Kaleidoscope of Death

Extra: Shameless Couple (2)

Ruan Nanzhu's stint as an actor was purely for fun, so nobody took the matter very seriously. But months later, as Ruan Nanzhu sat around bored at home with nothing to do, he got a call from Zhang Yiqing. The movie was premiering, and Zhang Yiqing sent him two free tickets for him to go have a look.

Tickets in hand, Ruan Nanzhu invited Lin Qiushi to go see the movie together. The two arrived happily at the theater, Lin Qiushi bought a bucket of popcorn, and they sat down in the audience.

The movie was a hundred minutes total; Lin Qiushi didn't have high expectations coming in, but afterwards, he was completely blown away. Though Zhang Yiqing had been an actor and had never gone through an official director's program, he obviously had quite a lot of talent in the realm of directing. At least, the techniques he used to shoot this wuxia film that Ruan Nanzhu got a cameo in were good enough to provoke cheers and applause.

Ruan Nanzhu, playing the prince in the movie, was also exceptional.

But after they watched it, that was that. Lin Qiushi and Ruan Nanzhu went home without thinking too much on the matter, until the next day when Lin Qiushi opened up his social media and saw that Ruan Nanzhu's character was trending...He didn't understand such things very well. He clicked into the tag and found many people gushing about Ruan Nanzhu's acting and good looks, and asking how come they'd not seen this new actor before. No one thought that this new guy with so few lines would be so eye-catching.

Lin Qiushi woke the bleary-eyed Ruan Nanzhu and pushed the phone in front of his face.

"Nanzhu, are you famous?"

Ruan Nanzhu opened his eyes and peered once at the phone screen before pushing Lin Qiushi down into bed again. He kissed Lin Qiushi's chin and said, "forget about that..."

Lin Qiushi, "oh..."

Ruan Nanzhu had little actual concept of himself going viral, so when he was having lunch with Lin Qiushi one day, he was actually pretty irritated to get Zhang Yiqing's phone call.

"I'm just a minor side character," he said, "why should I go on your publicity tour? What? Blacklist me? Did you take the wrong meds this morning? I'm not even in the industry, blacklist me all you want—"

Lin Qiushi listened at the side and found it funny, but then Zhang Yiqing said something at the end, and Ruan Nanzhu actually stopped refusing. Brows furrowing, he looked up once at Lin Qiushi before agreeing to Zhang Yiqing's request to go on a publicity tour with him and the cast.

After hanging up, Ruan Nanzhu said that Zhang Yiqing wanted him to go do publicity for a bit of time.

"Go," Lin Qiushi said. "But if you really dislike it, don't force yourself. We lack for nothing."

"Mh." Ruan Nanzhu nodded, taking Lin Qiushi's words to heart.

After that, Lin Qiushi's projects got busy as well, and he didn't have the time to pay attention to developments around Ruan Nanzhu's movie. The point at which he realized Ruan Nanzhu was well and truly famous was when he discovered that a young employee had switched her desktop screensaver to a picture of Ruan Nanzhu. Lin Qiushi had even thought he'd been seeing things at first, pointing at the screensaver and asking the girl, "who's this?"

The girl turned to Lin Qiushi with an expression of excitement and began a fanatic recommendation of Ruan Nanzhu, saying how this was a super popular newcomer named Yu Qiuqiu, and not only was he good looking but is acting was also amazing!

Lin Qiushi, "..." Alright alright, enough already. I know exactly how amazing his acting is.

That night, Lin Qiushi stared thoughtfully at Ruan Nanzhu, who was in his pajamas in the kitchen, watching TV.