Chapter 139

Nine-Bend Slope—just like its name suggested—was a place of winding paths and twisting mountain roads. The trail curved and coiled endlessly, and more than once, they’d be walking along only to find the path abruptly cut off. Then the guide would suddenly veer to the side, and—bam!—a bamboo ladder would be hanging down from above.

The director was on the verge of a breakdown. They had brought so much equipment—how were they supposed to get it all up there?

After huddling together at the base of the cliff for a quick strategy session, they decided to send a few of the stronger crew members up first. Once they reached the top, they dropped down ropes, and with the help of some woven baskets generously lent by the locals, they managed to haul up the filming gear.

Of course, all that sweat and effort didn’t go to waste—the director made sure to capture the whole ordeal for the behind-the-scenes reel. Later, they could post it on the official video channel. For web dramas, keeping up the buzz was crucial, and for die-hard fans waiting for Season Two, these fresh behind-the-scenes clips were their only sustenance.

Thankfully, they had notified the village in advance. Village Chief Lei Jiang personally brought over a dozen strong men to help. Without them, the so-called “mountaineering equipment” the crew had brought—more for show than function—would have been utterly useless against the treacherous terrain of Nine-Bend Slope.

“This is what they call crossing mountains and rivers!” someone joked as they passed beneath a rushing waterfall. At long last, the crew arrived at the Village Committee’s headquarters.

Calling it the Village Committee might’ve been a stretch. Space was tight in the village, and here in Nine-Bend Slope, the Village Committee shared its building with the Lei Clan’s Ancestral Hall. The structure was a grand, traditional courtyard house with gray brick walls and high eaves. A bold plaque hung above the entrance, inscribed with imposing characters: Lei Ancestral Hall.

To the side were two white signs with red lettering. One read: Jiu Qu Township, Nine-Bend Slope Village Party Branch Committee. The other: Jiu Qu Township, Nine-Bend Slope Village Residents Committee.

The crew couldn’t help but feel a little awkward. Should they be lighting incense for the Lei ancestors first, or heading in for a meeting with the Village Committee? Ahem…

Village Party Secretary Lei Yang, clearly used to this setup, didn’t bat an eye. He strode ahead and led them straight into the largest room in the Ancestral Hall.

At the front of the room stood rows of ancestral tablets for the Lei forebears. Beneath them was a long conference table. It was obvious this space doubled as the Village Committee’s meeting room. During the New Year, they probably just moved the table out of the way for ancestral rites.

Sharing an “office” with their ancestors—if that wasn’t proof of how little spare land Nine-Bend Slope had for a separate administrative building, nothing was.

Once everyone was seated, before Wei Sheng and the others could even speak, Lei Yang called out, “Guests have arrived!” Moments later, someone came in with a red lacquered tea tray, serving hot tea and snacks.

The fruit, unsurprisingly, was the village’s specialty: Navel Oranges. They had picked only the highest grade—each one weighed nearly half a kilo, far too big for one person to finish alone.

The tea was a local high-mountain green. Before they started growing Navel Oranges, Nine-Bend Slope used to cultivate tea. It was a rustic, hand-fried variety—not much to look at, and sold for thirty yuan a pound at the local market. Just enough to make ends meet.

Now that the entire village had switched to Navel Oranges, the trees—large and spaced far apart to ensure fruit yield—left gaps where some families still kept a few tea bushes. Surprisingly, the tea grew even better than before. The orange trees filtered the sunlight, mellowing the bitterness of the native tea and giving it a delicate citrus aroma.

Wei Sheng took a sip and his eyes lit up. He asked Lei Yang if the village could sell him some—he wanted to bring some back as gifts.

Lei Yang smiled and promised to ask around.

After tea came the snacks. The crew had assumed that given Nine-Bend Slope’s remote location and difficult access, supplies would be scarce and food would be basic. Before coming, they had stocked up on instant noodles, sausages, instant coffee, chocolate, and other rations. But on their very first day, the villagers’ hospitality completely shattered those assumptions.

Down the center of the long conference table, ten red lacquer trays were neatly lined up. Each tray held four small porcelain dishes filled with puffed rice candy, roasted peanuts, stir-fried fava beans, and steamed rice cakes laid on fresh corn leaves. The rice cakes were snowy white and glutinous, each one marked with a festive red dot from the tip of a chopstick.

