A Wedding! (Please Vote)

Shen Qi sat down on a mound of earth.

He had failed the college entrance exam again, and he was no good at farmwork either. Naturally, he felt miserable.

"Cut! Again!"

The first ruined take was Zhang Yi's fault. He stumbled as he jumped onto the mound, and the slip drew attention away from the scene.

"Didn't train properly, did you? Even a soldier in the performing arts corps has to keep fit!"

Kang Honglei couldn't resist the jab.

Zhang Yi looked ready to cry.

Not only had he been scolded, he now owed Shen Qi five yuan.

Luckily, on the second take, he jumped onto the mound without a hitch and stood beside Shen Qi.

He gave Shen Qi a pat. Shen Qi turned and patted his leg in return.

The two childhood friends who had grown up together in the countryside exchanged a smile.

It was a little awkward.

This time, Kang Honglei didn't call cut.

After all, they didn't always have to follow the script to the letter.

They were childhood friends, but one had stayed in school while the other had left early to make his way in the world.

A little awkwardness between them made sense.

Smiling, Zhang Yi took out a cigarette and offered it to Shen Qi. Shen Qi waved it away.

"Still haven't learned?" Zhang Yi smiled and sat down beside him. He studied Shen Qi with a complicated expression, then sighed. "No luck again this year?"

Shen Qi kept his head down, looking dejected.

"Then... are you going to take the exam again?"

Zhang Yi went on with his lines.

Only then did Shen Qi realize how effortlessly natural Zhang Yi's acting was. He was in another league.

For this scene, Shen Qi only had to stay dejected.

But Zhang Yi had to approach him and start the conversation. He conveyed both the joy of seeing an old friend and the care he took in asking about Shen Qi's life and plans.

In other words, Shen Qi playing a version of himself couldn't even match Zhang Yi improvising on the spot.

Fuck!

How was that fair?

He'd run into some goofball in Hengdian who couldn't catch a break.

And the guy turned out to be a one-in-ten-thousand acting genius.

What were the odds?

How had he managed to run into him?

Shen Qi began to panic.

He felt like he was going to lose.

What if... the Magic Book?

No. How could he cheat on a bet?

Shen Qi refused to accept defeat.

"Don't you dare mention that word to me. I'm telling you, just hearing 'exam' makes me sick now. You couldn't make me take it again if you beat me to death. Not in this life, and not in the next!"

Throughout Shen Qi's speech, Zhang Yi kept his eyes on him, and the camera stayed focused on Zhang Yi's face.

That was a real test of acting skill.

"So what are you going to do?"

"Haven't figured it out. I'll take things as they come." Shen Qi sighed. "What about you? How's it going in the county?"

"Cut. Shen Qi, watch the shift in your tone. Until now, you've been talking about yourself. When you change the subject, you're setting your own troubles aside and forcing yourself to show concern for someone else..."

Kang Honglei gave Shen Qi a ruined take.

When it was time to settle the bet, Shen Qi handed Zhang Yi ten yuan.

Zhang Yi had ruined one take; he had ruined three.

He was a country boy playing a country boy, yet he hadn't done as well as Zhang Yi, a city kid.

Was this...

...the advantage of being ugly?

Honestly, Zhang Yi's performance had made Shen Qi see him in a new light. It had also sobered him up.

There really were geniuses in this world.

Even with a cheat, an ordinary person might not surpass them.

He still needed to work hard.

The cheat was only there to help.

What mattered was putting in the effort to make the most of it.

Shen Qi didn't have many scenes with Zhang Yi. Most of his scenes were with Fan Ming and Pan Yuchen.

Filming went smoothly over the next few days.

Shen Qi gradually found his rhythm.

For simple scenes, he could draw on his own experience. For more complicated ones, he used the Magic Book.

In the days before Huang Qidao returned to school, the crew happened to be filming Shen Qi's wedding scene.

Though the crew was feeding and housing Huang Qidao as an "assistant," they roped him into keeping order too.

There was no helping it. Far too many extras had shown up. People had come to watch the spectacle not just from this village, but from several neighboring ones.

It was Shen Qi's first time acting in a wedding scene.

Then again, everything had a first time.

He felt nothing much about it. To him, it was just work.

Pan Yuchen, on the other hand, seemed a little uneasy.

The main problem was that the villagers brought in as extras had gotten far too invested.

