Mired in the Mud

Seven years ago, to escape the attentions of playboy Shen Yinan, Ou Qian took a terrible piece of advice from her best friend.

The day the well-behaved Ou Qian agreed to be Shen Yinan's girlfriend, his roommates were all in an uproar.

For the sake of their relationship, Shen Yinan changed in all sorts of ways. He quit smoking and drinking, and even when people caught him and beat him against a wall, he never fought back.

But in the end, Ou Qian still broke up with him.

"I can't keep playing along with you. I have to go home and meet the man my family picked for me. I'm sorry."

The day she left, he happily chain-smoked until his lungs were black, then drank himself into a stupor and beat up four or five people, sending them to the hospital.

When they met again seven years later, he had come to her city for an art exhibition. By then, he was a renowned, eccentric painter, but women still flocked around him. He had even turned portraits of himself with every girlfriend he'd ever had into a series titled The Scandalous Beauties.

"See? It's a good thing you listened to me back then and pretended to love him. You made him lose interest in you, so he wouldn't bother you after the breakup. Otherwise, what you'd be losing now wouldn't just be your portrait rights."

Her best friend said this to her.

She thought so too.

But later, a famous art critic raised a rather pointed question.

"The teacher Shen in these Scandalous Beauties paintings may seem deeply in love, but if you look closely, you'll see they're all copied from the original painting called 'Qian.' He just changed the clothes."

The inscription Shen Yinan put at the end of his work: Deeply trapped in the mire.

Shanghai's second-generation young master and a pampered beauty from Guangzhou

Theme: Becoming a better version of yourself