Only three or four minutes had passed, but to the two people trapped inside the elevator, it felt more like three or four hours. Finally, someone came running over and shouted at the top of his lungs from outside, “Who’s in there?”
Xiao Bai moved closer to the door and called back loudly, “Me…”
There was a moment of silence outside. “Who are you?”
“Zeng… Bai…”
“Wait there.” The man outside tossed out the words coldly and was just about to stroll away at a leisurely pace.
Yan Su Ang suddenly added, “I’m in here too.”
The footsteps outside came to a bizarre halt. Then they transformed into the frantic clatter-clatter-clatter of someone sprinting away, followed by a tremendous bang! as a door was violently opened and slammed shut.
Even through the elevator doors and the other door beyond them, Xiao Bai could faintly hear the man roaring, “Oh my god! Hurry, hurry, hurry! Great God is trapped in the elevator!”
Yan Su Ang suddenly curled his fingers and gave the elevator wall a couple of taps.
Tap, tap.
The crisp sounds seemed particularly sharp and clear inside the enclosed space.
Xiao Bai said faintly, “Don’t damage public property.”
Yan Su Ang’s fingers froze. “Don’t worry. Even if something breaks, it’ll be my fingers.”
Xiao Bai thought about it and decided that made perfect sense. “Oh.”
What do you mean, “oh”? Does that mean it’s fine as long as it’s my fingers that break? Yan Su Ang felt the frustration in his chest begin to rise.
At the height of his career in the entertainment industry, it had been a very, very long time since he had experienced anything resembling frustration. Even internationally renowned directors treated him politely when they met him and never put on airs. Yet this young nobody standing beside him—someone whose entertainment career had barely begun and who possessed neither background nor powerful backing—had made him run headfirst into one brick wall after another. Most infuriating of all was the fact that Yan Su Ang knew perfectly well Xiao Bai was not deliberately treating him this way because he was Yan Su Ang. At that thought, the pent-up qi in his chest shot straight toward his Baihui acupoint, practically achieving the legendary state of Three Flowers Gathering at the Crown.
Elio’s Notes: Baihui (百会穴) is an acupuncture point at the crown of the head. “Three Flowers Gathering at the Crown” (三花聚顶) is a Daoist cultivation expression associated with an elevated spiritual state. Here, the narration hilariously applies grand cultivation imagery to Yan Su Ang becoming so frustrated that his anger is practically shooting out through the top of his head.
“Xiao Bai.”
“Mm?”
“Do I really rub you the wrong way that much?”
“No.”
Hmph. At least you answered quickly. Some of Yan Su Ang’s anger dissipated.
“Anyway, I can’t see you right now.”
“……”
All the anger that had just dispersed instantly gathered again.
Yan Su Ang asked darkly, “Are you saying that if you could see me, I would rub you the wrong way?”
“No.”
Yan Su Ang waited for the rest.
But Xiao Bai seemed to have fallen asleep. Even his breathing was calm and steady.
“And?” Yan Su Ang finally couldn’t resist prompting him.
“And what?” Xiao Bai, who had been about to doze off, had no choice but to wake himself up again.
Yan Su Ang forced himself to calm down. “Why don’t I rub you the wrong way?”
This was the first time in his life he had ever asked such a… self-destructive question.
The two negatives spun around Xiao Bai’s head several times. After thinking for a long while, he finally said, “Ah. Oh. Because I don’t have any reason to dislike you.”
“……”
Yan Su Ang tried approaching the matter through Xiao Bai’s logic. In an exceptionally gentle voice, he asked, “Because you basically don’t feel anything about me at all, right?”
Xiao Bai nodded vigorously, then remembered Yan Su Ang couldn’t see him and answered crisply, “Right.”
The pent-up qi shot straight through the top of Yan Su Ang’s head and formed a dark cloud above him. “Then what about Feng Ya Lun? What do you think of him?”
