Chapter 57: Chapter 28: Breaking the Threshold
The advancement ritual requires actual viewership rather than the platform’s displayed play count, which means inflated view numbers. However, the play count itself has a promotional effect, and these two data points are related.
The "Selling Mountain Goods" series of live streams and videos have surpassed one billion plays, and it’s roughly estimated that the number of viewers should have exceeded millions. However, Peng Xian’s promotion ritual was not successful, always feeling like something was missing.
Peng Xian concluded that the reason lies in the ritual’s requirement to evoke a strong resonance among the public. The issue probably stems from this "strong resonance."
Many viewers indeed resonated, but not to the extent of being completely moved, feeling from the bottom of their hearts that they must do something about it.
On the Internet, it’s easy to stir some people’s emotions, but completely moving someone to the point where they not only fully believe but are willing to take action is very difficult.
Internet performances can easily reach audience numbers unimaginable before, but the effect is far inferior to that of ancient live performances.
Speaking of action, indeed many people bought mountain goods, with order numbers accumulating to nearly one hundred thousand, and total sales exceeding tens of millions. After deducting promotional and shooting costs, Peng Xian earned millions in just under half a year.
But these customers already had the intention to buy such products. They just happened to see the livestream or video and felt pity for the elderly and children, so they placed orders on a whim, rather than feeling they must do so sincerely.
From a money-making perspective, these two are the same, but the meaning for the ritual is different. Even if it’s just for money, Peng Xian feels this speed is too slow, just earning some hard money.
There’s also one thing Peng Xian might not have realized, or even if he thought about it, he automatically ignored it, and that is the quality of the products he is promoting. What he bought in bulk are all industrialized products, repackaged and shipped directly by manufacturers.
These goods can’t be said to be of poor quality, but at least their cost-performance ratio is quite low. Once repackaged, their price is much higher than the original market price—this actually affects the ritual’s effectiveness greatly.
What to do? There are two strategies. The first is to continue expanding influence and attracting more traffic, as long as the scale increases, the ritual’s effect will definitely be better; this is a probability issue.
The second is to forge another path based on expanding influence. He adapted the videos appropriately to make them appear more like a field follow-up mode and dubbed them in foreign languages to put on overseas platforms.
There are probably quite a few foreigners who are more naive and easily moved, right? On overseas platforms, it is not easy to sell mountain products like walnut oil directly, so he registered an overseas account to accept voluntary donations.
It seems quite effective; in a short time, Peng Xian received several small donations, but the total wasn’t much, amounting to tens of thousands in East Country Coin.
But more importantly, as the video’s influence was exported and then re-imported, domestic traffic surged accordingly! He glimpsed the dawn of ritual success... Right at this moment, someone dismantled the threshold.
Unknown whether someone did it out of full stomach or jealousy, but they found the actual location of his major video shoots, namely the shooting scene of "Xiaozhao" and the "Sangjie Elderly Couple" video, pointing out the inconsistencies.
What was called Xiaozhao’s home, which appeared to be a rundown house, was actually an abandoned building that had long been uninhabited. Many setups in the original video were staged by the crew, and no Xiaozhao family lived locally, nor was there any Sangjie Elderly Couple.
Continuing the investigation, that Uncle Sangjie turned out to have appeared in another video far away in a mountain village, dressed in another ethnicity’s clothing, becoming Uncle Laxi, with Granny Laxi being a different elderly woman.
This old man, after discovering he could make money by appearing in videos, embarked on a path of being an extra, working in other "crews." With this kind of live commerce routine, anyone could copy and imitate, even extras accidentally swapped roles.
This couldn’t be blamed on Peng Xian’s lack of caution; if he didn’t want to be exposed, he should have signed confidentiality agreements with all actors and paid substantial fees. But his team only provided fees for specific performances, insufficient to buy out the old man’s entire acting career.
After this threshold-demolition video came out, it had a self-generating flow effect causing massive sharing, severely hitting Peng Xian’s live-selling business. His designed promotion ritual undoubtedly failed.
There’s talk about relevant departments set to investigate him; fortunately, Peng Xian had already taken precautionary measures with corresponding platforms and transferred his earnings in time, otherwise, he couldn’t have gotten away unscathed!
Peng Xian was furious, wanting to find the person who dismantled the threshold and give them a good lesson for their envy.
However, the Magic Sect has rules; if someone unintentionally dismantles the threshold, as long as no illegal means are used, one cannot deliberately retaliate but can only blame oneself for insufficient skills and lack of caution.
So this can only be dealt with privately, and now being in the spotlight, it is better to bear with it for now. Revenge doesn’t have a deadline of ten years for a gentleman!
Peng Xian was primarily focused on the promotion ritual lately, so he hadn’t set aside time to specifically search for Hidden Moth, just having a girl who listens to him carefully watching the clues.
The girl’s name is Meng Ya, arranged by him to work at the 110 command center, where she can access abnormal information unknown to ordinary citizens. Speaking of this Meng Ya, she is actually related to Peng Xian’s previous promotion ritual.