Utterly disgraced on camera

Jiang Yanchu's eyelid twitched violently.

He took a deep breath and turned to the production crew, trying to sound polite. "Excuse me, could we pause filming for a moment? I have a family matter to deal with."

The assistant director glanced at Liu Wanying awkwardly.

Liu Wanying's smile remained unchanged. "Yan Chu, whatever it is can wait. The crew came all this way. Let's get the child settled in first."

Her tone was still gentle, but Jiang Yanchu heard the command beneath that gentleness, one that allowed no argument.

When the cameras were rolling, she was the world's most perfect mother, its most virtuous wife, every expression calibrated down to the pixel.

But once the cameras stopped, the warmth in her eyes could drop to freezing in an instant.

"Aunt Liu," Jiang Yanchu said through gritted teeth, lowering his voice, "you never discussed this with me."

"I discussed it with your father," Liu Wanying said without batting an eye. "Besides, Jiang Xun wanted to go himself, didn't he?"

She turned toward the assistant director with a gentle, gracious smile.

The assistant director opened her mouth, recalling what Jiang Xun had said that morning-"My stepmother drugged me, knocked me out, and dumped me in some mountain backwater"-then looked again at the dignified, elegant society lady before her.

Torn between ratings and her conscience, she struggled for three-tenths of a second before choosing to keep her mouth shut and nod.

After all, a conscience couldn't exactly put ratings on the table.

Shen Yuxing stood beneath the porch with his head lowered, both hands gripping his backpack straps tightly.

He had fought with everything he had for this chance to appear on the show.

The day the production crew visited the countryside to scout locations, Shen Yuxing had run dozens of li along mountain roads to catch up with them in town. Armed with a report card ranking him first in his school and a poverty certificate issued by the village, he had told the casting director that he wanted to participate.

The director had taken one look at his scrawny frame and his little face, already striking even before his features had fully developed, and made the decision on the spot.

"If you do well, that family in the city might even keep you," the director had told him half-jokingly at the time. "It wouldn't be the first time."

The speaker had meant nothing by it, but the listener had taken it to heart.

Shen Yuxing had welded those words into his heart.

He didn't want to spend another day in that impoverished place, Shiban Village.

His older brother, Shen Wangjing, had spent his whole life holed up in that mountain backwater, tending to their paralyzed grandfather and a little patch of farmland, wasting his best years on three meals a day, chopping firewood, and carrying water.

His brother thought it was his responsibility, the natural and right thing to do, but he didn't agree.

Whatever he wanted, he had to take for himself.

Liu Wanying held Shen Yuxing's hand, her smile tender as water before the cameras.

"Come, Yuxing. Let me show you your room."

Her fingers were slender, fair, and soft, her nails painted pale pink. Resting against the back of Shen Yuxing's dark, thin hand, they made a contrast so stark it hurt the eyes.

Shen Yuxing nodded obediently and let her lead him toward the stairs.

Jiang Yanchu remained where he was, his face livid, his hands clenched into fists at his sides.

He took out his phone and called Jiang Changping, but no one answered. It should have been late at night in Germany, and Jiang Changping was probably already asleep.

He called Jiang Huaixiao next, but again, no one answered.

Jiang Yanchu hurled his phone into the sofa and took a deep breath. Just as he was about to follow them upstairs, a crew member stepped in to stop him.

"Young Master Yanchu, we need to get a pickup shot here. Could you cooperate?"

"Cooperate, my-"

Halfway through, he caught sight of the two cameras rolling beside him and forcibly swallowed the rest.

Suddenly, he understood.

Liu Wanying had chosen this exact moment, when his father and eldest brother were both away, with a production crew filming every step to serve as witnesses.

She wasn't sending Jiang Xun to the countryside to suffer. She wanted the show to utterly destroy Jiang Xun's reputation, then erase him from the Jiang family completely.

And he, Jiang Xun's second brother, had been kept in the dark from beginning to end.

Jiang Yanchu's nails dug into his palms.

Liu Wanying's gentle voice drifted down from upstairs. "Yuxing, take a look. Do you like this room? If you don't, I'll get you a bigger one."

Then came Shen Yuxing's timid, tiny voice, which made people feel sorry for him despite themselves. "I do. Thank you, Auntie. This room is so big, so much bigger than the main room back home."

"What a child," Liu Wanying said, smiling with slightly reddened eyes as she turned to the camera. "So considerate."

The cameraman followed them inside with his camera on his shoulder and filmed a tour of the room. Only when the assistant director called cut was the segment finished.

The moment the camera stopped, the smile on Liu Wanying's face abruptly faded.

She removed her hand from Shen Yuxing's shoulder and glanced down at her freshly manicured nails, frowning-a little dust had clung to the spot that had touched his clothes.

"Wang Ma," she called coldly toward the end of the hallway, "take him to have a bath and change into clean clothes. Throw these old ones away. Who knows what dirt pile he dug them out of."

Wang Ma answered and hurried over, leading Shen Yuxing toward the bathroom.

As they passed through the second-floor hallway, Shen Yuxing noticed a row of Jiang family photographs hanging on the wall. Their gold-edged frames had been polished to a shine, but Jiang Xun wasn't in a single one.

He had done his homework thoroughly before coming.

Jiang Xun, the Jiang family's biological son, recovered seventeen years after being abducted.

Bad-tempered and defiant, he had thrown the household into chaos after his return and even knocked out his stepbrother's teeth.

The production crew had sent basic information on the Jiang family to the participating households in advance for background research. Shen Yuxing had read those few pages over and over, memorizing every word.

A feral child picked up from an orphanage, who didn't even know how to be a wealthy family's young master.

Shen Yuxing looked away and obediently followed Wang Ma into the bathroom.

Hot water poured from the showerhead. He tilted his face up, letting the stream wash every expression from it.

When he opened his eyes again, not a trace of that timid little country bumpkin from moments earlier remained in the face in the mirror.