Forced Me to Regress, Huh?

Chapter 56: Someone, Take Pictures!



Cheng Zhu’s message made Shen Qingning pause for a moment.

Regardless of whether he was telling the truth or not, it clearly indicated that he had never intended to chat with her privately first.

Shen Qingning sent the photo she had taken and typed, “Remember to tell Little Youzi tomorrow that I’m using this keychain.”

“Okay,” Cheng Zhu replied.

The conversation came to an abrupt end.

A quality online chat should never just be a question and an answer. It should be a flow of conversation where each reply either continued the topic or introduced a new one.

Cheng Zhu naturally understood this simple logic. He knew that replying with a simple message would end their private chat.

But he wanted it to end here.

At this moment, he stopped chatting with Shen Qingning. Instead, he opened the photo she had sent and glanced at it briefly.

In the photo, besides the car keys and Pikachu keychain, a bit of the bed sheet and the curtains were visible.

From the colors and style, Cheng Zhu thought, Is she really one of those women who is strongly self-constraining?

He had never believed that women who dressed in modest, restrained outfits and decorated their homes with dark tones were truly consistent in their appearance and character.

He had been in women’s bedrooms more times than he cared to admit.

And he knew that once the lights were off, the person he saw could turn into an entirely different person.

With this thought, he closed the photo.

He wasn’t the type of person to zoom in on a photo and study it, poring over every detail, just because a woman had sent it.

He was busy, and his time was valuable.

Just as he was about to focus on managing his store, Keep Coming, he received a WeChat message from Lin Lu.

She had taken a photo of the piglet plushie and sent it to Cheng Zhu.

You two are really best friends. You do the same things, he thought.

He opened the photo and saw the two words ‘Cheng Pig’ written on the piglet plushie’s clothes.

And behind the words was a small drawing of a pig’s head.

“I think you’re trying to deceive your master and destroy your ancestors, huh?” he typed back angrily.

“You’re my master, and I’m your senior sister. We’ll each use our own titles for the other. No need to worry about the details!” Lin Lu replied instantly.

Cheng Zhu continued, “Originally, the combination of us master and disciple could have taken one character from each of our names and called ourselves Vying for Supremacy. (Cheng Zhu’s Zhu (逐) and Lin Lu’s Lu (鹿) makes 逐鹿, meaning Vying for Supremacy). How domineering would that be?

“But you had to make it sound like a zoo, with you being a deer and me being a pig. What’s the point of that?” Cheng Zhu complained.

Lin Lu stared at the message and muttered, “Pfft, pfft. You picked a character from each of our names? Are you trying to make a couple name?”

But then again, she did think Vying for Supremacy was quite domineering!

In the end, the voice actress stubbornly typed, “Vying for Supremacy? Why is your name first and mine second? I’m not giving this combination my official approval!”

Cheng Zhu sent her a ‘do whatever you want’ emoji.

“By the way, I’m starting school in a few days. You get my hint, right, Senior Sister?” Cheng Zhu typed.

“Got it! This senior sister will give you a full service package, new student!” Lin Lu replied casually.

“Okay, I’m looking forward to your full service.”

Cheng Zhu’s attitude towards Lin Lu was completely different from his attitude towards Shen Qingning. He wasn’t as cold.

They chatted warmly for another five minutes before he said he needed to get to work.

He sat down at his computer and first checked the store’s data for the day.

Tsk, it’s going up every day. Cheng Zhu was very satisfied.

He estimated his store was about to experience an explosion in orders soon.

Before that happened, he needed to quickly change the main images of his product listings to the new format of combining Korean manhwa with photos.

Right now, the store that’s aggressively bidding for the stepmother dress keyword is called the Graceful Flagship Store.

It’s ranked really high in the same category. It’s second in the sexy lingerie section.

By this point, the owner should have made a lot of money over the years.

They’re basically copying my designs, but the prices are eight yuan lower than mine.

Oh, they’re offering a free pair of stockings with every stepmother dress purchase?

Speaking of which, advertising adult products on Taobao’s ZTC was really expensive.

After all, the nature of ZTC ads was essentially a bidding system for keywords. For example, if you paid to bid on the stepmother dress keyword, when users searched for it, your product would appear in a prominent spot.

