It did not take long for a large crowd to gather outside the studio. According to the order of the list, Chu Yu was fifteenth. There were neither too many nor too few people ahead of him. Bored, he stood with Jing Yan waiting for the staff to call his number while occasional bursts of conversation drifted from around them.
"Did you see Wei Ziyu just now?"
"The Crown Prince? Isn't he right at the front of the crowd? The most conspicuous one. Who doesn't know him?"
"His debut spot is already predetermined this year, right?"
"Everyone knows it. No need to say it out loud… I bet he ends up a landslide number one in fan voting."
"Setting that aside, the Crown Prince is still handsome. He's probably the best-looking person in the entire camp, right?"
"If you're talking about best-looking, where are you putting Jiang Chenglu? The first thing I thought when I saw that face during auditions was that he'd definitely trend after the premiere."
"Jiang Chenglu really is gorgeous. It's just that he has no backing and no background, dragging along a useless company that can't get its act together. Poor guy."
Standing in the middle of the crowd, Chu Yu let the discussion go in one ear and out the other. His eyelids gradually drooped. He looked visibly bored and listless, as though his body might collapse in the next second. Jing Yan quickly reached out to steady him. "You're not falling asleep, are you?"
Chu Yu struggled to furrow his brows and shook his head. Then he remembered that in a while he would have to perform some talent in front of several cameras, and the recording would be uploaded online for tens of thousands of viewers to watch. He immediately felt it might be better to faint after all.
"Hey, have you guys ever paid attention to someone named Chu Yu? I ran into him after auditions. I think he's really good-looking too, like not losing to Wei Ziyu or Jiang Chenglu at all!"
Chu Yu's swaying body gave a violent tremor.
"Never heard of him. Chu Yu? Who's that? I don't remember."
"Let me look. I heard his name in the announcement just now too, so he should be nearby…"
Expressionless, Chu Yu pulled a black mask from his pocket, hooked it over his ears, pulled up the hood of his jacket, and shrank behind Jing Yan.
Jing Yan: "…" His mouth twitched. Considerately, he chose to block the searching gazes shooting toward the poor socially anxious man.
When Chu Yu transmigrated, both his name and face replaced those of the original Cannon-Fodder A. The original character's looks were merely average by entertainment-industry standards. So even though his company strongly pushed him in the novel, he still failed to win many shots on the show. His initially decent popularity gradually sank to the bottom. Later, the exposure of his scandals became the fuse that turned him into a universally hated figure. He did not even last until the second public performance before being forced to withdraw.
Chu Yu's assessment of his character's ending was: pretty good. He had never been all that eager to live anyway.
After elimination, he could roll up his things and move under an overpass. During the day, he would set up a stall on top and apply screen protectors to people's phones. At night, he would sleep beautifully underneath as a high-quality human vagrant. He might even live more comfortably than in the entertainment industry's chaotic zoo of demons, monsters, fish, and dragons.
Because the current Cannon-Fodder A, Chu Yu, was using his face from his original world, everyone who had previously seen the character would experience a deviation in their memories. Not many people had noticed yet, but as the show progressed, more and more people would discover that his appearance did not lose to the camp's other main characters and might even surpass them.
"Host, did you hear those two names?" the System asked inside his mind.
Chu Yu blinked, then tiredly closed his eyes.
The Crown Prince?
That was the only title that had made much of an impression on him.
"Right. The Crown Prince is Wei Ziyu. And Jiang Chenglu. Those two are the protagonists of this novel." The System's tone gradually grew excited. "Host, you need to build a good relationship with them, infiltrate the enemy ranks, gather intelligence, defeat them, and then you will be the protagonist!"
Chu Yu furrowed his brows and pointed one long finger at himself. Me?
Want to say that again?
"…" The System choked, realizing it had not fully adjusted to having a new Host. "Sorry to bother you. My previous Host was a grind-obsessed overachiever who watched too many hot-blooded shonen series but was a fan of a pile of villains. Every day we'd hype each other up like this. I accidentally got used to his way of speaking."
