Chapter 51: Popularity Like a Tidal Wave

Monday, eight o'clock sharp in the morning.

Jiang Ningxi woke up to her phone alarm. After pulling off her eye mask, she kicked off the quilt, revealing a pair of smooth, fair, and well-proportioned calves. Then, her feet hit the floor, and she blindly felt around for the slippers in the hotel suite.

After brushing her teeth and washing her face, she first went into the other room of the hotel suite to shake Shen Yinuo, who was still fast asleep, awake.

Shen Yinuo writhed on the bed like a little snake, mumbling groggily, "Five minutes, let me sleep for five more minutes."

Looking at the sleep dress strap that had slipped off Shen Yinuo's shoulder, and the snowy, deep cleavage squeezed together as she lay on her side, Jiang Ningxi helplessly reached out to hook the strap back up for her.

As she hooked it, her movements stalled slightly; because it was so large and compressed while lying on her side, the strap was actually a bit stuck.

The Little Red Riding Hood girl Jiang Ningxi looked down at her own barren region that was still waiting for a second growth spurt, and feeling a surge of irritation, she directly shook Shen Yinuo awake and said, "Stop sleeping. Today's schedule is quite full, the makeup artist will be here soon, hurry up and brush your teeth and wash your face!"

"Got it, Mother Jiang!" Shen Yinuo kicked off the quilt and sat up on the bed. After being dazed for five seconds, she quickly lay flat again like a plump corpse.

"One minute, just one minute." Before Shen Yinuo had even finished speaking, her buttocks suffered a heavy blow.

Although this wealthy young lady of Xinyu loved to stay in bed, she didn't have any morning grumpiness. After feeling the pain, she obediently went to the bathroom to wash up, speaking incoherently to Jiang Ningxi, who was leaning against the bathroom door, while brushing her teeth.

"Mother Jiang, you hit me again. I was playing on my phone late in the room last night, but there was a reason for it!" Shen Yinuo began to rinse her mouth: "Gurgle gurgle gurgle~"

Jiang Ningxi looked at her buttocks under the sleep dress, recalling the sensation from just a moment ago. She had always been puzzled as to why the flesh on Shen Yinuo's body was so soft; the feel was ridiculously good, truly like a woman made of water.

"Every time you stay up late playing on your phone, you say there's a reason. You always have more excuses," Jiang Ningxi mocked, long since accustomed to it.

After Shen Yinuo finished rinsing, she wiped her lips with a disposable face towel from her makeup bag and said, "Oh, it was because of Luo Mo last night!"

"Seriously, I couldn't sleep because he kept tossing me about. This man is too good at tossing people!" Shen Yinuo said.

"Hmm?" Jiang Ningxi's eyebrows shot up sharply, and her already cold face instantly gathered frost.

I told you to read more books long ago. What kind of demonic vocabulary and lewd words are these?

After wiping the white foam from the corners of her mouth, Shen Yinuo said, "His song, 'Big Fish', has caused a sensation."

"I know that. I saw it climbing very high on the charts, an air drop directly." Jiang Ningxi was quite sensitive to Luo Mo's data.

Shen Yinuo nodded and said, "I'm not studying his data and charts. I don't look at those; the more I look, the more jealous I get. I was scrolling through Weibo yesterday to see the evaluations of this 'Big Fish' by well-known music critics."

"Whoa, let me tell you. When we released the title track of our last album, the company sent these music critics such large red envelopes, and they only wrote a tiny bit!"

"Good grief, when they wrote about this 'Big Fish' by Luo Mo, the word count was like it didn't cost money! The word count doubled, and the vocabulary was all-encompassing. I was stunned just looking at those adjectives."

Jiang Ningxi now understood why Shen Yinuo had stayed up late.

She picked up her phone, opened Weibo, and saw that Luo Mo's "Big Fish" was still hanging on the Hot Search list.

Half of it was because the popularity was too high, and the other half was due to the collaboration between Ning Dan and Weibo.

As for whether money was spent to grease the palms of the music critics, Jiang Ningxi didn't know.

But it was clear that the music critics' evaluation of this "Big Fish" was still very high.

The reason was simple: some music critics don't look at a singer's background, while others value it highly, dividing singers into different ranks and looking down on internet singers, Idols, and talent show singers.

Many music critics earn money from these people while secretly despising them in their hearts.

Of course, it also had to do with the fact that the skill levels among these types of singers were indeed too uneven.

In this regard, the girl group Aurora Girls had a lot of experience and understood the "Spring and Autumn" writing style of music critics very well.

So Jiang Ningxi could tell at a glance that the music critics were praising it sincerely and truly liked the song.

This phenomenon was almost identical to when "Big Fish" first appeared on Earth.

At that time, it also triggered a carnival among music critics.

Those with greater fame, like 【Er Di】, would write a new piece every time a new version of "Big Fish" was released.

Before this, Zhou Shen's popularity wasn't actually that high, and his company was even a bit of a drag, with very weak ability to pull strings.

"Big Fish" was the turning point of his career, and it was precisely because of this that when Zhou Shen participated in "Singer", he chose to perform this "Big Fish", which was of extraordinary significance to him, in the very first performance.

Shen Yinuo turned around and, seeing Jiang Ningxi constantly scrolling through her phone, leaned over and said, "How is it? Envious of your old deskmate? This kind of treatment is something we can't get even if we spend money."

