Young Master, Why Did You Stop Smiling?

Blurb: Xie Xinzhou is a cellist. His symphony orchestra picks up a small gig: a quintet at a wealthy family’s banquet. The orchestra manager tells the five musicians to treat it as a private job. Once they’ve seen how much they’ll be paid, they can negotiate with the client at the going rate. The wealthy family’s banquet turns into a melodrama. As the mistress and the wife throw red wine and claw at each other, the wife’s lover joins the fight. Someone flings a paternity test into the air, and it flutters down. Someone shoves someone else into the pool. Red wine soaks the carpet, and a cupcake splatters against the floor-to-ceiling window, leaving a smear of frosting... Amid the chaos and the mess, surrounded by shouting and cursing, Xie Xinzhou plays the first movement of Dvorak’s Cello Concerto in B minor. Then a young man with ash-gray hair, who’d been watching him from the shadows for a long time, wanders over with a glass of champagne. He smiles, his eyes curving. “All your colleagues have run off. You’re the only one keeping your cool. Should I pay you, then?” “Sure,” Xie Xinzhou says. “My name is Yu Wu. Pleased to meet you.” “Xie Xinzhou. Eighteen thousand eight hundred.” “...” Yu Wu’s smile freezes. “How much!?” Just then, some idiot stumbles into Yu Wu from behind. Yu Wu lurches forward, and his glass of champagne spills all over the cello, which looks expensive enough to buy ten Yu Wus. Then his foot slips, and he falls onto the cello, bringing the people behind him down with him. Crash “That makes it one million one hundred and sixty-eight thousand eight hundred,” Xie Xinzhou says coolly and firmly, looking down at him. Yu Wu stops smiling altogether. “Hold on. I’ll go pick up the paternity test. It says I’m the real young master, the biological son.” He never cared about this lousy rich family in the first place, but this musician he thinks is incredibly handsome and whom he adores is asking him for 1,168,800 yuan. So he’ll just have to fight them for it. (The Rich Young Master’s Debt Repayment Diary) (No, that’s not it.) * A cold, antisocial musician uke who looks at everything as if it were trash X A sweet-talking, black-hearted younger anime-obsessed manga artist seme Blurb screenshot dated November 25, 2023 Theme: Work hard first. Figure out the rest later.