about a million.”

“That’s not much,” Luo Quan remembered how Japanese pop idols in her past life sold tens or even hundreds of thousands per album.

Wen Xia smiled. “We don’t live off record sales—tours are our real business. One major concert can earn millions in ticket sales alone, and we do ten to twenty of them a year!”

Luo Quan counted on her fingers, astonished. “I thought your group had five members including you—so each of you is a millionaire?”

Wen Xia spoke with resentment. “The boss is the millionaire—we’re just hired hands. We work our asses off all year, then split the earnings ninety-ten, and even that ten percent depends on the boss’s mood!”

“Whose mood?”

“The president of SM Company!”

Luo Quan was startled. “So you’re basically begging on your knees?”

Wen Xia sneered. “Korean idols look glamorous in front of fans and cameras, but to those chaebol bosses, they’re begging on their knees—and even that, many would kill to get!”

“But I’ve figured it out—if you’ve got talent, you can thrive anywhere.”

As she spoke, Wen Xia bit hard into her rice ball—it was wasabi flavor!

“Why is it wasabi?!” Wen Xia wrinkled her nose, feeling suffocated; though Chongqing people loved spice, wasabi wasn’t just heat.

“I didn’t know—I told the shopkeeper to grab me whatever.” Luo Quan also disliked wasabi; upon hearing the rice ball was wasabi-flavored, she immediately set aside the one she was about to eat.

“I’m choking!” Wen Xia gulped down two large sips of mineral water, finally suppressing the wasabi’s burn.

Neither dared touch the rice balls again, so they split the remaining sushi. Fortunately, they were both girls, so the portions were small—this much was enough.

Luo Quan wiped her mouth with paper. “By the way, how long are you planning to stay in Tokyo?”

Wen Xia propped a pillow behind her, half-reclining. “Probably until the end of the year. My Korean agent and I broke up, and I don’t have many contacts back home—no great opportunities yet, so I might as well rest a while.”

Luo Quan asked curiously, “So what’s your plan? Go back to China and join another girl group as an idol?”

Wen Xia gazed at the ceiling, softly saying, “I’ve always had a dream—to create a Chinese idol group that can conquer the world. That’s my ultimate goal for the next twenty years!”

Luo Quan frowned. “You want to be an idol mentor?”

“I haven’t released many works in China, and I’m still young, but given the current environment here, even if I were to become a mentor, I’d be more than qualified.” At this, Wen Xia’s face brimmed with confidence.

Though it sounded arrogant, Wen Xia was telling the truth.

As one of the most talented trainees in Korean idol history, she leapt from D-rank to A-rank in under two years.

Her second album swept every major Korean music award; as team leader, she won Korea’s Most Popular Female Artist in her debut year and was named among the World’s 100 Most Beautiful Faces—she had reached the peak of her career.

Though Sweetgirl, the group she was in, hadn’t been around long enough to gain high international recognition, within Korea, Wen Xia and Sweetgirl were already considered a top-tier girl group.

If not for that incident, Wen Xia would never have demanded to break her contract before it expired—even if it meant forfeiting all her earnings.

SM originally didn’t plan to let her go, but Wen Xia was stubborn: she openly threatened to expose everything she’d witnessed after meeting that corrupt official, forcing a mutual ruin.

To protect the company’s and the official’s image—and Sweetgirl’s future—the SM CEO chose to compromise.

If Wen Xia had been Korean, those capitalists might have targeted her family—but her relatives were all in China, and no matter how bold they were, they dared not stir up trouble there. So they had no choice but to swallow their pride.

After leaving the group, Wen Xia escaped the mire, but her skyrocketing career froze. If she didn’t release something powerful soon, the faster she rose, the harder she’d fall.

Yet Wen Xia didn’t know that beside her stood a living composition machine capable of effortlessly producing dozens or hundreds of hit singles.

And this living machine now stared grimly at her phone, endlessly scrolling through Twitter, watching every tweet related to her record.

Sony had spent heavily on promotion these past few days: Twitter flooded with posts, giant digital billboards on buildings—this level of publicity had only been granted to Hoshino Sakura before.

After Luo Quan persistently scrolled Twitter for half an hour, she suddenly jumped up, shouting excitedly: “It blew up! It blew up!”

“What blew up?” Wen Xia, watching a drama on her tablet, turned her head.

“My record!” Luo Quan held her phone toward Wen Xia. “The reviews and sales—it’s blown up!”

Wen Xia saw that the keyword “Quan” had surged to the top of Twitter’s trending list, with over twenty thousand related tweets.

“Lemon,” “Hanabi,” and “I Once Thought of Ending It All” had all hit trending topics.

One mini-album, three songs, four trending topics, nearly fifty thousand tweets—this level of buzz was truly explosive.

Clicking into the “Quan” trending topic, the most-liked tweet was from Japan’s most authoritative music magazine, “Sakura”: “A Genius Girl Emerges—Japan’s Music Market Savior!”

Unlike their usual superficial reviews of Japanese artists, “Sakura” gave a detailed professional analysis of Luo Quan’s melodies, arrangements, lyrics, and vocal performance, lavishing praise without restraint, ending with a high evaluation:

“The production quality of this mini-album is remarkably mature, reaching the level of seasoned musicians—hard to believe it was created entirely by an eighteen-year-old girl! A genius is a genius because she accomplishes what ordinary people cannot comprehend.”

“The only minor flaw is that Quan’s vocal technique needs further refinement, but her gentle, healing tone and astonishingly stable breath control are breathtaking. If she dedicates herself to vocal training, catching up to the veteran divas is merely a matter of time!”

This tweet was the first official evaluation from a reputable media outlet. Other magazines and news agencies were surely drafting articles now—soon, the first wave of media attention would crash upon Luo Quan.

Beyond these media outlets, the general public also gave widespread praise to Luo Quan’s mini-album.

Many had bought the record after seeing the Twitter trends, then immediately promoted it across social platforms. This behavior rapidly spread across all Japanese online communities—in this moment, anyone online had a fifty percent chance of seeing a post about Luo Quan.

Some were fan-driven, some were influencers chasing trends, others were simply Twitter’s algorithm pushing content due to overwhelming popularity.

From this moment on, Luo Quan and her three songs began their true, all-consuming viral explosion.