15-19 minutes 24.07.2022
“Have you told your family about the two of us already?”
During lunch, Tao Mu appeared a little worried. He was uncertain whether Chairman Li’s instructions were based on his status as his son’s business partner, or his status as his son’s life partner…..
“No.” Li Xiaoheng replied without any pause: “I won’t rashly speak to my family without your consent.”
After a pause, Li Xiaoheng added: “However, my family has always been concerned about my love life, and they know my sexual orientation. I have lived for 26 years, and this is the first time I have been so close to someone else, even bringing back the gifts you bought for my family. They must have guessed.”
“En.” Tao Mu replied softly. His chopsticks poked at the rice grains, not having much appetite.
“Don’t be too worried.” Li Xiaoheng warmly persuaded: “My family members are all very amiable. They won’t hurt you.”
Li Xiaoheng picked up some celery and put it in Tao Mu’s bowl, and said with a smile, “clearing heat and removing fire, reducing fat and blood pressure.”
“Are you laughing at me?” Tao Mu admitted that he did have quite some worries. However, the Li family was an affluent family, and Tao Mu’s impression of parents was that they were all very old-fashioned and focused on carrying on the family line. Even an ordinary family like Zhuo Yan’s couldn’t accept that their child found a same-sex partner, let alone a wealthy family like the Li family?
“How could I bear to laugh at you?” Li Xiaoheng placed his chopsticks down and looked at Tao Mu tenderly: “I’m comforting you. My family is very good-natured, and they are very satisfied with you.”
Tao Mu raised his eyebrows, not convinced.
Li Xiaoheng smiled and said, “Think about it from another angle. My family has always known about my sexual orientation, and they have also known how chaotic the same-sex circle is. Before, I was busy with work and didn’t find a partner, they were all worried about whether I would bring home a same-sex partner who had a gender identity disorder or a rich relationship history. Then they found out that I might be with you——a business wiz who is only 19 years old this year, and created the website FlyNews.com in your freshman year of college, which now already has more than 150 million registered users, and also helped me earn at least tens of billions of dollars in just one year of cooperation, and has never been in a relationship before being with me.”
“Such great conditions, even if I agreed to a marriage alliance, I might not even find anyone similar. What could they be dissatisfied with?”
“So they will definitely not object to us being together. On the contrary, my parents should be worried that you are so young and would get bored of me after being with me for a few years, decide that I am too old-fashioned and boring, feel that there is no longer any passion in being with me, and then dumping me for a younger, more handsome and more interesting lover.”
“How is that possible?” Tao Mu laughed out loud: “Who said you are old-fashioned and boring? You are actually quite men sao, alright?” (TN: refers to people who look quiet, cold or even dull outside, but inside they are volatile, charismatic, hot and sexy)
Li Xiaoheng smiled: “You’ve said that I’m men sao. So how could anyone else know about what I’m truy like except you?”
Li Xiaoheng spoke righteously, he was not a casual flirt. Besides his lover, who else could he flirt with?
Tao Mu chuckled, and suddenly thought of one thing: “Is your family the same as you?”
“Are you saying that in front of outsiders, we look like a normal person, but in front of close ones we are actually quite unrestrained?” Li Xiaoheng raised his eyebrows, touched his chin with his hand and pondered for a moment, then said, “My dad is even more men sao than me.”
“En?” Tao Mu was a little surprised that Li Xiaoheng actually described his father like that.
“My dad is the kind of feudal patriarch who keeps his face serious and unsmiling even in front of his children.” Although he rarely spent time with his family, when Li Xiaoheng mentioned his family, he couldn’t help but smile: “Always appearing very serious. But in fact, inside he is quite gossipy with very rich inner emotions.”
“My mom is a very normal full-time house-wife. Her daily schedule includes playing eight rounds of mahjong with her friends. During this period, she would exchange gossip about the families in their social circle. She also likes to pretend to be sick and trick me into going home to attend blind dates. The blind dates also include both men and women. And because I’ve never been interested in anyone before, she even worried that I’m not even gay, but asexual.”
When Li Xiaoheng said this, he paused for a moment and broke the news to Tao Mu: “Did you know? The most outrageous thing my mother did was to bribe a boy to sneak into my hotel room to test if I had any response.”
Tao Mu: “…..”
Seeing Tao Mu’s expression of disbelief, Li Xiaoheng smiled slightly: “So you know. How much my parents want to marry me off.”
