Showbiz: My Decade in Seclusion Hid Half the Entertainment Industry

Ten years ago, Lu Yanci was the “Godfather of Entertainment,” a titan straddling music, film and television, and variety shows. Armed with Earth’s library of classic entertainment, he swept across a parallel world, only to leave at the height of his career with the words, “From here on, the road is long. I’m done with entertainment.” He packed his bags and disappeared into Yunqi Village in western Zhejiang.

Over the next ten years, he became “Villager 001.” His The Chronicles of the Jianghu reignited the wuxia craze, while Seeking the Dao in the Azure Clouds pioneered a new approach to xianxia, with physical book sales topping a hundred million. Under the name “Woodcutter,” he wrote Ballad of the Green Stream and The One Who Swam Against the Current, licensing them to newcomers while refusing to sign with any platform. He anonymously donated the royalties to impoverished mountain regions. The outside world knew only that “a talent like this comes along once in ten years,” yet couldn’t find a trace of either secret identity.

In 2024, the rural variety show Returning to the Countryside, on the verge of cancellation, arrived in Yunqi Village by mistake in search of a lifeline. He used film-set tricks to repair a stove, casually corrected the vocal run in The One Who Swam Against the Current, and pinpointed the essence of a character from Seeking the Dao in the Azure Clouds. Beneath the coarse cotton shirt, Lu Yanci kept his brilliance hidden, but he could no longer stay concealed.

When Huang Lei stumbled upon the three characters “Lu Yanci” on the final volume manuscript of The Chronicles of the Jianghu in the study, when Cheng Yanqiu answered the phone and choked out, “You’ve been hiding from me for ten years,” and when the Four Heavenly Kings and Zhao Benshan called one after another to reminisce, the “ordinary villager” living in seclusion sent the entire internet into a frenzy.

From the manuscript’s exposure to his singing live on air, from a fierce scramble for the rights to an industry-wide overhaul, from his works reaching overseas to a Nobel Prize nomination, Lu Yanci wielded Earth’s entertainment as a blade, cutting through the restlessness and chaos of the parallel world. “Entertainment isn’t a game of capital. It’s about resonating with people’s hearts,” he said. And so one man spent ten years in seclusion, then spent another ten reshaping an entire era of entertainment.