“Brother Ya Lun is a really, really good person.” A really, really good person? Yan Su Ang gave a self-mocking smile. Of course. They’re senior and junior artists at the same company, and the magazines have been hyping them as rumored boyfriends. No matter how you look at it, Xiao Bai would naturally be closer to him than to an artist from a rival company.
Knowing that did nothing to make him feel better.
For the past several years, Feng Ya Lun had competed with him over practically everything, but had never actually beaten him. Awards, popularity, reputation, album sales, television ratings, box office—Feng Ya Lun had never won. That was why Yan Su Ang had never particularly cared what Feng Ya Lun did. But this time, he found himself genuinely starting to dislike the man.
Of all things, he had actually lost to Feng Ya Lun when it came to winning someone over!
Sulking, he asked, “What’s so good about him?”
Xiao Bai answered happily, “He bought me a shirt that cost more than five hundred yuan.”
“……”
Yan Su Ang immediately came back to life. “That’s it?”
“I’m incredibly grateful to him.”
Yan Su Ang carefully chose his words. “Don’t you think your standards for judging whether someone is a good person might be a little too low?”
Xiao Bai looked surprised. “You sound just like Zhi Qing.”
“Zhi Qing?”
“My best friend.” Xiao Bai paused, then added, “He’s also my manager.”
“Great God…” Chaotic footsteps approached from the distance.
Then came the creak, scrape, creak of someone prying open the doors.
Remembering where the sound had come from earlier, Yan Su Ang grabbed Xiao Bai’s arm. “Step back.”
Xiao Bai obediently took two steps backward.
BOOM!
The doors were forced apart from the middle.
The sudden flood of light made Xiao Bai and Yan Su Ang both shut their eyes for a moment.
The maintenance worker looked ingratiatingly at Yan Su Ang and apologized over and over. “Mr. Yan, I’m terribly sorry. I’ll have someone repair this elevator immediately. I’m so sorry you were caught up in this. Please don’t take offense. We were only—”
Yan Su Ang interrupted him with a smile. “Could you pull us up first?”
We can’t exactly stay suspended halfway between floors staring up at your crotches forever.
The maintenance workers suddenly came back to their senses and immediately reached down to pull them out.
Once their feet were safely on solid ground, the maintenance staff resumed the apology ceremony they had left unfinished.
By the time Yan Su Ang finally managed to convince them that he absolutely would not hold the incident against them, he discovered that Xiao Bai had already wandered off on his own, coolly leaving without so much as saying goodbye.
The next day, GO! GO! SU… SUPER STAR aired. Its average ratings astonishingly reached 32.6, while its highest-rated segment hit 38.3—three full points higher than the episode Great God had originally appeared on!
At the same time, the episode’s spectacular content caused the official forum to explode all over again.
Netizens excitedly discovered that ever since Xiao Bai joined the show, they never had to worry about running out of things to rant about.
The man was practically a troublemaking machine.
First he offended a Heavenly King, then a Heavenly Queen, and he didn’t even need to stop and catch his breath.
Taking advantage of the excitement, the moderator pinned two threads—
[Poll] Who do you support Feng Ya Lun being with?
Zhou Min Li
Xiao Bai
Yan Su Ang
Nobody
NP
Other
The voting remained fiercely contested. By midnight, 3,486 enthusiastic netizens had participated. To everyone’s astonishment, the winner was Yan Su Ang—the very person who had competed most fiercely with Feng Ya Lun over the past two years.
The results were:
Zhou Min Li 812
Xiao Bai 974
Yan Su Ang 1,256
Nobody 223
NP 176
Other 45
That gloriously four-digit result was impossible to ignore.
Elio’s Notes: NP is Chinese fandom shorthand for a multi-partner romantic or sexual relationship rather than a single exclusive pairing. Here the voters are essentially choosing “put them all together.”
Typical explanations from the voters included:
Fans who voted for Great God: Great God has to fight for first place in absolutely everything! Never admit defeat!
Netizens who voted for Xiao Bai: In that secretly photographed picture the magazine published, Feng Ya Lun was protecting Xiao Bai like his most precious treasure. The chemistry is incredible. So deliciously wicked!
