Chapter 233 - 189: Breaking Out! Z’s Saturation Bombardment

Lin Xia even saw dozens of accounts controlled by Z skillfully starting flame wars.

Using snarky, passive-aggressive language that looked incredibly familiar—as if it had graduated from the darkest corners of the internet—they instantly set off a few doubters, kicking off flame wars that stretched for hundreds of replies.

Lin Xia: "..."

’Pretty good, it’s adding to the hype! And the comment section isn’t entirely just flame wars...’

To be fair, most manufactured comments have a distinctly bot-like feel to them.

On many social media platforms, you can tell at a glance that the comments are being deliberately controlled... That kind of cookie-cutter praise is just too obvious.

But now, anyone who saw the comments under these trending topics... would never think it was astroturfing! They’d never think they were bots.

It was too chaotic.

It was a veritable who’s who of internet trolls, old and young. You could tell at a glance that they’d all done postgraduate work on the most unhinged forums online...

Snark, metaphors, praise, criticism, surreal memes... it had everything! Anyone who didn’t know better would think the forum dwellers were having a get-together.

Of course, the posts from Z’s sock puppet accounts weren’t all praise. Some were deliberate criticisms and doubts, but the criticisms were so moronic that anyone with a normal IQ couldn’t stand to read them...

It even provoked many normal listeners who had become fans of the songs to join the debate!

"...Ah Zhu, I suspect my grand-niece has dissociative identity disorder! She must have split into at least a thousand personalities..." Lin Xia said with heartfelt conviction.

Chu Bamboo: "..."

"Oh my god, Douyin is blowing up too! It’s a trending topic... Right now, the live viewer count is 1.24 million people! And it’s still climbing, this is insane..."

"Damn! Of the one or two thousand videos posted on Douyin, some of them have already broken ten thousand likes... How long has it even been? At this rate, getting a few videos with a hundred thousand likes will be no problem at all... I just wonder if we can get one with a million."

Lin Xia’s voice grew excited again. He tapped into a certain pink-themed app, glanced at it, and saw a meme remix video that had appeared out of nowhere on the charts...

Although the video was only ranked twentieth at the moment, its popularity was climbing steadily at a terrifying pace.

Tapping into the video, Lin Xia watched the sparse bullet comments scroll across the screen.

"Leaving my mark before this blows up! If it doesn’t, I’ll livestream myself eating three pounds of shit."

"Another one looking for a free meal... Look, man, we’re not unreasonable here! If you want to freeload, just do it. Why bother making a vow?"

"66666666!"

Meanwhile, the comment section below the video was just a sea of question marks.

"? What’s going on?"

"This song is really good... but how come I’ve never heard it before?"

"I think I might have time-traveled... this is too ridiculous! I checked the song’s release date—it was just a couple of days ago, and there’s already a meme video out today? This has to be a new song, right? I searched for it online, and there isn’t even a proper encyclopedia entry yet... Is that right?"

"What the hell? You’re telling me this is a new song... I thought it was a classic from twenty years ago! A song with this kind of style can still be produced in today’s shallow society... Are you kidding me?"

"The only thing that confuses me is why so many new songs were released at the same time... Don’t tell me this Chu Bamboo person has been hoarding songs for years and then just dumped them all at once?"

"This Chu Bamboo is really something! So, can anyone tell me if Chu Bamboo is a man or a woman?"

"Why are people asking that here too? Did you guys just come over from next door? The comment section on Douyin is also full of people asking the same thing!"

"It’s more than that, the question is already trending on Weibo... Wait, doesn’t this kind of thing usually stay on one website? How come I’m seeing this on every platform I go to... Is this the power of the algorithm?"

"It’s on the charts of every platform, and you’re still blaming the algorithm?!"

"Is it possible that this isn’t a marketing campaign, but it just genuinely went viral and broke out of its niche?"

"Is that what ’going viral’ means... I don’t get it, I don’t understand it, but I am utterly floored!"

As he watched, Lin Xia couldn’t hide his excitement. "Hey, the hype is absolutely perfect right now... so, about that AI Idol plan, are you in or not? If you agree, I’ll get on it right away... We can use this to fuel the fire! It looks like it’s already broken into the mainstream; we have to seize this opportunity."

"Oh, right, and your novel... you should post more, I’m still following it... I mean," Lin Xia cleared his throat and said righteously, "What I mean is, we can incorporate it into this whole publicity blitz! Let it blow up along with everything else. The traffic from this is huge right now! And it’s still growing! We should ride this momentum; we’ll get twice the results with half the effort."

Chu Bamboo: "..."

’We’re this close, you don’t need to come up with such a lame excuse, do you?’

Rubbing the bridge of his nose, Chu Bamboo thought for a moment before saying, "You can discuss it with your grand-niece. I’ve basically handed over all the novel-publishing stuff to her anyway. If she thinks it’s a good idea, then go for it."

After that, Chu Bamboo hung up the phone. After a slight hesitation, he also sent a message to Zhao Shao, indicating his agreement to the AI idol plan.

Zhao Shao: "?"

Chu Bamboo: "?"

Zhao Shao: "Is it possible... that I’m right next to Ah Xia right now, watching him talk to you?"

Chu Bamboo: "???"

’Wait, since when did you two get so close? Is it just because you slept together last night?!’

After a long silence, Chu Bamboo sent a message, "Well, I won’t disturb you two then!"

Zhao Shao: "???"

...

"An AI idol, huh." Chu Bamboo put away his phone, a strange light glinting in his eyes. ’If I really become... just like it was recorded in my good brother’s diary... the single biggest sensation of this era! Then with just a single sentence, I could probably...’

Chu Bamboo pursed his lips. With the influence of a top-tier celebrity, he could export certain ideas and naturally attract the attention and trust of many people.

Gaining immense fame, achieving all sorts of massive accomplishments... these were all excellent strategies for raising his status level in Nuwa’s future evaluation... without having to join the Official system.

No, even without considering his future status, simply becoming an opinion leader... would also be helpful for the future! After all, he was supposed to save the world... If he really ran into trouble, or if something big happened, he could just get online and make a single post, and that would at least solve the problem of information dissemination—then again, with Z around, spreading information was never really a problem.

After a moment’s hesitation, Chu Bamboo decided to see for himself and opened Douyin. After hearing Lin Xia hype it up so much, he was also a bit curious about what exactly was going on...

Chu Bamboo only had to swipe a couple of times before a video playing a familiar song appeared in front of him.

He liked just one related video, and the next thing he knew, it was like he’d poked a hornet’s nest; they started appearing one after another. He even got five or six in a row...

Clicking his tongue, Chu Bamboo jumped to other platforms and skimmed through them, the corner of his eye twitching. These comments... they were just too surreal...

’Z, have you really only been studying stock market-related content?’

"Wait!" Chu Bamboo suddenly had a realization. "I think I get it now—why Z still hasn’t finished learning everything about the stock market."

’With this many operations, just how much computing power is it using?’

’Then again... with so much going on, I bet Lin Xia didn’t sleep at all last night...’

"I hope Lao Zhao got some sleep," Chu Bamboo worried for a moment. "Otherwise, what if he actually dies from overwork... Wait, if he suddenly died, wouldn’t Z be born immediately?"