Chapter 14

"Get up, ancestor, time for breakfast." Miss Luo Quan returned home, divided half of the breakfast, and placed it next to Wen Xia's pillow, saying this while eating.

"It smells so good..." Wen Xia opened her eyes, reached into the bag, pulled out a piece of sushi, and began to eat it in big bites.

"How are the records selling?" Wen Xia finished a piece of sushi, sat up from the tatami mat, and asked Miss Luo Quan.

Miss Luo Quan thought for a moment and nodded: "Not bad, at least some people are buying them."

Wen Xia laughed: "Your requirements are too low. This is the largest record market in Asia; releasing a record can easily sell fifty or sixty thousand copies."

Miss Luo Quan retorted unconvinced: "Then how many copies did you sell in Japan?"

Wen Xia recalled: "In the last two years, we've released two albums and seven singles in total, with a total sales volume of about a million or so."

"That's not much either." Miss Luo Quan remembered those popular Japanese divas from her past life; any random album would sell hundreds of thousands or millions of copies.

Wen Xia smiled: "We don't rely on selling records to make a living; touring is our main business. A single large concert can sell millions of RMB in tickets alone, and we hold a dozen or twenty such concerts a year!"

Miss Luo Quan counted on her fingers and said in surprise: "I remember your group has five members including you, which means you are all multi-millionaires?"

Wen Xia said with full resentment: "The boss is the millionaire; we are just a bunch of wage earners. We work ourselves to death all year, and the money we earn has to be split nine-to-one. And even for that one-tenth, we still have to look at someone else's face!"

"Whose face?"

"The president of SM Entertainment!"

Miss Luo Quan was taken aback: "Then aren't you just begging on your knees?"

Wen Xia curled her lips: "Korean idols are indeed bright and beautiful in front of fans and cameras, but in the eyes of those chaebol bosses, it's just begging on their knees. And even then, many people want to kneel but don't even have that opportunity!

But I've figured it out: as long as you have the ability, you can eat well and live well anywhere!"

As she spoke, Wen Xia took a fierce bite of the rice ball in her hand—it was wasabi-flavored!

"Why is it wasabi-flavored?!" Wen Xia wrinkled her nose, feeling like she couldn't breathe from the sting. Although people from Yuzhou are good at eating spicy food, wasabi isn't just simple spiciness.

"I don't know, I just let the landlady grab whatever." Miss Luo Quan didn't like wasabi either. Hearing Wen Xia say the rice ball was wasabi-flavored, she quickly set aside the rice ball she was about to start eating.

"It's choking me to death!" Wen Xia drank two large gulps of mineral water, finally suppressing the pungent taste of the wasabi.

The two of them didn't dare to touch the rice balls anymore and could only split the remaining sushi. Fortunately, they were both girls, the portion wasn't large, and eating just this little was enough.

Miss Luo Quan wiped the corner of her mouth with a tissue and asked: "By the way, how long do you plan to stay in Tokyo this time?"

Wen Xia propped the pillow behind her and lay half-reclined, saying: "Probably rest until the end of the year. I've already terminated my contract with that Korean manager I had before. I don't have many acquaintances in China, and I can't find any particularly good resources for the time being, so I might as well rest for a while longer."

Miss Luo Quan asked curiously: "Then what route do you plan to take in the future? Continue to find a domestic girl group to be an idol?"

Wen Xia looked at the ceiling and said softly: "I have always had a dream, and that is to let our China also have an idol group that can go to the world. This is my ultimate goal for the next twenty years!"

Miss Luo Quan frowned: "You want to be an idol mentor?"

"Although I don't have many works in China and I'm still so young, given the overall environment in China right now, even if I really went to be a mentor, it would be more than enough." When she said this, Wen Xia's face was full of confidence.

Although it sounded arrogant, what Wen Xia said was indeed the truth.

As one of the most talented trainees in the history of Korean idols, it took her less than two years to complete a triple jump from a D-level trainee to become an A-level trainee.

The second album after her debut swept all major music awards in Korea. As the leader, Wen Xia not only won the award for Korea's most beloved female artist in her first year of debut but was also shortlisted for the world's top 100 beautiful faces. It could be said that she walked directly to the peak of her life.

