Chapter 13: CH 13

Qi Yue rushed head over heels, but when they arrived at the recording site, they were still not the first ones to arrive.

In the dressing room, someone was already changing his clothes, and the hair stylist was working on his hair.

“His name is Pei Zhengwen, the male lead of a web drama that exploded a little while ago. He’s hot right now. Be polite and go say hello to him.” Qi Yue poked Ou Shaowen’s waist, reminding him very professionally.

Ou Shaowen then walked up to the young man, nodded gently and said “Hello”.

Pei Zhengwen did not look up, waiting until Ou Shaowen had finished his greeting before glancing at him, “Sorry, I’m bad at recognising faces. Who are you?”

“My name is Ou Shaowen.”

“Ou Shaowen?” Pei Zhengwen smiled in a sunny way, “A bit like my name (the “wen” part is the same, Zhengwen means “main text”), but I still don’t seem to have heard of you. Can you introduce your representative work or something? I’ll start. My name is Pei Zhengwen. I’m a newcomer. I was lucky, the web drama ‘Chang’an Zhi’ that I starred in some time ago did quite well. What about you?”

Ou Shaowen replied calmly, “I’ve never acted in a TV show, I’ve only done a few magazine photo shoots.”

“Oh, so.” Pei Zhengwen shot him a look with a slightly deeper meaning, “That’s okay, I think you’ll have a chance to act soon. Don’t you need to hurry up and do the styling? When Sister Yueyue and Brother Yicai come, the make-up artist won’t have time to do styling for us.”

“Okay, thank you.” Ou Shaowen thanked him in a calm tone. He had heard that the show would give fixed sportswear, so he was dressed casually today and only needed some base make-up and a hairdo.

By the time he finished styling, Pei Zhengwen finally arranged his hair and went to the dressing room next door to greet several big-name celebrities. At Qi Yue’s suggestion Ou Shaowen also went to say hello and after that found a small stool in the corner of the studio to sit down.

“My God, you might as well not say hello at all.” Qi Yue’s tone was exaggerated and he kept circling around Ou Shaowen with some anxiety, “Your expression and tone are too cold, people who don’t know will think you’re so arrogant, don’t you know how to smile? Can’t you smile at people and look cheerful?”

To be honest, Ou Shaowen wasn’t in a good mood now. This occasion was different from a magazine photo shoot. He had done whatever Qi Yue asked him to do since he got here, but he didn’t really like this kind of an occasion where he had to talk to strangers over and over again, and he couldn’t figure out the need for this kind of tedious conversation.

“They don’t make me feel happy, so why should I smile at them?” He asked with particular righteousness, completely sincere.

“It’s polite to smile at people!” Qi Yue couldn’t help but raise his voice, “If others treat you with an arrogant and indifferent zombie face, wouldn’t you feel unhappy?”

“No.” Before he met Ou Renjin, there was no one who had ever smiled at him either.

Qi Yue held his forehead speechlessly, “I was wrong, I thought that taking you on was such a lucky thing. I thought that maybe I could use being the assistant as a springboard to become an agent slowly. But now I finally understand that anything like luck will never come my way.” Because of Ou Shaowen’s special status, Qi Yue was nominally just an assistant, but was actually responsible for most of the work that agents were responsible for.

“Fine.” He quickly compromised, “Just do what you want to do, I’ll go back and talk to the company about changing your persona to cold and self-absorbed in future promotional marketing, and see if you can occasionally lean in the direction of dorky.”

“Good.” Ou Shaowen nodded, agreeing.

The variety show he was participating in today was called “Desperate Escape”, and the rules of the game were simple: a total of fifteen guests went on the run. The pursuers, men in black, were dressed like super athletic robots, handpicked among the sportsmen who participated in major competitions. No guest could outrun them in a straight line, but they were programmed to give up the chase and continue the established patrol route as soon as you disappeared from their view and they reached the place where you were last seen and still couldn’t see you.

In simple terms, as long as there were two consecutive corners, you could get rid of these robots.

During the game, the crew would hand out tasks that, if not completed within the time limit, would trigger a greater search range. The countdown was 100 minutes. You could withdraw midway through the game and receive a certain amount of prize money, determined by how long you lasted. Those who could successfully hold on to the end would receive a grand prize of over 100,000 yuan. Those who were caught midway would be locked in a small black room and lose all their prize money as well as their on-camera scenes.

Ou Shaowen listened carefully to the director’s explanation of the rules and took a look at the men in black who were still in the “frozen” state, feeling as if there was no challenge.

His body was different from that of ordinary people, his cells dividing and renewing dozens of times faster than those of normal people, which meant that he could quickly eliminate the lactic acid produced by his muscles during exercise. In layman’s terms, his power was explosive and he did not tire easily.

