Chapter 046: I’m Seriously Not Bragging!

Chapter 046: I’m Seriously Not Bragging!

As for female celebrities—aside from the rare few who’d earned real seniority and become major shareholders in their own agencies, or who’d walked into the industry already backed by serious money, most of them didn’t amount to much in front of genuine power.

That said, a celebrity riding high wasn’t easy to touch either.

She was her company’s cash cow.

The entertainment world ran deep. The big agencies and media companies had connections that reached everywhere—some had even been founded by people from major families to begin with—and they protected their cash cows accordingly.

So while most female stars might not carry much weight themselves, there was usually serious muscle standing behind them.

Beyond an agency’s protection, there was another arrangement entirely.

Being kept by a patron. Being lifted up by one.

That was Tao Manying’s story.

She’d graduated from the Beijing Film Academy, but she’d already been taken on by a patron back in high school. She’d wanted to be a star, and he’d agreed to let her study acting.

Through her college years, the patron started spending, pushing her into film roles.

After graduation, he threw his full weight behind her.

For several years, despite starring in film after film, she never quite broke through—stuck hovering between first and second tier.

Then, last year.

One film changed everything, and she shot straight to the top.

None of it happened without her patron’s hand in it—including the more than twenty Best Actress titles she’d swept up in one stretch. Some she’d genuinely earned on talent. Others were simply his doing.

Dragon-Subduing No Regrets was that patron.

Wu Chen typed back a private reply: “Friend, something urgent came up. That’s it for today. I have to log off.”

“Damn it, man, don’t go! Don’t!”

“What could possibly be that urgent? Can’t we finish this first?”

“You’re not some shill the server owner hired, are you? Baiting me into dropping ten million and then bailing? You messing with me?”

Dragon-Subduing No Regrets fired off message after message, tone growing rougher by the line.

“If I were a shill, I’d keep playing with you. I really do have something come up,” Wu Chen replied.

“…Right. Sorry.” Dragon-Subduing No Regrets caught himself.

He’d only accused Wu Chen out of pure frustration.

Thinking it through, it made no sense anyway.

A shill wouldn’t have played this aggressively—wiping out the server in a matter of hours would only scare off a whale like him.

He’d dealt with shills before, and he knew how they worked: string you along, keep you company for days, milk you for cash while making sure you had fun doing it.

Server-Dominating King·Chen clearly had no interest in giving him fun.

The two guilds’ numbers weren’t even close—Dragon-Subduing Realm ran nearly four hundred members against Server-Dominating King’s little over two hundred. And still Dragon-Subduing Realm couldn’t win.

The gap was in the core.

Dragon-Subduing Realm had barely twenty reliable core players; the rest were solo players who came and went as they pleased.

The zone had only opened the day before yesterday. Over the past two days, Dragon-Subduing Realm had pulled in plenty of solo recruits, but most played for a day and vanished. By the time the decisive battle came, both sides had roughly the same number online—a bit over two hundred each.

But Server-Dominating King didn’t just have more core players. Even the ones who’d only joined that very morning, without the guild prefix yet attached to their names, followed orders as tightly as veterans.

Because they’d all started fresh that day and ridden the same momentum straight through to the end.

Thinking it over, Dragon-Subduing No Regrets understood exactly what had happened: he’d run into a billionaire who shared his exact hobby. An ordinary rich man couldn’t do this. Throwing millions, tens of millions, into a private server wasn’t something normal wealth could…