When Qin Ran learned about the situation, she scoffed, "Doesn't Ling Miao Han have enough endorsements already? Why does she still feel the need to take more?"
After going solo, Ling Miao Han had also secured a few roles under Pei Qi's guidance, including the lead in a youth campus drama. According to Qin Ran's knowledge, Ling Miao Han should still be filming on set.
Despite being busy with filming, Ling Miao Han still found time to covet the Whitney endorsement.
The Whitney brand, which Qin Ran had acquired, was known for its sexy image, and Yu Shuman fit their brand perfectly. If not for this, Qin Ran wouldn't have bothered buying the company. Ling Miao Han trying to take this endorsement simply made no sense—her image didn't even align with the brand.
But Pei Qi seemed to disregard this fact entirely. He even offered to make concessions in other deals if they would consider Ling Miao Han for the Whitney endorsement, presenting many favorable terms. Qin Ran now suspected that Ling Miao Han had secured some of her other endorsement deals in a similar manner.
To be fair, Pei Qi's methods were very much like Qin Ran's: leveraging his resources to benefit the person he cared about. However, while Qin Ran's actions were backed by a system that made it a win-win, Pei Qi's methods seemed a bit unethical. He was using company resources inappropriately to please his favorite, which, as a former board member herself, Qin Ran found distasteful. If she knew her CEO was misusing company funds like that, she wouldn't hesitate to reprimand him.
But since Pei Qi hadn't wronged her personally, Qin Ran decided to keep this information to herself. They had clashed in the past, but that was in the past, and besides, the entertainment circle was vast. Yu Shuman would inevitably cross paths with Pei Qi's artists, so there was no need to make things unnecessarily hostile. All of this was, of course, for Yu Shuman's sake.
Qin Ran expected the matter to die down quickly, but to her surprise, a nosy party leaked the situation online before Yu Shuman's endorsement photos were even ready. A marketing account claimed that Yu Shuman had stolen a teammate's endorsement, and it quickly became a trending topic. The moment Qin Ran saw this, she was furious—there was no need to guess who was behind it. It had to be Pei Qi.
If there was one thing Qin Ran excelled at, it was sending legal notices. Both 99 Entertainment and Whitney's legal teams swiftly issued letters to the marketing account, with receipts of the legal proceedings already in hand. 99 Entertainment had long been known as the "crazy company" in the industry, and they didn't mind maintaining that reputation. At Qin Ran's direction, they issued a straightforward statement clarifying that Whitney had approached them first.
Qin Ran could get away with this because Whitney was a foreign company, with no easy way to check ownership details online. Had it been a domestic company, a quick search on a business information app would have revealed that the two companies shared the same owner, sparking a whole new scandal.
When Qin Ran first instructed the CEO to make such a statement, he hesitated, "But even though they approached us first, wouldn't this upset them?"
"Just post it," Qin Ran said curtly. The CEO had no choice but to follow orders and had the statement posted online.
To their surprise, Whitney was very cooperative, quickly retweeting 99 Entertainment's post and issuing a firm denial that there had been any attempt to steal an endorsement. They reiterated that they had chosen 99 Entertainment's artist from the start.
Both companies tactfully avoided mentioning Yu Shuman by name, leading the public to believe that the issue was a dispute between the two companies, with Yu Shuman merely a pawn in the game. As a result, the focus shifted away from her, and barely anyone bothered to criticize her on social media. Partly, this was due to recent government crackdowns on online trolls, and partly because both companies acted so quickly that most people didn't even have time to grasp the situation.
In fact, the speed of their response led to a new trend on social media:
#Whitney, if you're being held hostage by 99 Entertainment, just blink twice.#
With the situation resolved so swiftly, there wasn't much left for people to gossip about, and they moved on to other topics. 99 Entertainment wasn't known for its restraint; the company had earned its reputation by engaging in a major conflict every three months and a minor skirmish every ten days.
Recently, a rising star known as "Little Ronghua" had publicly accused the real Ronghua of stealing her role. 99 Entertainment had immediately gone to war, exposing all of Little Ronghua's misdeeds. The company had no shame and wasn't afraid to pick fights with trolls, media outlets, or even other artists.
Little Ronghua had been utterly defeated. Her agency had initially tried to intervene, but the intense media coverage and the emergence of scandalous gossip about her left them powerless.
At first, the public had decried 99 Entertainment as a "crazy company," but now they couldn't imagine life without it.