“My older little brother is only 22 years old this year. He just graduated from college but is already dragged by my mother for a round of matchmaking. The twins, my youngest siblings, just graduated from high school, and my mother is urging them to find a boyfriend/girlfriend in college. By the way, the twins are also your brainless fans. Using your fandom terms, my sister is probably your face and fashion fan, and my brother is your technical and aesthetic fan.”
Speaking of this, Li Xiaoheng frowned, and couldn’t help but complain: “Seriously, I must really be too old and have a generation gap with them. I just can’t understand, they like you as a person, but why do they split their likes into different camps? Can one even divide their likes for a person into different versions? Unlike me, I like everything about you.”
Suddenly receiving a confession, Tao Mu’s hand holding the chopsticks froze slightly, and he glanced at Li Xiaoheng helplessly.
This was the first time Li Xiaoheng mentioned his family in front of Tao Mu. Probably because the words Li Xiaoheng used to describe his family’s antics were just too humorous, Tao Mu actually felt that the Li family was not so scary after all. But he was still a little reluctant to meet the Li family. And Li Xiaoheng didn’t rush him either.
After lunch, Tao Mu said he wanted to go back to FlyNews.com headquarters to have a look. Li Xiaoheng dropped him off at the company headquarters, and he also planned tp return to his company to handle his workload. Before leaving, he did not forget to tell Tao Mu, “Wait for me to pick you up at night.”
Tao Mu waved at Li Xiaoheng then turned around and entered the building.
Since the number of registered users had exceeded 150 million, and the talent search activity, “National God and Goddess”, jointly organized by FlyNews.com, Longteng Entertainment and Summer Star Entertainment was also coming to an end, the entire headquarters was very busy.
Tao Mu first went to the CEO’s office to find his Xiao Qi Dad. Only to find that Meng Qi was not in the office, and the secretary told Tao Mu that Mr. Meng was in the conference room, discussing with the representatives of Longteng Entertainment and Summer Star Entertainment about the matter of the contestants signing contracts after the talent show ended. There were also specific matters about gathering the top 20 contestants in the country to film an idol drama.
The script of the idol drama came from the outline drawn by Tao Mu, who then hired a team of screenwriters to expand and adapt it.
It mainly told the story about a fashion editor who was deeply aware of the development trend of new online media, and suggested that his magazine should also develop an online APP, but the proposal was rejected, and he was laid off because of the economic crisis. In a rage, he joined several programmer friends to develop an online fashion APP and online shopping platform. The heroine of the story was a rookie model who had just stepped into the fashion circle. Because she didn’t want to succumb to the unspoken rules of the industry, she was slapped by reality and ended up hitting walls wherever she turned. In the end, she was selected by the male protagonist because of her sweet image and humorous personality to became the spokesperson and new anchor of the fashion APP, and so the hero and heroine harvested success in both career and love.
——That’s right, in order to promote his own FlyNews.com and BulletScreen.com, Tao Mu also described in the script how BulletScreen.com could support Internet celebrities for live broadcasts, and how the anchors could bring goods to online shopping platforms.
Tao Mu drew on the real cases of later years and wrote several storylines involving e-commerce war in the script and then mixed it with all kinds of dog blood and conflict. And because the background of the script was the fashion circle, a lot of gossip and industry secrets in the fashion circle were also added. Tao Mu had also invited major international luxury brands to be sponsors of the idol drama, most of which agreed because of Tao Mu’s reputation in the fashion industry.
Coupled with the strong partnership of Longteng Entertainment and Summer Star Entertainment, the A- and B-list artists under the two companies would directly make cameo appearances in the TV drama. The production team of this drama was also headed by the Taiwanese team that was best at shooting idol dramas. The director was Ren Yating, who filmed the popular idol drama “King of Pop” two years ago.
And as for the fashion consultant of this idol drama, Tao Mu did not need anyone else, he himself could handle it easily. When he was writing the script, he also included character designs, and the images of the male and female protagonists and important supporting characters had been set in advance. Many of the set clothes had appeared on seasonal catwalk models of major international brands. Tao Mu had communicated with the major brands in advance and borrowed them all.
All in all, Tao Mu really wanted to make this idol drama a classic of business warfare plots. And in order to cooperate with the launch of the online shopping platform, Tao Mu also wanted to make this drama a weekly broadcasting drama. Both broadcasted on TV and on BulletScreen.com at the same time to maximize the enthusiasm of netizens and audiences.
