After New Year’s Day, Li Younan spent a few peaceful and warm days, mainly accompanying his mom and taking his grandparents for a stroll nearby.
On one of the following days, the video of forging those dozen knives in the United States was edited by Winslow, and thanks to his good relationship with the Sword Forging Competition production team, the program directly aired on the History Channel.
Of course, due to the certain lag in the transmission of news, nobody would intensely search for information related to you all day long, even if you are a super influencer with fans nearing 20 million.
If there aren’t occasional news hotspots, people’s attention would quickly be overwhelmed by the endless flow of information online.
However, this series of programs gradually gained considerable popularity in the United States. The Sword Forging Competition was already a show with good ratings, and the video of Li Younan sword forging in Winslow’s studio was enhanced with the best photography equipment and professional editing arranged by Winslow at great expense, making this series of programs more exquisite than the official competition videos of previous productions.
Li Younan forged a total of 13 famous ancient Chinese swords for Winslow, including the Yuanhong Sword used in the competition, all of which were included in this series.
Each episode tells the story of one sword, starting from its owner.
For example, when discussing Ying Zheng’s Wentian Sword, the program begins with a brief narration of Ying Zheng’s deeds, showing that those who produced this series really put effort into it.
The enticing gimmick is the movie clips of Ying Zheng played by Jet Li in "Raiders of the Lost Ark," followed by a catchy statement: "Here’s Ying Zheng from the movie scenes, but what kind of figure was Ying Zheng in history, known as the greatest emperor ever by the Chinese?"
Of course, the introduction of Ying Zheng is not extensive, primarily highlighting some of his important deeds, and then leading the main focus towards Ying Zheng’s sword, the Wentian Sword.
It can be imagined that the youngsters in the United States put quite a bit of effort into producing this episode, given that the Wentian Sword comes from "Qin’s Moon," and finding information about this sword wasn’t easy, so they simply chose not to introduce it, thereby leading to Li Younan’s forging of the sword.
The other 12 episodes are also produced in the same structure, which in a sense, serves as a promotion of Chinese culture.
But Winslow’s aim was merely to announce to others, through this method, that he is the owner of these swords.
Therefore, the essence of each episode focuses on depicting the sword-forging techniques of the tourist guy and showcasing the beauty and abnormal performance testing of the final formed swords.
In today’s information explosion era, people’s attention gets easily diverted, yet for the period while the show aired, it still drew quite a bit of focus.
As for the forger, Li Younan, more information about him has also been sorted out by people abroad, as there are media channels specializing in cutting and editing clips of others for a living.
Firstly, he’s from China, an almost all-rounded traveler.
Chaos reigns in online information; unless you constantly follow Li Younan, it’s extremely difficult to have a complete understanding of him.
What people love to discuss are the "Alone in the Wilderness" program, the Mount Everest descent, and the Sword Forging Competition alongside these couple of scenes.
In Western countries, people esteem personal value more, and more info about Li Younan has been dug up: before doing these extraordinary things, he was a corporate slave in a Chinese company.
People enjoy such tales, a young man exploited by his boss, breaking free from constraints, pursuing individuality and freedom, and becoming rich and famous.
In contrast to the Chinese restraint, in capitalist countries, it’s a virtue for a small person to flaunt their counterattack.
Meanwhile, domestically, with someone of Li Younan’s status naturally come endless business deals seeking him out, and he basically entrusted managing these commercial affairs entirely to Liu Yu.
Liu Yu is an extremely proud person; in a positive sense, it is called dignity in his bones, whereas negatively speaking, he still carries an air typical of Kong Yiji.
He cannot bring himself to profit by leveraging Li Younan’s fame, and he even fears Li Younan might misunderstand this, so every time he assists in handling Li Younan’s commercial matters, he hands over a mess of materials such as contracts and transaction records repeatedly proving that he hasn’t done anything to cheat Li Younan.
Each time, Li Younan lazily reads through them but has to pretend like coaxing a child, saying "I’ve seen them, seen them," otherwise, Liu Yu would keep chattering nonstop, creating endless annoyance.
But overall, Li Younan hasn’t invested much energy into earning money.
After a trip to the United States, his wallet swelled again, and he had even less motivation regarding this matter.
Logically speaking, given that his influencer account is nearing 20 million followers, estimating his earnings for the year easily reaches nine figures.
However, many people believe that it’s unrealistic for a web influencer to earn that much money based solely on oneself; managing affairs would be extremely complex and chaotic, inevitably involving forming a team, establishing a studio, or even founding a company.
Once you venture onto that path, you are no longer yourself, as there will be many people relying on you for their livelihood. For Li Younan, it’s akin to shackling himself.

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