“Mmh… ah…”
On the European-style king bed, two figures were tangled together, their syrupy breaths falling like pearls onto a jade plate.
Beside them, a disheveled woman raised her phone with trembling hands and filmed through a veil of bed curtains.
“Ruan Qiang, go bring me that thing.”
President Liu, sprawled over the man beneath him, reached a hand through the bed curtain and pointed at the red pill beside the cabinet.
Ruan Qiang’s scalp prickled. She lowered the phone and hesitated. “President Liu, is that really necessary? He’s still pretty young… and he’s already unconscious…”
“What? You’ve taken a fancy to the brat?” President Liu grabbed a fistful of the young man’s riotously colored hair. Picking him up by it felt about the same as grabbing a wild pheasant.
“…” Ruan Qiang did not dare say anything more. She walked over to get the pill, then glanced sideways at the young man’s outstretched hand and froze.
In the entertainment industry, beautiful faces and beautiful hands were as common and cheap as cabbages hawked by the roadside.
But even if this hand was cabbage, it was the exquisitely prepared cabbage served at a state banquet.
The five fingers were slender and fresh as scallions, the knuckles clearly defined, the pads tinged rose pink.
Unfortunately, the owner of that hand had never landed a decent management team. By binding himself to other celebrities and stepping on them for publicity, he had hacked a road straight through the hate toward the title of “cancer of the entertainment industry.”
Ruan Qiang took the pill and hesitantly handed it to President Liu.
President Liu was impatient with lust. He grabbed the pill and was about to force it into the half-conscious young man’s mouth when he remembered Ruan Qiang beside him. A lewd look seeped into his face. “Ruan Qiang, hold the phone steady. It’s Little Chu’s first time—we ought to make a souvenir of it. Get a good shot of how slutty he looks. Later we’ll show it around and let them see whether he’s even more shameless than you.”
Ruan Qiang said nothing. The phone in her hand shook several times.
Just as President Liu was about to drug Chu Shicha, the half-conscious young man woke up.
Everyone said Chu Shicha was nothing more than a pretty vase in the entertainment industry, but even with hair like a rainbow-colored pony, his face was exquisitely beautiful.
President Liu pinched the young man’s wrist, and amazement flashed through his eyes.
“Beautiful, absolutely beautiful! See, it’s better when you’re awake—that makes it more exciting! Look at those eyes, gorgeous… Why do you look even better than before?”
Ruan Qiang was startled too. It was not as though she had never met Chu Shicha. He was a green-tea schemer and white lotus, capricious and violent, with taste as garish as the colors on his head. If his management team had buried his future, then Chu Shicha himself had never once tried to play his terrible hand well.
When those eyes opened, it was like a cluster of white narcissus blooming over an ice field. Across a haze of mountains and distance, they gathered an ethereal beauty that seemed not of this mortal world.
Even from more than a meter away, his eyes were long and narrow, the outer corners slightly lifted. Beneath thick, long lashes lay a faint wash of watery red. Wherever his gaze fell, it brushed like a feather and silently made the heart itch.
One sweep of that gaze made President Liu even harder. With the red pill between his lips, he leaned down to feed it to him mouth-to-mouth.
“Come on, baby. Take this. I guarantee you’ll feel better than a god.”
He could hardly wait to see those pale, delicate hands clutch the sheets because they could no longer bear it, swaying like water, surging like waves.
Chu Shicha’s icy gaze landed on the red pill and sharpened. He had no time to wonder why he was here. The pill before him had awakened some secret terror buried deep inside him.
“Heh.”
With a soft laugh, Chu Shicha’s supple body suddenly sprang up, and he launched a flying kick in midair.
President Liu, built like an old mastiff, went flying and slammed into the wall. The red pill rolled under the cabinet, and Ruan Qiang screamed.
“Chu Shicha, are you insane?! You hit President Liu! Do you still want a career in the entertainment industry?!”
President Liu climbed up from the floor, his face an ugly palette of colors, and spat a mouthful of blood onto the ground.
“Fuck, Chu Shicha, you actually dared to hit me! Don’t give me that unwilling, dead-fish face and pretend you’re some pure little thing! You don’t want the movie anymore, is that it? Don’t want a future? You used to beg me like a dog, and now you dare hit me! You just like pretending to be fierce, don’t you? Fine. I’ll play with you today!”
