I Wasn’t Famous When I Fell for You

[Important warning, please read, thank you, thank you!] Four years ago, Su Xuan worked with Shen Chao, who had just debuted, on a gay-themed film called Four Courtyard Houses. The film was banned after production wrapped, but Su Xuan fell for his costar while filming and confessed to the young, handsome Shen Chao. Shen Chao rejected him coolly. “Don’t get too caught up in your role, senior.” After his debut, Shen Chao’s career took off. He became a massive star, worked with countless popular actresses, and was linked to all kinds of rumors. Su Xuan finally understood. Shen Chao was straight. Four years later, Four Courtyard Houses somehow passed review. After its release, it grossed three billion at the box office. Su Xuan, whose career had been dead for four years, made a comeback thanks to the film and landed a great role: the second male lead in a web series adapted from a popular IP. Shen Chao was the male lead. After Four Courtyard Houses became a hit, the CP fans went wild. Shen Chao’s fans mocked Su Xuan’s fans for trying to ride his coattails to fame, while Su Xuan’s fans shot back, “What’s wrong with getting a piece of a man who’s slept with millions?” CP fans: “Ride his coattails, get famous, have a go at him. I’m so shipping this, thank you, thank you!” Solo fans: … When the new production team suggested promoting the show by playing up their CP, Su Xuan calmly turned them down. There was no happy ending to getting tied to a straight man. If he couldn’t have Shen Chao, he wasn’t about to cling to him either. Shen Chao was silent for two seconds. “Why not?” Su Xuan hinted tactfully, “If we promote ourselves as a CP, it’ll be hard to separate us later.” Shen Chao: “Then we won’t separate.” And so the entertainment industry’s first CP to stay on the clock all year was born. Su Xuan waited and waited for them to split up, but Shen Chao kept pulling one outrageous stunt after another. On the red carpet, he casually put his own earring on Su Xuan. In an interview, he said the first time he’d fallen for someone was when he was filming with Su Xuan at eighteen… Su Xuan: This is too much, this is too much, this is too much. Just as Su Xuan was about to leave the set and end their arrangement, Shen Chao chased after him like a madman and grabbed his hand. His eyes reddening, he pinned Su Xuan against the wall. “Would you still be willing to love me?” Naturally gay bottom × aloof, proud, born-to-be-the-center-of-attention top Prominent warning: This is a fictional entertainment industry. Please don’t associate it with real people. There are no real-life models. Don’t make baseless guesses about who the characters are based on. Anyone who does will be cast in a movie that gets shelved for four years. Don’t mention real-life celebrities in my comments or derail the discussion. Thank you, thank you. This is extremely melodramatic. The author has never been a fan of any celebrity or followed any star. The people I love are all fictional characters. I’m terrified of readers projecting real people onto the characters. Anyone claiming I’m a fan of so-and-so can take that back. The entertainment-industry setting is wildly unrealistic: the film opens with a four-billion box office, the top is a ten-billion box-office movie emperor, and the bottom is a screen genius who later becomes a ten-billion box-office movie emperor too. It’s extremely self-indulgent. Run if that’s not your thing. Coming soon: Extra Credit ABO When Xu Jiawen was in his first year of high school, he casually signed up for the biology olympiad. Through sheer luck, he guessed the answer to the final bonus question correctly, and the school made a big fuss as they sent him off to the provincial competition training camp. But Xu Jiawen knew he was a real academic slacker. He hadn’t wanted to go and embarrass himself, but his mother gave him a kick in the butt and sent him straight to the provincial team’s summer training camp. That year’s biology competition was incredibly difficult. Only two people in the entire province solved the bonus question, and one of them was assigned to Xu Jiawen’s dorm room. Xu Jiawen knocked on the door, expecting to find some aloof academic prodigy… …He was aloof, and he was a prodigy. Xu Jiawen just hadn’t expected the person who solved the bonus question to be like this. Qi Yan glanced up at Xu Jiawen. “I won’t share a dorm with someone who guessed the bonus question.” “Okay,” Xu Jiawen said, setting down his luggage. “Then just don’t count me as a person.” Qi Yan: … Only later did Xu Jiawen find out that this lunatic Qi Yan had only answered that one bonus question on the entire paper. When Xu Jiawen returned from the competition training camp, his homeroom teacher looked at his near-perfect grades in every subject except Chinese and asked the question that haunted his soul: “Does biology competition training include math, physics, chemistry, and English?” Xu Jiawen: “I wasn’t planning to score this high.” Homeroom teacher: ????? Xu Jiawen: “But someone said I couldn’t share a dorm with him if my grades weren’t good.” Before meeting Qi Yan, Xu Jiawen had thought he would never touch a bonus question in his life. But after meeting Qi Yan, Xu Jiawen began adding a note that said “Solve this” to the bonus questions. Xu Jiawen knew that as long as he wrote “Solve this” on a problem, Qi Yan would figure it out, no matter how difficult it was. A seemingly cold and solitary academic god who gets way too invested in work and problem-solving, top, Qi Yan × a seemingly unmotivated but actually hardworking academic fraud, bottom, Xu Jiawen Important warning: The bottom is an academic fraud. He can do two tons of practice problems and then cry that he’s been playing around for three years and will never get into college, and the top will actually believe him. The bonus question was one the academic fraud solved correctly himself, but he insists on telling everyone his beautiful correct answer was just a fluke. () Theme: Persistence leads to success! For the top, in love; for the bottom, in his career.