975 An Old Friend Appears

Looking at her watch, it was about seven-ish o’clock in the evening. The novel had been posted about an hour ago, at six o’clock. Now, the author was online again at seven odd o’clock. Was this author trying to refresh their novel, or was the author trying to have a chat session with their fans?

Without hesitating, Gu Nianzhi sent the author a direct message as bait to lure the author into talking to her. The author saw her message almost instantaneously.

Gu Nianzhi’s direct message from the hacker software masked her identity and made her look like support staff from Weibo, saying that there was an issue with their account and requesting them to confirm their identity.

This was the easiest hacking method. Gu Nianzhi intended to give this a try first. If the person did not bite the bait within five minutes, she would use another method.

However, Gu Nianzhi only had to wait three minutes for the person’s account and password details to appear in her hacker mailbox. With the information on hand, Gu Nianzhi logged into the author’s account and downloaded all the contents from their account.

She downloaded everything including their direct messages with others from the account, the author’s login IP, and login address. Then, she deleted the message that she had sent before she clearing out all traces of her having logged in and logged out of the account. Then, she changed the website of her sending website, making it so that the author could never find the website where they had keyed in their credentials.

After she had settled everything, Gu Nianzhi quickly looked through all the data in front of her. Then, she downloaded it to analyze. She realized almost immediately that this person had close contact with the owner of another Weibo account.

To put it simply, someone had contacted this author a couple of days before and given them a huge sum of money to write a novel. The outline and names of the characters had all been decided upon by this person, and this person had even planned ways to promote the novel.

The mastermind was also putting a lot of effort into pretending that this novel was becoming popular on its own. Because they wanted this novel to look like it had gotten popular on its own, they had prepared a grand plan to execute. They intended to let this novel become popular after two to three days. That was why the novel had not been promoted yet. The situation was still within their control.

Gu Nianzhi breathed a sigh of relief. However, almost immediately after, she realized that right before this incident, the account of this author had only three fans! Therefore, the 90 odd fans that this author had on their Weibo account were bots from internet marketers. But only authors of some quality would have been able to write something like this, wouldn’t they?

This author was desperate to become famous and rich at the same time. Those who were slightly popular and treasured their own work would never accept bribes to do such dirty tricks as this. They had to know that writing novels to tarnish one’s reputation was illegal in the Hua Xia Empire.

Gu Nianzhi continued to look at the private messages exchanged between these two accounts.

The person had confidently assured the author that this would not sabotage the author in any way. They said that the author had “someone behind them” to support them. Then, the person reassured the author again that the author would never meet with any legal repercussions.

Seeing words like “legal repercussions,” Gu Nianzhi tapped her slender fingers on her desk. She wolf-whistled, not able to contain her emotions.

This person knew what legal repercussions were?

They had a professional behind them?

Gu Nianzhi felt energetic all of a sudden, not at all tired anymore. She felt her fighting spirit surging through her.

The author’s true identity was quickly revealed to Gu Nianzhi. He was a mere amateur online author who had all of his mind focused on becoming famous. He had just turned into a full-time online author and was working from home. He wanted to write a novel so good that it could make him famous overnight…

He was not exactly special.

The more important issue now was to look for the owner of the account that the author had been conversing with. Gu Nianzhi traced the account and found the person’s Weibo account.

She managed to discover that this person owned an account in a large-scale private limited company that dealt specially with personal relations! He was the one who had sent a private message to the author and gotten him into this, writing untrue facts to tarnish Gu Nianzhi’s reputation and give Huo Shaoheng a warning along the way.

This company was only too familiar to Gu Nianzhi.

When she’d been investigating the affair between Gu Yanran and Tan Dongbang, she had investigated this entertainment company. It belonged to the Cai family and was managed by Cai Songyin personally.

Haha, this was made for a news story!

However, could the mastermind be found so easily?

After saving all the information she had uncovered, Gu Nianzhi still felt that something was amiss. If Cai Songyin was really the one who had ordered someone to do this, why would she be so ruthless? Hadn’t she already given in so many times for the sake of Tan Guiren? Didn’t she want to be on good terms with the Huos?

If this novel spread, Gu Nianzhi would not be the only one whose reputation was tarnished. The person who would receive the most negativity would be Huo Shaoheng.

Think about it… A highly ranked major general who was still climbing up his career ladder and had an amazing future ahead of him could be completely tarnished by a short novel of fewer than 3,000 words…

Under such circumstances, even if Huo Shaoheng was greedy for power and authority, he would never get together with Tan Guiren. Therefore, if Cai Songyin was the mastermind behind this, Gu Nianzhi could only draw two conclusions.

First, Cai Songyin was reluctant to let Huo Shaoheng be with Tan Guiren. Therefore, she was going all out to destroy Huo Shaoheng’s future. That way, Tan Guiren would never get to be with Huo Shaoheng, no matter how much she wanted it.

