Face Blindness (32)

Upper City was just as it had been when he arrived: a place of revelry and extravagance, with people divided into rigid ranks.

Yi Si finally returned to the little house his parents had left him in Lower City.

It was far too small and cramped, bought with the savings his parents had spent the first half of their lives scraping together. People in Upper City would only laugh that the slums were full of "coffin homes"—

Homes as small as coffins meant to hold the dead.

The tightly packed buildings faced away from the sun, and not a sliver of sunlight could reach inside even in broad daylight.

He had been gone so long that the wiring had developed a fault, and the light overhead flickered. The bulb was tiny, so he found a little comfort in thinking that perhaps he could imagine it as a twinkling star.

On the low table sat a record player his parents had salvaged and repaired when he was a child. He used to lie beside the table while doing his homework.

There was only one record, with just a few tracks that played over and over.

Before entering Upper City, Yi Si had never heard of symphonic music. Ignoring the dust on the floor, he sat down wearily beside the low table. A melodious tune drifted out, and he finally learned that the last track was Moonlight Variations.

Yi Si wiped down the revolver his lover had given him and smiled silently.

The light flickered, and the shadow on the floor slid down along the low table.

Crimson blood flowed to the slow rhythm.

No one knew who at the audition was the first to call out their praise, but applause followed.

Xin Hexue brushed off the dust and rose from the floor of the audition room.

He had auditioned with the final scene.

Some of the watching staff still had not recovered their senses. The young man's performance had been so compelling that it had pulled them from the audition room into the little house in Lower City in an instant, letting them feel the sorrow, helplessness, and lack of anything left to hold on to as Yi Si finally chose to end his life.

The young man was like a red gesang flower blooming into decay. Once its wild-grass vitality was spent, it was ground to dust and turned to soil.

Qiu Yuan was very pleased, though he still followed procedure and said, "Very good. Go home and wait for the notice."

As Xin Hexue was leaving the audition room, an alpha who had been sitting beside Qiu Yuan and the screenwriter came up to speak to him. "Hey, you're Xin Hexue, right? I'm Will. I play the younger of the Carter Brothers in the film."

Xin Hexue looked at him quietly and simply nodded. "Hello."

He evidently did not understand what Will wanted.

Will was very different from his character, cheerful and outgoing in person.

Seeing Xin Hexue's indifferent reaction, he scratched his head. "You don't know me?"

Xin Hexue tilted his head without realizing it. He had a very good memory. "I know who you are."

Will breathed a sigh of relief.

After all, he had won the Rice Award for best actor two years in a row. He couldn't be that unremarkable.

Xin Hexue repeated the radio news he had heard earlier in Xi Zhengqing's car, his voice flat. "A suspected love triangle? Young Master Hill, the Plastic King's eldest son, meets a mysterious movie star at night?"

Xin Hexue said evenly, "You were the movie star in that report."

Will's vision went dark.

"Hill is my cousin."

"Those paparazzi, honestly! Aaaah, they made the whole thing up!"

Xin Hexue looked at him. "Was there something you wanted?"

Will caught sight of his face, and the tips of his ears reddened. "Oh, I just wanted to introduce myself. We'll be filming together and spending a long time around each other, after all."

Xin Hexue did not understand why he was so certain. "Director Qiu Yuan hasn't decided on the cast yet."

Will stared at him in surprise. "Oh my god, sweetheart, don't tell me you didn't know you were the only actor invited to audition for Yi Si?!"

Xin Hexue: "..."

Hadn't Qiu Yuan told Xi Zhengqing with a perfectly straight face that he always followed the rules and proper procedures?

He had acted as though he had zero tolerance for pulling strings, and told Xin Hexue to wait for the audition arrangements.

Just now, he had even told him to go home and wait for the notice.

A staff member carrying props passed by, saw Xin Hexue, and hurried over. "Teacher Xin, Director Qiu is waiting for you in the lounge!"

The quiet lounge.

"Can you drink?"

The blond director sat cross-legged on the sofa, looking at Xin Hexue with interest as he asked.

The last time, at the cruise ship dinner party, he had offered Xin Hexue a drink.

Xin Hexue had only wet his tongue with a little, like a kitten lapping at it.

"Yes."

It wasn't that Xin Hexue couldn't drink; he simply rarely touched alcohol. When he had been an emperor in an ancient dynasty, the temperature had dropped on deep, snowy nights, and he had occasionally drunk some to warm himself while dealing with memorials. Drinks had also been unavoidable at court banquets.

But he had also needed to take medicinal decoctions to nourish his body at the time, so he had tried to drink less often. At banquets, You Yi had replaced the wine in his cup with water or warm tea, and as time went on, he stopped drinking altogether.

Having received his answer, Qiu Yuan nodded in affirmation. "In the latter part of the film, there are quite a few scenes of Yi Si circulating and drinking at banquets."

Xin Hexue said, "I'm fine with drinks that aren't too strong."

Qiu Yuan looked Xin Hexue's figure up and down. He was slender and, for a beta, tall.

