Our Glamorous Time

Chapter 21: Keep Your Hope Up

After the words burst from Lin Qian's mouth, she felt her heart lift somewhere high, wobbly and uncertain.

"Okay," was the only thing Li Zhicheng said.

Lin Qian hung up the phone. She could feel covered in an icy frost, yet the palms of her hands were hot and sweaty.

Pacing around the room, she had no idea when Gu Yanzhi had come in. He stared at her from the doorway and looked sullen.

"I already know," he said. "We can only try our luck now."

Gently biting her lower lip, Lin Qian nodded in agreement.

This was a gamble, a massive one—one that could cost 20 million. But it was their last hope.

The gamble carried all of their strong desires: fear, luck, reluctance, and their unwillingness to give up.

The two stepped out of the room together.

"Manager Gu," Lin Qian said, lowering her voice, "I think for our next step we slow down the process and drag the online promotion along."

As the words came out from her, oddly, she found herself already calming down. But her heart pounded intensely.

Unexpectedly, Gu Yanzhi glanced at her with a smirk. How could he laugh at this point?

"That was also our opinion," he responded.

Soon, on behalf of Li Zhicheng, Gu Yanzhi placed a new order—keep the website open, but lower the access speed of the servers and the event pages. The customers' payments could only come through around one out of every ten orders.

Meanwhile, they needed to release an announcement saying they had been working on fixing the website attacked by hackers.

Lin Qian returned to her computer and started to cook up a commercial hype in various online shopping websites, their related forums, and the popular discussion groups in the second and third-tier cities.

...

The lights of the Aida headquarters were on throughout the whole night.

The customers' shopping craze lasted until one o'clock the next morning. The first 2,000 bags containing the first prize were finally sold out. However, even after the promotion was over, the sales volume still grew for another 800. The main event page had over 5 million visits, leaving the comment section overloaded. The heated posts also kept coming on all the other major forums.

For those who failed to be one of the first 2,000 visitors, it was a shame. But the majority of them believed the sale was justified, as they were happy with the quality of Aida's bags.

Those who managed to get the first prizes were extremely pleased. They started to post their proof for winning on their social media. However, there was also a lot of skepticism, questioning if Aida would be able to pay these prizes worth 20 million yuan due to the mistake.

Some people posted blogs and claimed that they would give up the prize because they were loyal customers of Aida, and they understood Aida was in a difficult situation. Some others proposed to Aida that there was no need to pay out the full 10,000 yuan prize, but it would be appreciated if Aida could reduce the payment for each prize after an explanation.

But, for the most part, the customers wouldn't acknowledge the fact that Aida's website had been hacked. They believed that this was the company's own business. So they suggested Aida give away the red envelopes—that way they would be loyal to them forever.

Aida was already in the center of the media's attention after the previous Carcinogen Incident. But after that night, multiple media platforms and websites had all started to forward this ridiculous news. The title of one of the articles read, "20 million dollars. Are you sure?" Yet Aida remained silent throughout the heated skepticism.