Although Chu Yu looked indistinguishable from someone asleep, his mind was still awake. He chatted idly with the System. What happened to that overachiever later?
"He completed every mission smoothly. It's just that during the final review, when he rolled his blind box, he got 'Second Reincarnation, Triple Salary.' He hesitated, agreed, and now he's working in a melodramatic youth-campus-idol-drama world."
Ah. Chu Yu found that difficult to evaluate. Is your Book Transmigration Bureau's judgment system really that flexible? How can every possible blind box come out? The number of branching endings is almost catching up to an open-world game.
"That's why they're called Surprise Boxes. The core feature is that you either get a surprise or a shock."
After saying that, the System shook its head and turned serious. "No, we've gone off topic. Let me introduce the basic situation of the protagonist top and bottom first."
Wei Ziyu, the protagonist top of the novel, would be called a top-tier alpha in an ABO setting. He was the Crown Prince of the capital's elite circle, a young master raised by one of the most powerful wealthy families. His keywords were domineering and naive. His classic scene involved pinching the protagonist bottom's chin, pressing him against the wall, and closing in step by step while sneering, "Who do you think I came here for? You think I care about the entertainment industry's paltry scraps?"
Jiang Chenglu, the protagonist bottom, came from a family bankrupted by his father's compulsive gambling and burdened with one billion in gambling debts. He also had a mother bedridden with cancer and an innocent younger sister still in school. His keywords were stubborn and pure; his entire person radiated the exquisite brokenness of someone suffering beautifully.
Exactly. The classic configuration of a coercive-romance novel: a sick mother, a gambling father, a little sister in school, and one beautifully broken him.
He and the Crown Prince had grown up together. Their feelings were entangled with family grudges and affection, leaving them unable to fully separate. By the time Jiang Chenglu entered the survival camp, he had unilaterally chosen to cut Wei Ziyu off and start over. Unfortunately, the company he signed with was hopeless. It only wanted to drag him down and use him as a blood bag to feed several junior artists from the same company. His life in camp was precarious and extremely difficult. Even so, with a pitiful, attractive face and a suffering-fan script in which the warmhearted captain had to carry three teammates, he still managed to win considerable attention.
His classic scene involved being forced against the wall by the protagonist top, only to stubbornly lift his chin while a tear slipped from the corner of his eye in shadow. "I don't need your charity. I can do perfectly well on my own."
The novel padded itself out to more than a million characters, and over eight hundred thousand of them described the protagonist pair repeatedly breaking up, getting back together, tugging at one another, and running circles around their crematorium of regret. It was lucky the setting was a youth survival show. If this had been a modern wealthy-family romance, their divorce and marriage certificates combined could probably have been used as a deck of playing cards by now.
He ran, he chased. Neither could escape even with wings.
As for Chu Yu, he was wondering whether playing cards were permitted inside the survival camp.
"Number fifteen, Chu Yu. Where is Chu Yu?"
A staff member stepped outside the studio to call his number. Jing Yan took the opportunity to shove Chu Yu out and loudly answered, "Teacher, right here!"
Every gaze in the area immediately shot toward him.
Chu Yu became the center of the crowd in an instant. He was so embarrassed he wanted to find a crack in the ground and crawl inside, but his face remained cool: mask, cold eyes, long limbs carrying him through the crowd toward the studio. The wind around his feet briefly made him resemble Fu Hansong before everyone had discovered the thirteen centimeters of hidden height inside his shoes.
"Cool guy," bystanders whispered to one another.
"Why wear a mask just to record a vlog? I can't even see his face properly."
"With that build and that aura, he's definitely handsome. His recorded segment is probably going to blow up later."
"You guys haven't heard of him? He's got a ton of scandals."
