Don’t Be a Kept Man

ignal Ling Dang to return home and held his phone out as he thought for a bit.
After a while of deliberation, he sent a message.

Fu Xiu Nian had just walked out of the tunnel when the phone in his pocket vibrated.
He opened it and there was only one sentence that greeted him:

>> Do you recognize this idiot?

A photo was sent next, and it was a picture of Fu Xiu Nian hiding behind an LED sign, with only his eyes popping out from behind it.
Who knew how Chen Yi could have taken that photo secretly when the cameras were on him?

When Fu Xiu Nian saw that, he first was surprised, and then he immediately checked his appearance through the reflection of his phone.
He asked his little cousin, 

“Can you recognize me like this?”

Jiang Yan replied, 

“Don’t worry.
No one could recognize you.
Even if your mom stood in front of you, she might not even recognize you.”

So how did Chen Yi recognize him?

 

Fu Xiu Nian was just deciding on whether or not he should reply when his phone vibrated again.
Chen Yi had sent another message back, but this time, the other had not scolded him.

He had instead turned the picture into a sticker and added the caption of “Sneaky Doggie”.2

In response, Fu Xiu Nian returned a middle finger.

When the concert tour was completed to its last show, Ah Ya’s team started their marketing campaign, blowing out of control for her visuals and buying up ranks on the trending charts.
During the time that the marketing started, and the time where it was very silent and dark, with no pedestrians on the streets, Ling Dang drove Chen Yi home with the streetlamps shining as their only companion.

Chen Yi lived in a fairly middle class community, and the environment was quite nice and quiet as a result. 

Ling Dang said, 

“Xiao Yi Ge, there aren’t any other events scheduled for the next few days, so you can have a good bit of rest.
Go home and accompany Xiao Meng and if you need anything, call me on my cell.”

Chen Yi nodded his head and grabbed his luggage from the car, 

“Go back home early yourself.”

It was very close to 12am and besides the night owls, everyone would be pretty much asleep.
When Chen Yi rode up the elevator, he deliberately lightened his steps, but he found that the lights in the living room were still shining brightly when he opened the door.

“Brother, are you back?”

There was a faint female voice sounding out from inside a room, and then after some rustling, Chen Xiao Meng walked out on crutches.
Her aura was the complete opposite of Chen Yi, displaying a gentleness and graciousness about her, with her black inky hair lying peacefully and quietly on her shoulders.
She was a woman with an ethereal air, of someone otherworldly, someone who belonged with elegance.

Chen Yi didn’t know what to say.
He had never had a sister, and when he was small, he was always surrounded by ruffians, with rough and physical gruff brothers.
Even when he had not so easily gotten a junior-sister, she was more aggressive and bolder than any of the brothers, playing with her whip like no other.
She was even more manly than a man.

Chen Yi nodded his head and dragged his suitcase in, 

“Hmm.
Just came back.”

Chen Xiao Meng said, 

“Then are you hungry? I’ll cook you some noodles.”

“I already ate before I came back.
It’s pretty late, so you should go to sleep soon.” 

And then slightly panned his gaze over her legs, adding, 

“If you have any problems, call me.”

Chen Xiao Meng smiled as she nodded her head, 

“Don’t worry.
I’m almost healed.
It’s just that I can’t really walk for very long, but this will get better as I work on it.”

Their home had evidently been taken care of very meticulously.
There were even fresh flowers, giving off a “homey” kind of feeling.
Chen Yi took a shower, and his tightly wound consciousness relaxed slightly, and before long, he was asleep.

And with that, the living room was set back into darkness once again. 

At the same time, news about the concert was spreading faster and faster on weibo.
The morning after, Chen Yi’s phone was ringing nonstop.
Chen Yi took a look at the caller ID and saw that they were from Ling Dang.

The moment he accepted the call, he could hear her voice that was a bit numb, 

“Xiao Yi Ge, you’ve been flamed again for joining the concert yesterday.”

An attitude as if it was very normal.

Chen Yi raised his eyebrow, very impressed, 

“I sat there like a log and I can still be flamed?”

Ling Dang explained, 

“No, there was a bit of a problem with the positions when the photography session happened.
Some antis said you stole the spotlight from Tong Yue.”

Tong Yue, a singer artist like Ah Ya, was the girl who had her dress straps snap off yesterday. 

Yesterday night, an anonymous user had uploaded a short video and in it, Chen Yi was standing near the right side, but for some reason he had stepped forward randomly, for no reason, blocking Tong Yue. 

In that moment, because Tong Yue had been in a state of such hurry to fix her dress, she had used that chance to step back.
But with the timing, it looked like she was forcefully pushed away in the video.
And because she was freezing up from her situation, her expression did not look right, with her eyes reddened as she ran down the stage after.
And through an entire night, this video moved up the ranks to number six on the charts.

The video had evidently been maliciously edited, cutting away the section of Tong Yue’s straps snapping.

Chen Yi was unconcerned and said, 

“Oh.
Whatever.
You don’t have to call specifically for this in the future.”