Netizens who voted for Zhou Min Li: It’s already been so many years. We’re used to seeing them together. If you keep changing the pairing, we have to adjust all over again. What a hassle.
Netizens who voted for nobody: A public heartthrob belongs to the public! If everyone’s happy, that’s what really matters!
Netizens who voted for NP: The messier, the healthier.
Netizens who voted for Other: Everyone else can go die. The person Feng Ya Lun loves most is me!
The other pinned thread was—
[Spotlight] Subtle Moments Between Love Rivals
Creating the post had clearly required tremendous dedication, because the poster had practically watched GO! GO! SU… SUPER STAR under a microscope.
Xiao Bai’s utterly sincere expression whenever he “insulted” Zhou Min Li, Zhou Min Li’s rigid smile as she answered him, the cold sweat repeatedly appearing on Shi Da Ming’s forehead… every single moment had been captured in screenshots. Combined with captions created by the netizens, the result was both vividly lifelike and endlessly entertaining.
In stark contrast to the roaring excitement online, Yimate held a quiet, low-key emergency meeting attended by only Ma Rui and Gao Qin.
The main subject of the meeting was Xiao Bai, whose popularity was currently soaring.
The way Xiao Bai had become famous resembled those entertainment-industry figures who deliberately rose to prominence by insulting people, exposing private matters, and publicly cursing others. The rise was fast, the method bizarre, and the blast radius enormous.
Yet Xiao Bai was supposedly following an idol route.
In Ma Rui’s words, he was a freakish anomaly.
He had undergone no long-term professional training, his thoughts and actions ran stubbornly in a straight line, and he offended people without even realizing it. He was a hot potato—but a profitable one.
“I think it would be best to hide him away for a while and stop exposing him to the audience this quickly. Give it some time. Repair his brain until it’s at least slightly more complete so he doesn’t sound like he’s missing a string every time he opens his mouth.” Zhou Min Li’s talent agency was no pushover either. The sarcastic, insinuating phone call they had just received was enough to make a person’s scalp go numb.
Gao Qin smiled. “I actually think he’s fine exactly as he is. Completely unvarnished, with a distinctive style of his own. The fundamental reason Yimate hasn’t managed to produce another star as popular as Feng Ya Lun in the past few years is that we’ve been endlessly reproducing Feng Ya Lun. But no matter how well trained those newcomers are, no matter how much they resemble him, they can never replace him. It’s time we considered a different way of thinking and created a new path.”
Ma Rui disagreed. “Feng Ya Lun’s success proves the public likes that style. Feng Ya Lun will grow old eventually. Of course we need a successor. Isn’t Zhang Fu Man doing exactly the same thing? How many Yan Su Ang look-alikes has he tried to mold over the past few years?”
If you keep running along behind Zhang Fu Man’s ass forever, you’ll never truly surpass him.
The sentence circled once on Gao Qin’s tongue, but in the end he chose not to say it.
Ma Rui continued, “I’m not saying we should give up on Xiao Bai. I just think letting him stumble around blindly on his own like this is irresponsible. An artist’s career is a long one. If he offends every big name in the industry now, who’s going to dare hire him later? You know perfectly well that this industry runs on connections and face.”
Gao Qin had to admit that Ma Rui had a point. “I’ll think about it again when I get back.”
“Of course. Since I put you in charge of the management side, naturally I trust you completely.” Ma Rui straightened up in satisfaction. “I think that kid Jia Zhi Qing is pretty good. He’s quick-witted and willing to learn. Shame he was born with the wrong face. If he had Xiao Bai’s looks, I’d be putting everything behind him right now.”
Was he saying Xiao Bai had the looks but no brains, while Jia Zhi Qing had the brains but no looks?
Gao Qin curled his lip. “If President Ma had Xiao Bai’s face and Jia Zhi Qing’s brain, I wouldn’t have bothered promoting Feng Ya Lun back then.”
Ma Rui: “……”
Fuck! We talked for so long without anything happening that I thought the poison in this brat’s tongue had finally worn off. I still got hit!