Transmigration of the Famous Cyber Star

The next day after Liu Man had exposed the fake cat food sellers, she had received an urgent call early into the morning. The person who called her did not greet her, nor did they introduce themselves. They directly questioned her, “Did you film that live-stream video?”

At that moment, Liu Man had just woken up. She immediately became completely conscious after hearing a brash and crude voice.

That person must’ve been completely sure that she had been the one who had posted the video. They didn’t even wait for her to speak, but instead continued, “We’ve already refunded you with that 548 RMB, and you now have it on your Alipay. Please, immediately delete that video on Weibo.”

He said the word “please,” but it was as if he didn’t have any means of supplicating. It was as if Liu Man had to listen to his orders since he gave her back her money.

Liu Man slowly asked,

“Who are you, if I may ask?” To be honest, she had already known when saw where the call had come from.

TL’s Note: By where the call came from, the author meant how when you call someone, that person would see where the call came from in the country.

“I’m the owner of “Winnie Loves Pets.” My first name is Chen.”

“Oh.”

Liu Man’s indifferent actions really irritated the person on the other side of the call.

Owner Chen’s full name was Chen Desheng. Chen Desheng’s shop had been on Taobao for five whole years, and his shop was a very old one with two badges. He already had employed lots of professional managers to operate the shop because of how big his business had become, and he instead backed up to behind the curtains and was mainly in charge of other things, such as the shop in real life and purchasing more products.

TL’s Note: Chen Desheng became a person who operates behind the public eye.

Because his shop had a great reputation, there were a lot of orders being placed every day. He also had a lot of professional social media monitors, and they were usually quick to solve normal reports, refunds, and bad ratings. He never really cared about these things.

However, this morning, a sales manager in Chen Desheng’s company had disturbed his dreams and called him. He had told Chen Desheng to log onto Weibo and Taobao. As he opened Weibo, he saw a video on his homepage with a woman with a young voice and didn’t show her face. As the video began, the woman didn’t try to hide it at all and named their shop directly. She said that she bought fake cat food from their shop.

Chen Desheng knew how bad the situation was as soon as he saw this. He then checked the most popular topics and saw: #Immoral-Businessman-On-Taobao-Selling-Fake-Cat-Food#, #Boycott-Winnie-Loves-Pets#, #Stop-Buying-Fake-Cat-Food-On-Taobao#. There were all kinds of negative news over the social media platform.

Chen Desheng then opened Taobao and went to his homepage, where hundreds of refund requests popped out. The comment section almost broke down, and almost all of them were bad ratings.

He didn’t have any cardiac diseases, but he was so outraged that he almost had a heart attack. It didn’t even dawn yet, and he called everyone he thought could help him. However, who would be up at this time? Even his customer service staff members had gone to sleep.

Chen Desheng didn’t sleep at all after seeing all of the news. He spent hours analyzing the content of the video with a few of his employees. They then searched through the orders before and confirmed that the one who had posted this video was the ‘Ms. Liu’, who had boughten cat food from their shop twice.

The old Liu Man always used to shop on Taobao using ‘Ms. Liu’ as her name. She never used her real name.

Chen Desheng had also found the conversation Liu Man had had with the customer service staff member and became really angry at that customer service employee. Because of that 548 RMB, they had lost almost everything. He hadn’t said anything else but immediately fired that specific customer service employee. He seemed to have forgotten that the customer service employees had all been acting under the orders from him.

“Ms. Liu, we businessmen always like to do business in a peaceful way while earning as many benefits as possible. There was an issue with the products we had gotten recently. It was just an accident. Now that we’ve refunded you with the money, your problem has been fixed. Why do we have to make our relationship so harsh and do things this way?”

Chen Desheng had realized that this young girl wasn’t that kind and naïve, so his voice had finally had a tone of pleading.

Liu Man said, “So now you finally admit to the fact that I bought fake cat food?”

“Yes, you did buy fake cat food,” Chen Desheng was fast to admit, “To be honest, nowadays, which cat food shop on Taobao can say that they have never sold anything fake without lying? The customs are now stricter, and the factories outside the country only produce a limited number of products. We can’t find more resources to get cat food. Brands like Cats’ Garden have too many people trying to be dealers with them, and we barely could find any of their products in the Hong Kong supermarkets. We finally found some after some time, but it would’ve been sold out within a week. We couldn’t have only done a week of business. I have 200 employees in my company, and everyone’s just trying to make a living. You need to forgive us.”

