Little Fruits in China bought a bit over two hundred thousand copies of All Nations, Vol. 1 through resellers. Most went the South Korea route, Japan's pricier, and shipping from other countries takes too long.
Even if the domestic physical market's limp, Vietnam still put up 280,000. Coming in under Vietnam really didn't sit right with Little Fruits.
"Lin Xia can move four hundred thousand. With Xiao Jiu's popularity, isn't eight hundred thousand reasonable," Bingtang Xueli Binggan said. She wasn't dunking on Lin Xia. She thought she was being pretty gentle.
So why the gap between a few hundred thousand and eight hundred thousand? Bingtang Xueli Binggan wrote a long post and summed it up as three points, channel hurdles, reseller fees, long purchase cycles.
That post is why she's leading this whole campaign. The long wait hurts most. Fans obviously want to hold the album as soon as possible.
But any reseller takes at least a week.
"None of this is on Xiao Jiu," Bingtang Xueli Binggan murmured, looking over the plan. "He did it for Little Fruits."
Under her coordination, Little Fruits gathered power, tidy and disciplined, putting initiative to work.
The person at the center of all this had no idea. He was backstage, ten minutes to go, brainstorming a new Chinese-language album.
The Emperor Beast squeezed the time.
"So what's the theme," he muttered. Yesterday, Niu Jiangxue had thrown one question that froze him mid sprint. They'd been hyped to talk about a Mandarin album.
True, critics called All Nations, Vol. 1 "top artists jamming with zero coordination, but they're too top-tier to fail," which meant a Mandarin set would be even more fragmented.
No theme means it's a compilation, or you're a greenhorn with zero control, singing whatever the company bought. It could be a big deal or nothing. If he didn't care, he could glue it together and drop it. He's the producer, the team won't argue.
"This really is a problem. 'Those Flowers,' 'Three's Company,' 'Rosemary,' you can't force them into one concept."
He couldn't solve it in a minute. He refocused. The central AC was cranked up. It was hot.
"System bro, what should I do," he asked, undoing the two buttons on his jacket.
[Pick a theme first, then backfill and search.] the system answered.
A last-resort plan.
He sighed and called Su Shangbai. If anyone in the business could offer an angle, it was him.
"I want to release a Chinese album, but the tracks I've got don't connect, so it's hard to lock a theme."
One line from Su Shangbai flipped a switch. "No theme is a theme."
That's so annoyingly right.
His vision opened.
Album theme, Chu Ren's Rhapsody. Meaning, it's a set of everyday tracks with no single banner.
"Then the title Surrounded on All Sides fits."
He opened Notes and started stuffing songs into a shortlist, with the system's help of course.
When he searched rap, system bro surfaced a track, "The Stars In The Sky Don't Speak."
"The artist's called Kindergarten Killer? That's… cute."
He skimmed the lyrics. His smile cracked, then froze. He found himself mouthing along, softly.
🎵 "The stars in the sky don't speak, I know you get that feeling. When you lost your parents as a kid, you waited alone, counting passersby, hoping the next face was Dad or Mom, until your eyes glittered with tears. You once got mad at Mom when she didn't buy the toy. On a thin paycheck, she still had to budget for life and school. Dad had an affair, Mom crouched alone in the kitchen sobbing, what a dark stretch that was…" 🎵
He didn't choke, his voice didn't shake, his face stayed blank, but tears just poured.
The words hit him right in the ribs, because he wasn't guarding his heart.
"I cried," he breathed. He hadn't cried from sadness in ages. Something flashed in his mind. He wiped hard, so hard his eyes stung. He did it on purpose, using pain to shut the flood off. It was his childhood trick. The only downside, red eyes.
"System bro, you don't have to stab me," he sniffed a breath, then joked, "I'm usually the one doing the stabbing. Guess it's my turn."
From raw to steady to joking, the Emperor Beast took barely ten seconds.
"We can't use this rap. The original body's parents were loving, so people would think I'm writing a confession. That's messy PR." He tossed it and kept digging.
Time trickled by.
Late October's a Scorpio, and they say Scorpios love tipping and voting in monthly tallies.
Ordinary day, the sun rose. Office folks in reality, why can't a few million just fall from the sky so they can rest?
Life doesn't work like that. Reality stays busy, the internet too. The past few days were flooded with Li Fei's big announcement.
Li Fei's a friend, and when things were messy in the press, he posted support. The "Wu head, Chu tail, soaring with Yi" group, same generation as Su Yiwu, the tears of an era.