And then he hung up the phone and flipped around to continue sleeping.

It was very quiet and calm on Chen Yi’s side, but the situation online was building into a storm of blood.
There was even someone who had stated in a group all the notorious things Chen Yi has done since he debuted.
There were many detailed discussions studying why such a stingy and narrow eyed man of this degree was walking on this earth, bullying even girls.
When morning came, this particular post was already seen by thousands and thousands of viewers.

 

# Chen Yi and a New Idol Fighting for the Spotlight on the Same Stage, Female Celebrity Gets Mad and Cries Off Stage #

Fu Xiu Nian had only seen the trending hashtags this morning.
Although he was quite far away yesterday so he had not seen it in detail, but as long as he had a brain, he knew that Chen Yi could not do such a thing so thoughtlessly.
Multitasking, he began to check up on the details of the situation, all the while he phoned around to try and fix the video, and scrolled through the pages to report each and every hate comment.

>> Tong Yue didn’t do anything wrong to him right? Why is he stealing the spotlight from newbies? What a mannerless gentleman.

>> Ah, why did Chen Yi go steal the spotlight from newbies? He’s someone who’s on the charts everyday, UGH!

>> How did God create such a crazy miraculous man

>> Didn’t happen like this.
I was there in person at the concert yesterday and Tong Yue seemed to have a problem with her clothes so she had to leave the stage.
If you look closer at the video, she’s been holding onto her shoulder the entire time.

When Fu Xiu Nian saw that comment, his brain suddenly grasped at something and he quickly put on his armor to head into the battlefield himself.

Xiu Nian: Why doesn’t the uploader give us the entire version? Just a few seconds of the camera, it’s not even clear what happened before or after.
This is obviously malicious editing.

Someone with the account name Dream quickly followed along: There are so many truths and lies in the entertainment industry so who could say it clearly? We don’t know what the truth is, and without knowing everything first, who has the authority to toss out blame so carelessly?

Antis who saw these comments immediately came crazily to tear them apart, even dragging along the one who just came to the defense of Chen Yi.
Antis swore and cursed at them, saying that they were part of a troll bot army, being bought out with money, causing the other to immediately fight back in anger.

>> Bot Army, your mother fucking bot army! I was the fan who won the lucky draw yesterday and even took a picture with Ah Ya.
I have kept that video I took yesterday, and I’m going to find that and release it.
Antis, you can go kill yourself ok?

And then they immediately uploaded a video.
Because it was filmed with a phone, the camera was a bit shaky and the quality wasn’t that clear.
The video was concentrated on Ah Ya, but one could still see Tong Yue and Chen Yi on the side.

In the video, after Ah Ya had stepped away, everyone could see very clearly that the dress strap on the right shoulder of Tong Yue had suddenly snapped off.
She was so shocked and had quickly held her dress up with her hand, looking around left and right frantically.
She had seemed to want to hide but she was being pushed towards the center by some other unknown celebrity.
Just looking at her made others worried and pained for her.

And it was at this time that Chen Yi seemed to glance in her direction, and seeing the situation had quickly retracted his gaze and directly stepped in front of her to block the cameras.

 

Notes:

 

*1 So this phrase is a bit tricky, in that it’s a 4 word idiom which can constitute an entire story, but this one was apparently never from a story (well a song which is varied on which one it based on…) and kind of passed by mouth? To kind of condense the very vague meaning that I don’t really think I have the right words for, it’s a phrase that literally means to glance with eyes and see through a thousand years, and there’s a lot of connotations to that with not a lot of one coherent meaning (lots of people have their own interpretations).

But take it as if someone has seen with their eyes a thousand years or something that they saw makes it seem like a thousand years has passed.
Usually related to matters of love and all that, but as a meaning, it’s to say something was very memorable, one that could be etched into your soul kind of memorable.
In particular, it can be taken to mean like I knew you were there, but now that I see you, I am moved and mesmerized by you, as if we have known each other for a thousand years, as we were fated to always be led back together.
Perhaps another way to say it would be how it’s almost like love at first sight, but with a bit more of a weighty implication, rather than a glance of infatuation

*2 Sneaky Doggie: A meme/sticker that came from a husky being “sneaky” (or a better phrase maybe, “up to no good”), but the phrasing is taken from (or based on)another saying/proverb that means sneaky as a ghost/doing something bad.
There are quite a few variants which are all pretty cute like putting a dress on the dog or changing it to a cat being up to no good, and you can search it up (and narrowed down) by “狗狗祟祟表情包” where the first four characters are of the action, the dog being sneaky/up to no good and the last 3 characters are like to mean stickers (or expression package).

>>  As I’m currently a bit swamped, and you might have seen with Plum helping me upload for a while now, I am usually only able to fix somethings/wordings/phrases/footnotes/notes after it has been posted.
If you have noticed some disrepancies or how something might have been changed, that’s probably the reason why  Thank you for all your patience (and I swear I will wrangle all these formatting issues/typos to nonexistence one day… ) Hope you all are having a great start to the week, and see you Galactic Judges on Wednesday!