There were two ways to wake up early.
For the disciplined, one would wake up early if they had also gone to bed early.
For complete academic failures, one could only wake up early if they had not slept last night.
For Lin Yu, who was a self-aware academic failure, making the effort to change for the better meant that he went to bed early last night. Due to that, he was woken up in a groggy state by several notification chimes.
The first thing he did upon opening his sleepy eyes was instinctively reach for his phone beside his pillow. After finding it, he lazily unlocked his phone and began scrolling through.
However, the moment his phone was unlocked, the groggy state he was in instantly faded away as he sprung up from his bed and sat upright.
Penguin's notifications: 99+
WeChat's notifications: 99+
"What on Earth?"
Sitting upright, Lin Yu was still slightly confused as he started checking WeChat as it was his most commonly used app. Immediately, his eyes were assaulted by a barrage of red notification bubbles. Upon checking the sender's profile, he noticed most of them were his highschool classmates whom he had not contacted in years.
"Holy sh*t! Old Lin, you're a bad*ss!"
When Lin Yu opened the first message, there was no buildup nor an ending to the text, so he found it slightly odd when he read it.
As he continued reading the other text messages, he noticed all of the text messages were pretty much the same. There were also occasional messages from people who thought that his name sounded familiar and asked, "This is you, right?"
More often than not, text messages like those would have a link attached to them. Judging from the shared description, it was most likely a video from B site.
Lin Yu randomly chose a link and clicked onto it. This caused him to exit WeChat and prompted the B site app to open, leading him to a video there.
[When Imagination Comes to Life, Prop Master Violently Battles A Thug. Explosive Force from The Exo Suit!]
Upon reading the video title, Lin Yu had a rough idea as to what had happened.
Just as he suspected, he saw that someone had actually recorded last night's incident when the video began playing.
It was such a horrible coincidence as the uploader was one of his attentive followers that even the name was familiar to him. It seemed to be one of the troll army's pillars of strength.
When the person had uploaded the video, they had even tagged a huge group of trolls. This was a good thing though, as the entire comment section became a verbal battlefield and resulted in the video gradually becoming viral. In addition to that, all kinds of major and minor uploaders were interacting in the comment section, making it an instant hit overnight, propelling the video to the most viral video on the site's daily rankings. There were also all sorts of discussions in the comment section. Some praised it, while some were skeptical and there were also others who called it a hoax with added video effects.
"Gasp!"
Lin Yu was shocked the instant he opened up his profile page.
A followers count of 700,000!
He had gained 500,000 new followers in a single night!
Moreover, whenever he refreshed his notification feed, B site would notify him of how many followers he gained. It would normally be between 20 to 30 followers and never more than that. Now, however, his new followers' count increased at a rate of hundreds and thousands whenever he refreshed his feed. It would actually be possible for his new followers count to accumulate more than 10,000 new followers if he waited a little longer.
He was stunned for a long while. It was only after he had refreshed his feed infinitely that he snapped out of his 'manic trance'. The first thing that came to his mind was, "I'm going to be rich."
Having followers meant that he would gain views, and gaining views meant revenue pay and most importantly, was EXP points to upgrade his items.
The crudely-made Exo Suit video had reached a terrifying 4,000,000 views. Even the Charge Blade and Lady Luck's Smile videos were growing virally at different rates and at the moment, their total views were still growing.
The ranking board for the day on B site was completely dominated by him. Ranked first was the video titled 'Exo Suit Violent Battle With a Street Thug', followed by his crudely-made Exo Suit video, Hextech Gauntlets, and all of Lin Yu's other recent uploads. The rest of the ranking board was similarly made videos. These were hastily made videos done in a night to hitch a ride on the viral train, titled, 'Prop Master's Exo Suit Analysis', 'True Combat Practicality of Prop Master's Exo Suit Discussion', and more.
After rough calculating, the Exo suit video alone would gain him more than 10,000 yuan. This was only his secondary priority as he was not in desperate need of money. However, the most urgent priority for him now was gaining EXP points for his equipment's upgrades.
Since he had continuously run into both the skinny, shriveled-up middle-aged man and Xu Zhaoyang, who had awakened their Superhuman abilities, he no longer had suspicions or assumed it was just pure luck toward the whole 'rejuvenation of spiritual energy' debacle. Although it was unknown to him how things would progress in the future, he knew for a fact right now that it would be a good time for him to grow stronger in order to defend himself.
Thud, thud, thud!
As Lin Yu was about to pick a few WeChat messages to reply, someone was knocking on his door.
Naturally, he took a quick glance at the time on his phone's display. It was 8am sharp in the morning. It seemed that the person who was knocking on his door had been waiting outside for a while and only began knocking right on time.
Lin Yu's heart skipped a couple of beats as a single thought flashed across his mind
Although becoming famous was a good thing for him, the truth of his superhuman abilities would now have a higher chance of being exposed due to the increasing following and attention he now possessed.
"It wouldn't be the inspector now, right?"
Lin Yu hastily approached the door to his room and was instantly relieved after looking through the peephole. He chuckled to himself in response.
The people knocking on his door were only his classmates living next door.
"It seems I am very insignificant. The gauntlets were only a mechanical build and have nothing to do with superhuman abilities. It would not alert the inspectors that easily."
Lin Yu shook his head while chuckling to himself as he opened the door.
"Holy sh*t. Old Lin, you're a bad*ss!"
The instant they laid their eyes on Lin Yu, a few students who still had bedhead and bloodshot eyes immediately said the same line he had seen countless times on WeChat.
"Old Lin, did you know you've become a viral search topic already?"
"Exo suit, Old Lin. Where's the goddamn Exo suit? Hurry up and let me see it?"
At this moment, four to five people excitedly barged into his room. They were telling him the good news while impatiently questioning him about his Exo suit at the same time. It seemed that there were plenty of ulterior motives behind their impatience and judging from how they looked, they had most probably spent the entire night waiting impatiently.
Lin Yu felt bad to refuse them after noticing how excited they were. Besides, there was nothing to hide about his Piston Exo Gauntlets anyway in reality, so he casually allowed them to play with it.
"Who in the world! What on earth are you guys fussing about this early!"
Xu Zhaoyang and the other guys were furious to be woken up by all the noise. Although furiously yelling at them initially, they soon immediately joined them in fighting over the gauntlets.
Fortunately, those people were swift in losing interest and Lin Yu told them he had not refilled the compressed air yet as an excuse to prevent them from punching. After they had toyed with it for half an hour, their curiosity and interest faded and they returned back to their rooms to catch up on their sleep.
"Goddammit, why was only that segment recorded and not my superheroic pose? These people have no style."
After the bunch of troublemakers left, Xu Zhaoyang began watching the viral video that they had been spouting about and his expression darkened.
"You're lucky they didn't record that or else those people would want to rob your 'secret martial arts edict'."
Lin Yu chuckled as he thought that 'secret martial arts edict' could be expressed with a stronger tone.