So, after the official clock-on, when everyone was discussing who would press the button three metres away from the frozen man in black, he took the initiative to raise his hand, “I’ll go.”

“Huh?” Everyone looked back at him with expressions of distrust.

“Shaowen, are you good at running?” Meng Yueyue spoke in an amiable tone.

“Very good.” Ou Shaowen replied affirmatively.

“Alright then, you go ahead and press it then!” Wang Yicai was senior and famous, the big brother of the team, and once he had the final word, no one could refute it.

“Then we’ll leave it to you, go go go, all of us step backwards, let’s go a little further away, they can’t catch us if we’re 30 metres away, right?”

“Haha, we don’t have to run faster than the men in black, we just have to run faster than the last one of us.”

“That’s right, we have Ou Shaowen behind us anyway!”

The participants each tried to say something to make the camera pay attention to them, somewhat envious of Ou Shaowen who was being filmed by a separate camera.

Ou Shaowen, however, quickly went to the button and without hesitation or adding to the drama, simply pressed the button to start the 100 minute countdown. The box holding the men in black opened with a crash, and the five men in black sprang out.

The moment they came out of the box, they were less than a metre away from Ou Shaowen. The group of participants, who were standing far away, screamed chaotically, turned and ran.

After running for what seemed like ages, there was still no sign of the participants being caught. Those who were running in the front couldn’t help but look back and see the distance between Ou Shaowen and the men in black growing wider and wider, while he quickly approached the other participants at the speed that no ordinary person could imagine. Then he overtook a few participants who were running the slowest. Before anyone could react, he was getting closer and closer, seeming to bring a gust of wind with him. Next he ran to the very front, becoming the one farthest away from the men in black among all the participants.

“My goodness, Ou Shaowen, are you a pro runner? You can go to the Olympics with this speed.”

“How can you run so fast!”

“Ah ah ah, brothers, don’t catch me!”

During this period, a female guest and two male guests who were running the last had already been caught by the men in black. Those who ran fast kept running, and those who ran slowly found obstacles and hid as soon as possible.

Ou Shaowen stopped half a mile away from the men in black, neither flushed nor breathless, calmly waiting for the cameraman who was working hard to catch up with him.

Pei Zhengwen somehow managed to run over as well, panting, put his hand onto Ou Shaowen’s shoulder heavily and hung his whole body on him, “Wow, you, you’re so good, I’ll be under your cover today, please protect me, ah, big guy!”

“It’s not good for you to be with me if you want to win.” Ou Shaowen calmly refused, “I’m a fast runner so I’ll definitely try to do those dangerous missions. If you go with me, you’ll be the one caught.”

The expression on Pei Zhengwen’s face instantly stiffened a little; he chuckled twice, “Haha, you’re right, then I’d better act on my own. I’ll go and find a place to hide.”

After some freeloading on Pei Zhengwen’s camera, Ou Shaowen’s cameraman finally caught up with him, huffing and puffing as he carried the camera.

“I’m sorry.” Ou Shaowen felt a little guilty, “You’ll have to work hard today.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine.” The cameraman waved his hand, thinking that this kid seemed cold on the surface but actually knew how to be polite. But before the little bit of good feeling in his heart could rise up, it was viciously extinguished by the process that followed.

In the next half an hour, he had to walk around an area the size of two football fields several times.

Ou Shaowen had almost no idea of avoiding the men in black. He walked straight ahead, and once he met the man in black, he quickly avoided the pursuit with his running speed. How many times? The cameraman could only film his back from afar, watching him quickly disappear from his lens again.

He was exhausted and then some, so when he saw Ou Shaowen leisurely standing in the most prominent position by the road waiting for him, he finally couldn’t help but have a nervous breakdown and sent a message to the directing team requesting an extra cameraman to rotate with him.

He now finally understood what Ou Shaowen’s previous apology, the words “You’ll have to work hard today”, meant.

After Ou Shaowen’s cameraman was replaced by a more youthful and athletic cameraman, all the participants finally received a notice from the directing team about the assignment.

Without saying a word, Ou Shaowen ran to the location of the assignment. He arrived at the mission’s trigger location before everyone else. The noble young lady who was locked up in the house just repeated a few words like “help me” when Ou Shaowen jumped onto the windowsill without any help and lightly jumped into the room.

The NPC was quite startled but still tried to finish the plot wholeheartedly. However, before she could ask him to find the key, Ou Shaowen put one arm around her waist and easily picked her, using a nearby stool to jump back up onto the windowsill, and then landed firmly on the ground.