In the fan-economy churn, stars swap out fast. By this afternoon, his story calmed down. Around one o'clock, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, Weibo, Douyin, every platform lit up with the same headline.
"5,345,87,0 Little Fruits' Wish."
Two weeks of prep later, Little Fruits, organized and disciplined, had gathered over five hundred thousand letters.
[Jiu-yé, I want to buy a physical album too. — Relying On Cold Wind]
[Strongly suggest brother Jiu release domestic physicals. Streams stay free. If we want the disc, we'll pay. If we don't, we'll stream. — Tom Bolibo]
[Ugh, all the copies I bought are in Japanese or Korean. People think I'm a Japan or Korea simp. I'm tired. — Qianmu Yixue]
And more, the trending page showed only a slice.
Every hand was different, neat, elegant, or scrawled.
It hit like thunder out of a clear sky.
It also felt like a crow taking a plane.
Casual onlookers crashed and rebooted.
"So fans are proactively asking to get fleeced?"
"Wait, that album with ten-million-plus sales overseas didn't release domestically? I never clicked the story, I thought China was the main market. So it all sold abroad?"
"Half a million signatures, yeah if this were South Korea, that's enough to storm the presidential office."
"Idol doesn't want fans to spend, fans petition to spend, that's a first."
"This is what cultural export looks like, tactical lean back."
Passersby were dazed. The industry was too. A half-million-strong petition for a domestic physical release, that's never happened.
Media folks jumped in.
"My Ksitigarbha and Nie Xiaoqian, are you kidding me? The zip is 2.7 TB," a Guangming Daily reporter, Xiao Nao, gasped. Over half a million hand letters could kick a president's door in. He had to check.
Don't be fooled by celeb accounts with ten million followers. If you've got a real ten thousand diehards, you can run the industry. But this workflow, handwrite, shoot, upload, package and share, it's tedious. Only diehards do it.
He opened the index. The folders were clean by province and city. The largest stacks were Shanghai and Suzhou Province.
That matched Damai's past ticketing data, concert buyers skew hard to those regions.
He tried to download Beijing's bundle. He didn't have cloud VIP. His home fiber screamed, but the download crawled at 200 KB.
Staring at dozens of GB, he nearly choked, then surrendered to the dark side and bought the monthly auto-renew, 25 RMB, five cheaper than normal.
"Fine, you win. You're so noble."
He enabled it, immediately turned off auto-renew in WeChat, and hissed.
With VIP, his speed went back to normal. Good, news needs speed.
"Actually checks out. Phone snaps, say 5 MB each, times five hundred thousand, that's around 2.5 GB per ten thousand, so yeah, roughly 3 TB. Jiu-yé really unified the fandoms," he muttered.
Ten minutes later, he cracked the folder. It was stuffed with petitions.
[I almost got scammed by a reseller last time, T_T Jiu-yé, save me, give us a reliable channel. — A Brief History of Humanity]
[Jiu-yé promised free albums to Little Fruits during 'Red Chamber, Dream,' and he's kept it. I'm moved, but don't strip us of our right to support him. — Grapefruit Is Bitter]
And so on.
Some were on A4, some torn from notebooks. All real pictures.
"Wild," he started typing furiously.
The petition blitz swept the country. Bingtang Xueli Binggan's plan worked.
Meanwhile, another very capable woman, Niu Jiangxue, stitched alliances. Aiguo signed strategic cooperation frameworks with China Film and the Beijing Film Academy.
Aiguo's not a film company, but with the investment in Unsinkable and a pipeline to overseas markets, if the film hits, Aiguo will own Western distribution muscle.
Breaking Asia into the Western market is brutal. If Aiguo opens that artery, it's a golden rooster that lays eggs. Money, money, money.
Elsewhere, Aiguo's inbox got two odd emails. Chu Zhi was shooting in Chile's Rapa Nui National Park, Easter Island. What ad needs that kind of lift, Netflix's.
When he wrapped and checked his phone, he saw two forwards from Niu Niu.
"Seven Men wants me as a concert guest, got anything more ridiculous," he sighed.
He remembered them. The frontman Leighton is a dyed-in-the-wool China-hater. They tried to trap him at WOA and at the World Opening. Inviting him now felt like windmills apologizing to Don Quixote.
"Leighton's got issues," he muttered.
Xiao Zhuzi walked over with water and caught the name. "That's just your magnetism."
"What magnetism," he blinked.
"Aren't you talking about Leighton, Seven Men's lead," she handed the cup.
"Yeah," he nodded.
"Then it tracks. I saw a post on Weibo. Lemme find it." She scrolled.
