“The falser the rumor, the more credible it is”

“The falser the rumor, the more credible it is” is an expression used by Shen Tang to describe the perverse logic of public scandal. It does not claim that falsehood becomes fact; rather, it identifies how an outrageous story can appear convincing when it fits an audience’s prior image of its target and is amplified by the machinery of publicity. The phrase is especially significant for Shen Tang, whose public identity has been shaped by accusation long before evidence has had any chance to matter.

Meaning and Context

The expression appears when Shen Tang examines a rumor that she is being kept by an old man. The trending search connected with the accusation has been suppressed and cannot be found through an ordinary search, although its contents remain accessible through a specific search. Shen Tang discovers that the story originated in a single person’s leak and has no support beyond hearsay. Her surprise is not only that the claim is unsubstantiated, but that so many people believed it anyway. The expression gives that contradiction its sharpest formulation: the rumor’s extravagance does not weaken it in the public imagination; it helps make it memorable and therefore credible.

The rumor also works because it attaches itself to an already established scandal persona. Shen Tang is a Z-list celebrity and an “ever-trending queen of scandals,” burdened by labels such as “loose tea bitch,” “plastic surgery freak,” “compensation scammer,” and “troublemaker.” Her company’s public-relations team has paired her indiscriminately with male celebrities to exploit attention, turning her into a figure whom people in the entertainment industry avoid. In such a setting, a new allegation does not arrive as isolated information. It is absorbed into a ready-made narrative about what kind of person Shen Tang supposedly is.

Rumor as Public Performance

The expression exposes the gap between truth and visibility. A claim can be weak as evidence yet powerful as entertainment, and the novel repeatedly places Shen Tang in situations where public perception is managed through display. Her contract marriage requires her to appear occasionally at family dinners and maintain the image of a loving couple, while the agreement promises her five million per month, living expenses charged to her husband’s card, and a settlement of two hundred million after the two-year term ends. The marriage is therefore both a private arrangement and a public performance: its visible appearance has practical value even when its emotional substance is contractual.

The same tension governs her work. During a livestream intended to help farmers sell surplus agricultural products from remote mountain regions, black fans flood the room and the program’s popularity rises sharply. Shen Tang keeps a professional smile as though the insults in the comments are directed at someone else, privately recognizing that the company will pay her a substantial share of the revenue. Her expression becomes a form of emotional labor: she performs composure for the audience while converting attention, including hostile attention, into income. The rumor principle belongs to this economy because scandal itself becomes a marketable form of visibility.

Her manager Wang Brother treats even damaging publicity as potentially useful. When Shen Tang announces that she wants to retire, he argues that bad publicity is still publicity and reminds her that many people never obtain the chance to make an impression at all. He also recalls her earlier ambition to earn enough money to buy a house and improve her siblings’ living conditions. His reasoning turns notoriety into professional capital, even when that notoriety is humiliating or false. The expression consequently functions not merely as a comment on gullible spectators but as a diagnosis of an industry in which being hated can be more commercially valuable than being ignored.

Recurring Pattern Beyond the Scandal

The logic captured by the expression extends into Shen Tang’s online and social encounters. In a game of King of Glory, she is left alone in the bottom lane, repeatedly harassed and ganked while the opposing pair receives no assistance from her teammates. After seeing the score at zero to three, she asks the jungler to come and help. Instead of addressing the tactical situation, Hao insults her rank and suggests that she obtained her position by sleeping with someone. The accusation is unrelated to the evidence of the match, yet it relies on a familiar gendered stereotype and converts a mundane defeat into a sexualized explanation.

Gaming also supplies a contrasting form of recognition. Miao Miao invites Shen Tang to play, and Shen Tang later discovers Gu Huaian online at King rank before being pulled directly into his room. These interactions show that digital spaces can produce both arbitrary suspicion and genuine connection. The same mediated environment that permits strangers to attach an unsupported story to Shen Tang can also reveal skill, companionship, and changing relationships through observable participation.

Even the farming variety-show setting follows the pattern in reverse. The guests initially doubt Shen Tang’s cooking, but once the rice is ready they eat voraciously, abandoning any pretense for the camera; Ao Ziping even tears up at the meal, leaving Shen Tang startled by the intensity of the reaction. Here, direct experience corrects expectation. What the guests and viewers see finally challenges the prior image imposed on her. The scene provides a small counterexample to rumor culture: performance can be judged by its result when an audience is willing to wait for evidence.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

As a recurring maxim, “The falser the rumor, the more credible it is” condenses the novel’s concern with reputational identity, media circulation, and the difference between an inner self and a public role. Shen Tang’s circumstances repeatedly force her to manage appearances: she must look like a loving wife under the marriage agreement, endure the scandal identity manufactured by her company, smile through hostile livestream comments, and navigate judgments that precede her actual conduct. The expression names the mechanism by which those appearances harden into social fact.

Its irony lies in Shen Tang’s awareness. She understands that the rumor is only a one-person leak supported by hearsay, yet she also understands why the public accepts it. The more implausible the charge, the more efficiently it travels through an audience already prepared to believe the worst. In that sense, the expression is both cynical and analytical. It records Shen Tang’s refusal to confuse popularity with truth while acknowledging that, within the entertainment economy, popularity can still determine money, opportunities, and social treatment. The phrase therefore becomes a compact theory of her world: falsehood needs no proof when spectacle, repetition, and an established scandal persona have already prepared the audience to receive it.