"Ding dong!"

The phone lit up, and the avatar on the messaging app flashed: "Fox requests to add you as a friend."

Inside the club, Mr. Carter casually tapped "accept," and a video chat window popped up. Both sides were using virtual avatars. On this end was a sleazy old raccoon, on the other, a seductive fox.

"May I ask if you are 'I Love Monica Bellucci'?"

"Yes, and you are?"

"I'm from Tianyuan Entertainment. We're reaching out about your competition entry. We want to buy out the copyright to this song. What do you think?"

Oh!

Mr. Carter turned to look at William Clark, who was playing cards nearby. William Clark had heard as well and waved at him.

"We don't intend to sell the copyright."

"I hope you'll reconsider. As long as you sell the copyright and withdraw from the competition, we're willing to offer 300,000. That's quite good for a newcomer."

"Sorry, we really don't plan to sell."

"Alright then, but let me remind you, there should be some harsh clauses in your contract... Please think it over. You can contact me anytime if you change your mind!"

The fox went offline.

"Huh, she's not going to push harder?"

Mr. Carter was puzzled. William Clark thought for a moment and contacted Evelyn: "Little Evelyn, pull up the contract for me, I want to take another look."

So the contract was pulled up, and he read through it line by line, quickly finding a clause:

"Contestants who advance to the finals will automatically sign with Huihuang Entertainment. The company will have full authority to manage the contestant and their work, develop them for the market, and share the revenue, blah blah blah..."

Tsk tsk!

William Clark marveled. It's the same everywhere. Didn't "Super Girl" also sign for eight years?

"What does that mean?" Evelyn asked.

"It means they'll squeeze us dry, give us a little money, and once we're no longer valuable, they'll kick us to the curb."

"How shameless!"

"It's just business, making money. Nothing to be ashamed of."

William Clark was used to it.

For example, for instance! In real life, on a certain online platform, a production company wants to make a show and broadcast it on the platform. The platform says, we have our own actors—if you want to air it, use them.

The production company says fine, but some of your actors really can't be leads, I need to find someone from outside.

The platform says sure, but sign a split contract.

What's a split contract?

If you want to be the lead, from now on, for all your contracts and all the money you make, you have to give half to our platform!

Impressive, right?

So impressive! Even the old gangs never did this!

"Should we accept Tianyuan's offer? At least it's 300,000." Evelyn was startled. Someone who picked up scraps had never encountered this kind of world.

"Trying to buy a goddess for 300,000? Dream on!"

"So what do we do?"

"Just let it be!"

...

The news got back to Tianyuan.

David Young snorted. He'd seen plenty of these overconfident types—most of them flashed by like shooting stars and vanished without a trace.

He didn't get the song, so naturally, he didn't need to be nice.

...

In the blink of an eye, three episodes of Supernova had aired.

Evelyn and Mr. Carter received their performance order and broadcast time.

This show really had a huge audience. Each person could only vote for one contestant, and after three episodes, the top contestant had over a million likes.

100,000 likes earned one star, 1,000,000 likes two stars, 10,000,000 three stars, 100,000,000 four stars... Getting two stars meant that, riding the wave of popularity, this newcomer could at least earn a year's worth of income.

William Clark didn't even need to look to know that this must be a newcomer heavily promoted by some company.

Although fake likes were forbidden, you could still buy bot votes—it just cost more.

And as the competition date approached, William Clark couldn't help but get nervous.

"The great wind rises, the clouds fly high!"

"There must be wind, there must be meat; there must be hotpot, there must be mist; there must be beauties, there must be donkeys!"

"There are three things I must do: fairness, fairness, and fucking fairness!"

At night, Evelyn and William Clark watched a movie together.

She'd recently gotten hooked on art films from 2021, binge-watching every night. Today, William Clark suddenly picked out "Let the Bullets Fly." She didn't really like it—mainly because she couldn't understand it.

"Why do you want to watch this? Is it really that good?"

"I'm a bit nervous too, so I need some strength."

"Him? Him?"

Evelyn pointed at a man on the screen—big ears, stubbly beard, a domineering monkey-like face. "He can give you strength? Or is it this guy, this one..."

She pointed at another man, pale-skinned, with an extremely sleazy vibe. "He can give you strength too?"

"Coming to your world is like stepping on a cloud—can't touch the sky above, can't reach the ground below. So I need to see something familiar. You wouldn't understand..."

William Clark simply handed her the phone and went off to play Dou Dizhu.

He himself watched "Let the Bullets Fly" again for who knows how many times, still feeling empty inside. After sitting in a daze for a while, he suddenly grabbed Evelyn's computer, did some fiddling, and started making avatars again.

But this time, it wasn't beauties—it was those two guys from the movie.

After he finished, he sent the little Taoist to the background, and put those two guys on either side of the screen, one left, one right. He typed a few lines, set up the voice program, and stared at the screen:

"Old Jiang?"

"What the fuck do you want?"