Chapter 15

His eyes sparkled with anticipation. "We still have plenty of future ahead of us."

Sheng Chi said nothing.

He had been through far too many cycles of the same old failures.

Training, preparing to debut, failing, training, preparing to debut again, failing again-disappointment had almost become a habit.

Never had anyone caught him as he was about to fall into the abyss again and said, "It's okay. I'll be there with you."

Sheng Chi looked up and gazed at him for a long, long time before finally taking Gu Zhijing's hand in his.

Gu Zhijing's palm was soft and damp, pressed against Sheng Chi's pounding heart.

Sheng Chi heard himself say, "Okay."

"Together."

After Qi Wang was fired, the Qi family naturally withdrew its investment.

They also declared to the industry that they would watch Leap Entertainment go bankrupt.

At the time, Fei Yue had prepared himself to burn his bridges.

To his surprise, he was lucky enough to secure a new investment.

But as a condition of the deal,

he had given up some of his shares to the new investor.

The investor had given Fei Yue two years.

If the debut group he worked so hard to train failed to deliver the desired returns after two years, the investor might restructure the company, absorb it, or sell it to another company.

On the day the new contract was signed, Fei Yue went out for a rare drink.

It was a highly risky move, an all-or-nothing gamble.

But he was happy.

Then came the task of reorganizing the company's staff.

Quite a few trainees and staff members had left in the upheaval, leaving the company scattered and nearly in complete disarray.

Fei Yue had prepared himself to rebuild everything from scratch, but when he looked back,

he found that four trainees had stayed.

Four people were a little few.

But when he thought about how he had started the company alone and still managed to keep it going in the end...

Everything was starting over.

Everything would get better.

Fei Yue found the old proposal, opened it to a fresh page, and wrote down the name of the new debut group.

Color4.

Chapter 16

"Color4?"

Gu Zhijing looked at the group name Fei Yue had written on the whiteboard and raised an eyebrow slightly. "How do you pronounce it? Color four?"

It was two in the afternoon, in the office.

Leap Entertainment's four remaining trainees were sitting obediently in a row for once, watching as Fei Yue pulled over a whiteboard and wrote out their debut plans bit by bit.

Fei Yue stopped writing and looked back at the four markedly different expressions on their faces. His heart skipped a beat.

"Yes. You don't like it?"

Fei Yue was quite pleased with the debut name himself.

Color 4, Color four, represented the four members of the group.

It also sounded like "colorful," meaning vibrant, wonderful, and full of energy.

It was the perfect description of these four young men, whose average age was under twenty.

"No, no."

Hugging a cushion and leaning against the sofa, Jiang Yu cackled for a while before saying, "It's great. Color4, shortened to C4. How about we call the group's fans C4 bombs from now on?"

Fei Yue: "..."

Gu Zhijing couldn't help smiling.

His ideas were the exact opposite of Jiang Yu's, romantic and girlish. "Can we make the group's official color rainbow? The centrally controlled lights at a big concert would be so spectacular and beautiful!"

Jiang Yu objected in his own name. "No, rainbow is so tacky! If we're picking a color, it has to be colorful black!"

Gu Zhijing shot right back, "Then I want multicolored white!"

"If we're choosing individual colors too, let's go with the classic four: red, blue, green, and yellow."

Amid their joking around, Xu Linyuan finally took up the conversation with a laugh. "With those colors, are we going to be Teletubbies or play UNO?"

Gu Zhijing was still enthusiastic. "Why not? I've even thought of our first endorsement after debut. Daddy Skittles, would you give me a look?"

"Now you're even sucking up to a hypothetical endorsement!"

Jiang Yu offered a spoiler of his own. "I'm different. I want a Rainbow Six endorsement!! Brother Fei, can you get it? Can you, can you?"

Fei Yue: "..."

Unable to bear it any longer, he finally turned to Sheng Chi, who hadn't said a word this whole time. "Sheng Chi, what do you think?"

Sheng Chi, suddenly put on the spot: "?"

He hadn't expected the person in charge of the whole company to actually discuss a group name with the trainees under him. He couldn't help laughing and shook his head. "Anything works for me."

"If Sheng Chi says it's good, then it's settled."

Fei Yue stopped Gu Zhijing and Jiang Yu from continuing to spout nonsense and went on writing the plan. "I've already found someone to design the group's logo. I'll get everything else ready too."

"The tracks for your debut EP were prepared earlier. I plan to keep using them, though if any of you know how to arrange music, you can make some changes yourselves. Linyuan, I remember you graduated from the Central Conservatory of Music, right? I'll send you the demos in a few days. If you think they're okay, we'll go to the recording studio three days from now."

Jiang Yu looked excited. "Since when did we have a recording studio?!"

"We're renting it."

Fei Yue paused and warned them, "Just for one day. It's expensive. You'd better record a decent version for me."

"Let me check the schedule. Hmm... we'll shoot your official debut photos tomorrow."

"Then over the next few days, I'll film a pre-debut documentary for the archives. Get ready for that."

"I'm still contacting venues for the group variety show. That should be arranged too."

Fei Yue's tone grew abruptly serious when he got down to business, and the four of them became much more serious too, asking questions about this and that in the debut plans.

Finally, it was Sheng Chi's turn.

After a moment's silence, he finally asked the question he most wanted answered. "When are we debuting?"

Fei Yue turned a page in the proposal. "Tentatively, October tenth. It's a little rushed, but we should have enough time."

People in the entertainment industry were more or less superstitious.

For instance, actors checked feng shui before filming and burned incense at opening ceremonies, while singers picked auspicious times to release songs. Fei Yue wasn't quite so particular, but he still wanted an auspicious sign of perfect completeness for the group's future debut.