However, weekly broadcasting dramas were still quite rare in China now. When TV stations buy dramas, they were more inclined to buy completely filmed dramas. In addition, Tao Mu’s FlyNews.com had just been established for a year, and had no connections in the TV station circle. Therefore, the task of negotiating the purchase of their drama by TV stations was directly handed over to Longteng Entertainment and Summer Star Entertainment.
Don’t know how the negotiation was done, but they finally sold the first-round broadcast rights of this idol drama to Mango TV. And the broadcast time was every Saturday night at ten o’clock, two episodes a week.
Meng Qi was talking with representatives of the two companies in the conference room. Tao Mu wandered outside for a while, then returned to Meng Qi’s office to wait obediently.
After more than an hour, Meng Qi, who had sent the representatives of the two companies off, returned to the office, where Tao Mu was lying on the sofa without any care for his image, answering the phone.
Meng Qi smiled and made a cup of milk tea for Tao Mu. After waiting for Tao Mu to hang up, he asked with a smile, “Who called?”
“Director Zhou Hong. The post-production of “The Great Wall of Flesh and Blood” has been completed, and it has been sold to National TV. It is going to be broadcast on the evening of September 28 so it can also be considered a National Day gift. Director Zhou discussed with me whether we should also do some publicity before it is shown.”
As for the previous life, “The Great Wall of Flesh and Blood” was released without any publicity. After all, “The Great Wall of Flesh and Blood” was just a poor crew at that time. The filming budget was so tight that they could only hire two horses. The filming was almost unable to be finished towards the end. Even the post-production money was squeezed out by the director from the salary of the several leading actors (asking the leading actors to help fund in advance, and then pay them back with a share of the money after the TV series was released), so how could there be any energy left to talk about doing publicity?
Besides, in the thinking of Director Zhou’s generation, there was little promotion for such things as war dramas. Unlike those idol dramas where the cast could go on several variety shows before the broadcast, and a group of young people play games or something. They were a group of middle-aged and elderly people in their 40s and 50s. Even if they go on those kinds of variety shows, there was a generation gap. Besides, the audiences were of different age groups, so even if they did publicity, it might not work.
And the way of publicity of the national TV station was just to put out a trailer during the advertising period.
Relatively speaking, the promotion method was quite simple and boring. But when it came to Tao Mu, things were completely different. Just a simple National Day gift, Tao Mu was able to create huge hype. Last year, FlyNews.com’s military uniform photo activity was very publicized and caused a lot of hype. Therefore, after thinking about it, Zhou Hong decided to hand over the promotion side of things to Tao Mu.
After all, Tao Mu was also an investor in their crew!
Meng Qi was particularly interested when he heard that Tao Mu’s TV series was about to be released: “Can we get the film source so we can watch it in advance?”
Meng Qi smiled and said, “Just the episodes in which you appeared.”
Tao Mu smiled: “It just so happened that I was going to ask Director Zhou to cut out a trailer first. I’ll ask for the film source then.”
Speaking of the pre-release promotion, Meng Qi remembered another thing, and told it to Tao Mu as a joke, “Did you know that the martial arts movie Shen Yu and Yan Sheng made together was released?”
Before Tao Mu could speak, Meng Qi continued: “When you were hanging out with those big celebrities in Hong Kong, didn’t the fans of Shen Yu and Yan Sheng complain that you deliberately excluded their idols? Shen Yu’s fans were angry, saying that as the CEO of FlyNews.com, you disrespect other fans very much, and were clamoring to cancel their FlyNews account and move to Weibo instead. Only to find out after going there that its liveliness and publicity level couldn’t keep up with our side, so they came running back pathetically.”
Meng Qi didn’t know about this at first, but it was Shen Yu’s fans who couldn’t help themselves and carried out another slapstick operation, somehow making their embarrassing actions of unregistering then re-registering shoot to the top of the hot search. Just in time for the film’s hot release period, Yan Sheng’s popularity and box office ability were still remarkable. The film had been released for two weeks and still dominated the weekly box office charts. So Shen Yu’s fans began to swipe the topic “Yesterday’s me, you like to ignore, but today’s me, you can’t even reach” on FlyNews.com.
You c an fi nd t he la te st cha pte rs at ( th e ir on tr ee bl oo ms. c o m )
Meng Qi laughed: “I believe that when you promote “The Great Wall of Flesh and Blood” and when you attend the launch conference of “Fashion Storm”, there will definitely be reporters asking you about topics related to them. Prepare yourself.”
Tao Mu wiped his face, not wanting to talk about a certain someone at all. He said to Meng Qi, “The Li family seems to know about my relationship with Li Xiaoheng?”
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