They genuinely believed the crew was holding a wedding, and that Shen Qi and Pan Yuchen were the ones getting married.

The crew wasn't paying the extras.

Instead, they got to eat at the wedding banquet.

Anyone who came could eat.

There were several big gatherings to film: Ju Shuangyuan's wedding and two village funerals, one of them for Ju Shuangyuan's mother.

They were filming all those scenes together.

Kang Honglei had chosen to shoot the wedding first, then the funerals.

It really was lively.

Shen Qi had seen plenty of rural weddings like this.

When children ran up to ask him for candy, he even took wedding sweets from his pocket and gave them some.

Some villagers even tried to give wedding gift money.

The crew had made it clear: "We're filming a show. Please come eat with us and help with the shoot. There's no need to bring gifts."

But many of the villagers had never encountered anything like this.

They had no idea what filming a show meant. If they were going to eat at a wedding banquet, they had to bring a gift.

They couldn't let these outsiders look down on them.

That was the complicated thing about village life. Some people loved a bargain and would bring one gift, then turn up with their whole family to eat.

Others would rather die than take advantage of anyone.

They would sooner go hungry than give up their pride.

"Sir, we're not really getting married! We're filming a show, a TV show! You know those shows you watch on television? This is how we make them, bit by bit. It's all make-believe!"

Of course Shen Qi couldn't accept the gift money.

What right did he have to take it?

"You can speak the Shanxi dialect? You sound just like them."

Pan Yuchen stood beside Shen Qi in her wedding outfit.

She was quite pretty, especially with her slender, tall figure, which suited current tastes.

Plenty of extras kept looking at her.

"I'm from the countryside. Shandong and Shanxi aren't that different."

Shen Qi was talking nonsense.

The dialects of Shandong and Shanxi were actually quite different. Speech could vary widely within a single province, let alone across provincial borders.

It wasn't like the area around Zaozhuang, Xuzhou, Huaibei, and Shangqiu, where four provinces shared a similar accent.

Shen Qi could speak the Shanxi dialect thanks to the Magic Book's supernatural power.

He had run an experiment.

He found an elderly farmer in the village and asked him to speak in the local dialect while they chatted.

Then he tried recording the dialect as a "skill."

To his surprise, it worked.

And it wasn't difficult at all. As long as Shen Qi could hear and understand what the man said, he could record it.

Once recorded, he could use it immediately.

After doing this several times, Shen Qi had picked up most of the local speech.

It looked as though regional dialects could help him open doors in the future.

In fact, the dialects in Migrant Workers were all over the place.

Even at the Ju family dinner table, people spoke in a patchwork of dialects from different places.

There were Shandong, Henan, Hebei, and Northeast China dialects.

Kang Honglei had never considered making everyone deliver their lines in the Shanxi dialect.

Casting only actors from Shanxi wasn't realistic either.

Even neighboring villages could sound different, and it wasn't as if Shanxi-born actors were easy to assemble.

"Weddings here really are lively," Pan Yuchen said with admiration.

Even after the crew had explained that the wedding was fake and arranged for village officials to explain the filming to everyone, they still couldn't dampen the crowd's enthusiasm.

There were firecrackers, drums and gongs, laughter and cheers. It felt as though she really was about to marry Shen Qi.

The thought was a little... exciting!

"People in the countryside do have closer ties. With all the neighbors here to witness a wedding like this, it'd be recognized even without a marriage certificate."

Shen Qi watched the director's and production teams struggle to keep order. He even spotted Huang Qidao in the crowd.

"Huh?!"

Pan Yuchen was stunned.

But she soon realized Shen Qi was teasing her.

How could she get married just by acting in a show?

He hadn't even offered a bride price!

Shen Qi...

He was decent-looking, but he had no connections, no formal acting training, and he came from the countryside.

The countryside!

The more Pan Yuchen learned about it, the more frightening it seemed.

A one-night stand might be fine.

But marrying someone like him would bring endless trouble.

Besides, Shen Qi looked rustic in this show, even a little slow-witted.

He had gotten deep into character.

On set and off, he came across as a genuine country boy, which did his looks no favors.

Add to that his cool attitude toward pretty girls, and even Liu Siyan had become less keen.

Maybe she was trying to stay in character too.

After all, her character was supposed to end up with Zhang Yi's. If she kept making eyes at Ju Shuangyuan in the show, viewers would be baffled.

Was there some hidden subplot?