Jing Yan froze for several seconds before remembering to suppress the smile escaping at the corner of his mouth. When he turned his head, several trainees beside him were already hooked around one another's shoulders, laughing so hard their shoulders shook.
"A-Yu, how tall are you?" Xie Man was naturally familiar with people. After being bombarded by one inner-voice broadcast after another over the past hour, he already felt toward Chu Yu the kind of fondness one had for a ridiculous idiot brother. He casually slung an arm over Chu Yu's shoulder as he asked. Then he saw the other man narrow his eyes and faintly furrow his brows, radiating an aura that warned people not to provoke him.
Xie Man froze. Just as he instinctively started to pull away, the familiar voice sounded beside his ear:
[Why is he calling me so intimately? I'm shy.]
He looked again at the young man whose shoulder he was holding. Chu Yu wore a stern handsome face, looking colder than a block of ice in thirty-degree-below-zero weather.
Chu Yu opened his mouth. His real speaking voice was actually very pleasant: warm, fine, slightly textured, low and unhurried, with an unconscious hint of seduction. It was completely unlike the little slacker lunatic in the inner-voice broadcasts who seemed ready to lose his mind at any moment. Even though the actual timbre was identical, everyone in the corridor found it strangely unfamiliar.
"One seventy-nine."
That answer made every trainee fall silent.
One slender trainee who was visibly shorter than the others tentatively repeated, "One… seventy-nine?"
Chu Yu paused with a cold face for half a second, then added, "One seventy-nine point three."
Precise to one decimal place. Detailed enough now, right?
Tang Yanning said nothing. He remembered deliberately testing how many layers of socks he needed to wear before joining the show so he could just barely measure one seventy during the physical. Yet when the height measurement actually came, he still miscalculated. The person measuring him called out one sixty-nine point seven. When he went to register the result, he reported one seventy point one.
Ah. He could not think about it. If he kept thinking, he would have to tilt his head at a forty-five-degree angle toward the sky and shed two sparkling diamond tears.
Eventually, the trainee manager called to urge them to hurry to the dorm building, organize their luggage, and complete check-in, saying everyone except them had already registered. Jing Yan immediately dragged the others at top speed to the dormitory building. The moment they entered, they saw several lonely suitcases standing in the corner of the lobby. All the others had already been claimed by their owners. Only theirs remained in a neat row, each labeled 602.
The group lugged their suitcases all the way up to the sixth floor, panting and straining. Chu Yu was last because he had absolutely no idea which suitcase was his. He could only wait until everyone else claimed theirs, then pick up the one left over.
His suitcase was a cool silver-gray, with understated luxury brand patterns and high-end leather material. Like the character he now played, it gave off an aura that said not to mess with it.
When he followed the group into the dorm and opened it, all he saw were dazzling arrays of expensive cosmetics and skincare products. He did not recognize a single brand. He did not even know how to open some of the packages.
With pointless hope, he searched through the suitcase for a PSP or a stack of game cartridges. Unsurprisingly, he came up empty-handed and profoundly disappointed.
What gave him an even bigger headache were the things hidden beneath the cosmetics—three boxes of laxatives, two bottles of sleeping pills, and one small bottle filled with transparent liquid. A paper label was stuck to it. He leaned closer to read—
[Holy shit, sulfuric acid!]
That shout made everyone in the dorm freeze.
He reached into another hidden pocket and pulled out a second bottle of the same size—
[Holy shit, sodium hydroxide!]
Now no one even dared move. They transformed into rigid wooden figures whose eyeballs did not turn and attempted to communicate entirely through glances.
Xie Man's sharp brows drew together as anger surged in his heart—
He brought contraband like this too! He really is a vicious, scheming bastard!
Tang Yanning's eyebrows and eyes moved wildly with agitation, almost tearful—
He wants to poison this emperor! He wants to poison this emperor!
Jing Yan remained calm in a crisis, his gaze firm enough to suggest he was about to take an oath to join the Party—
My ministers, don't rush to judgment. There may yet be a chance to turn this around.
While several people traded meaningful looks, the inner-voice broadcast sounded inside the dorm again.
[Sodium hydroxide plus sulfuric acid…]
Everyone nervously sucked in a breath.
[That's an acid-base neutralization reaction. It can form sodium sulfate and water. If the sulfuric acid ratio is high, I think it becomes sodium bisulfate?]
Everyone froze.
[Eh, I should gather some materials another day and do chemistry experiments for fun. Not a bad way to kill time.]
[Did I come here to join an idol show or become an assassination spy?]
[Seriously. I already lived this life like I was walking on thin ice. I get to the other side and discover there aren't even any game consoles, and I still have to cosplay a vicious imperial consort going around sticking needles into people.]
