Chapter 206

A pilot episode of less than two hours had practically blown every gossip-seeker on the internet out of hiding.

The bullet comments were so dense they were impossible to keep up with, so netizens took to the comment sections to vent their emotions.

“The part about selling corn to pay for the newspaper subscription really made me cry. I remember in elementary school, our class was required to subscribe to a children’s paper or something. Everyone had to get at least one magazine and one newspaper, which cost over fifty yuan total. We really had no money then. My dad went out at night to set eel traps, hoping to catch some to sell for my subscription, but he ended up getting bitten by a snake. He only made a dozen yuan from the eels, but the medical bill cost several hundred. I cried and said I didn’t want the subscription anymore, but my dad still borrowed fifty yuan from a neighbor for me. He said everyone else had it, and if I didn’t, my classmates would laugh at me.”

“Seeing Wen Zhuangcai is like a carbon copy of my childhood! My dad passed away early too, and my mom was weak and practiced blind filial piety^[1]. My dad had built a big house for us, but first my grandparents moved in, followed by my second uncle and my aunt’s family. Later, when my cousin got married, my second uncle actually had the nerve to say there wasn’t enough room. Since I was renting an apartment for work in the city anyway, he told me to take my mom to live with me to free up a wedding room for his son. Why? That was my family’s house!”

“I don’t understand why people are bashing Yan Xingxing’s father. Yes, he might not have the ability to make big money, but he’s doing his best, working himself to the bone so his wife and child can live a slightly better life. Does he not want to earn more? He just doesn’t have the knack for it. Some people just aren’t wired that way and only know how to earn money through hard labor. What can he do?”

When people saw others calling Wen Zhuangcai “selfish and unfilial” for supposedly leaving his mother in their hometown to be bullied and tortured by a wicked mother-in-law while he enjoyed a quiet life in the city, the netizens nearly exploded with rage.

Which ancient tomb hadn’t been sealed properly? How did ghosts from the Qing Dynasty^[2] manage to escape?

“Oh, right, right! Wen Zhuangcai should have stayed in the village so the mother and son could be bullied until they were forced to dig for wild vegetables every day. With no money for school, he’d end up working like an ox for his black-hearted uncle’s family. Is that what you call filial piety and virtuous character? Get lost!”

“I’ve moved the Giant Buddha of Leshan^[3] aside. Please, Saint Mother^[4] OP, take the seat of honor.”

“I’ll give you five yuan to change your IP address from Province A to Province B, okay? Just to clarify: we in Province A don’t have this kind of brain-dead ‘Saint Mother’ syndrome.”

“As someone from Province B, I’m actually getting angry! Province B didn’t provoke the big brother from Province A. Let me clarify too: Province B doesn’t have this brain-dead ‘Saint Mother’ syndrome either.”

“I think the OP is right. He really shouldn’t have left his mother alone in the village. So, I’ve decided to start a crowdfunding campaign. Let’s all chip in to send the Saint Mother OP to Wen Zhuangcai’s hometown. Let him use ‘love’ to reform that old woman and the selfish uncle. Like this comment if you agree.”

“Good grief! I already had my forty-meter blade^[5] out. I almost hit an ally by mistake.”

“Too late, already slashed. Give the ally upstairs a proper burial. Also, I personally sponsor 250 yuan^[6] to send the Saint Mother OP to Wen Zhuangcai’s hometown. You better be properly filial to that old woman, you hear?”

Wei Sheng hadn’t expected Guagua Video’s ability to generate buzz to be this powerful. It was rumored that the cunning CEO Yao had even paid for water armies to flood major forums with brain-dead comments promoting mindless filial piety, doing everything possible to incite online warfare.

Even though they knew these idiotic comments were intentionally inflammatory or just clout-chasing for traffic, netizens still found themselves deeply emotionally invested.

This was especially true for those whose original families were similar to those in the pilot episode. Thinking about the bitterness and heartache their own families had endured over the years, and then seeing the suffocating, brain-dead “Saint Mother” comments online, they wanted nothing more than to crawl through the internet cables and start a fight on the spot!

How could there be so many “Saint Mothers” in the world who talked big because they weren’t the ones suffering?

Was Wen Zhuangcai’s mother pitiful? Her husband was dead, she was a woman alone with a child, and she was being schemed against by a wicked mother-in-law. Of course she was pitiful.

But shouldn’t Wen Zhuangcai be considered even more pitiful?

He clearly should have had a bright future. His father was hardworking and a good provider, his mother was gentle and virtuous, and he was so intelligent. He should have gone to university and changed his family’s destiny. But overnight, his father was gone, and his mother’s weakness and blind filial piety caused her to hand over their last bit of survival capital to others. This forced him to drop out of school at a young age to pick up trash just to feed himself. Is he not pitiful?

The most discussed topic was Yan Xingxing’s family.

This family was a true portrayal of countless families at the bottom of society!

None of them were bad people. The father was kind, the child was filial, and they were all hardworking. Even the grandparents weren’t nightmare relatives. The whole family was working hard to earn money, wanting the household to improve. On the surface, it seemed very positive and wholesome, right?

But in a family like this, no matter how hard they worked, there seemed to be an invisible wall surrounding them in a place called “poverty.”

Some worked themselves to death their whole lives without ever saving much. Like Yan Xingxing’s father, working over ten hours a day, his earnings might not even cover the cost of an Australian lobster for someone in the upper class.

