Of course, this was due to the nature of his job. He had been in the background for a long time and been unable to show his face in public.
After this, General Ji intended to nurture Huo Shaoheng as his successor and promote him to the Assistant Secretary of the Standing Committee of the Military Supreme Council. He’d only appeared on television a couple of times since then.
Each time he’d appeared, his time on screen had been extremely short. Moreover, he was in disguise. He was often wearing a huge pair of shades that had covered half of his face. For example, in the news broadcast when he had gone to America to bring Tan Guiren back, he’d been wearing those shades.
The audience had, at the very most, seen his tall build and the aura he exuded. Even if he did not speak, no one could ignore his presence.
However, Huo Shaoheng’s current popularity was almost akin to when a new idol that starred in a new drama became popular. Such popularity that came on so quickly led Gu Nianzhi, who was a netizen who was used to stirring problems online, to sense that something was amiss.
However, she could not find any hard evidence to support her suspicion. She just felt constantly worried and suppressed as if something was about to happen.
Therefore, when she suffered insomnia from the stress that night, she got up and came up with a program. The program was able to search for information related to Huo Shaoheng on Weibo, with filters set according to her preferences.
To get ahold of the latest news, Gu Nianzhi set this program to run every six hours. Then, it would send emails to Gu Nianzhi’s mailbox according to their relevance.
For the next fortnight, everything seemed normal. It was so normal that Gu Nianzhi thought that she’d been merely overthinking things. That was the case until the fourteenth day of the first lunar month…
Gu Nianzhi was finally done helping Zhao Liangze synchronize the satellite and all of its security measures. She returned to Huo Shaoheng’s mansion and had a nice dinner before taking a bath and heading to bed.
Huo Shaoheng had sent her a text earlier in the day saying that he would be back the next day. The next day would be the broadcast station’s dinner for the final day of the lunar new year. The three major organizations, the Senate, Cabinet, and army would all be present. Huo Shaoheng would be attending such a function for the very first time, accompanying General Ji.
Gu Nianzhi took out her phone and saw the news. She glanced at it for a while before opening her email. There were a lot of emails in her inbox all of a sudden. It was way more than the amount she had received over the past couple of weeks. Gu Nianzhi’s heart skipped a beat.
These emails had all been sent to her based on the program she had created. Every single Weibo post related to Huo Shaoheng, even if it was slightly related, was ranked under her filter according to relevance, then sent to her email.
As Gu Nianzhi looked through the emails one by one, her attention was attracted by one particular email. Her program had managed to find a novel that was written based on Huo Shaoheng by a Weibo account.
This was her first time seeing someone using Huo Shaoheng’s name and writing a novel using his name. In a moment of curiosity, Gu Nianzhi clicked on it.
As she glanced through a short chapter of fewer than 3,000 words, her face turned pale. She was so angry that she found it difficult to breathe. She sat up straight in bed, one of her hands holding her phone tightly. She had the impulse to crawl to wherever that author was and destroy them!
The story was about a twelve-year-old little girl called Gu Nian. After being rescued by a high ranking soldier, Huo Shao, she began seducing the soldier shamelessly.
She was only twelve, but she already had the assets that an adult woman would have… That was the reason why Huo Shao was seduced by her. Once, after getting drunk, he was successfully seduced by Gu Nian and made the biggest mistake of his life.
Knowing that this was not a good nor right relationship, Huo Shao tried to find ways to get rid of Gu Nian. However, Gu Nian used the fact that she was an orphan against him. Each time Huo Shao brought up the topic of a breakup, Gu Nian would threaten to take her own life.
One day, a goddess akin to an angel appeared. She helped Huo Shao to get out of this seemingly incestuous relationship…
After skimming through the entire story, Gu Nianzhi was filled with endless questions.
What in the world?!
Gu Nianzhi finally understood what people meant by turning words upside down and being completely unscrupulous. Logically, even if someone wanted to write a novel, they would have to observe the nature of life. What twelve-year-old girl had assets that a fully developed woman would have?!
For reference, Gu Nianzhi remembered that she’d been so plump when she was twelve-years-old that her face had been the size of a huge silver plate and her waist the size of a barrel. Even if she’d used her body, she would have merely looked like a wobbling barrel. How on earth would that be considered seductive?!
