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"Mo Li? Aren't you holding his light sign?" The fansite girl with the huge camera lens didn't even blink, snapping away at Jiang Yangfan with single-minded focus.

"No, no, I mean the one with the lightest hair."

"The one farther back? The younger guy in the black coat, with skin so pale he's practically glowing?" someone beside her asked.

"Yes, yes! That's him!"

"His name is Miura Yuki," another person helpfully explained. "A lot of people have been posting livestream screenshots under the trending topic to ask who he is. There are several threads dedicated to him on the forums, too. Besides thirsting over his looks, people have made tons of reaction memes and clipped his iconic lines. He's probably a future popular contestant, so you can't go wrong stanning him early."

"That name... could he be a foreigner?"

"Who knows if he—"

The voice cut off abruptly.

The helpful girl forcibly stopped herself mid-sentence. She raised her DSLR with one hand and waved wildly in a certain direction with the other, screaming at the top of her lungs, "You Shu! You Shu, look at the camera! Miura You Shu—! Baby, are you hard of hearing?!"

The fan considering switching stans: "..."

So she'd been trying to recruit a new fan all along.

Lai Yudong followed the main group out of the building. As soon as he stepped outside, he felt the drastic change in temperature.

Without the warmth of the indoor heating, the winter night wind stabbed at his body from every direction like a knife. The hem of his thin clothing rose and fell in the air like a withered leaf drifting in the wind.

He shivered with cold, and the wind made his dry colored contacts uncomfortable. He had no choice but to lower his lashes slightly to fend off the biting north wind.

The chill woke Lai Yudong's muddled brain. Filming had come to a temporary end, and the bullet comments had shut off with it—the broadcast wouldn't resume until they boarded the bus and reached the dormitory building. The long-missed peace and quiet finally let him settle down and give proper thought to his plans.

Even so, his mind was blank, and he couldn't come up with a single solution.

It wasn't as though he'd been sent to take the postgraduate entrance exam, where he might just turn a bicycle into a motorcycle if he gambled on several months of grueling all-night practice problems every day.

An idol survival show wasn't like a beauty pageant or a singing competition. Even if he restarted life and trained for eight or nine years before signing up again, he still wouldn't necessarily be able to debut so easily. If it came down to looks and talent alone, there would be no need for viewers to send trainees to debut one vote at a time; they could simply bring in professionals to score them.

Personality and image, the ability to attract fans, selling fanservice and hyping up CPs, iconic moments that broke out of the fandom, and so on—even setting aside the many factors relating to the trainees themselves, there were also power plays between capital interests behind the scenes. Screentime and online opinion were entirely controlled by those interests.

And Lai Yudong's temporary agency, LYD Entertainment, sounded like an unreliable shell company.

Rather than count on the company to help him, he might as well pray that "Ascend to Stardom" was a conscientious show with no shady dealings whatsoever.

As such, he was extremely pessimistic about his chances of debuting.

"You Shu! You Shu, look at the camera!"

"Miura Yuki!"

"You Shu, turn your head! Look over here! You Shu!"

Liang Zhisheng couldn't help glancing at the unresponsive, light-blond-haired boy beside him.

His steady footsteps, vacant gaze, and frozen expression all pointed to one fact—

That was right, his soul had left his body.

"You Shu." Liang Zhisheng nudged the blond boy with his elbow. Sure enough, the boy raised his head blankly, looking completely out of the loop. "Wake up. A lot of people are calling you."

"Me...?"

Lai Yudong came back to his senses as though waking from a dream. Only then did he realize that calls were coming from the distance, one after another. His brain had automatically filtered out the new name he still wasn't used to. If Liang Zhisheng hadn't kindly reminded him, he probably would have walked the whole way like a deaf person.

Acting like a big shot on the first day of filming—now that took guts.

Given how well-known he was, he should be acting like a little shot. No, a mini shot.

Lai Yudong turned toward the voices. Moonlight, lamplight, and flashes mingled at random, blurring the distant view like faintly colored neon lights, or like an unreachable Milky Way stretching between them. Everything reflected in his eyes seemed so unreal.

Without the bullet comments to guide him, he found it hard to guess what everyone was thinking.

They didn't miss the livestream, did they?

Apart from that explanation, Lai Yudong found it hard to understand the cameras pointed at him. Even he wanted to delete that unbearable memory with a single click, to say nothing of how stupid he must have looked to other people. The screenful of "hahahaha" bullet comments was proof enough that he had suffered a crushing defeat at the starting line.

But whether or not they would leave disappointed once they saw his true nature as a pretty vase, it wouldn't change the fact that, at this very moment, they had waited this long through the long, cold night for his sake.

So, without the slightest hesitation, the moment he turned toward their voices, a faint smile bloomed on the light-blond-haired boy's face. The curve of his lips softened his cold, stern features, as though the ice frozen over by the lingering winter had melted into trickling streams in the warmth of spring. It was beautiful enough to make hearts surge.

In an instant, cries of wonder erupted from the crowd, and the frequency of the flashing cameras shot up.

"You Shu!!!"

"You have to debut, You Shu!"

"Smile more, cool guy!"

Before Lai Yudong could respond, a faint, cold snort came from beside him. Someone muttered sarcastically in a sour tone, "Being good-looking sure is impressive."

Lai Yudong: "..."

Isn't it?

Puzzled, Lai Yudong looked away and discreetly glanced around, but the person had spoken too softly and suppressed their voice, so he couldn't figure out who it was.

In any other situation, the logic that being good-looking made someone impressive wouldn't hold up, but that wasn't necessarily true on a boy-group survival show. There was a saying widely circulated among fans: an idol being ugly is the original sin.

Still, it didn't matter who had said it.

There were so many good-looking trainees that he had no reason to assume it was aimed at him. Even if it really was about him, he could just take it as a compliment. He wouldn't get angry over the truth; after all, it was an acknowledgment of his looks.

Quite a few people, including Lai Yudong, heard the baffling remark, but most of the trainees silently agreed to turn a selective deaf ear. Their onstage personas were one thing, but the chances of a truly top-tier silly, sweet innocent appearing in real life and saying it outright were practically zero.