Chapter 13
All the actors were finalized only five months later.
Those five months were pure devil training.
Not only did I lose ten pounds and shed some of my girlish innocence, but Bai Yu also handed me over to an acting coach, who made me walk the streets and alleys every day, immersing me deeply in the local street life I had long forgotten.
During this period, I also helped Officer Gu catch three ill-intentioned pickpockets and one “pervert” who harassed people on the bus.
After the official opening ceremony, we entered the intense and busy filming schedule.
Bai Yu is the kind of smiling, devilish director who, in order to achieve his standards, even made us repeat the same scene twenty-six times in a single day.
In such circumstances, there was naturally no time to pay attention to the chaos outside.
Back at the hotel, I would fall asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.
And so, the New Year arrived.
A heavy snow fell before the Spring Festival, and at the same time, filming progressed to the final climactic scene.
There was no rain when the last person was killed.
That day, there was a rare heavy snowfall in the area.
The female lead would have a confrontation with the murderer here; the two would injure each other in the struggle, and in the end, the female lead would die and the murderer would escape.
The focus of this scene was the fight, which conceptually represented the struggle between good and evil in human nature.
“Why is it that when kindness faces evil, kindness always loses?”
I had never done a fight scene before, but-
[Ding! Would you like to learn common killing techniques (close combat version)?]
[Yes.]
So on set, the Action Director was stunned: “Wait, Juexia! Did you just get out of prison or something?”
“Where did you learn these street-fighting moves?”
With my sweet and harmless face, I replied earnestly, “When I was a kid, I was undefeated in street fights. My parents almost sent me to martial arts school.”
Action Director: “…What a pity, what a talent!”
Bai Yu then came down to demonstrate and raised some questions about the choreography.
“If the knife comes from here, first, it doesn’t look good on camera…”
While he was demonstrating, I caught a flash of white out of the corner of my eye!
My body moved on its own-I turned and pushed Bai Yu away, and the actor playing the murderer thrust the prop knife at my chest!
In a panic, I raised my right arm to block.
“Hiss-”
Somehow, the prop knife had been switched with a real one, and it pierced through my arm!
Blood dripped down.
“Juexia, Director Bai, I-I-I didn’t mean to, I don’t know how the knife…”
The actor’s malice value didn’t increase, which meant he really didn’t do it on purpose.
“Call 120! Everyone in the crew stays put, and no one is allowed to delete any footage from the cameras,” Bai Yu said as he picked me up amid the chaos. “Assistant Director, watch things here and contact the police!”
The ambulance arrived quickly.
Fortunately, I had learned those System moves and used the back of my hand to block, avoiding the artery as much as possible.
By the time I got to the hospital, my condition wasn’t too bad.
Just blood loss and dizziness.
“It was my oversight. If not for you, I would have been stabbed.”
“Not really…” I started to feel sleepy. “Who would have thought you’d come down to demonstrate for the actors? It was supposed to be my scene… They were aiming for me…”
The doctor had to treat my wound urgently. After the anesthesia, I completely passed out.
When I woke up again, it was night.
“Ahhh, it hurts so much!” As soon as I moved, my right arm, wrapped in bandages, throbbed with pain.
Bai Yu quickly held my hand, coaxing me like a child, “Xia Xia, don’t move. The anesthesia has worn off. The doctor stitched you up, now you have to wait for the wound to heal inside.”
As the crew’s well-known scene-stealer, I blinked away tears of pain and asked aggrievedly, “Does this count as a work injury?”
…
“It does.” Bai Yu couldn’t help but laugh.
“Has the investigation found anything?”
Bai Yu said, “No news yet. I’ll let you know when there’s a result.”
“Oh. Will the filming be affected? I think I’ll recover in a week.”
“There’s no rush for filming. Wait until you’re fully recovered.” He lowered his head, peeled an apple, cut it into small pieces, and held them to my lips.
I took a bite.
He seemed very satisfied, the corners of his mouth curving up.
“When I got hurt, you didn’t seem very flustered,” I suddenly recalled. “Most people wouldn’t be so calm right away when someone gets injured.”
“Really?”
“So, the nervousness you showed later in the ambulance – was that just an act?”
Bai Yu’s hand paused, then he naturally fed me another piece of apple.
He didn’t answer, and I couldn’t press him any further.
After a few days of recovery, I realized that the hospital I had been taken to wasn’t the one closest to the crew.
With my arm in a sling, I wandered the corridors, constantly being pulled aside for photos.
A young nurse was excited. “Wow, that’s Bai Yu! He seems even more handsome than the male celebrities!”
“It’s not just handsome, it’s that kind of aura…”
The nurses gossiped when they weren’t busy.
“What’s so surprising about that?” a doctor said during rounds. “Bai Yu used to stay in this hospital for a long time.”
I was puzzled. “Really? Did he have some serious illness?”
The doctor realized he had spoken out of turn, muttered a few words, and left.
Late at night.
I went to the doctors’ duty room to request to see my own medical records.
The sleepy resident doctor who had befriended me let me look it up myself.
I searched: Bai Yu.
The name was so unique that all the records appeared instantly without any filtering.
Admitted at age nine, suffered major life trauma due to mother’s death, exhibited certain auditory and visual hallucinations, suspected Borderline Personality Disorder, with self-destructive tendencies and anxiety symptoms…
He was that boy.
The wife who went out with an umbrella, and the boy who stayed at home.
In an instant, I remembered the blurry photo of the boy in the newspaper.
And Bai Yu had been treated in this hospital for two years.
I shut down the computer and quietly returned to my ward. At the door, I saw Bai Yu carrying a thermal food container.
“My family made some pigeon soup. I wanted to bring you some.”
I lowered my head and mumbled, “Mm.”
Bai Yu looked at my expression and said calmly, “You found out, didn’t you?”
“…I was just a bit curious. Sorry.”
He shook his head. “It’s nothing. Everything happened twenty years ago.”
At the small table in the ward, I drank soup while listening to him talk about the past.
“After my mom died, my dad couldn’t handle it and became very depressed. He was a good man, a model worker at the factory, but later drank himself to death. He always thought that if he hadn’t worked overtime that day, my mom wouldn’t have had the accident. After that, my elder uncle couldn’t bear to watch and took me abroad for treatment and school, thinking that leaving that environment would help.”
During the long psychological treatment, he mimicked the emotions, reactions, and ways of life of those around him.
His medical records noted that Bai Yu repeatedly had the same nightmare, repeating the same words:
“Mom, don’t go out, you can’t go out, Mom, my stomach hurts, my hand hurts too… Mom!”
In psychology, this is called post-traumatic stress reaction. He was always trapped in the memory of that rainy day, blaming himself for not stopping his mother from going out.
Awkwardly, I reached out and touched his hair.
So, I had always been playing the role of his eternally young mother in his memory.
“I never blamed you,” I seemed to slip into another perspective, my soul drifting as I embraced him. “Because you were such a sensible child, you never made me worry. Your dad was silly, even sillier than you, I just couldn’t stop worrying about him… Ah Yu, sometimes life isn’t that complicated. The rain will always stop.”
Bai Yu bent down and buried his face in the crook of my neck.
After a long time, my collar was wet.”