Chapter 104: Huang Sibo and His Fellow Sufferer
Chapter 104: Huang Sibo and His Fellow Sufferer
“Great job today, everyone! That’s a wrap!”
With Director Zhu Xiaoce’s final call, the day’s filming came to a successful close.
Pei Qian, standing off to the side, remained perfectly calm.
He’s used to it by now.
Today's shoot was outdoors—on the road—and they even made use of the Cayenne Pei Qian had rented earlier.
After all, always shooting in the office gets stale fast. The audience’s eyes need something fresh to hold their interest, which meant they had to keep experimenting with new themes and settings.
Still, no matter how the scenes or backdrops changed, the core of the show remained the same.
Ever since that heart-to-heart talk with Pei Qian, both Director Zhu and Huang Sibo had clearly taken his advice to heart. They’d completely dropped the idea of chasing hard advertisements and focused solely on the story.
Not every episode could be a masterpiece, of course, but they had managed to maintain a solid and consistent level of quality.
So far, the more popular videos were pulling in around six to seven hundred thousand views. Even the less popular ones managed four to five hundred thousand.
For a series of short videos that had only recently launched, those numbers were nothing short of phenomenal!
After tidying up the props, the crew got ready to call it a day.
“You guys go ahead,” Huang Sibo said to the others. “I’ve got something personal to take care of.”
No one pried.
Hailing a cab, Huang Sibo headed to a nearby café where he’d arranged to meet an old friend.
Roughly ten minutes later, he arrived.
As he stepped out of the car and stared at the familiar yet distant building in front of him, a strange feeling washed over him—like stepping into a dream from another lifetime.
On the second floor of the building were two bold characters: Shangyang Games.
This was the very company where Huang Sibo had worked before.
Back then, he was at the very bottom of the food chain—an errand boy in the planning department. “Exploited” would be putting it mildly. Naturally, he hadn’t made many friends.
Just one, really—a fellow low-level planner who had suffered right alongside him.
It was that shared struggle that bonded them—misery does love company, after all.
Even after Huang Sibo managed to join Tengda, they still kept in touch from time to time.
But he rarely talked about his new job.
Why?
Well, in the beginning, Huang Sibo wasn’t entirely convinced he hadn’t joined a scam company. He was too embarrassed to tell his buddy about it.
But when the company’s benefits turned out to be real, and their game actually became a massive success, he got even more embarrassed.
He didn’t want to mess with his friend's mindset—make him feel like life was unfair.
And then he got busy with the short video series, while his friend was swamped with overtime. They just never found the chance to meet up.
Now that the New Year had come and gone, both of them finally had a bit of breathing room to catch up.
At the café, Huang Sibo waited a while, sipping his drink. Not long after, his old friend arrived.
He was just over 170 cm tall, with a body that had softened from years of overwork. He gave off a slightly introverted vibe, but his appearance was clean and tidy.
If there was anything particularly striking about him, it was his hands—fair, smooth, and delicate. One look, and you could tell he hadn’t done much manual labor as a kid.
“Yiqun, over here.”
Huang Sibo raised a hand in greeting.
His friend immediately spotted him and slid into the seat across the table.
His full name was Ma Dubiao, but no one ever called him that. Everyone just called him Ma Yiqun.
Ma Yiqun worked as a story planner at Shangyang Games.
He was a proper graduate from a top university’s Chinese Literature department—came from a family of intellectuals.
As for why someone like him would willingly throw himself into the brutal world of game development…
Well, that’s a story for another time.
Just like Huang Sibo, Ma Yiqun was also stuck at the very bottom of the planning department food chain.
That said, his days were slightly more tolerable.
Huang Sibo worked as an execution planner, which meant their lead planner, Old Liu, dumped every imaginable task on him—regardless of whether he had the time or even the ability to complete it.
Ma Yiqun, on the other hand, was a story planner. While he still had to shoulder a bunch of execution work on top of his own, at least he had some actual story content to work on too. That gave him a tiny bit of breathing room.
And story planning had its… advantages.
Take naming equipment or writing item descriptions, for example. It was the kind of task you could knock out in three or four hours—but Ma Yiqun would drag it out for two days and hand it in on the third. Old Liu didn’t complain.
Why?
Because “naming stuff” depended entirely on creative inspiration—so it wasn’t like Old Liu could accuse him of slacking off without making himself look stupid.
Eventually, Huang Sibo hit his limit and rage-quit.
Ma Yiqun? He hesitated. And then hesitated some more… and just kind of kept on hesitating for several more months.
“Hey, Huang Sibo, did you get a little tanner?” Ma Yiqun asked as soon as he sat down, noticing a slightly deeper shade to his friend’s complexion.
“Really? Might be from shooting outside a lot lately,” Huang Sibo replied casually, handing over the menu. “I already ordered coffee, but go ahead and get something else if you want—my treat.”
“Outdoor shoots?”
Ma Yiqun took the menu and ordered a latte without thinking much of it, still stuck on that one phrase.
‘Outdoor shoots? What kind of game company makes you shoot stuff outdoors?’
“Oh, right—I never told you.” Huang Sibo leaned back in his seat. “I’m not in the gaming industry anymore. I’m working on short videos now. Ever heard of President Pei’s Daily Life? That’s our project.”
Ma Yiqun’s eyes widened in slow motion.
“President Pei’s Daily Life? That was YOU guys?! Holy crap! That series is huge right now—I’ve been watching every single episode!” His voice rose with excitement. “What do you do there? Writer? Stagehand? Why haven’t you made a cameo yet?”
Huang Sibo chuckled. “Come on, you know I’ve got zero acting talent. As for my job title… it’s kinda hard to pin down. I do a bit of everything, running around handling stuff. Let’s just say I’m one of the partners.”
“That’s awesome. Seriously, it looks like you’ve finally found your thing. Congrats, man,” Ma Yiqun said sincerely, his voice filled with genuine happiness for his friend.
“I think you’ve got potential too. That novel of yours—”
“Ugh, don’t even mention the novel,” Ma Yiqun cut him off with a wave of his hand.
He gave Huang Sibo another look-over and realized it wasn’t just his complexion that had changed. He seemed healthier, more energetic—his whole vibe had shifted.
“You’ve really been through some stuff these past few months, huh? You’re like a whole new person. Spill it—I want to hear everything.”
Before long, their coffee arrived.
Huang Sibo took a small sip and smiled. “Let’s talk about you first. How’s the company these days?”
“Eh, what do you think? Same old, same old—dead air, stagnant water, total creative drought.”
That was all it took for the dam to break. Sitting across from his old comrade-in-suffering, Ma Yiqun finally opened the floodgates, venting months of frustration in one long rant.
“Just recently, Old Liu had this brilliant idea—he wanted to price a new sword at 888 yuan!”
“And get this—it wasn’t even some super-rare, limited-time item. If it was one-of-a-kind, fine, maybe you could justify the price. But no! They were releasing 100 copies across the whole server and still charging 888 each! Has he completely lost it?!”
“But Old Liu wouldn’t budge! He was dead set on that 888 price tag—wouldn’t accept even a single yuan less!”
“Turns out, he was jealous of Ocean Fortress. They priced their Rainbow Neon Fire Qilin at 888 and made bank, so he figured if they could do it, so could we!”
“What happened next? Exactly what you’d expect. The second it went live, players went nuclear. The backlash was insane.”
“The boss absolutely roasted Old Liu in a meeting. We were just sitting at our desks, and we could hear the shouting from inside the conference room…”
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