[So tired. Dying really would be more comfortable.]
"Don't!" Jing Yan could not hold back. The heartfelt plea burst out of his mouth.
At the same time, Chu Yu's muttering inner voice continued playing:
[They want me to bully other people? I'm scared other people will isolate me. Doesn't everyone know I'm a sensitive, fragile little boy who has nightmares at night? Oh. Turns out only I know.]
Chu Yu felt he possessed a unique skill: he could think alone for a while and suddenly make himself emotionally collapse.
"A-Yu, want some water?" Xie Man proactively picked up a paper cup from the dispenser and asked in Chu Yu's direction.
Chu Yu's movements stiffened, as if he might transform into a tin puppet in the next second. "…No, thanks."
"A-Yu, A-Yu, do you play games?" The last trainee in the dorm, Meng Shuan, sat on the bottom bunk in the farthest corner, holding up a Switch. Smiling sweetly, he waved it at Chu Yu.
Chu Yu's eyes lit up.
Then, in the very next second, a cameraman and dorm supervisor burst through the door to confiscate their phones and caught them red-handed.
"Attention, trainees. Starting now, each of you has ten minutes. You can call your family or friends to let them know you're safe. In ten minutes, all phones will be collected into this box. The timer starts now." After setting up his giant camera, the cameraman stood to the side and patted the large cardboard box in his hands.
Then he glanced at a young man in the corner who had not yet managed to hide the contraband and was fumbling in panic. "Hey, hey, hey, look what I found. Hand it over, hurry."
Thus, the already impoverished spiritual life inside the dorm suffered yet another devastating blow.
"Only ten minutes?! How could anyone possibly finish talking in that time!"
Jing Yan wailed, only for the cameraman to mercilessly point at his watch. "You only have nine minutes and fifty-five seconds left now."
In sharp contrast to all his roommates scrambling to dial numbers, Chu Yu stood in place like a capybara. Just blinking took him four seconds. By the time he slowly pulled his phone from his pocket, an entire minute had passed.
How could there be a whole ten minutes? What was there to say for that long? This was clearly forcing the impossible on him.
With his level-ten skill at killing conversations the second he opened his mouth and his lifelong motto that hell was other people, he could not scrape together even ten sentences, never mind ten minutes.
More importantly, in this world he had no familiar friends or family at all. Even if he wanted to call someone, he did not know whom to dial.
He was just about to stand there in a daze and muddle his way through among everyone else when the sharp-eyed cameraman spotted his attempt to coast by. The man had only opened his mouth—"Hey, you…"
In one second, Chu Yu turned around, lowered his head, pulled on his hood, hammered wildly at the keypad, dialed a number, and pressed the phone to his ear. The entire sequence flowed with breathtaking smoothness.
How can I get singled out and turned into the focus just for slacking off?! Fine, I'll call. I'll call, okay?!
The cameraman, who had been about to cue him, silently lowered the hand he had raised to point.
Several dialing tones sounded from the other end of the phone. Only then did Chu Yu belatedly realize that, on instinct, he had dialed the number he knew best.
Eh, any number was the same. It couldn't possibly connect in this world anyway. When the automated hang-up message came, he could mumble a few words along with it and muddle through this segment…
"Hello, who's this?" A cool, magnetic voice so familiar it could not possibly be mistaken sounded beside his ear, carrying faint impatience. Chu Yu could almost picture the person on the other end—brows slightly furrowed, eyes slightly narrowed, perhaps a thin mint cigarette between his fingers, wearing his usual trio of trench coat, shirt, and jeans, a stack of textbooks and handouts tucked under his arm—with one sheet of his own lyrics mixed in, the kind containing four swear words in every three lines of rap.
It was a strange and wonderful feeling. He was clearly in a completely unfamiliar environment, yet the sudden sound of that voice somehow made the whole world feel familiar.
But another kind of excitement was also flooding his chest right now.
How? Did? It? Connect?
Holy shit, Mom, the phones in this world can contact spirits!
Luo Jiayu waited without hearing a reply. He lowered the phone, looked again at the unfamiliar international number on the screen, clicked his tongue, and raised it back to his ear. "If you've got something to say, hurry up. You understand Chinese, right?"
"A little, but not much." Chu Yu's nerves abruptly relaxed. His mouth started running faster than his brain. "Handsome guy, want to buy insurance?"
The other side paused. Then the impatience vanished, replaced by amusement. "Chu Yu?"
"You recognized me?"
"I'd recognize that half-dead tone of yours even if you were burned to ashes."
"…" Chu Yu choked on that line and rolled his eyes. "You didn't burn me anything?"
