FPE Chapter 13

Online Controversy

It started with a video posted by a visitor to the park. The clip was only three minutes long, but it had plenty to catch the eye. First came a burst of noisy gasps and screams, a shaking camera, and a crowd of startled visitors stumbling backward — enough to make anyone who stumbled across the video pause out of sheer curiosity. Then the camera shifted and steadied on a glass wall. There was nothing behind it, yet even through a screen, you could feel the thick glass humming and vibrating, as though something invisible was in there, furiously pounding against it.

Someone fired off a comment in the live feed: Which zoo is this? Hope it’s not an earthquake — where did the animals go?

At that point, the person filming spoke up. Her voice cut clearly through the surrounding chaos: “Watch closely, everyone — it’s time to witness a miracle!”

Then a pair of plastic-framed glasses with slightly blue-tinted lenses appeared in front of the camera lens, which quickly pressed up against the phone’s camera — and suddenly, inside that empty glass enclosure, a creature appeared. There was no other word for it: a monster, unlike anything that could be easily described.

The comment section erupted in a wave of “What the—”

Everyone who watched the clip found themselves dragging the progress bar back and forth. Some marveled at the technology. Others suspected the footage had been spliced together. Still others accused the uploader of stealing someone else’s video. Comments and likes surpassed ten thousand in no time.

The uploader’s username was Little Daze Cutie. She was a food blogger with only a few hundred followers — this was the first time she had ever gotten this kind of traffic. She was both flattered and irritated by the skeptics, and she quickly posted a second video, this one ten minutes long, filming continuously from the park entrance all the way into the Magic Beast Viewing Corridor. She even bought another ticket just for that.

The magic beasts appearing inside the Viewing Corridor numbered more than one, though not every beast lingered. Some dashed through without stopping; others squinted lazily and dozed. But most of them drooled at the visitors for a while before cycling through the same routine — slam the glass, can’t break through, bound away, never come back. Little Daze Cutie was in luck this time: she captured four magic beasts on film, each with its own striking appearance that easily surpassed anything the human imagination could conjure in the way of patchwork monsters. In the video, she said with full conviction: “This is the sightseeing attraction at our city’s Fantasy Amusement Park. I didn’t believe it before I walked in — I actually told my friend it had to be a scam. But now my face is thoroughly slapped. This is genuine holographic technology — genuinely epoch-making.” Her voice grew more and more excited. “I truly never thought I’d live to see technology like this in my lifetime. And it isn’t just visuals — if you put on the holographic glasses the ticket sellers hand out, you don’t just see them, you can touch them. It’s incredible. I swear I’m not lying, and the video isn’t edited. If I am, may I go bald on the spot!”

That was quite the oath. Little Daze Cutie had appeared on camera — she looked like a girl of about twenty, and for a young woman, going bald really was about as severe a curse as it gets. Her earnest, swear-on-everything delivery gave even many skeptics pause. Wait — could it be real? There’s a date, there’s an address, and the video clearly shows plenty of other visitors. It can’t be fake, can it?

After two hours of spreading across the platform, both videos quickly climbed to trending.

As everyone knows, trending on a video platform is no easy feat. It demands high real-time view counts, like rates, share rates, and conversion rates. The lowest-performing videos on the trending list still rack up hundreds of thousands of plays, and truly strong content can pull in millions. But trending topics also breed a particular kind of parasite — uploaders who made a living latching onto viral content like a swarm of locusts, draining every drop of heat until there was nothing left. Jiang Zharen operated exactly this way.

He was shrewder than most, though — he had real skills and a knack for reading the room, which had earned him hundreds of thousands of followers over the years and a devoted, largely uncritical audience on the platform. That day, the moment he opened the app, he spotted two videos that had just shot onto trending. The similar thumbnail style told him instantly they were from the same uploader. It was rare for a single creator to land two videos on trending in one day — that usually pointed to a well-established veteran. Jiang Zharen was almost ready to let it go, but when he looked closely at the username, he didn’t recognize it at all. He clicked through, and to his surprise, Little Daze Cutie had barely two thousand followers.

Two videos with hundreds of thousands of views, and the uploader had two thousand followers. What did that mean? It meant that before today, she’d had fewer than a few hundred.

Jiang Zharen immediately recognized this as a very easy target. The kind he could bleed dry without any blowback.

He clicked into the videos and looked carefully. Science and technology content, huh. Debunking this kind of thing was almost too easy — there was practically a template for it.

Jiang Zharen got to work without delay. He wasn’t operating alone; he had a team behind him. While he drafted the script, the team had already finished the editing and background music. He recorded his voiceover, and in under an hour, an assembly-line video rolled off the production floor and went live.

Meanwhile, on her end, Little Daze Cutie was still in the comments, trading blows with the doubters.

— The address is 88 Taoyuan Street, Xinghu District, Jin’an City. If you don’t believe me, come see for yourself. I’ll be right here waiting!

She dropped the address, and the commenter who had been furiously questioning her instantly went quiet and disappeared without another word.

Little Daze Cutie gave a satisfied little humph. She was in a good mood.

She was just about to put her phone away when her friend sent her a message: “Cutie, this is bad — look up Jiang Zharen, quick. He posted a debunking video about you.” There was a link attached.

Little Daze Cutie froze. She knew who Jiang Zharen was — notoriously sharp-tongued on the platform. She couldn’t stand him, but he had a massive following, and saying one word against him meant getting chased down by a mob. She had never imagined she’d be the one he set his sights on.

She tapped the link. A video loaded, its thumbnail and title impossible to miss: 《Debunking Fantasy Amusement Park — The So-Called “Holographic Technology” Is Nothing But a Clout-Chasing Scam》.

The video opened with Jiang Zharen’s signature backdrop and his trademark comedic style. It spliced in several clips from Little Daze Cutie’s videos, breaking them down with a string of technical-sounding jargon she barely understood, punctuated by comic sound effects to set the mood. At the very end, Jiang Zharen delivered an address directly to her with his characteristic air of unshakeable confidence: “…It’s just another influencer scam harvesting gullible viewers. Little Daze Cutie — you call yourself an influential content creator, and you’re out here making dirty money by misleading your audience. Don’t you get nightmares?”