Rage flared in President Liu. He yanked a thick black leather whip from the cabinet, and Ruan Qiang screamed even louder.
“Chu Shicha, hurry up and apologize to President Liu!”
Blood seeped from the split skin on President Liu’s forehead. His sinister grin widened as the neon outside shifted red, making him look like an evil ghost that had crawled up from hell.
The whip cracked against the floor again and again; the sound was especially [one character obscured].
Chu Shicha knitted his handsome brows, his expression murderous. His waist and back were held ramrod straight, thin muscle covering his slender frame, every line drawn taut like a bowstring ready to release a blade.
President Liu charged while lashing the whip. Chu Shicha had nowhere left to retreat, and Ruan Qiang cried out in alarm.
In that split second, his supple body bent into an impossible arc. One could almost hear his bones creak at their limit. Amid President Liu’s wild swings, Chu Shicha slipped in close like a ghost and clamped a hand around his throat.
“Tell me. Where did that pill come from?” Chu Shicha’s voice was ice-cold. At the same time, he sensed several subtle differences in his body.
The lean muscles hardened by years of training were soft now, his bones creaking in protest at the overload.
This was not his body.
“This pill? Everybody plays around with this stuff. How would I know where it came from?” With his throat trapped, President Liu’s joints made faint cracking noises under Chu Shicha’s fingers. A little more force would crush his larynx outright. At last President Liu realized he had run into someone dangerous. “Little Chu, let’s talk this out. Whatever you want, I’ll give it to you…”
Chu Shicha’s head was beginning to swim. His breath came short and hot. He chopped President Liu across the back of the neck and knocked him unconscious.
“What did you do to him?!” Ruan Qiang was terrified. While Chu Shicha got dressed, she reached under President Liu’s nose to check his breathing and let out a sigh of relief.
Still alive.
“Relax.” Chu Shicha glanced at the clothes and trousers torn to pieces on the bed. He did not bother being picky: the pants ended halfway down his legs, the shirt exposed most of one shoulder, and the colors were gaudy, with punk chains dangling from it.
After pulling them on, he picked up the phone Ruan Qiang had set aside, removed the memory card, and tossed the phone back to her. In a cool voice, he advised, “Quit that kind of drug while you still can.”
His long eyes curved beautifully, the outer corners lifting toward a wash of golden light.
Chu Shicha was about to leave when Ruan Qiang suddenly called out, “There are paparazzi everywhere outside! I—I was trying to… Anyway, you can’t leave through there!”
“Thank you.” Chu Shicha looked back with a smile, opened the balcony door, and peered down.
The hotel was built in a European retro style, with projecting balconies outside every floor and relatively little distance between levels. Chu Shicha came back in, knotted a bedsheet around the balcony railing, and, amid Ruan Qiang’s scream, stood in the wind beneath the brilliant lights like a swallow spreading its wings.
He jumped from the fifth floor.
“Ms. Gong—Mom~ Relax. I promise I’ll bring you back a nice, chubby daughter-in-law… With your son’s qualifications, what kind of woman can’t I get? Don’t worry. Soon enough I’ll give you two grandkids in three years…”
Everything above, repeatedly emphasizing “I can definitely find a wife,” was almost certainly nonsense.
Ms. Gong Ling knew perfectly well that her son’s promises were worth about as much as a fart. After repeatedly hammering into him, “I don’t care whether it works out, just date someone first,” she let out a long breath and switched into tigress-mother mode.
“I don’t care! Once that Lu kid’s show is over, get your ass back here and go on blind dates properly! Your father and I have already collected a shortlist of 101 prospective daughters-in-law for you—every shape and style you could possibly want!”
“You’re almost thirty and you don’t even have someone by your side to talk to. How are your father and I supposed to rest easy when we go meet the King of Hell?”
“Yes, yes. I’ll definitely make sure you get to meet that old King of Hell.”
Gu Hanjian held his phone farther from his ear. As Ms. Gong launched into full machine-gun mode, he pushed open the balcony door and stepped outside. Moisture gathered into clouds across the sky. It looked like rain.
“It’s Lu Yi’s first variety show. I’m just going to help out because I’m one of the few friends he has.”