Though he lacked an impression of physical strength, he still fit the character.

Qiu Yuan asked, "How tall are you?"

Xin Hexue answered, "179 centimeters."

Qiu Yuan nodded in understanding.

K paused, then said to Xin Hexue with a hint of puzzlement, [According to the pre-employment medical report, Host is 177 centimeters tall.]

[...] Xin Hexue said calmly, [It's a tradition among male celebrities.]

There were no men in the world who were 179 centimeters tall. They all claimed to be 180.

At a time like this, Xin Hexue, calmly and honestly stating that he was 179 centimeters tall, would be more credible.

Qiu Yuan had no doubts whatsoever. The average height for alphas was 190 centimeters, which left him with little real sense of how tall betas were.

He asked another question. "Can you fight?"

In the film, Yi Si's first outburst came during the locker-room incident after swimming class. His uniform trousers had been replaced with a skirt, and the younger Carter brother had brought others to corner him, demanding that he put it on and wear it for all his academic classes for the rest of the day.

Qiu Yuan had found the uniform skirt prepared by the props department somewhere. He raised an eyebrow and said in feigned surprise, "Oh, it looks like they misjudged your height?"

The skirt had been altered too short.

If he put it on, it would barely cover the bottom of his buttocks.

Before Qiu Yuan could react, he was shoved forcefully onto the sofa. The short skirt fell from his hand to the floor, and a weight pressed down on his lean, powerful waist and abdomen.

Xin Hexue sat on top of him, his eyes betraying no particular emotion, but the way he looked down from above made it seem as though he were regarding a piece of trash.

His white shirt sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, and the pale blue veins in the white skin of his arms stood out from the effort.

Once, twice, three times...

He lightly patted Qiu Yuan's left cheek, his palm cool and soft. Only when Qiu Yuan fixed his gaze on him did he leisurely part his lips and speak. "Yes, I can fight."

His voice was cold and clear, but not sharp.

"Is that so?" The dangerous impulses in Qiu Yuan's heart were already stirring with excitement. "Try hitting me? Like in the script."

Before he had finished speaking, he was already slapped across the face.

A crisp smack rang out, followed by a hot, stinging sensation and a little pain. Qiu Yuan stirred his tongue around the rusty taste on the left side of his mouth.

Qiu Yuan laughed. "That felt so good."

[Qiu Yuan's Affection Points +10]

Chapter 32: Face Blindness (32)

The result of the audition was announced soon afterward, and after the opening ceremony, the crew began filming without a hitch.

The entire crew seemed to have no objection to Qiu Yuan having chosen an unknown actor as the lead in advance.

After observing for a few days, Xin Hexue came to a conclusion: Qiu Yuan had the final say over everything on set.

Only after Will explained did he learn that the Qiu Group was behind all the investment in the production. To put it bluntly, this was the young heir's game.

The Qiu Group had vast wealth and holdings. Even though it had shown signs of decline compared with the Pei and Xi families over the past decade, its wealth was still far beyond the reach of ordinary minor wealthy families.

Qiu Yuan had never expected to make money by directing films.

Thinking about it that way, the "genius director" label might have been built on a barrage of publicity and marketing, just as people online speculated.

Especially after Xin Hexue once walked into the lounge and discovered that Qiu Yuan was holding a communicator in each of his eight tentacles, using ten alternate accounts to trade insults with netizens.

"..."

Psycho.

Xin Hexue closed the door.

Another reason the crew had no objections was probably that Xin Hexue had starred in Director Yun Ziming's previous film.

Normally, since they were now filming a sequel, there was nothing wrong with keeping an actor from the previous film.

Xin Hexue had many solo scenes and scenes with other actors, so he had to film almost every day. As Xi Zhengqing had promised, he had provided Xin Hexue with an entire professional team of managers and assistants. During breaks when he wasn't filming, Xin Hexue only needed to rest in his van and wait for his call.

The weather was already starting to warm up in late spring and early summer.

Today they were filming the swimming class scene before the changing-room incident.

There had been a scene in the rain earlier. After Xin Hexue finished filming it under the artificial rain set up by the props department, he developed a high fever that night and had to take two days off, so they could only film other characters' scenes first.

Qiu Yuan leaned against the van door and said to Xin Hexue, "The water in the pool is warm. That's all right, isn't it? I don't want Xi Zhengqing calling me to demand an explanation again."

Xin Hexue slipped off the coat draped over his shoulders and let his assistant put it away. "Mm."

Although he did want to appear more dedicated, like the celebrities in those Star Network reports who filmed in a single layer of clothing at minus fifteen degrees or worked through the night with a fever of forty degrees, Xin Hexue had to admit that, for him, being called dead young would come sooner than being called dedicated by the public.

"Mr. Xin, this..."

The assistant spoke up to remind him.

Xin Hexue looked at the ring on the middle finger of his left hand. "I almost forgot. Thanks for reminding me."

It was one of a pair of understated silver rings set with diamond chips, designed around the idea of intertwined branches, with an ingenious design and delicate detailing.