"Really? Tell us, tell us…"
"Before, at his company…"
Chu Yu entered the studio amid a pile of whispered conversations. His hearing was actually excellent. His mental state, however, was not. Whenever he encountered a crowd like this, he automatically entered power-saving mode: plant himself in place, remain motionless, shut down both ears, and let every voice slide past without hearing a single sentence.
There was no one else inside the studio. The director responsible for recording spoke to him through a remote intercom behind the camera. "First, give us a self-introduction. After that, perform one talent lasting no longer than a minute. Recording begins when the indicator light turns on."
Chu Yu glanced at the dark indicator light in front of him and slowly nodded.
"Beep-beep—" The orange-red light snapped on. The director on the other side pressed Record and watched the trainee on the monitor bow toward the camera, expressionless. "Hello, everyone. I'm Chu Yu from Tianxing Entertainment."
A staff member near the door mouthed and gestured at him to "be more lively."
Chu Yu saw it and blinked blankly.
"All right, you can begin your talent demonstration now." The director could tell this trainee was probably quiet. There were introverted personalities in camp too, but compared with cheerful, outgoing people they created far fewer topics and entertaining moments. He therefore did not pay much attention. After giving the cue, he waited for the trainee to finish so he could immediately move to the next person.
"Mm. What I'm going to perform is…" Chu Yu took a deep breath. He decided to create a little suspense so the second half would not sound too abrupt. "The instrument I'm best at."
"And what is it?" the director patiently asked.
"The retreat drum."
The instant he finished speaking, Chu Yu knocked three times—thump, thump, thump—on the nearest wall beside him.
Then he bowed crisply and said goodbye. "My performance is over. Thank you, everyone."
The tall, striking young man turned and left with a decisive, resolute back. There was not a trace of reluctance. If anything, he looked bizarrely relaxed and happy.
"…"
The entire recording room went silent, presumably because no one had ever seen an operation like this.
"Director?" An editor below cautiously asked his supervisor, "This segment…"
The director froze, thought for a moment, then waved his hand grandly. "Keep it."
"Huh? Don't cut it?"
The director imagined himself as a viewer and decided that the trainee's brief, reckless ten-second stunt might actually be funny. "If he dares to brush us off like this, why wouldn't we dare keep it?"
Less than thirty seconds passed from the moment Chu Yu entered the studio to the moment he exited. The sheer speed of the process astonished everyone waiting outside.
"You're done? That fast?" Jing Yan asked in surprise when he saw him come out.
Chu Yu nodded and chatted with the System in his mind at the same time. I was really funny just now.
The System was developing a headache from how far its child had exceeded all expectations in the category of being impossible to manage. He truly did not want to fight for even a single shot or chance to showcase himself. Hearing that tone only made the headache worse. "And you're pleased with yourself?"
Yes. Chu Yu was frequently amused by his own lack of ambition.
Masks were not allowed while recording, so his entire face was visible now. He watched Jing Yan enter the studio right after him, then, bored, leaned against a nearby poplar tree. The longer he stood there, the less interested he became. The System was still urging him to study more of the original plot, research crematorium-romance literature, and develop strategies for rising to the top. Chu Yu only wanted to find somewhere empty, lie down, stay far away from everything, and quickly fall asleep.
When he zoned out, his gaze lost focus, but outsiders could not tell. They would only think he was staring intently at one particular person in the crowd.
Even when the person who assumed he was being stared at left the crowd and came over, Chu Yu took quite a while to notice the additional living organism in front of him.
"…Your name is Chu Yu, right?"
Hearing that, Chu Yu barely lifted his eyelids and looked at the newcomer. The man was oppressively tall, his brows nearly twisted into a deep crease. Though he was only in his early twenties and had a handsome, sharply defined face, he somehow carried the dignified bearing of a thirty-year-old man. His whole aura radiated the suffering restraint unique to a domineering CEO in a tragic romance.
"Can we go somewhere else and talk privately?"
Oh-ho. The male lead of the crematorium romance had arrived.
