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 sustain.

He fired off another message: “Brother, don’t go! Finish this with me! Whatever you spent today, I’ll reimburse you. Call it making a friend.”

He genuinely felt sick over this.

Ever since the wave of Server-Dominating King players showed up, nothing had gone right for him.

Granted, he didn’t always spend this much on a private server. It depended on the competition. Usually a few days in cost him tens of thousands, maybe low hundreds of thousands. The last time he’d spent millions had been half a year ago.

This particular server he’d only started two days back, and across those two days he’d spent less than three hundred thousand total.

Wu Chen had dropped a million in a single move.

And from the start, he’d kept Dragon-Subduing Realm pinned down.

At first, Dragon-Subduing No Regrets had been thrilled to finally have an opponent. He’d thrown in a million without hesitation.

Then Wu Chen spent more.

So he kept matching it.

Dragon-Subduing Realm had stayed on the back foot the entire time, right up until Wu Chen suddenly triggered the siege. By that point, the fight had stopped being about who had deeper pockets.

In a straight spending war, Wu Chen could never have outspent him.

But a private server only held so many players. By the end, virtually everyone online belonged to one of the two guilds—a few hundred people, total. Beyond what money bought outright, the top dungeons dropped top-tier gear too, so both sides were nearly fully decked out regardless.

Past a certain point, more money bought nothing.

What decided it, in the end, was the number of core players—and whether the rank and file actually followed commands.

Dragon-Subduing No Regrets knew he might lose today’s siege.

But not for certain. There was still a chance to turn it around.

He wanted to win. Winning was the whole point.

Instead, Wu Chen had handed him the win by simply quitting—every core member stripping their gear and walking off at once. If he hadn’t needed to message Server-Dominating King·Chen directly, he might have thrown his computer across the room.

“Brother, what could possibly be this urgent? One or two hours won’t kill you, right?”

“If you quit, who am I supposed to play with now? Between us we’ve dropped twenty million into this. What’s the point if it doesn’t end in a winner? You’d just be handing all that cash to the server owner for nothing.”

“A man’s got his pride, brother! Come on, let’s finish it! Even if I lose to you today, fine, I’ll take it—just don’t walk away!”

The urgency practically bled through the text, message after message stacked on top of each other.

While Dragon-Subduing No Regrets kept typing, his guild members held back entirely—no attacks on Server-Dominating King, no one even bothering to pick the loot off the ground.

Clearly he’d already ordered them to hold off in the guild channel.

“I really do have something going on,” Wu Chen typed, smiling at the screen. “I need to head to Donghai’s CBD right now. Can’t keep playing.”

“Huh? You’re in Donghai too? You’re from here?” Dragon-Subduing No Regrets replied, clearly caught off guard.

“??? You are?” Wu Chen typed back, sounding even more surprised.

“Not from Donghai originally, but I’m here now.”

“What a coincidence,” Wu Chen wrote. “All right, all right, I really have to go.”

“No, no, don’t!”

This time the reply came fast: “Brother, you in some kind of trouble? Tell me. I’ll fix it. I’m seriously not bragging—there’s nothing in Donghai I can’t smooth over.”

“Sure, sure, I believe you,” Wu Chen replied—the words said he believed it, but the tone carried something else entirely: polite disbelief.

“Hey?! You don’t believe me at all, do you? Fine—you stick around and play with me properly today, and I’ll carry the sky itself for you if it comes to that!”

“That impressive, huh?” Wu Chen kept typing. “It’s not even really my problem. My woman’s company hit a wall—the product spokesperson got hit by a car, the contract’s off, and now she needs a new one fast. I’m heading back to help her sort it out…”

“A spokesperson? An actress? Man or woman?”

“Woman.”

“Women are easy. I’ve got a few. Just tell me what tier you’re after.”

“That’s a bold claim.” Wu Chen sounded unconvinced again.

“You still don’t believe me?! I’m seriously not bullshitting you—even Tao Manying, I could get her here with one phone call!”

Wu Chen’s fingers, halfway through typing something else, went still.

He looked at the screen and smiled.

That was exactly the line he’d been waiting for.