Chapter 390: The Best Actor’s Waterloo — Mom, Are You a Secret Agent?
Jiang Ci felt the cold sweat on his back turn even colder than when he was watching himself being tortured in the movie theater earlier.
He instinctively wanted to shrink back. “Mom, have you been watching too many spy thrillers? I’m just a good actor,”
“Too deeply immersed in the role, you know… Stockholm Syndrome, you get it, right?”
“Don’t try to fool me with fancy foreign terms.”
Chu Hong wasn’t buying any of it.
She took a step forward and pinched the deltoid muscle on Jiang Ci’s right shoulder.
The pressure wasn’t heavy, but it made Jiang Ci’s whole body stiffen.
She looked up, staring at Jiang Ci through her sunglasses:
“You can’t develop this kind of reaction without taking hundreds, even thousands of hits. It’s a conditioned reflex, impossible to act out.”
Li Li, standing to the side, was dumbfounded, forgetting to even drink the milk tea in her hand.
She looked at Aunt Chu, whose aura seemed to radiate power, then at her idol, who looked utterly guilty,
and felt like the world had turned surreal—was this still the same neighbor aunt?
Jiang Ci swallowed hard.
It’s over.
No matter how much he schemed, he never anticipated that while his biological mother might be a housewife, she was also a woman who had slept with a narcotics officer for over a decade.
The usual tricks definitely wouldn’t work anymore.
He had to pull out the big guns.
Jiang Ci dropped his playful, grinning expression.
“Mom, since you’ve seen through it, I won’t hide it from you anymore.”
Jiang Ci lowered his voice, his tone turning weathered: “Actually, these past two years, I haven’t been taking the conventional path. I’m a ‘Method Actor’.”
Chu Hong’s brows furrowed slightly. “What kind of actor?”
“Method Acting. It means transforming yourself into the character, truly listening, truly seeing, truly feeling.”
Jiang Ci began spouting nonsense with a perfectly serious face. “To play Shen Qingyuan well, the company sent me to a special security training camp abroad.”
“A closed-off, hellish training program. A full six months.”
“If I didn’t personally experience that kind of despair, how could I deceive hundreds of millions of viewers in front of the camera?”
“Mom, I’m an actor. If I want to win the Film Emperor award, I have to earn my keep this way.”
This speech was seventy percent truth, thirty percent fabrication.
Li Li, listening nearby, was moved to tears, covering her mouth as she gasped:
“Oh my god! No wonder we heard nothing from you for those six months, Ci-ge! So you were in special training!”
“That’s just too dedicated… sob sob, the domestic entertainment circle is lucky to have you!”
Chu Hong’s hand, pinching Jiang Ci’s shoulder, slowly loosened its grip.
This explanation was logically flawless.
Looking at her son’s somewhat slender frame, the sharpness in Chu Hong’s eyes faded, replaced by a trace of unconcealable heartache.
“In the future…” she paused, “take fewer of these life-threatening roles.”
A huge weight lifted from Jiang Ci’s heart. He was just about to seize the opportunity and make a promise when he heard Chu Hong add another sentence.
“Since you’re working so hard for your acting, then tell me, what’s the deal with the last drama you wrapped?”
The smile on Jiang Ci’s face, which hadn’t even fully bloomed yet, froze mid-air.
Chu Hong, expressionless, reached into the large pocket of her down jacket.
The next second, an iPad appeared in her hand.
She swiped the screen open, tapped on her favorites folder,
and shoved the screen right into Jiang Ci’s face.
It was an official announcement page—【Film ‘Icebreaker’ Production Filing Announcement】.
The poster was in a stern, solemn blue-black color scheme.
The character played by Jiang Ci had a face smeared with blood, holding a police gun in his hand, his gaze fierce.
And at the very top of the poster, a line of bold, shocking red text read:
【A tribute to the dancers on the knife’s edge—the first panoramic anti-drug action film.】
The air fell into dead silence.
Li Li quietly took two steps back, afraid of being caught in the aftershocks of this Asura-like battlefield.
She stared at Chu Hong in shock—so Auntie not only knew how to use an iPad, she even knew how to check filing announcements!
What kind of hardcore fandom is this… no, what kind of hardcore parental investigation is this!