Wei Sheng thought that was all, but soon after, dozens of bowls of brown sugar-boiled eggs were brought out—one for each person.

“Come on, have a bite to fill your stomach. We’ll talk while we eat!” Lei Yang warmly invited them to enjoy the snacks and sugar water.

This was a local tradition. With Nine-Bend Slope’s steep and treacherous paths, even locals were exhausted by the time they climbed home from the foot of the mountain. Their stomachs would be growling. Families with better means would crack an egg into a bowl, add a couple spoonfuls of brown sugar, and serve it up to replenish energy.

In the past, when times were tough, most families only made this treat when relatives visited during the New Year. On regular days, they made do with roasted potatoes or sticky rice cakes warmed over the hearth.

After downing a warm bowl of brown sugar egg soup, the whole crew felt human again. Back when they first came to Langshan, they thought mountain roads weren’t so bad. But now, having trekked through Nine-Bend Slope, they realized those earlier trails were nothing compared to this.

Case in point: after nearly two hours of hiking, their legs were trembling uncontrollably.

Fortunately, this was just a short series shoot, and the crew numbered only about twenty. Including the escorts Jiang Xiaoman had brought from Langshan, they totaled just over thirty people. The villagers of Nine-Bend Slope had helped them borrow two residential houses to settle in.

After the crew settled in, they got to work the very next day. Short dramas are all about being fast, punchy, and efficient. Plus, the website was pushing hard for updates, so the entire team was running like they were on a sugar high—hell-bent on churning out ten seasons in one go if they could. If they slowed down, copycats would flood in, mimicking their format and stealing their thunder. Word on the street was that the industry was scrambling to find screenwriters who could do legal education-style scripts. No way were they going to let others snatch away their rice bowl.

While the crew was busy, Wei Sheng wasn’t exactly sitting idle either. Caught in the middle of a contract dispute, he couldn’t go live himself to promote products for the folks back in Nine-Bend Slope. But hey, that’s what Jiang Xiaoman was for.

“Leave it to me. Nine-Bend Slope’s part of our Langshan too, and these Navel Oranges are a local specialty,” Jiang Xiaoman said with a cheerful smile, not mentioning a word about Wei Sheng being blacklisted all over the internet.

Even before the scandal blew up, Wei Sheng had already messaged all his friends privately, asking them not to take sides or speak up for him online. Jiang Xiaoman didn’t quite understand why, but he trusted that if Wei Sheng’s agent was planning to bail with the whole team, they wouldn’t throw them under the bus in the process.

“Alright! You go live and sell for a couple of days, see how it goes. If there’s still stock left, I’ll figure something out on my end. Worst case, we’ll get the crew to do a livestream and help sell it!”

Having uninstalled all his social media apps, Wei Sheng had no idea that his and Shen Yi’s family backgrounds and personal details had already been dug up and were spreading like wildfire online. Especially his. Somehow, someone with serious skills had even tracked down Wei Zhiyong’s hometown!

In the video, Wei Sheng’s father and grandmother were shown living in an old house with tiles falling off the walls, clearly struggling to make ends meet. The elderly woman, claiming to be Wei Sheng’s biological grandmother, sobbed into the camera, saying her second grandson had never once returned to visit her, didn’t care whether they lived or died. His father was unemployed, stuck at home with no income. When he tried asking his son for some money to get by, Wei Sheng’s mother supposedly stopped him…

In short, the blogger’s video was sending a very clear message to netizens—especially Wei Sheng’s fans: Look! The idol you worship, who’s always promoting his image as someone who helps the poor and supports rural communities, doesn’t even care about his own father and grandmother!

The narrative was spun masterfully, and public opinion exploded.

The average gossip-hungry viewer didn’t know anything about the dirty laundry of the Wei family. All they saw was a poor, honest farmer and a bedridden grandmother living in a run-down house. They were so frugal they wouldn’t even use gas to cook. Wei Sheng’s father had to chop firewood in the mountains and cook on a makeshift stove in the yard. The kitchen had collapsed, and they didn’t have the money to fix it…

Damn! Wei Sheng wasn’t some D-list nobody anymore. He had two hit variety shows under his belt and over a dozen endorsements. Rumor had it that his contract dispute with the TV station stemmed from him starting his own company. Someone reported him, and rather than give it up, he decided to break ties and go solo.