Others might luckily come into a small fortune, but soon, countless relatives and friends would come knocking. A little borrowed here, a little borrowed there. Then there were parents who used “filial piety” to pressure them into “targeted poverty alleviation” for less successful siblings. They would forcibly pull back the one successful child who had a chance to change their fate, making them live at the same level as the other siblings, as if only then were they a “loving and harmonious” family.

With one hard-hitting, realistic topic after another, The Way of Shennong had only aired a pilot episode, yet its views and popularity immediately skyrocketed to the number one spot on Guagua Video’s variety show charts. Its total search volume was even higher than a hit drama currently airing on the platform. It could be said that before it even officially premiered, it had already secured the throne of a “phenomenal variety show of the year.”

Competitors were gnashing their teeth while holding overnight meetings. Groups of professionals repeatedly dissected and analyzed this competitive variety show, The Way of Shennong, which had suddenly hijacked the trending searches.

There were no A-list celebrities, no dramatic catfights, and no scandals. It was just a story about a few teenagers from a poverty-stricken mountain region. Hadn’t people seen plenty of these tear-jerking stories before in poverty alleviation programs or TV news reports?

So, what exactly was the audience so moved by?

Could it all be paid shills hired by Guagua Video?

“Wait! Rewind it. Pull it back to those segments where the bullet comments suddenly get dense,” a leader suddenly spoke up.

The subordinates quickly dragged the video back to the beginning. Fortunately, they had already watched this teaser several times and had a general idea of where the screen became cluttered with comments. Sure enough, as soon as they rewound, everyone realized where the issue lay.

“Guagua Video… they’ve really hit the public’s nerve!” the executives of their old rival, Baitu Video (White Rabbit Video), lamented.

Moreover, they had struck a nerve with the grassroots commoners who make up the vast majority of society.

This “nerve” wasn’t the typical, overexposed gap in welfare benefits like healthcare, education, or elderly care. Likely to ensure they passed censorship, Guagua Video didn’t recklessly test the waters with those dangerous topics that often face immediate bans. Instead, through a series of seemingly mundane small incidents, they vividly portrayed the helplessness of children from grassroots families – those who try desperately to change their fate, only to be knocked back to square one by various accidents time and again.

In this way, it wasn’t just the common people currently at the bottom of society who felt a deep sense of empathy. Even successful individuals who had originally come from poor backgrounds and luckily changed their fates through hard work could hardly avoid having their childhood memories stirred.

Truly successful tragedies are sometimes not about blood feuds spanning three lifetimes or heart-wrenching life-and-death separations. Instead, they are the things that seem like no big deal to outsiders, yet remain a lifelong source of regret and pain for the people involved.

There was one plot point in the teaser that drew an extraordinary number of comments from viewers returning for a second or third watch. A young girl was already a veteran herb gatherer in her village at a tender age. The reason behind it was almost unbelievable.

It was simply because the family was poor. The girl’s second older sister couldn’t afford a new school uniform that cost 280 yuan. To save money, her mother bought fabric herself and imitated the style and color of the new uniform to sew a “knock-off” version for her daughter.

The materials used for the “knock-off” were actually better than the ones the school purchased in bulk, and the stitching was sturdy and well-fitted. However, because it lacked the machine-embroidered school crest, the older sister was mocked by her entire class. She was cornered in a hallway and ridiculed by several female students. In her shame and indignation, she jumped from the top floor of the school.

After bringing home the broken and twisted body of her daughter from the school, the mother knelt before her like a madwoman, slapping her own face repeatedly. That night, she drank pesticide and committed suicide.

Is it hard to imagine? A 280-yuan school uniform literally cost two lives.

Only those who have truly lived in such an environment can understand how difficult that 280 yuan can be.

After her mother and sister died, the little girl finally understood a truth: the dignity of the poor is bought with money. If she could have produced that 280 yuan, her mother and sister would not have died.

From then on, the girl began to shamelessly follow the old herbalists in the village, watching what kind of herbs they gathered. Every weekend, she would wander through the markets to see how much the herbs on the stalls were selling for and which ones were the most expensive.

The girl’s reason for signing up for the show was also very simple:

First, she wanted to study under a famous master. She heard that the more famous the teacher, the more capable the students they produced.

Second, she wanted to make it into the top eight, because every top-eight contestant would be provided with a job by Yuanxi Biotech.

This young girl, who came to the show with such blatant pragmatism, was not there for a dream, yet she earned the sympathy of all the netizens.

She was a girl who didn’t have the right to have a dream. In her world, all dreams required the support of money, and the thing her family lacked most was money.

In the bullet comments and the review section, countless teenagers and young adults who had once abandoned their dreams for the sake of survival felt for the girl. They used their own life experiences to encourage her, telling her not to listen to what the internet trolls said.

Comments like “So young yet so materialistic” or “A doctor should have a benevolent heart; this girl is so greedy for money, she’ll definitely be an unscrupulous quack who loves taking kickbacks” were absolute nonsense!

As long as one’s medical skills are good and they can cure patients, there is no shame in earning money through one’s own ability.

Although studying medicine is grueling – to the point where medical students often joke that “encouraging someone to study medicine is inviting a lightning strike” – it is undeniable that among the three hundred and sixty professions, medicine is truly the most reliable path for children from humble families to improve their family’s economic situation.

As long as you don’t cause trouble, work hard, and climb the ranks step-by-step, then by the time you’re over forty, you’ll have at least a middle-class income, if not a high salary.

Seeing this, what was there left for Guagua Video’s competitors to not understand?

The show “The Way of Shennong” had truly mastered the art of using small things to reflect the big picture.

(End of Chapter)