Monday.
Today was an important day. Zhang Ye woke up at 5 A.M. and could not return back to sleep. After tossing and turning, he reached the unit early. The office was still empty. There was not a single person. Editor Zhang who opened the doors had not arrived, so Zhang Ye had to go downstairs to the lobby to get the key to the Literature Channel, before he managed to enter the room.
He watched the news.
He checked his name.
He searched for comments for his program.
These were the three things Zhang Ye did every morning. A glance at the morning news was sufficient. The comments were mostly similar to those of yesterday. Either they were cursing that Zhang Ye was without morals by neutering the story, or they shouted to not have “Old and Young Story Club” end. Zhang Ye was mainly searching for his name and he was surprised to find out that in a day’s time, the number of searches for his name had reached a total of 16,000 times on the country’s biggest search engine website. Although it could not be compared to those A-list celebrities who had hundreds of thousands to millions of searches, it was still a sharp rise. Note that this was not the search numbers of Zhang Ye’s segments. It was also not for his fairy tales or novels, but the two words “Zhang Ye”.
“Ghost Blows Out the Light” having 10,000+ was no surprise, as there was nearly ten thousand searches every day!
The search numbers for “Little Bunnies Be Good” exceeding 10,000 was also no surprise. In fact, it had exceeded 110,000 the day before!
They were all searches, but the value of Zhang Ye’s name being searched was completely different. This meant that many listeners who had tuned into the programs had noticed the voice behind the radio, Zhang Ye. This was a mark of his growth in popularity. Zhang Ye’s ambition was to become this world’s greatest and most famous celebrity in the world. He knew how things worked in the industry. Following a particular work was just the beginning stages. It was just popularity on the surface and wasn’t as reliable. This was because once a piece of work “expired”, people will forget with time. Then this popularity on the surface would also dissipate, and not much popularity would be left. However, if people paid attention to a person, it was different. This had a much deeper meaning in terms of popularity than paying attention to a piece of work.
Once his popularity rose, even if it was negative, that was also considered fame. Zhang Ye could feel his dreams taking its initial steps, but it did not stop one bit. He was developing towards his goal with every second.
However, even though it was a good thing, he still could not feel happy.
This was because the fate of “Old and Young Story Club” was still unknown. If the program was axed, then he would not have a platform for him to disseminate his works. As such, he would not be able to carry on increasing his popularity using high-quality works. The little amount of popularity he had would not be able to be maintained for long before turning to naught in the end.
“Eh, Little Zhang, you’ve come?”
“Teacher Zhang, why are you so early today?”
At around 8 A.M., colleagues began reaching the unit.
Teacher Feng had also arrived early. After seeing Zhang Ye, their gazes crossed and after a greeting, no one said anything more. The both of them were aware. Teacher Feng was also waiting for a result. He wanted to see if Zhang Ye was able to create another historical miracle!
Quite a number of people were also discussing about this.
“Do you think the station will cancel the axing of ‘Old and Young Story Club’?”
“I’m pretty sure that won’t happen. Little Jia is, after all, a relative of Deputy Station Head Jia. Have you forgotten?”
“But now Teacher Little Zhang has made his program perform so well with listenership ratings in second place. If the station did not revoke the notification from before, how much pressure would they need to withstand?”
“That’s right. The listeners paralyzed our station’s official website with all the cursing!”
“That doesn’t mean that it won’t be axed. There has never been such a precedent.”
“Precedent? A late-night program had never reached the top three in the ratings. A children’s fairy tales segment has never reached second place in the ratings. Precedents are meant to be broken!”
“How would we know what the Leader is thinking? Let’s just wait and see.”
At this moment, Tian Bin had arrived. Jia Yan had also arrived. So no one carried on discussing this topic.
The office turned silent, as if everyone was watching Zhang Ye and Jia Yan. Everyone knew that this day belonged to them. It was the day of their battle!
At 9 A.M., Zhao Guozhou arrived punctuality. It was clear that he had just arrived at the unit. His hand was still holding a bag. He did not return to his own office first and instead came to announce yesterday’s listenership ratings, “Almost everyone is here, right? Al