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Chapter 16: Trending... Again

Ten years ago, Jiang Xun was a very smug second-year in middle school. Practically every day, he would pick up a thin wafer roll and pretend to smoke it like a cigarette. And every now and then, he would tip his head up at a forty-five degree angle to gaze at the sky.

When he penned that ancient Weibo post, Jiang Xun had been in the middle of fighting with his parents over a training camp he wanted to attend. At only thirteen, he was a precocious and stubborn kid, and he often struggled to properly communicate with the people around him.

As for whether or not he felt lonely back then, he didn't know. But he had definitely felt misunderstood.

The post was just so old. Not even Jiang Xun himself could remember what he had been thinking or feeling when he wrote it.

Everybody had some darkness in their past. Some skeletons in the closet. But not everyone's skeletons were pulled out and put on display for the whole world to see.

Gu Wei, the meddling little archeologist, had sunk his shovel in and, in one deft plunge, unearthed the worst of Jiang Xun's dark past.

There was no further communication from Gu Wei, but some sharp-eyed fan had taken a screenshot within seconds of him liking that post. The evidence had since spread like wildfire across every major social media platform, and a bud of something very… not good had started to sprout.

Gu Wei had a controversial sort of popularity, but he had scores of followers. His fans spread the incriminating screenshot to their followers, and their followers spread it to their followers, and in no time at all, the screenshot of that piece of Jiang Xun's dark past was plastered all over every social media platform imaginable.

Unsurprisingly, just twenty minutes later, the world-renowned professional esports player Jiang Xun and the tabloid starlet Gu Wei once again ascended to the top of Weibo's trending topics—

#LonelyJiangXun

This kind of tag was the perfect bait for curious netizens. Just looking at it made people want to click through.

Within five minutes, the sticker next to the tag changed from 'NEW' to 'HOT'.

Jiang Ying, in the living room of their home, was still laughing so hard that he'd started snorting like a pig.

"I warned you about him," Jiang Ying wheezed, "and you said you protect fans." The pig-like snorting turned into a goose-like honking. "Go ahead and protect your fan. Too bad he's a thankless little punk."

The honking turned back into a chicken-like squawking sort of laugh, and it just went on and on and on.

Jiang Ying was single-handedly turning their living room into a zoo.

And Jiang Xun, all the while, remained silent.

Trapping Gu Wei against the door. Teasing him by calling him a 'young bride'. Had that been all it took to offend him?

But that wasn't the end of it.

Things were just getting started.

The guys in Jiang Xun's team were all kings of staying up late. One after another, their reactions were lured out by Gu Wei's like. One of them responded to that old loneliness post with a doge face emoji. The others quickly added their own comments, and soon the four of them were all swept into the trending tags by spectators as well.

It was already one in the morning, and Jiang Xun's cell phone hadn't stopped buzzing with new notifications. Their team's QQ chat group was abnormally active as each of the other members took turns checking in on their leader.