You're not dead yet? Tough to kill, aren't you?

With Jiang Xun's boring daily routine consisting of either holding a foxtail grass stem between his teeth or squatting on a field ridge basking in the sun, the director finally broke down in front of the monitor.

The whole point of sending him here had been to let him experience the hardships of rural life, but he had turned Metamorphosis into a vacation show, following a daily routine so regular it nearly gave people heart attacks.

Get up, go to school, eat, sleep, and occasionally browse the market-he lived a healthier life than the village's old men and women. Several whole days had passed without a single usable piece of conflict footage.

The director had spent days at the monitor, cutting three different versions of Jiang Xun talking back to Li Guizhi and adding three layers of special effects to the iconic boxed-lunch snatching scene. There really was nothing new left to squeeze out.

"Does he think he's on Back to Field?" The director slammed his walkie-talkie onto the table.

The assistant director cautiously handed him a coffee. "Director, why don't we try a different approach? If there's no conflict, we create some."

The director narrowed his eyes and scoured his contact list of Capital City's wealthy elite, finally settling on the Duan family, who lived next door to the Jiang family.

The Duan family had made their fortune in real estate, and President Duan had been quite impressed after watching the trailer for Metamorphosis.

His only son, Duan Qizhao, had just turned eighteen. He spent his days idling around, learned nothing, and did nothing but follow Jiang Yu around getting into trouble.

His grades consistently placed him in the bottom three. Last month, he had totaled one of his father's limited-edition sports cars; this month, he had maxed out three credit cards.

President Duan answered the director's call, and the two immediately hit it off. The countryside was a good place. It ought to knock some of his son's rotten habits out of him.

Early the next morning, Duan Qizhao was having a lovely dream under his covers. He dreamed he was driving his newly bought sports car along the Fifth Ring Road at two hundred miles an hour, with a fair-skinned beauty in the passenger seat gazing at him tenderly as she fed him cherries.

The next second, the cherries suddenly turned into two bodyguards in black, who grabbed an arm each and hauled him out from under the covers.

"What are you doing?! Is this a kidnapping?!"

Wearing nothing but SpongeBob underwear, Duan Qizhao kicked his bare feet in the air. "Let go of me! I'm going to fight my dad! What gives him the right-"

Without expression, the bodyguards draped a coat over him and stuffed him into the car. The door shut, the driver floored the accelerator, and the car sped away.

The production crew's car dumped Duan Qizhao at the village entrance and drove off.

Dragging his suitcase, he stumbled along the dirt road for a full kilometer before he finally found the Shen family's crooked, battered wooden door.

As he pushed the door open, a yellow dog bared its teeth at him. He jumped back in fright and struck the back of his head against the doorframe, raising a huge lump.

There was only an old man in a wheelchair in the main room. Whatever he asked, the man only replied, "Huh? Huh?" He was infuriatingly hard of hearing.

Duan Qizhao shouted himself hoarse, but the old man still stared at him blankly. In the end, he simply closed his eyes and began to doze.

Duan Qizhao looked around in despair.

Mud-brick walls, a dirt floor, no air conditioning, no Wi-Fi, not even an electrical outlet to charge anything. The production crew had also mercilessly confiscated his phone, which had only one bar of reception left.

He sat there from noon, when the sun was at its fiercest, until dusk, when the mosquitoes began patrolling in formation. The three-legged bench had already pressed two symmetrical red marks into his backside.

He was so hungry his stomach felt stuck to his spine. When he could no longer stand it, he swallowed his pride and approached a crew assistant. Before he could speak, the assistant clutched his boxed lunch and bolted as though he had seen a ghost.

"Fuck!" Duan Qizhao ground his teeth. "What is wrong with these people?!"

At last, as darkness fell, a sound came from the courtyard gate.

Duan Qizhao perked up, crossed one leg over the other, and cleared his throat, ready with a full arsenal of mockery.

He was going to show this poor country boy that not just any nobody could share meals and a roof with Young Master Duan for a month.

He would put him in his place and make him back off!

The wooden door creaked open.

Duan Qizhao raised his head, his mouth half-open.

Their eyes met.

That pretty face, those curved eyes, those two unmistakable dimples, and that perpetually languid expression, as though he had just woken up-

Duan Qizhao's pupils shook. His crossed leg snapped back reflexively, and his knee struck the edge of the low table, making him grimace in pain.

"Holy shit! Why is it you?!"

Jiang Xun leaned against the doorframe and yawned, squinting as he looked the dumbstruck blue-haired boy inside up and down.

"Who are you?"

Duan Qizhao nearly fell off the bench.

This guy had nearly killed him with a bottle of Romanée-Conti laced with laxatives. He had spent the entire ambulance ride shitting, had been repeatedly dragged out by his own father as a cautionary example, and had lost a full four kilos during those few days in the hospital!

And now the culprit didn't even remember who he was?!

"Me! Duan Qizhao!" He pointed at his own nose. "Last time, at your house, you put laxatives in the wine, and I drank it! I nearly didn't make it through the ambulance ride! You don't remember?!"

Jiang Xun yawned again and tilted his head in thought, finally digging up the memory of the blue-haired boy who had brought five or six people to corner him, only to snatch his wine and drink it.

"Oh, it's you."

Duan Qizhao lifted his chin, waiting for more. An apology? Remorse? Even a guilty look would do.

Jiang Xun walked straight past him toward the bed. "You're not dead yet? Tough to kill, aren't you?"

Duan Qizhao: "..."

He watched helplessly as Jiang Xun plunged into the quilt, buried his face in a pillow flattened to little more than two layers of cloth, and soon went still.

Asleep?

He. Just. Fell. Asleep?!

Steady breathing came from the bed. Half of Jiang Xun's face was buried in the pillow, his lashes casting a small patch of shadow over his cheekbone. He was sleeping as soundly as could be.

Duan Qizhao stood beside the bed with clenched fists for a long while. Finally, he let out a muffled snort of frustration and turned to find the other living person in the house.

Shen Wangjing was scrubbing a wok in the kitchen, well water splashing over the iron. He did not even look up.

Duan Qizhao planted himself in the kitchen doorway, trying to make up for his lack of height with sheer presence. "Hey, where am I sleeping tonight?"

Shen Wangjing poured the water out of the wok and wiped the stove with a rag.

"There aren't any spare beds."

"..."

Duan Qizhao was on the verge of despair. Was there a single normal person in this house? "Then where am I supposed to sleep?"

Shen Wangjing picked up a bench from behind the door and set it in the middle of the main room, then pulled a ragged padded coat from the corner and tossed it onto the bench before turning back into the kitchen.

He had said only that one sentence the entire time, without so much as giving him a glance.

One of the bench legs was bad, too, propped up with half a brick. It was uncomfortable even to sit on.

Duan Qizhao looked back at the quilt-wrapped lump that was Jiang Xun, sleeping away without a care for day or night. A surge of anger lodged in his throat, unable to go up or down.

The mountain night grew cold quickly. Wind poured through cracks in the walls, drilling straight into the gaps between his bones.

Duan Qizhao wrapped himself in the ragged padded coat that let drafts through everywhere and huddled on the three-legged bench, his teeth chattering.

He glared at the dim yellow bulb hanging from the roof beam and silently cursed his father, the director, Jiang Xun, Shen Wangjing-even the yellow dog that had bared its teeth at him.