With that kind of career, he was probably making tens of millions a year, right?

Making that much money, donating to impoverished areas, setting up a “Foundation for the Aid of Elderly People Living Alone”—he was even willing to help complete strangers. And yet, he could just stand by and watch his own grandmother suffer back in the village?

The smear campaign was well-executed. But unfortunately for them, they underestimated the courage of a mother protecting her child.

Hu Qianqian was usually easygoing, but when it came to her son, she had a bottom line.

Seeing the internet flooded with accusations that her son was unfilial and heartless, and even people defending Wei Zhiyong and Wei Laoniang, saying things like “There’s no such thing as bad parents,” and “No matter what, Wei Zhiyong is still his biological father. With tens of millions in income a year, couldn’t he spare a few hundred thousand to support his dad?”

Then there were the so-called Internet Saints defending Wei Laoniang, saying she was just a simple rural woman who only knew her two sons—one successful, one not. So what if she wanted the successful one to help out the other? How could Wei Sheng hold a grudge against an uneducated old woman from the countryside? She was his grandmother, after all. Not going back to visit for years, not even giving her a single cent—wasn’t that just cold-blooded?

Wei Sheng might’ve unplugged from social media, but Hu Qianqian hadn’t. Zhou Mingxing had forgotten to warn her to stay offline, and the result was that she ended up hiding in the storage room of her shop, clutching her cat, scrolling through Weibo with tears streaming down her face.

Liang Yi got a call from Xiang Hong, dropped everything, and rushed over. He found her in the storage room, sitting on a tiny plastic stool, trying not to cry out loud, her eyes and nose red and puffy. The sight made Liang Yi’s heart ache. He didn’t care about propriety anymore—he crouched down, opened his arms, and gave Hu Qianqian a warm, solid hug.

“Don’t be sad. I’ll make them pay for this!”

His fierce tone startled Hu Qianqian, and she hiccuped involuntarily, looking dazed and pitiful—adorable, even. Liang Yi couldn’t help himself. He reached out to gently wipe the tears from her face, his voice softening without him realizing it.

“Qianqian, did you forget what I do for a living?”

“Don’t believe a word of what they’re saying online. They’re just jealous of Wei Sheng’s success and trying to use public opinion to drag him down and steal his opportunities.”

“If you really can’t stand them spreading lies and smearing Wei Sheng’s name, then how about this—hire me as your legal rep. I’ll send cease-and-desist letters to every single one of them. I swear, I won’t let a single one of those bullies off the hook!”

“Pfft~ You make it sound like you’re some overbearing CEO, throwing around legal threats left and right.” Hu Qianqian burst out laughing through her tears.

She knew, deep down, that most people online didn’t know the full story. They saw a clipped, contextless video and thought it was the truth. Some probably didn’t even mean harm—they just thought Wei Sheng was in the wrong and wanted to persuade him to be more forgiving, to not hold grudges against the elderly.

They had no idea how much psychological damage Wei Laoniang’s favoritism and spite had inflicted on Wei Sheng. Nor did they understand the harm Wei Zhiyong’s neglect had done to both her and their child.

“If they don’t know, then you tell them!” Liang Yi looked sternly at Hu Qianqian. “I know you want to protect Xiao Sheng. There are some things he can’t say as the younger generation—it’s up to you, his mother, to speak on his behalf.”

Hu Qianqian’s mind was a complete mess. Only now did she begin to bitterly regret not continuing her studies when she was young, just because she didn’t want to suffer.

If she’d been well-educated—if she were as capable as Liang Yi—she wouldn’t have to hide here crying. If anyone dared bully her son, she’d slap them with a lawyer’s letter and sue them into the ground!

At that thought, Hu Qianqian pouted and suddenly grabbed the sleeve of Liang Yi’s suit, her voice trembling with tears. “Liang Yi, c-can you help me?”

Liang Yi’s heart nearly melted at her crying. How could he possibly say no?

“Of course! Don’t cry. I’m here.”

(End of Chapter)