They would debut on October tenth.

Gu Zhijing did the math in his head. That left a little over half a month to prepare.

In another half month, he would leave his old identity as a trainee behind for good, officially enter the entertainment industry, and become a small-time, bona fide idol.

After going over all the plans, Fei Yue asked one last time, "No problems, right?"

The four of them shook their heads.

"If there are no problems..."

He closed the proposal and smiled. "Then here's to a smooth debut for our Color4!"

Everything had finally returned to its orderly course.

In all fairness, Fei Yue's plans were thorough.

So although the upheaval had dealt them a heavy blow, the debut group's plans had quickly been rebuilt and set in motion again.

It was just that, even with a new investor,

Leap Entertainment still had the air of a tiny, dirt-poor operation.

The venue for their official debut photos was the same as before, cramped and shabby. The trainees' clothes had been bought at the last minute on Taobao, and they didn't quite fit.

Fei Yue said they could leave everything to post-production after the shoot. They could always edit the photos into something presentable.

But even these cheap clothes couldn't be thrown away after the shoot. They had to keep them and reuse them if another opportunity came up.

It was painfully pitiful.

Next came the debut documentary.

The documentary mainly covered their days of training before debut, the effort they put into each evaluation, the process of preparing to debut, and some of their personal thoughts.

Footage of the evaluations and practice room had already been archived, but their personal thoughts needed to be filmed now. Each person would get a solo segment to introduce himself and talk about his thoughts and expectations for debut.

Gu Zhijing was standing in front of the camera now.

Before filming started, he was a little nervous.

But once he stood before the camera and looked up, his peach-blossom eyes naturally curved with a beautiful starlight, like a seasoned idol who had been through countless scenes just like this one.

"My name is Gu Zhijing, I'm eighteen, and I'm a member of Color4-"

While Gu Zhijing was filming, Sheng Chi sat nearby and waited.

Looking at eighteen-year-old Gu Zhijing, he suddenly remembered his own past.

Where had he been when he was eighteen?

It seemed that was the year SPC had promised him that as long as he worked hard, he would get a chance to debut when he turned twenty.

So he worked himself to the bone, spending sixteen to eighteen hours a day in the practice room. Ignoring all the cold looks and exclusion, he gritted his teeth and fought his way alone through fierce competition and cold judging standards.

He had finally made it out, but there were no cheers or flowers to welcome him.＿奇米影视

Someone merely pushed him back down to rock bottom and said, "Do it again."

An undisclosed trainee got nothing. No one could see him, no one would pay attention, and both the road behind him and the road back were empty.

He had walked them alone.

Now, all of a sudden, he had someone by his side.

And there were cameras recording their days of training, the sweat and tears shed in the practice room and the bruised knees they had injured, every desperate effort before their debut evaluations, every time they gave their all, every drop of effort that hadn't gone to waste.

That was good.

Sheng Chi had once thought he might be a jinx.

Wherever he went, something went wrong.

Three debuts, three disruptions.

He had also wondered whether he was born unlucky, or whether heaven didn't want him to stay in this line of work.

Only at this moment did Sheng Chi feel that he was so lucky.

That eighteen-year-old boy who had gritted his teeth in the practice room, swallowed his blood and tears, and climbed upward

had finally gotten his wish at twenty-one.

On the night before their debut, Fei Yue took them out for a few drinks.

Jiang Yu couldn't hold his liquor and got thoroughly drunk. As the other three carried him back, he was still shouting nonsense like "Color4 will blow up tomorrow!" and "Color4, get famous for me!"

Gu Zhijing, though not drunk, found himself unable to sleep again.

Thinking about their debut the next day, he tossed and turned until he finally got up and shook Sheng Chi in the top bunk. "Look how nice the night is. Let's go for a walk?"

Sheng Chi: "..."

He hadn't really been in the mood.

But Gu Zhijing's cheeks were flushed from the alcohol, and his eyes shimmered as he looked at him.

Sheng Chi really couldn't refuse.

It was October, already autumn. The days were still hot, but cold winds sprang up as soon as night fell.

So before they went out, Sheng Chi dug a thick coat out of his wardrobe and put it on Gu Zhijing.

Leap Entertainment's dorm wasn't in a busy area. Hardly anyone passed by during the day, and at night it was even emptier, without a soul in sight.

Gu Zhijing and Sheng Chi sat beside the little road in front of the company.

The cold wind blew on Gu Zhijing, but instead of sobering up, he grew dizzier.

He tipped his head back to look at the dim yellow streetlight and narrowed his eyes. Then, on a sudden impulse, he began to mumble a half-true account of how he had been kicked out of his home, leaving out the reason.

As he spoke, his eyes suddenly reddened, and he nestled against Sheng Chi, whimpering.

Sheng Chi listened quietly, then squeezed the back of his neck, as if soothing a drunken cat. "Shall we go back?"

Gu Zhijing didn't want to.

He insisted on sitting there a while longer.

In the end, he sleepily leaned against Sheng Chi's shoulder and fell asleep.

He seemed to be fixated on something.

He thought that once he debuted tomorrow, he would be a big star, completely cut off from his past self, and everything would be different.

That young master of the Gu Family would be gone forever, never to return.

That wasn't true.

How could debuting go so smoothly?

Sheng Chi sighed and gently pulled the hood of Gu Zhijing's coat down a little.

But this time, facing an uncertain future, he felt unusually calm.

Probably because he finally had someone with him. Whether things went up or down, whether they were good or bad, there would always be someone by his side to shoulder it all with him.

In the end, Sheng Chi couldn't remember how the two of them got back.

Only later...