"I did. I burned all your game cartridges. I even set up a shrine for you at home, with that photo of you in girls' clothes from our high-school graduation in front. Want me to livestream it for you?" Luo Jiayu replied naturally, then suddenly realized something was wrong. "Wait. You're not dead?"
"Surprised? I reincarnated into another world." After saying that, Chu Yu frowned as he realized the true problem. Then, at the highest volume he had used since entering camp, he roared, "Why do you still have my cross-dressing photo?! Burn it now!"
The System listened to this exchange inside his head and felt close to crashing. Birds of a feather really did flock together. These two good brothers were each more absurd than the other when it came to identifying the important point.
"Why burn it? A bunch of girls from high school want it. I'd make more money selling secondhand copies at a high price and splitting the profit seventy-thirty with you than burning it myself." Luo Jiayu raised an eyebrow after speaking. "No, answer me first. How are you not dead? I only heard a few days ago that you'd died in a car accident. I just finished half your eulogy."
That half alone had taken him three days and nights, including two all-nighters. His eyes were still red.
"I wouldn't say I'm not dead. Maybe just… not dead all the way." Chu Yu muttered. Then he felt the sentence was too abstract and tried to think of a more concrete explanation, but a shut-in who spent every day crouched at home playing games could not find one.
"Anyway, right now I'm inside some life-or-death evaluation system. I complete missions and get evaluated. If I pass the final evaluation, I can go back. If not… If I don't call you again in four months, you can continue writing the eulogy." Chu Yu habitually added one more sentence without caring how deranged it would sound to anyone else. "Don't put swear words in it, and don't make it rhyme. I'm afraid you'll keep rhyming until you end up rapping in front of my grave."
The other end went silent for a while. Luo Jiayu asked softly, "You really went to another world?"
"Mm."
"Is it fun?"
"…" Chu Yu pressed his lips together. His childhood friend suddenly asking after him in such a gentle tone gave his previously numb senses a small jolt. Then emotion broke through like a collapsed dam and surged forward all at once. "It's not fun."
An absurd transmigration mission that seemed impossibly far away; the suffocating feeling of having to face a huge crowd of living humans every moment; cameras everywhere; all the open and hidden scheming written into the plot… As a socially anxious person who disliked socializing, it was genuinely difficult for him to adapt to surviving in this environment.
By the time he finished saying that, his eyes had reddened without his noticing. "I kind of miss you."
Without you as my designated mouthpiece, I can't move an inch in a world full of cameras and scripts.
"I miss you too." As Luo Jiayu spoke, he pulled the half-written eulogy from under his arm, studied it for a moment, and said, "I'll wait for you to come back."
"Okay."
The call ended. Luo Jiayu listened for a while to the busy tone from the other end, then tore the half-written sheet in his hand without hesitation.
Back in the dorm, Chu Yu stared blankly as the cameraman walked toward him and pointed at his wristwatch. "You're already thirty seconds over."
It's over already? How was that so little time? I hadn't finished talking yet.
Oh, right. That idiot burned all my cartridges. Those were thousands in private savings. One fire and they all turned into carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
His heart bled.
"All right, now let's interview Student Little Chu Yu, the last person to hang up." A staff lady appeared from nowhere, grabbed a microphone, and assumed the role of host, shoving it toward Chu Yu's mouth. "Who were you talking to just now? You seemed very happy chatting with them."
"I…" Seeing the camera creep closer and closer, Chu Yu hurriedly wiped away tears that had not yet spilled from his eyes. His mouth began tightening involuntarily. In this situation, he could only slow down his speech or he would either stammer or tie his words into knots.
So the inner thoughts made hyperactive by nervousness ran out ahead of his spoken answer.
[My biological son, who celebrated his twentieth birthday last month!]
"…My best friend."
"Pfft." Several roommates failed to hold it in and lowered their heads to laugh.
The host and cameraman had clearly never encountered anything like this and were still completely lost when an announcement sounded through the building. "Attention, all trainees. The following trainees whose names are called must report to Studio One within twenty minutes for individual talent-vlog recording. The list will now be read: Wei Ziyu, Jiang Chenglu, Chu Yu… Jing Yan, Fu Hansong. Trainees whose names were called, please proceed to Studio One immediately."
"Host? Are you all right, Host?" The System clattered away inside Chu Yu's head and, in a demonic tone, leaned beside his ear. "Time for us to hit the road."
"Chu Yu? Are you all right, Chu Yu?" Jing Yan familiarly patted Chu Yu, who looked as though he had entered crash mode, wearing an innocent, cheerful expression. "Let's hit the road together."
Hearing that, Chu Yu stood with a tragic expression.
An individual talent performance. A large-scale public death scene even worse than self-introductions.
What could he perform to die with some dignity?
A flash of inspiration crossed his mind. He lifted his eyes.
Got it.