How deprived must Huo Shaoheng have been to be seduced by the twelve-year-old Gu Nianzhi who looked like a barrel, or any twelve-year-old for that matter?!
However, this showed something. It showed that the person who had written this novel only knew certain parts of the real story. Therefore, this person must not be from inside the Special Forces. She knew this because those from the Special Forces remembered how Gu Nianzhi looked when she was twelve. Therefore, none of them could have come up with such a “masterpiece”…
Of course, there was a high possibility that this person did not know much about the details. If not, they would never have guessed that Huo Shaoheng had been requested by the army to be Gu Nianzhi’s guardian only after rescuing her when she was twelve.
Although that had happened, seeing that her reputation was being tarnished to this extent by someone else made her feel as though her heart was being thrown into a puddle of mud and stepped on many times. It seemed like this person would not be satisfied until her reputation was tarnished beyond recognition.
Gu Nianzhi controlled herself and her trembling, biting her lips tightly until it was bleeding. She tasted a hint of blood before she snapped back to reality.
When she thought about it properly, this author was not only trying to tarnish Gu Nianzhi’s reputation. More importantly, this person was trying to tarnish Huo Shaoheng’s reputation!
As a young, highly-ranked major general with an amazing career ahead of him, and as someone who had just become a highly-ranked major general with a lot of fame online, his reputation was in danger of being tarnished by this online author. It was too much to be true!
With her fists clenched, Gu Nianzhi coughed lightly and laughed coldly.
Did this person wish to stir nonsense?
She was more than happy to join the fun.
She calmed herself and traced the author’s main page to take a look. This author was a new author who had already written a couple of short novels. Looking at the timeline of the person’s Weibo account, this novel had just been uploaded less than an hour before.
However, this author had a limited number of followers, and therefore the novel had not been viewed too many times. Although this author had fewer than a hundred followers, there were already a good number of comments on this novel.
A series of “please write more,” “let us share this” comments and likes on the post were too abnormally neat and annoying.
Gu Nianzhi laughed coldly again.
It was only too obvious that this author was trying to bring Huo Shaoheng down!
Being a highly ranked major general in the army and being mentioned in such a high-profile manner on social media, even having a novel about him… This was neither support nor protection. This was about trying to tarnish his reputation on purpose and putting up obstacles for his future career progression.
On the surface, the novel’s direction was clear. The person who would have the most impact would be Gu Nianzhi. Huo Shaoheng was a man. Therefore, the author did not tarnish him completely.
However, the practical consequences would not be as simple as that. From Gu Nianzhi’s point of view, such a move from the author was beyond stupid. While this novel was tarnishing Gu Nianzhi’s reputation, it was also bringing Huo Shaoheng down to the extent that he would not be able to recover from it.
Although it was stupid, it was also extremely vicious.
With such a novel surfacing and Huo Shaoheng’s recent popularity, the moment a popular validated account holder shared the novel, it would create a major impact on social media. The consequences would be dire.
Gu Nianzhi continued pondering over it, instinctively feeling that this was linked to the Cais somehow.
On the first day of the lunar new year, Cai Songyin, Tan Guiren, and Cai Shengnan had been put down in front of Huo Shaoheng. This was them they were trying to take revenge!
However, if they were only seeking a temporary form of revenge, why were they lessening their chances of getting Huo Shaoheng as their son-in-law anymore?
This was too vicious for that, wasn’t it…?
If Huo Shaoheng’s reputation was put down so much that he would be unable to recover from it, would they still be willing to marry their precious daughter off to him?
Whether Huo Shaoheng would marry her or not aside, Gu Nianzhi was trying to put herself in the shoes of an idiot as she pondered this. She could see from this incident that the Cais, who had been controlling the media ever since Tan Dongbang was cleared of his impeachment, had gone overboard.
They were too confident that they would be able to control the discussion, reasoning that if they could tarnish someone’s reputation at one moment, they would be able to make someone popular again the next.
As long as their target behaved…
Gu Nianzhi was someone who strongly believed in knowing who your opponent was before you could win your battle.”
When it was her who needed to solve the problem, she would have to win against an idiot. To do so, she would have to know how an idiot would think. Had this not been the case, her opponent would be using their strong experience as idiots to defeat her.
Gu Nianzhi opened her laptop and turned on her hacker software. Fine then, since she’d already ended work early for the day, she would see who on earth this author really was.