Looking at the two big characters “anti-drug” on the screen, Jiang Ci felt his head buzzing.
This time, it was a real Waterloo.
He thought his mother was an old lady who needed half a day to learn how to send a WeChat voice message. Little did he know, in order to understand her son’s activities,
this mother, in countless late nights, wearing her reading glasses,
had learned how to search, character by character, learned to follow Super Topics, and even learned to check SARFT filings.
All his concealment seemed clumsy and laughable in the face of this ultimate “intelligence-gathering capability” born of maternal love.
Chu Hong’s finger tapped the screen, her voice trembling slightly:
“Jiang Ci, do you think I’m senile? Or do you think your mom is illiterate? You think I don’t know the characters for ‘anti-drug’?”
“How long are you going to keep lying to me? Huh?”
He opened his mouth, wanting to explain,
but looking into his mother’s red-rimmed eyes, filled with fear,
all his excuses got stuck in his throat.
Jiang Ci slowly lowered his head, looking at the shadow cast by his feet in the sunlight.
“Mom, I’m sorry.”
He said softly.
Then, he raised his head, took off the concealing baseball cap, revealing his thin yet resolute face.
“I didn’t mean to keep lying to you forever. I was just afraid you’d worry.”
His gaze passed over his mother’s shoulder, looking into the distance.
“I took this role, not for awards, not for money.”
His voice was steady, yet carried a kind of penetrating power.
“Mom, when I was playing Shen Qingyuan, and when I was training hard in the ‘Icebreaker’ film crew, I kept thinking about one thing.”
Chu Hong’s fingers curled slightly.
“I kept thinking, back in those unknown dark nights, was Dad also enduring pain like this?”
“Was he also like this, gritting his teeth and moving forward, even if misunderstood, even if covered in wounds?”
“I didn’t understand before.”
Jiang Ci took a step forward, gently holding his mother’s hand that held the iPad.
“I only knew he was a hero, hanging on the wall, cold.”
“But these past two years, when I really threw myself into that kind of environment… I feel like I’ve touched his warmth.”
“I wanted to get closer to him.”
Jiang Ci looked into his mother’s eyes. “Even if it’s just in a role.”
The wind on the old street rustled, sweeping up fallen leaves on the ground.
Chu Hong stared blankly at the son standing before her, now a head taller than herself.
His features looked so much like Jiang Yanjun’s when he was young.
That stubborn streak was also carved from the same mold.
This “emotional appeal” wasn’t a trick; it was sincerity.
And it was the finishing move.
The anger in Chu Hong’s eyes dissipated, leaving only a deep ache.
She turned her head away, quickly wiping the corner of her eye with her hand.
“You rascal…”
She cursed, but her voice was thick with a nasal tone.
“Who asked you to understand these things? Your dad had no choice; that was his fate.”
Chu Hong turned her head back. The sunglasses hid her eyes, but couldn’t hide her trembling lips.
She reached out and jabbed Jiang Ci’s forehead hard, with enough force to make him stagger.
“Jiang Yanjun is already a hero. Our Old Jiang family doesn’t need a second hero hanging on the wall.”
“You act if you must, but if you dare come back missing so much as a single finger…”
Chu Hong gritted her teeth, her voice choked, “I’ll go tear down that damn company of yours!”
Rubbing his forehead, Jiang Ci grinned.
He grinned like an idiot, but his eyes were terribly red.
“Yes, ma’am, Ms. Chu.”
He stood at attention and gave a salute that wasn’t standard but was sincere enough,
“I guarantee I’ll come back completely intact, alive and kicking.”
“Let’s go home.”
Chu Hong turned and walked towards the residential compound.
“We’re having dumplings tonight. Make plenty, let that dead man have a taste too.”
Jiang Ci watched his mother’s retreating back.
This hurdle was finally cleared.
“Ci-ge…” Li Li, who had been acting as a background prop the whole time, crept over,
looking at him with admiration. “Was that speech you just gave also a line?”
Jiang Ci put his cap back on his head, chuckled, and lowered his voice.
“Kids shouldn’t ask too many questions. Remember, this is called sincerity.”
With that, hands in his pockets, he strode forward with light steps to catch up.