Although the girl group hadn't been established for long and its international popularity wasn't too high, just in terms of Korea, Wen Xia and her girl group Sweetgirl were already at the level of a major trend-setting group.

If it weren't for that incident, Wen Xia wouldn't have insisted on terminating her contract with the company before it expired, even if it meant losing all the income she had earned over the years.

Originally, SM Entertainment didn't intend to let Wen Xia go just like that, but Wen Xia had a very tough personality. She stated directly that if they didn't let her go, she would expose everything she saw and heard after meeting that useless official, and then everyone would go down together.

For the sake of the company's and that official's image, and for the future development of Sweetgirl, the boss of SM Entertainment chose to compromise.

If Wen Xia were Korean, perhaps these capitalists could have started with her family, but Wen Xia's relatives were all in China. No matter how bold these people were, they wouldn't dare to stir up trouble in China, so they had to swallow their pride and accept it when encountering such a situation.

After leaving the group, although Wen Xia managed to escape from the quagmire, her booming career also entered a freezing period. If she couldn't produce any powerful works in the coming period, then the faster she became popular, the faster she would cool down.

However, Wen Xia didn't know that right beside her was a human creation machine that could easily produce dozens or hundreds of hit singles.

And this human creation machine was now holding her phone with a solemn expression, scrolling through Twitter over and over again, paying attention to every tweet related to her record.

Over the past few days, Sony had done so much marketing for her—the screen-filling discussions on Twitter, and even the electronic billboard advertisements on buildings. Such a large promotional effort was something only Hoshino Sakura had enjoyed in the past.

After Miss Luo Quan scrolled through Twitter tirelessly for half an hour, she finally jumped up excitedly and shouted: "It blew up! It blew up!"

"What blew up?" Wen Xia, who was watching an idol drama on her tablet, turned her head to look.

"It's my record!" Miss Luo Quan brought the phone to Wen Xia and said: "The word-of-mouth and sales have both blown up!"

Wen Xia saw that on Twitter, the keyword "Sister Quan Shui" had rushed to the top of the trending list, with over twenty thousand related tweets!

Moreover, "Lemon," "Sparkle," and "I've Even Thought About Dying" had all made it to the trending list.

One mini-album, three songs, four trending topics, and nearly fifty thousand tweets—this level of popularity had indeed blown up.

Clicking into the "Sister Quan Shui" trending topic, the one with the most likes was a tweet published by Japan's most authoritative music magazine, "Sakura," titled: The Genius Girl Who Appeared Out of Nowhere, a Market-Saving Work for the Japanese Music Industry!

Unlike their usual superficial evaluations of Japanese artists, "Sakura" this time conducted a fairly extensive professional analysis of the melodies, arrangements, lyrics, and even Miss Luo Quan's singing skills for these three songs. At the same time, they didn't spare any praise, and finally gave a very high evaluation:

The production of this mini-album is very mature in all aspects, reaching the level of a veteran musician. It's hard to believe that this was entirely the work of an eighteen-year-old girl! A genius is a genius precisely because they can always complete tasks that mortals cannot understand.

The only flaw is that Sister Quan Shui's singing skills need further improvement, but her gentle and healing timbre, as well as her terrifyingly stable breath control, are truly stunning. As long as she puts effort into studying vocal music, catching up with those senior divas is only a matter of time!

This tweet was the first authoritative media organization to formally evaluate Miss Luo Quan. Other magazines and news agencies should be writing their articles as well. It is believed that it won't be long before the first wave of media hits Miss Luo Quan.

Besides these media outlets, the general public also gave widespread praise to Miss Luo Quan's mini-album.

A considerable number of them only bought the record after seeing the Twitter trending list. After listening to it, they immediately recommended it on various social platforms. Such behavior radiated to all online communities in Japan in a very short time. At this moment, as long as someone was online, five out of ten people could see the push notifications about Miss Luo Quan!

Some were spontaneous actions by fans, some were self-media riding the wave of popularity, and others were simply like Twitter, where the popularity was so high that the system itself started pushing it.

From this moment on, Miss Luo Quan and her three songs began a true screen-filling sensation!