Chen Desheng made it sound as if he was right doing what he did. Liu Man laughed, “You lied to us buyers, and now you want us to forgive you? Then who would do the same to our pets? You’ve done the same business for many years now, and you know the importance of pets to their owners. Would you use fake cat food to feed your pets?”

“You can’t say it like that. You buy cat food from the internet because of selfish motives too. Don’t you just want to buy it at a cheaper price, and don’t you want to spend even less money on your pets? The cat food from Cats’ Garden, no matter what type of package they’re filled with, wouldn’t be sold under the price of 600 HKD. Although lots of the customers are very clear about this, they still try to believe that they got lucky. They’d rather buy fake cat food and buy it at a cheaper price, and who’s there to blame? We, as shop owners, are also very wrongly-blamed.”

“It’s true, I do keep a pet. I have a dog, and I feed him dog food that is exported from overseas. I would never feed him anything that’s obviously cheaper than other dog food. You all are willing to get lied to, and I can only say, ‘One is willing to deceive, the other is willing to be lied to.’ If you had only used your brain when you made your orders, you would know that nobody would o willing to buy real cat food all the way from overseas for you. Doesn’t it cost money to bring them all the way from other countries? Doesn’t the storage room require money? Doesn’t it take money to hire more employees to do all of this?”

“If all of these things were considered in the price, then you would have to pay at least 1000 RMB for just a bag of cat food. But if it’s really priced at 1000, then would you still be willing to buy it? You would be even more reluctant to buy expensive real cat food. This is just how it’s like on Taobao. You don’t compare the quality, but you compare the price. If it’s cheaper, then people like it. If we don’t sell fake products as well, then we would be beaten by people who also sell cat food. There would’ve been no way for us to survive.”

Chen Desheng kept on finding excuses for what he did, and not only did he emphasize on how arduous and tiring it was for him and his business to survive, but also insinuated that all of the customers only liked cheap things, and the responsibility was on customers.

“So, you mean that we are the ones who forced you to sell fake cat food?” Liu Man asked.

Chen Desheng didn’t speak, so he tacitly approved.

“You are the one who only thinks about money. If you only sold real cat food priced at 1000RMB, I believe that there would still be people who would buy it, and that you would still be able to earn money. However, interest would never be better than fake cat food, right? Because you would receive less customers, you would receive less resources. But if you did what I just said, you would still be able to make a living. But you just wouldn’t be satisfied, and you would want to earn more money. To people like you, money is much more important than morality. You only care about your dog but not others’ pets.”

Liu Man said exactly what Chen Desheng had been thinking. Chen Desheng didn’t want to debate with Liu Man anymore and said with a livid tone, “Ms. Liu, you do talk in a direct way, and I don’t want to be voluble. How much money must I pay for you to delete that video of yours?”

Liu Man said with a light and aloof tone, “I didn’t send those videos. I didn’t record my live-stream at all. It was my fans who did. I have no right to tell them what to do.”

“How about this. We’ll do this according to the Consumer Protection Law, to refund customers with 1000% of the original price if the product is fake. We will refund you with a total of 5480 RMB. And with that, you will do another live-stream today, saying that you did something wrong yesterday and that there is no problem with my shop.”

“Apologies, but I can’t do that.”

“How about 54,800? You are still a student, and this much money should be enough for you for a long time,” Chen Desheng continued his attempts at seducing Liu Man with money. He suddenly used a heavier tone mixed with some threatening means, “Little girl, you are still too young to understand the danger of this community. You are a woman, and what do you have to fight us? By doing this, you have not only made me your enemy, but other Taobao cat food shop owners. Aren’t you worried about being threatened by many others?”

Liu Man’s tone didn’t change, and she said without any hesitation, “Sorry, I cannot betray my conscience and lie.”

The other person hung up as soon as she finished her sentence.

Liu Man opened Alipay and was not surprised to see the 548 RMB refund from Chen Desheng. She then logged onto Weibo, where the first thing she saw was a bunch of notifications of new fans. Her Weibo account, which had previously been very unknown to the public, had suddenly obtained more than 6000 fans in just a night.

Credits: Sydney & Kathrien