"Here."
It was a post by a big entertainment KOL, A Lot Of Money, a few days old, titled, "How big is Chu Zhi's influence overseas?"
It laid out Seven Men's anti-China past, especially Leighton's line, "There are Chinese doing business in every country, they're leeches sucking the world's blood."
And now, "Every country has good people and bad people, don't cover your eyes with one hand," "Chu Zhi is a singer our whole band genuinely loves"…
The KOL ended with, "Values and tastes are hard to change, prejudice even more so, but Leighton's got one pulled out because of Chu Zhi. That's positive influence."
"He's your diehard now," Xiao Zhuzi said.
Huh. That was outside his mental model.
He always checked a poster's reliability. A Lot Of Money wasn't a rumor mill. They'd translated legit foreign entertainment reporting, not tabloid junk. It tracked.
"Cool," he rubbed his temples and told Niu Niu to decline. Guest spots weren't happening. He didn't have time.
The second email was weirder. Glastonbury invited him for next year. The first half was normal.
It's the big one at Worthy Farm, Somerset, the world's largest open-air festival. With his profile, an invite's normal. The second half though, the fee was way too low.
A million USD. Way low. Before One Gazed Upon by Gods and All Nations, Vol. 1, WOA had offered that.
Low's one thing, you can negotiate. The problem was, Glasto's tone was, this is the price, be grateful.
"Turn it down. I'm not using a festival to raise my Western profile," he told Niu Niu on a cross-border call.
She agreed. The international album's numbers gave them the spine to say no.
"What's up with Glastonbury," he asked.
"Can't swear by it, it's hearsay from Lao Qian, but the committee's backed by the Teman family, a major Five Eyes patron," she said.
Five Eyes, a familiar label. It made sense. Politics was a long story. They wrapped the call.
Before hanging up, Niu Jiangxue urged him to fly back soon. Chile wasn't safe.
"Chile's unsafe," he frowned. He hadn't watched the news.
She didn't mention the Little Fruits petition. She'd tell him once he was home.
He opened Weibo and immediately saw #HowManyFansDoesChuZhiHave and #HalfAMillionLittleFruitsUnited.
Uh. He skimmed for a few minutes to get the gist, then shelved it to check Chile's situation.
Survival first. He found a flood.
Bolivia's former leader had fled, a beauty of a legislator seized power, shocks rippled across South America. It tied into the US election year. South America's a backyard.
Chile and Argentina were affected. In Chile there were massive protests, and in Argentina, something nasty was brewing.
The wildest part, a Chinese film crew was in Bolivia, shooting at an Inca site. They were trapped. The streets outside were riots, the army had rolled out.
"Director Sun, did you call the embassy," Cai Jia asked, anxious.
"We did. The Bolivian government can't secure its own ground, so they can't guarantee foreign nationals' safety either. The embassy's trying everything," Director Sun said, frustrated and rattled.
"Is the ferry still refusing to come," the male lead, Guo Hao, forced himself to stay calm.
"Nothing. No one's even picking up," Director Sun said, hollow.
"Why didn't we go to Machu Picchu and film there. Why pick Iskanwaya in Bolivia," the second female lead, Zhang Xiaoqian, was fraying.
Producer Wu opened his mouth to explain. Peru won't allow film crews in Machu Picchu. They'd wanted the bigger name too, but conditions didn't allow it.
He swallowed it. In this mess, words didn't help.
They were on Isla del Sol, island of the sun on Lake Titicaca. La Paz was boiling, but for now, the island was quiet. The problem was, boats had stopped. They were stranded with hundreds of tourists.
How long would this last. What if the violence spread. The twin questions crushed Zhang Xiaoqian.
They'd rented a whole small hotel, sealed the doors and windows. It felt safer than being out with the tourists. Plenty of tourists were panicking. When South America goes off, it's live steel.
"Anyone got contacts here. Anything that gets us across would help," Producer Wu asked.
They were celebrities, sure, with their own networks, but Bolivia's off the beaten path. Who had a friend here.
Silence answered.
"Contacts don't matter now. Tour ferries aren't allowed in. Nothing else will be either. If we cross, it might be worse on the other shore," Cai Jia said, staying cool.
Faces went paler.
"So what do we do," Zhang Xiaoqian asked.
===
"天上的星星不会说话" — Tiānshàng de Xīngxing Búhuì Shuōhuà ("The Stars In The Sky Don't Speak") by 幼稚园杀手, Yòuzhìyuán Shāshǒu ("Kindergarten Killer").