Jiang Ningxi didn't speak and fell silent.

The reason was simple: several of Aurora Girls' songs were written and composed by her...

No one praising them meant her level wasn't good enough.

She knew Shen Yinuo didn't mean it, and Shen Yinuo had no face to mock her anyway; after all, Xinyu was her family's, and the songs that Xinyu tried so hard to get other internal songwriters to produce weren't any better than what Jiang Ningxi wrote herself. Everyone was equally mediocre.

The current situation of Aurora Girls was that their traffic was high enough and their fan base was huge, but they had too few breakout works and lacked a few songs that could hold the stage.

Jiang Ningxi put down her phone, feeling a sense of loss.

"I used to be the one tutoring him," she thought to herself, feeling dejected.

The student had progressed too quickly, causing her, the teacher, to lose a bit of face.

Shen Yinuo naturally didn't know about the past between the two during middle school. She looked at Jiang Ningxi, blinked, and said, "Jiang Jiang, look at this 'Big Fish', it's clearly tailor-made by Luo Mo for Tong Shu, right?"

"Mm, that's obvious. This song maximizes Tong Shu's advantages," Jiang Ningxi nodded.

"Then look, since he's so amazing in this regard, could he also tailor-make something for us?" Shen Yinuo had a new idea.

"Hmm?" Hearing this, Jiang Ningxi's mind also became active.

But she couldn't immediately adapt to this shift in roles.

I used to be his mentor...

"You go and beg him. Even if our Xinyu can't sign him in the end, we should at least get a few songs. We Aurora Girls are actually quite great too, have him tailor-make something for us," Shen Yinuo said.

"You go if you want to. 'Quite great', 'tailor-make' indeed." Jiang Ningxi looked up and down at Shen Yinuo's exaggerated parts; this wouldn't be easy to measure.

Feeling her gaze, Shen Yinuo couldn't help but pinch the plump thigh of this Leg Fairy, saying as she pinched, "Heh, I think the company shouldn't promote you as a female academic star anymore; you're clearly a female beast!"

She didn't know that Jiang Ningxi was forcibly changing the subject; she really couldn't do it, at least for now.

"I'm not going, anyway," Jiang Ningxi said. "You're a member of Aurora Girls and a company shareholder. If the songs sell like crazy, you'll be the one making the big money, so you should be the one to lead the charge."

"Pfft, I think you're just an old classmate who can't let go of your pride and wants to put on airs!" Shen Yinuo scoffed at her and said, "I'll go if I have to. Men, they're easy to handle. I see it said on the internet that it's a man's nature to love being a teacher, always having 'imparting all one's knowledge' on their lips, just loving to be a mentor."

"Let him teach me how to produce a hit song!"

Jiang Ningxi, who knew the profoundness of Huaxia culture well, felt her mouth twitch as she listened to these words, and she said weakly and softly, "It's not the kind of 'imparting all one's knowledge' you're thinking of, nor is it the 'mentor' you're thinking of. The characters are different..."

Having read too many books, I've ended up understanding all sorts of messy things instead.

Shen Yinuo didn't hear clearly and said, "Huh? What did you say? It's just the two of us here, why are you speaking so softly?"

"It's nothing," Jiang Ningxi maintained her cold, detached demeanor.

Shen Yinuo knew this damn woman was two-faced and likely hadn't said anything nice, so she stopped asking, saving herself the trouble of being snubbed.

However, Jiang Ningxi's refusal to help only further ignited her fighting spirit.

"Hmph! Even without using our old classmate connection, I can still handle him on my own!" Shen Yinuo held her head high and chest out, full of energy and fighting spirit, and said, "My dad told me not to take men too seriously; there isn't a man in this world his daughter can't handle!"

"President Shen is lying to you," Jiang Ningxi said directly.

My dear young lady, your dad is afraid of you being deceived by men with bad intentions; can you even tell the difference!

What greeted her was a flurry of wild punches from an infuriated Shen Yinuo.

And just at this moment, both women's phones rang simultaneously.

They opened them, took one look, exchanged glances, and showed expressions of surprise.

In WeChat, Chen Shanqi, that quasi-First-line Singer from Xinyu, had created a group chat for the three of them.

Chen Shanqi was crying and complaining frantically in the group.

She had planned to use her new album to charge for the First-line throne, but it was one thing that the first song on the album had been ridden over by "Confession Night" for a week. The second song, which she had high ambitions for, was instantly crushed on the charts by "Big Fish"!

She had only one purpose in creating this group.

"Xiao Shen, Jiang Jiang, I guessed the recording progress of 'Creating Idols'; the second public performance should be finished recording by now, right? Is the song from Luo Mo's public performance strong?"

"If the quality is still very high, help me ask Director Ning Dan whether this song will be broadcast in the first or second half of the third episode."

Although she spoke rather cryptically, both women understood what she meant.

Chen Shanqi wanted to calculate the broadcast time so she could avoid Luo Mo's upcoming new songs, making it easier to compete for the charts!

Has a Newcomer who hasn't even debuted yet reached such a level?

Even a quasi-First-line Singer has to avoid his sharp edge!

The new book has broken 100,000 collections; 130,000 words and 100,000 collections, a joyous and congratulatory occasion.

(End of this chapter)