Ms. Gong stepped directly on her dog-son’s sore spot. “You? Triple-Crown Best Actor? You’d better switch careers and do crosstalk while you still can.”
Gu Hanjian, one of the entertainment industry’s great spectacles, was nicknamed the “Triple-Crown Best Actor”: three nominations, zero wins, forever helping the current Best Actor carry his shoes. More awkwardly still, this master refused to follow the usual road. While his peers chased the youthful-idol route, he stubbornly hacked out a “tough guy” path through a crowd of pretty boys—and was pitifully ignored for it.
“Hey, what’s wrong with being Triple-Crown Best Actor? That pretty-boy Best Actor next door isn’t even as handsome as your son!”
Gong Ling: “But he has a girlfriend.”
“…” Gu Hanjian felt deeply wounded. “Hey, hey, hey, Mom, what did you say? I can’t hear you!”
Gong Ling: “…I said I’d have been better off giving birth to a slab of roast pork!”
“…”
After ending the call, Gu Hanjian lit a cigarette and poured himself a glass of wine. Upstairs, things were banging and clattering like a renovation site. He raised one glass to freedom and one to loneliness, feeling that if his spiritual cultivation went up just a little more, he could ascend on the spot.
Whoosh!
From the noisy “renovation” upstairs, a bedsheet twisted into a rope dropped down.
The cigarette in Gu Hanjian’s hand trembled. Had he stumbled across someone escaping a pyramid scheme?
He craned his neck to look and even considered taking out his phone to photograph the fearless hero’s face, so he could show society a little human courage.
A shaft of moonlight slanted through the thick clouds, followed by a swaying calf descending from the sky like warm jade lowered before Gu Hanjian’s eyes.
The leg was straight and smooth, thin muscle sheathing delicate bones in a gentle curve. The ankle hollowed inward, porcelain-white as jade, slim enough to imprison in one hand.
An androgynous leg, so smooth there was not even a hair on it.
The person dangled from the makeshift rope, small bare feet kicking twice in the air as though he had lost his grip. Afraid he would fall, Gu Hanjian was so startled his cigarette dropped. He hurriedly reached for the foot.
One reached, the other kicked, and they missed each other perfectly. The sole nearly planted itself in Gu Hanjian’s face.
It barely brushed his fingertip, leaving a cool touch that made Gu Hanjian shiver in the late-autumn air.
He froze for a moment. The autumn wind carried a faint fragrance. Before Gu Hanjian could react, someone landed squarely on top of him.
Firm bodies met; warmth and fragrance rushed over him. Gu Hanjian felt a little dizzy. Then he looked up, saw hair in a riot of colors almost identical to the multicolored LED lights across the way, and became even dizzier.
“Just escaped from a pyramid scheme? Your organization really spares no expense. Monthly rooms at a five-star hotel? Hey, did your group celebrate by buying a Cadillac today?”
“…” Chu Shicha pushed himself up from Gu Hanjian. Most of one shoulder hung bare, exposing a delicate collarbone. The clothes were too large, and when he rose, Gu Hanjian got an unobstructed eyeful, though Chu Shicha did not notice. He knitted his beautiful brows; the outer corners of his long eyes were red from the cold, his lashes lowered over lovely curves that somehow looked both detached and seductive.
“Quit the pyramid scheme. Look at those huge holes in your clothes. Getting rich overnight is a fantasy; being so poor your clothes are in rags is reality.” Thus spoke Straight Man Gu. Yet his eyes drifted unconsciously to Chu Shicha’s waist. The oversized clothes made it look extraordinarily slim, swaying lightly like a willow branch, full of effortless allure.
Chu Shicha finally reached the end of his patience and knocked him unconscious with a knife-hand strike. Looking at the off-shoulder outfit on his own body, Chu Shicha stripped Gu Hanjian’s coat off him, put it on, opened the door, and left.
Wrapped in Gu Hanjian’s coat, Chu Shicha left the hotel. The moment he stepped onto this land, banyan trees strung with pinpricks of light stretched along both sides of the street and into the night. The overly brilliant nightlife, the dense stream of pedestrians, and the dark rain clouds hanging overhead all proclaimed the same truth: he, Codename 0 of the “Orphanage,” had arrived in a place that had never belonged to him.