Read Novel Full Chapter 205: The Money Behind the Traffic
Chapter 205: The Money Behind the Traffic
Tang Guo set the stack of papers on the table by the window, the corner of the pages pressed up against the vinegar bottle.
"Three hundred twenty-four entries. Not one missed." The shadows under her eyes were dark. "The three with dates, I marked in red. Page numbers are in the bottom right corner—pencil. They mark page number, not entry number."
Shen Zhixia turned the pages one by one. Screenshots, account names, timestamps, and notes Tang Guo had typed out herself. Red ink only on three entries: May 23rd, seven cardboard boxes, I even have the landlord's phone number.
She stopped when she reached the last three pages.
"These three aren't insults."
"Price inquiries." Tang Guo said. "Asking how much I'd charge to post a video. Three accounts showed up two days apart. One asked how much for a spoken ad, one asked if I could attach a link, one just sent a rate card and said, 'volume talks, everything's negotiable.'"
"Read them to me."
Tang Guo picked up her phone and read from the screenshots: "'Sis, how much for a spoken ad under a minute.' 'Sis, can you do affiliate links on this one? We'll provide the link.' The third one came with an image attached—the first line listed three tiers: long video, short video, spoken ad. The last line read: 'High volume negotiable, long-term partnerships discussed separately.'"
"How do you know they were price inquiries?"
"I did this for two years." Tang Guo rubbed her hands together. "Those kind of accounts have business contact in their bio. They take orders without asking about content—only three things: how long, link or no link, when it goes live. Those three questions covered all of it. I thought about doing it myself once—three posts a day, supposedly ten grand a month. Good thing I never did."
Shen Zhixia pulled the three pages out and slid them into the left side of a hard-shell folder. On the corner of her sticky note, she added a line: Who sent money to those accounts?
"I want to post a video," Tang Guo said suddenly. "Just say the one-cent thing was a cut. People in my group chat are already screenshotting it and asking me—if I stay quiet, doesn't that mean I'm admitting it?"
"Don't respond yet."
"If I don't, it looks like I'm admitting it."
"It's not your turn yet." Shen Zhixia pushed the phone back toward her. "The sooner you speak, the more they'll have to say. When you've got that paper you can slam on the table, one sentence will be worth ten."
Clipped behind those pages were Shen Zhixia's own notes—numbers she'd recorded since the 17th, every refresh, every copy: date, time, play count, how many new reposts. The handwriting was crooked, the line spacing uneven. Last night she'd drawn two vertical lines on the page with a ruler, dividing it into three columns: time, play count, and new reposts.
17th, 4:02 p.m., first posted.
19th, 11 p.m., 170,000.
20th, 10:27 a.m., 218,000.
This morning, 6:40 a.m., 347,000.
She broke the last line's numbers apart and wrote them side by side: 347,000 plays, 894 likes, 316 comments, 327 reposts.
She circled the two middle numbers.
"That ratio is off." Tang Guo leaned over to look. "If it grew organically, a hundred plays would get two or three likes. Comments depend on content. Three hundred forty thousand plays with eight hundred likes? No." She tapped the timestamps. "And there's something worse. Between 3 a.m. and 4:30 a.m., it jumped 53,000 plays. Comments went up by eleven."
"Nobody's watching at 3 a.m."
"At 3 a.m., someone's paying."
Shen Zhixia added that line to the table too, writing at the top of the page: "Anomaly—unclassified." She flipped back two pages, where the repost times for that batch of accounts were recorded: several windows on the night of the 19th, one window in the early hours of the 21st. Within the same window, five accounts reposted within minutes of each other—names like Sukan, Selection, Hot News, plus two others that appeared later. She copied those lines onto a fresh page, one column for time, one for account name. When she finished, she drew a question mark beside them—one person awake in the middle of the night could repost five videos in a row, but eleven accounts doing it on the same schedule?
That empty account was still sitting there. The platform gave one answer verbally and another in writing, both the same sentence: Account identity and backend data are only provided to judicial authorities. She was on the third draft of the complaint. The defendant column had two lines—one for the platform's full legal name, one for that string of eleven digits, followed by the profile link, posting time, and video number. But who stood behind that string of digits would have to wait for the court. Waiting was the hardest word to write onto paper.
She picked up her phone and texted the number she'd never saved: "The empty account is a dead end."
The reply came faster than the previous times: "Don't trace who posted it. Trace who paid."
She copied those nine words onto the sticky note, beneath that character "Xing." The line before it read: "Hold that frame. Don't name it yet." The two lines crowded together.
He Xiufen came out of the kitchen with two bowls of noodles, set one in front of her, and glanced at the sticky note.
"That's right," He Xiufen said. "The people cursing you, the ones who watch and leave—they don't spend a cent. Getting a sentence in front of 340,000 people, that takes money."
"So how do I ask?"
He Xiufen pushed the pickled vegetable dish toward her. "Make the call."
"And say what?"
"Say you want to post something." He Xiufen sat down and stirred her noodles with her chopsticks. "Don't mention the firm, don't mention your certificate, don't mention Tang Guo. Just say you've got an account and you want to push a thirty-second clip. Ask the price."
"Isn't that just fishing for information?"