The charges were based on clicks, so the conversion rate was crucial.

These days, many people just browse for pictures here. They clicked but didn’t buy and just looked at the damn images. It was purely to satisfy their eyes or even their hands.

These people didn’t have any girls to accompany them in using these treasures, so it was impossible for them to actually place an order.

But as long as they clicked the ad, the merchants would still be charged and have to pay the platform.

The stepmother dress was now somewhat of an internet buzzword. Its popularity was rising, so people were bound to search for it out of curiosity, but they wouldn’t actually make a purchase.

This Graceful Flagship Store was simply burning money to seize market share.

However, they actually did have the strength and resources to sustain this kind of spending early on.

All of this was predictable. If nothing like this had happened, that would have been the real surprise.

What bothered Cheng Zhu the most was the several negative reviews he had received in the past few days. Some customers complained about poor quality, saying they developed red bumps on their skin after wearing it once.

Such comments were devastating, far worse than vague complaints like poor quality.

After all, these were lingerie products. They were worn close to the skin and in sensitive areas.

He had instructed Wang Anquan and the others to handle these negative reviews and reach out to the customers to resolve the issues.

These days, there were even professional ‘negative review specialists’ who made a living by leaving negative reviews and extorting merchants.

But these particular customers were something else. They outright ignored customer service. Even when the store offered compensation, they refused it. Every single one of them had the same attitude: I’m angry. I don’t need money, and I’ll make sure my negative review stays up.

Some wouldn’t respond at all, no matter how the store tried, making it impossible to get in touch, let alone persuade them to delete their reviews.

Interesting. A group of stubborn customers with weak physical resistance but incredibly rigid attitudes.

One of them, in particular, was downright fascinating. It was like she had learned The Art of War. She left a negative review saying the product had caused red bumps on her body and ordered another item the very next day, only to leave yet another negative review. Unbelievable, right?

What happened? Did another part of her body not develop bumps, and her OCD flared up? Or had getting red bumps become an addiction she just couldn’t quit?

This was a typical example of someone deliberately trying to disgust you and mess with your mental state.

What a cunning psychological tactic!

It’s way too obvious, Cheng Zhu thought.

There was a very high possibility that competitors were behind these malicious reviews.

Some inexperienced sellers might have no idea how to handle situations like this.

But Cheng Zhu knew exactly what to do. There were plenty of solutions. He could even hire a professional team to take care of it.

It’s not a big deal.

In his view, this constant back-and-forth was meaningless and boring.

Low-level business wars are always like this. So unsatisfying! Not nearly direct enough!

But I can only blame myself for not making it big yet and not being qualified to join the ranks of high-level business wars.

He had been yearning for those high-level business wars for a long time.

Wait—did you think high-level business wars were capital operations, stock market games, and hacking?

No, no, no!

It was storming into someone’s office with a gang to openly snatch the official seal, the one tightly fastened to their belt.

It was pouring boiling water on someone’s fortune tree or slipping the cleaning lady two hundred yuan to secretly cut off their office power every two hours.

It was a bike-share manager personally slashing a rival’s bike seats at dawn, only to get caught red-handed by the police.

Or a chairman sneaking into a competitor’s factory to spy and take photos of trade secrets, only to be caught by security.

Of course, there was the legendary ice cream incident, where someone blatantly used their official account to stir up chaos in a rival’s comments section: Why is only half the crowd typing insults and scolding? Does the other half not have hands?

This is the kind of thrilling battlefield I’ve been yearning for! Cheng Zhu sighed.

The next day, in the afternoon, the artist Fox Talk finally finished all the illustrations.

The way she drew the plump backside, absolute genius!

Cheng Zhu increasingly felt that this person was a talent worth cultivating. The perverts of the world needed someone like her.

Oh, my beloved sexy clothing industry, are you ready to embrace the impact of ‘human-comic fusion’?

Sitting in front of his computer, Cheng Zhu arched an eyebrow, ready to upload the images.

Next chapter will be updated first on this website. Come back and continue reading tomorrow, everyone!

Tip: You can use left, right, A and D keyboard keys to browse between chapters.