By now, any trending topic involving 99 Entertainment was tinged with humor, with comments like:
"Of all the people to mess with, why go after 99 Entertainment's artists?"
"Here we go again! Someone tried to take on 99 Entertainment, only to be shut down in less than an hour."
"Gossip central? More like psycho central! It's only been three days without a legal notice from 99 Entertainment, and people are already forgetting how tough they are!"
Seeing how quickly the topic of Yu Shuman was overshadowed infuriated Pei Qi. He realized that 99 Entertainment was a real thorn in his side, relentlessly protecting its artists.
Pei Qi simply couldn't understand this. He protected Ling Miao Han because she was his love interest, but for other artists, he remained a businessman at heart.
To a businessman, artists were both people and commodities. Entertainment companies existed to exploit the labor of these artists, turning their popularity into profit. When an artist could no longer generate income, they were discarded.
That was the harsh reality; a company couldn't survive otherwise.
But 99 Entertainment was different, almost like an anomaly. They didn't care about losses or their reputation. Whoever crossed their artists was met with the full force of the company, acting more like a personal studio than a corporation.
Pei Qi had also heard that 99 Entertainment had recently purchased an entire building and had just finished renovating it. He couldn't believe Whitney's statements and suspected that 99 Entertainment had made significant concessions to Whitney to secure the endorsement. But the idea that they would then give the endorsement to a relatively unknown artist like Yu Shuman seemed far-fetched. Pei Qi was convinced something else was going on.
His thoughts returned to the time he had seen Yu Shuman during the final round of Showtime, Girls! and the team she had with her, including the custom outfits. Pei Qi began to suspect that perhaps, just like Ling Miao Han, Yu Shuman had a special relationship with the owner of 99 Entertainment.
He decided to dig into 99 Entertainment's owner, using a business information app to pull up the name "Qin Ran." However, when he tried to find more details, he hit a dead end. When 99 Entertainment first emerged, Pei Qi had also tried to look up information on Qin Ran, discovering her name in the process.
Pei Qi had considered various possibilities, thinking that maybe she belonged to one of the old moneyed Qin families in Beijing. But after asking around, he found no one named Qin Ran in those circles. He had even looked into overseas Chinese families, but still came up empty. It was as if Qin Ran had appeared out of nowhere.
This time, he entrusted someone else to investigate, but again, they found nothing. However, those digging into 99 Entertainment's owner did find out that there was someone named Qin Ran in Yu Shuman's circle.
"Oh? Who is she?" Pei Qi thought he had caught a lead, but the response came back, "She's Yu Shuman's junior, a fellow student at the same university, currently in her first year."
Pei Qi sneered, "Don't bother me with such trivial information."
There was no way 99 Entertainment's boss was a college freshman. The person he was dealing with was too shrewd, handling acquisitions with lightning speed. Pei Qi was certain the owner had to be at least in their mid-thirties. He even suspected the boss was an older man, given the cutthroat nature of the business.
Qin Ran sneezed. She had just finished her exams and was now holed up in her penthouse, conducting a remote conference. After the sneeze, Wu Tezhu asked if she was alright, to which Qin Ran replied that it was probably just the air conditioning. Then, she seamlessly switched back to fluent foreign languages, continuing the discussion with the international executives.
Wu Tezhu was stunned. She had expected to be the one handling these multilingual conversations during the conference, especially since she had taken care of most of the international communication during their recent trip abroad.
But as soon as they got into the video conference, Qin Ran had effortlessly demonstrated her language proficiency, switching between three or four different languages while negotiating the acquisition of their companies.
Sometimes, Wu Tezhu couldn't help but wonder, Just what kind of prodigy is my boss? She knew Qin Ran's background, and there was no indication she had grown up in an environment conducive to learning so many languages. Wu Tezhu even had no clue where Qin Ran's wealth came from.
Occasionally, Qin Ran would joke about winning a billion-dollar lottery or inheriting it from a distant relative.
Wu Tezhu was curious but knew that being too nosy in her line of work could be dangerous, so she kept her questions to herself. As long as the money was clean, she didn't care where it came from.
After wrapping up the video conference, Qin Ran instructed Wu Tezhu to keep an eye on the Whitney situation, ensuring nothing went wrong during the production of the endorsement ads and that the payment for Yu Shuman's endorsement was processed promptly.
Just minutes ago, she had confidently managed a multi-billion dollar deal. But now, she was anxious about a mere tens-of-thousands endorsement fee for Yu Shuman. Wu Tezhu maintained her poker face, striving to keep her expression neutral. "Understood," she replied.