Second, Cai Songyin felt that she could manage to control the media to such an extent. Did she believe that she could tarnish Huo Shaoheng’s reputation in one minute, then force his reputation back to being positive in the next?

Gu Nianzhi shook her head. Cai Songyin had successfully used the media to make Tan Dongbang become the Prime Minister. Her knowledge of the media was simply not that shallow.

What the media could control was the views of netizens. What would that be? If she used an old saying to describe this, she would say that the views of netizens were like water. Water was able to make a boat sail or sink. If a single mistake was made, the boat that had seemed so safe and friendly could capsize immediately, drowning the people who had dared play around with the views of the netizens.

Therefore, even if she had become big-headed due to her ability to use the media to make Tan Dongbang the Prime Minister, she would never become so big-headed that it deteriorated her intelligence. As such, the second conclusion could not be related to Cai Songyin.

Gu Nianzhi pondered over this issue carefully and looked through the official account of the PR company for a bit. Suddenly, she realized that the account’s private message mailbox seemed to be too clean. It was so clean that there were no traces of evidence in it at all.

This meant that when the account holder of this Weibo account sent a private message to the author, only the author saved the conversation. This account holder had deleted all the chat history on their end. They had not only deleted all the messages that were exchanged between them and the author, but they had also deleted all their work-related private messages.

Did they have to delete everything so thoroughly…

Gu Nianzhi’s heart skipped a beat. She hacked into the control system of Weibo and searched for their back up data. This PR officer could only delete the data from his account, but the backup data of the messages were saved in the control system of Weibo.

After flipping through their records from the past 10 days, Gu Nianzhi found the records of the person deleting his data on Weibo…

“Such a good boy. You are really the PR of the entertainment company.”

The number of private messages was really crazy! Gu Nianzhi looked through the messages quickly. After a short while, Gu Nianzhi’s eyes were fixed on something as she realized that something else was amiss.

On the first day of the lunar new year, a secret account had contacted this PR officer. This secret account holder had instructed the PR officer to look for an author who was not very famous to write a short novel to tarnish the reputation of Gu Nianzhi and Huo Shaoheng as well.

This PR officer was reluctant at first, since the instructions he’d received were to get someone to focus on how shameless Gu Nianzhi was and to make Huo Shaoheng appear as someone who did not falter in any circumstance.

However, this secret account offered an amount that this PR officer could not refuse. This amount was large enough to buy the entire company he worked for.

It was 300 times his annual salary of about 30,000 dollars.

It was only due to such an amount being offered that this PR officer was willing to take the risk of going against Cai Songyin’s orders and changing the novel’s requirement to tarnishing Gu Nianzhi’s reputation and secretly tarnishing Huo Shaoheng’s reputation at the same time. The important point was that Huo Shaoheng would be so affected by this accusation that he would never be able to progress in his career ever again.

Gu Nianzhi continued investigating and looked at the secret account that had contacted this PR officer. However, when she followed the data from the backup data in the system, Gu Nianzhi realized that that the Weibo account had already been deleted!

With such a careful covering of tracks, it seemed like this person had really wanted to stir up some nonsense…

Gu Nianzhi was, however, getting more excited. She had always been someone who liked to face her challenges with equal vigor. She was also strong on her own. The tougher the issue was, the more Gu Nianzhi wanted to try to solve it. Of course, she could even hack into the internal site of the Federal Intelligence Agency of Germany all on her own, much less a website like Weibo with so many security loopholes!

Gu Nianzhi’s fingers flew across her keyboard, keying in string after string of commands as she hacked into the customer service machine for Weibo.

The last time she had been unable to enter Weibo’s customer service system had been because the account had been deleted. When a user deletes their account, it did not mean that they have truly deleted the account. The website would usually just shift the account from the usual security folder to a folder that was labeled “inactive.”

The security measures in the “inactive” folder were way lower than those in the active one. Like last time, upon opening the software to decode the account ID and passwords, it only took Gu Nianzhi less than a second before she managed to find the user ID and password of the secret account.

Upon decoding the user ID and password, Gu Nianzhi entered an open area. Very soon, she managed to find all the information and conversation histories there. She quickly downloaded them all.

She used a time sequence as a guide, managing to find the data from the day when the secret account had contacted the owner of the author. In the records, there was also the login IP of that mystery person.

Gu Nianzhi looked at the IP details and the corners of her eyes twitched.

It was all too familiar. It was almost like Gu Nianzhi’s old friend…

Wasn’t that the useless IP that had appeared during the affair between Gu Yanran and Tan Dongbang? Seeing this useless IP, Gu Nianzhi heaved a long sigh, like she had been expecting this, but at the same time, she felt like she had not.

She felt as though the long sword of Damocles finally had the potential to fall. After beating around the bushes so many times, she had returned to square one again.

“There was a nice path in heaven for you, but you prefer going to a hell that has no door…”