Chapter 374: The Rainy Night Rhapsody of "A Nobody"
Three days later, the film crew relocated to the outskirts of the “Pig Cage Tenement,” an increasingly desolate patch of ruins.
Gu Zhiyuan didn’t bother with the pretentiousness of professional rain machines.
He led those few “defected” thug-turned-set assistants,
climbed onto the factory roof using both hands and feet, and brutally hooked up a hose directly to a fire hydrant.
“Everyone, fucking stand firm!”
Gu Zhiyuan stood high up, yelling hoarsely through a makeshift megaphone rolled from scrap sheet metal.
“Today, we’re making artificial rain! What’s falling isn’t water, it’s our film crew’s backbone!”
It was the first time these thug set assistants had done such technical work, and they were so excited their faces were glowing.
The water valve was twisted open.
Water cascaded from the sky, drenching the entire expanse of ruins.
Squinting, Gu Zhiyuan watched the two figures positioned within the curtain of rain. The fervor that had been suppressed in his chest for so long was about to explode.
Tonight’s scene: Chen San sending Liu Piaopiao home for the first time.
The Props Team presented an umbrella, perfectly aligned with Gu Zhiyuan’s aesthetic of “extreme shabbiness.”
One rib was broken, the canopy was riddled with pinhole-sized holes, and the black lacquered long handle had lost its paint.
“Scene Three, Shot Four! Action!”
In the rain, the clapperboard snapped crisply.
Jiang Ci opened the umbrella and walked towards Chen Yi.
The moment the canopy unfurled, the broken rib drooped limply, comically blocking his face.
From behind the monitor, a few suppressed snorts escaped.
Jiang Ci didn’t call cut.
He went with the flow, walking while clumsily propping up the sagging canopy section with his head.
From a distance, the whole figure looked precarious, teetering in the wind and rain.
This single action stripped away the idol-drama-style rain stroll, beating it back into the humiliated, bedraggled original form that life had repeatedly whipped.
Chen Yi, wearing cheap red high heels, stumbled through the muddy puddles.
Her heels sank deep into the mud several times; she had to pull them out with effort just to barely keep up with Jiang Ci’s pace.
She didn’t take his arm. Between them, there was always a fist’s width of distance.
That was the unspoken understanding, the proper measure in the adult world.
Raindrops hammered the thin canopy with a dull patter.
Within that tiny space under the umbrella, the only sounds were their slightly hurried breaths.
Surrounding them were the cold, bleak ruins and darkness.
Only here remained a sliver of human warmth.
“Walk faster.” Jiang Ci’s voice came muffled from beneath the umbrella fabric.
Chen Yi didn’t respond, but her footsteps unconsciously quickened.
The two reached the alley entrance specified in the script.
A dim, yellowish light flickered on—a makeshift street lamp rigged by a set assistant using a large bulb wrapped in yellow paper.
Rainwater streamed down Jiang Ci’s hair. Half his shoulder was already soaked.
That was the proof, left from deliberately tilting the umbrella to shield Chen Yi.
Chen Yi stopped, looking at his drenched hair, at his comical posture of propping the umbrella with his head, and suddenly spoke.
“Do you think… people like us can really live the life we want?”
Her voice was soft, a tentative probe after being crushed by reality.
Jiang Ci also stopped.
Propping that broken umbrella, he freed one hand and roughly wiped the rainwater from his face.
Then, he grinned, his white teeth gleaming almost blindingly under the dim yellow light.
He didn’t roar like some passionate protagonist.
He just looked at her, his eyes shining startlingly bright.
“Yeah.”
“As long as we don’t think of ourselves as mud, who the hell dares to step on us?”
Behind the monitor, Gu Zhiyuan leaned his entire upper body forward with force.
Several seconds later, he found his voice and issued the command into his walkie-talkie.
“Close-up! Give me a big close-up on Jiang Ci’s face!”
“I want that foolishness of his! That stubbornness! And that damned naivety!”
The lens locked onto Jiang Ci’s face.
That smile wasn’t handsome; it was even a bit silly.
Yet it carried a brute force, capable of smashing a dent into the softest corner of a person’s heart.
Chen Yi was momentarily dazed by that smile.
She abruptly turned her head away, avoiding that scorching gaze, pretending to look at the rain at the alley entrance.
“Lunatic.”
She cursed, her voice so soft it was almost inaudible.
Then, she turned and walked up the steps of that dilapidated residential building.
Gu Zhiyuan in front of the monitor didn’t call cut.
The cinematographer’s lens captured the moment Chen Yi turned.
The corner of her mouth twitched upward, extremely quickly, uncontrollably.
A smile even she herself hadn’t been aware of.
But the next second, the cold rainwater mixed with a surge of warmth from the depths of her heart,
stung her eyes sharply, her vision abruptly blurring.
Thinking it was rain in her eyes, she blinked hard,
but that burning heat rolled down from the corners of her eyes, utterly beyond her control.
“Cut!”
Only after Chen Yi’s figure completely disappeared into the depths of the stairwell did Gu Zhiyuan utter that word.
The set erupted in relieved cheers.
Lin Wan, sitting behind the monitor, didn’t move, gripping the tattered script with force.
She looked at the frozen image on the screen—
the man soaked to the bone, smiling like a fool, and the woman quietly shedding tears in the stairwell shadows—
and suddenly felt,
that the lines she had poured her heart and soul into writing seemed somewhat pale in the face of their vivid, living performance.
Her eyes grew hot, and she cursed under her breath, “Two lunatics.”
Crew members immediately rushed over with dry towels and ginger tea.
The “artificial rain” gradually ceased, leaving only water droplets intermittently falling from the eaves.
Jiang Ci let go. The broken umbrella, having completed its mission, fell with a splat into the pooled water, sending out a small ripple.
He raised his head, rainwater tracing the clean line of his jaw.
Not far away, Chen Yi was also looking at him, unmoving.
She subconsciously wiped the water droplets from her face, unable to tell if it was just rainwater or something else.
The two of them just stood there, a few steps apart, staring at each other in the damp, cold air, neither speaking first.
The surrounding air grew thick and sticky, a subtle, ambiguous sentiment quietly fermenting in the post-rain moisture.
Right then.
“A—CHOO!”
A sneeze,
erupted without warning from Jiang Ci’s nostrils,
utterly shredding this damn romantic atmosphere.
Shivering from the cold, he instinctively hugged his arms. With that handsome face,
he looked utterly ridiculous with his eyes watering from the physiological reaction,
muttering indistinctly, “My god… Director Gu is trying to murder the male lead… So cold…”
Chen Yi: ”…”
Chen Yi froze for a few seconds. Her face, tense from the cold,
was finally completely shattered by this overly real sneeze.
She couldn’t hold back any longer and laughed out loud.
The laughter was clear and crisp, dispelling the last lingering trace of ambiguity in the ruins.
Lin Wan appeared just in time, interrupting this stare-down that might have developed in a strange direction.
She shoved a cup of ginger tea into each of their hands and tossed a thick, dry towel onto Jiang Ci’s head.