137: Chapter 137 Helmsman Sima Bei

A-Zu leaned against the edge of the vanity, his arms crossed over his chest, and he lifted his chin slightly toward Sima Bei, signaling him to continue.

"Today's rescue operations were too perfect. From the bank robbery to finding the missing child, you handled everything flawlessly."

"That is certainly good, and very inspiring, but the problem lies precisely in it being 'too perfect'."

Sima Bei lifted his whiskey, "If every crisis is perfectly resolved by you at the very first moment, the public will form a subconscious judgment: as long as Lord A-Zu is here, we will definitely be saved."

"If that's the case, then if your rescue is imperfect even once, it will become a point for others to attack you."

Sima Bei downed his drink, "So we need them to realize that your rescue is not a given, but a precious, irreplaceable resource."

"The scarcity of a resource determines its value. If you are everywhere, you are worthless, but if you occasionally leave behind a few 'regrets,' people will instead cherish those who were saved by you even more."

"Fear is the mother of demand, and demand is the source of power. Lord A-Zu, you should understand this principle better than I do."

A-Zu was silent for a few seconds, then nodded, "You people of Blue Star are indeed better than us when it comes to gauging human hearts."

"Lord A-Zu, you are too kind!" Sima Bei opened his folding fan again, "I learned this from our ancestor, a strategist named Sun Bin."

Sima Bei continued, "And after casualties occur, you need to issue a statement immediately, criticizing the existing institutional problems of New York City as much as possible."

"You must make them feel that it is not that you failed to save them, but that this old administrative system limited their chances of being saved by you."

"In this way, every regret of yours will be an indictment of the old system; and every life saved will be a yearning for the new system."

After a moment of silence, A-Zu suddenly cracked his wrists, his knuckles making two sharp cracking sounds.

"By the way. Today in the square, someone actually dared to laugh at me."

"At the time, with so many people watching, I ignored him, but I remembered his face and his scent."

A-Zu lowered his head to look at his hands that he had just washed, "I'll go sneakily kill him later, that's not a problem, right?"

Sima Bei was stunned for a moment. He originally wanted to say that he should try not to kill anyone at this time, but looking at A-Zu's bloodthirsty face, he quickly said, "Of course, no problem, Lord A-Zu."

"But please make sure not to leave a body. After all, without a body, there is no case. Without a case, there is no news. Without news, in terms of public opinion, it is as if it never happened."

A-Zu nodded, then turned and walked toward the window. The next second, the curtains were swept up by a gust of air, bulging into a ball in mid-air, before slowly falling back down.

Sima Bei stood in place, keeping his fan closed, until the sound of the wind disappeared completely at the alley entrance.

Then he turned around, picked up his phone again, and sent the internet troll instructions that had been sitting in his drafts, attaching a hand-gesture command emoji.

Kara had been sitting in the shadows in the corner of the room. Several sales reports were spread out on the table in front of her.

From the beginning of the conversation between Sima Bei and A-Zu until now, she hadn't said a word, just observing quietly with those golden pupils.

To her surprise, she discovered that she didn't dislike Sima Bei.

On this ship called the "Wuhu Mission," everyone had their own role: A-Zu was the fist, she was the brain, Karl was the support, and the rest were sailors.

And Sima Bei was the helmsman. After he took the helm, the ship suddenly stopped bumping around everywhere. This made her both relieved and uneasy.

She was relieved because efficiency had improved, and uneasy because she wasn't sure where the helmsman would eventually steer the ship.

"Sima Bei."

Kara's voice came from the corner, "Regarding the Superpower Serum, relying solely on offline store sales is too low. Although the lines to enter every day are long, the actual number of transactions is limited by the store's throughput, and the daily sales volume hasn't grown for a week."

She paused, "Do you have any ideas?"

Sima Bei placed his fan on the coffee table and picked up the whiskey bottle to pour himself another half glass.

"Lady Kara, the offline store is just a storefront. The purpose of a storefront is not to sell goods, but to display them. Let passersby see people lining up, and let those in line tell those who aren't that there is something to grab here."

"But the real business is never inside the storefront."

He used his fan to point at the sales reports in front of Kara, "I still have some sales channels in my hands, including logistics warehousing, cross-border payments, and gray-market customs clearance—a whole set of mature networks brought over from the East."

"We can sell the Superpower Serum directly online and ship it all over the world. Not just New York, not just the United States—for example, London, Tokyo, Dubai, Mumbai, São Paulo—any place with the internet has people who want to awaken."

"Do you know how many visits the Wuhu Ability Shop's independent website will have on its first day of launch? Given Lord A-Zu's current topic heat, at least 20 million unique IPs. 20 million potential customers, every single one wanting to gain a superpower. How many people can an offline store serve in a day? Two thousand, tops."

Kara said worriedly, "But if the sales channels expand, and the scope suddenly goes from a store in one city, New York, to the whole world, wouldn't humans discover that we are selling fake medicine? We can control the current store sales, but if you do that, I won't be able to control it at all."

"And," she flipped the report to the last page, which contained the Jam Man's physical condition records and production capacity statistics for the week, with the numbers circled in red pen and three exclamation marks next to them, "even if we sell only fake medicine, we can't produce that much."

"The Jam Man's mucus production is limited; after all, he isn't a machine. The raw material he can secrete daily is only enough to fill about two thousand bottles."

"Calculating by the demand in the global market, this number probably isn't even a fraction of what's needed."

"It doesn't matter." Sima Bei tapped the coffee table with his fan, the glass surface making a crisp sound, "In a few days, I'll find a beverage factory and have them produce the serum bottles and set up a filling line."

"For the formula, just use glucose, Vitamin B complex, food coloring, and add some sparkling water—just ensure it has a blueberry flavor."

Kara's pupils constricted, "But, someone will definitely test it, and what if they question us?"

Sima Bei snapped his fan shut, "Even if some anti-fraud bloggers buy our serum to test in a lab, discover the ingredients are glucose water, and record a video to post online, so what?"

"We only need to give a unified response: 'Earth's testing methods cannot identify extraterrestrial active ingredients, just as humans could not see bacteria before the invention of the microscope.'"

"They have scientific instruments, we have invincible rhetoric; after all, the less they understand, the more unsolvable it is."

"Besides, anti-fraud bloggers ultimately rely on traffic, and traffic relies on emotion. We just need to muddy the waters, get the comment section arguing, make half the people think he is clout-chasing, and the other half think we are stalling—then we win this public opinion war."

"The standard for winning is never to make everyone believe you. It is to give those who want to believe you a reason to keep believing."

"This is called cognitive market segmentation, the most basic tactic of modern information warfare. I wrote about this question on my civil service exam essay back in the East."

Kara was completely convinced. She at least put on a show initially, letting Blue Star produce a few awakened ones, but looking at Sima Bei, it seemed he wanted to blatantly cash grab.