"No-" Jiang Yue explained in a panic, then flipped over the phone lying facedown on the table and stood at attention, looking ready to face death. "Look for yourself if you don't believe me."
His manager lowered their eyes to look. The next second, an earth-shattering scream rang out. "Jiang Yue-you have a death wish?!!!"
Beep-
The call finally disconnected.
"Hahaha." Gao Yuan hurriedly kept raising his hands, signaling for everyone there to laugh along as he began brainstorming. "That was so convincing, I thought it really was Jiang Yue, Mr. Jiang... It was actually a fan pranking us, right? It had to be, right?"
Chi Li had watched many of Jiang Yue's performances and knew his voice very well.
He was certain that Better and Better was Jiang Yue.
"Haha, right." Wei Xuan played along with Gao Yuan. "Fans these days really have some advanced pranking techniques."
Whether it was a prank was obviously something they all knew perfectly well.
But they still had to save Jiang Yue some face.
After all, nobody wanted others to know they enjoyed watching their peers perform girl group dances.
"Hahaha, it had to be! The audience really is so wicked."
"We won't have people pretending to be the others and pranking us later too, will we?"
"Please, give us a break."
With awkward smiles on their faces, they each chimed in and actually managed to smooth things over.
Xie Weishui, however, found it a little hard to smile.
Was having Shen Qiang involved not enough? Now there was Jiang Yue too?
Weren't these top stars always aloof?
How come they were so "enthusiastic" when it came to Chi Li?
"All right." Having fooled himself, Gao Yuan still had to continue tonight's game. "Shall we start the next round? What should we have everyone post this round? Let me think..."
In the time it took him to finish speaking, the barrage had already filled with neat rows of "Jiang Yue."
"Um..." Gao Yuan raised a hand to wipe away some sweat and pretended not to see. "How about this? To reward me, your host, and let me experience being spoiled, everyone post my name this round-10, 9, 8..."
After a round of "hahaha," the barrage began posting "Gao Yuan."
The countdown ended, and the lucky viewer was selected.
"'Did My CP Do It Tonight...' Ahem-" Gao Yuan nearly choked on his own spit. He hurriedly regained his composure. "The name's too long, so I'll shorten it and call this viewer Ms. CP."
Then the call connected.
"Hello, hello, hello, everyone!" Unsurprisingly, Ms. CP was a girl.
Gao Yuan breathed a sigh of relief. He had been terrified of getting another guy on the line.
"You can tell from the name that Ms. CP must be a girl who loves shipping CPs. If I may ask, is the CP you ship among the eight of us?"
Ms. CP sounded excited. "Yes, yes! We're longtime viewers of this show!"
"Oh? Then did you call in because you want the CP you ship to interact?" Gao Yuan offered a reasonable guess.
"Oh, I called in because I wanted help with a relationship problem," Ms. CP said calmly, changing tack.
[Is this what they call defying expectations? Hahaha.]
[Set the CP aside for now. Solving your own problems is more important.]
[Don't try to guess what the audience is thinking. [Wags finger]]
"Mm... huh?" Gao Yuan had been ready for an affirmative answer, and this turn nearly left him at a loss. "Then, who would you like to help you with your relationship problem?"
Ms. CP was very generous. "There's strength in numbers. All eight of you can do it together."
"Sure..." Gao Yuan nodded, then volunteered a little extra incentive. "Once we've solved it, you can tell us who helped you the most."
"Sure!" Ms. CP wasn't shy at all. "Then I'll start telling my story, okay?"
Gao Yuan nodded. "Go ahead."
"I got a boyfriend a while back, and we had a great relationship." Ms. CP launched right in. "We were together like that for over half a year. I thought we'd always support each other and eventually get married, but suddenly, one day, another girl appeared by his side."
"Dump him!" Wei Xuan decisively jumped in first. "If you aren't dumping him over this, what are you waiting for?"
Wherever you went, people these days always advised breaking up rather than making up.
Ms. CP sniffled and continued, "Of course I couldn't accept it, but I really loved my boyfriend so much, so I directed all my cold looks at that girl..."
"That's where you were wrong." Gao Yuan couldn't help speaking up too. "What you should've done was slap your boyfriend twice."
"I know." Ms. CP gave a bitter laugh. "But I really couldn't bear to let my boyfriend go. I thought maybe he was just enjoying the novelty and would come back to me in the end... But I never expected that he'd later spend even more time with that girl than he did with me..."
"Oh my god, your boyfriend is taking advantage of how much you like him to keep pushing your boundaries, isn't he?" Jiang Lele covered his mouth, his eyes full of disapproval. "You really can't keep letting love blind you."
"Ah, I can't help it either." Ms. CP sighed, seemingly disappointed in herself too. "I really don't want to lose him... I wanted to have a proper talk with him, but we didn't get anywhere, and we ended up arguing over this girl again. It was a pretty serious argument too..."
Zhou Yang wanted to show what he could do too. "Since you like your boyfriend so much, why not do something to keep him?"
"Keep a scumbag like that? Are you sick in the head?" Jiang Lele shot him a sideways glare.
Wei Xuan was filled with righteous indignation too. "Exactly! No matter how much you like him, you can't put yourself through that!"
"Hey, what? What kind of thinking is that?" Zhou Yang didn't feel he had said anything wrong, and grew even more self-assured as he spoke. "She obviously doesn't want to break up?! In that situation, if she doesn't want to break up, doesn't she have to put up with a little?"
"Ah... I did put myself through it." Ms. CP had no backbone either. "After my friend talked me into it, I agreed to coexist peacefully with that girl."
"What?!!!" Gao Yuan nearly passed out from anger.
Jiang Lele was furious. "Isn't that letting the bastard have both women? That girl could put up with it?"
Zhou Yang commented with a smile, "That's the right thing to do. You have to be a little more magnanimous."
After saying that, he even deliberately glanced at Chi Li.
"If it were right, she wouldn't have called in." Chi Li hadn't caught his look at all. With candy in his mouth, he spoke slowly, addressing Ms. CP. "I think you may have misunderstood your friend. Coexisting peacefully actually meant breaking up amicably."
Shen Xunye unwrapped a candy in the same flavor as Chi Li's and asked, a little puzzled, "How do you know what her friend meant?"
Chi Li curled his lips into a smile. "Don't you think this story sounds a little familiar?"
Jiang Lele said, "...Story? Isn't this something that really happened?"
Gao Yuan scratched his head in confusion. "What do you mean?"