"You're asking for a price, and you intend to pay that price. Fishing for what." He Xiufen looked up at her. "Keep one rule: don't agree to anything, don't sign anything, don't pay anything. And don't open by asking who's footing the bill—no businessman tells a stranger who they've done work for."
Shen Zhixia opened the "Sukan" profile. The bio was one line: Business inquiries followed by an account number. She tapped "Selection"—same line, same account number, even the emoji in front was in the same position. Three accounts, one operation.
She didn't call. She added them as a friend first. Text could be screenshotted. Words left in a chat log held up better than words in her ear.
The request was accepted quickly.
"How much to post something around thirty seconds?"
"Depends on content. Reposted clips twenty, spoken ads fifty, extra for links."
"What about a specific posting time?"
"Double. Any time you want."
"Can you boost the play count?"
"Volume is priced separately. One thousand plays for 120, six figures negotiable by volume. If you need it fast, I've got open slots."
She paused with her fingers over the screen. She wanted to ask: "Did anyone else buy volume last month?" and see how they answered. She typed it and deleted it. That question would've been prying into someone else's business, and the other side would tense up immediately. She didn't want their guard up. She wanted their rate card.
"Send me the rate card."
They sent an image. In the bottom right corner was a line of small print: Jiangzhou Dingchang Culture Media Co., Ltd., with bank and account number below, and at the very bottom: "Corporate transfers accepted, invoices available." Two minutes later, they sent a photo of a contract—standard template, they said. If she wanted to sign, she just needed to send over her business qualifications.
She saved the image twice—once as the original, once enlarged—appending the date and time to each filename, then took a full screenshot of the conversation. Only after that did she zoom in on the text.
One thousand plays for 120. She did the math on the corner of her paper: 170,000 plays at that rate came to 2,040 yuan. Even if all 347,000 plays had been bought, it was under 4,200. Someone was willing to spend a little over two thousand yuan just to get people cursing at Tang Guo for taking money. In the blank space below the rate image, she wrote a small line: This money isn't for the insults. It's for delivering the message.
[Thud. Third line of the Checklist—who paid. It has a name now.]
He Xiufen finished her noodles without saying a word. When the bowl was empty, she said, "The trip on the 25th, you're still going. I'll put my name on things here. You do the legwork."
At 2 p.m., she sat at the old computer in the firm, opened the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System, and copied every character into her notebook.
Jiangzhou Dingchang Culture Media Co., Ltd. Registered capital 1 million, subscribed. Established two years and three months ago. Business scope, first several items: advertising design, production, agency, and placement. Number of employees enrolled in social insurance: one. Registered address: Room 403, Block B, No. 9 Chuangxin Road, Chengdong Xingang Industrial Park.
Her pen paused at "Number of employees: one." She drew a small circle beside it. A company that could push hundreds of thousands of plays at once, and only one person on social insurance.
The change record column had only a few lines. The most recent entry was November 14th of last year: Legal representative changed from Zhou Dehai to Hao Qiuchi.
She turned the screen around.
He Xiufen glanced at the address and pushed her reading glasses up. "Room 403, Block B, No. 9 Chuangxin Road. I've been in that building. Year before last, I handled a payment dispute for a small label-printing factory. There were three signs on the door at 403, and inside there was just one girl answering phones—taking calls for seven or eight companies."
"How many short-video companies are in that park?"
"Only one big one—Xingyao Media, 11 Chuangxin Road, Block A." He Xiufen said. "Across a small lane. The sign at the security booth still has its name on it. Look up how far apart those two addresses are."
"Hao Qiuchi." Shen Zhixia read the name aloud.
He Xiufen's hand stilled on the edge of her bowl.
"Which Hao?"
"Hao, with the ear radical on the right side."
He Xiufen got up and went into the back room. She dug through the bottom drawer of the metal cabinet for a while before pulling out a photocopy with curled edges.
"Year before last, a girl came to the firm." She handed over the paper. "Worked as an editor at a short-video company, asking whether she could claim overtime pay. She left this page when she went—a printed settlement sheet, with a handwritten signature in the handler column. She said, 'Lawyer He, keep it for me. They signed it themselves, and now they won't even admit it.'"
Shen Zhixia pulled up the contract photo and laid the two pages side by side on the table.
Each bore a handwritten signature at the bottom, equally sloppy—the first stroke pressed down hard, the final stroke flicking out from the upper right, the tail curling into a hook.
"I've seen this exact signature before. Year before last." He Xiufen's finger pressed onto the paper and didn't move. "Year before last, she signed for Xingyao. This year, she signed for Dingchang."
Someone downstairs shouted about collecting scrap paper. Shen Zhixia aligned the two pages, pierced a paper clip through the middle, and squeezed it tight. She wrote the date in the corner, then added a line: One page is provenance. One page is purpose.
He Xiufen collected the bowls, took two steps, and turned back.
"That hand tells you one person did work for two companies," she said. "It doesn't tell you which card the money came from. If you want to move up the chain, go find that card first."
Shen Zhixia slid the two pages into the hard-shell folder, tucked behind the pages marked "Pending Verification." She put Tang Guo's printed stack into another folder, together with the notarization receipt. As she closed the hard-shell folder, the lamp flickered across the paper's edge—two signatures lying side by side, the same brushstroke, cast across two sheets.