Chapter 25 "I'm also quite curious, Teacher Liang..."

The plane broke through the milky white clouds and drew a long straight line in the sky. Liang Kongxiang woke up from her dream. The orange-pink outside the window compressed into a thick dividing line separating the upper gray-blue and the lower pitch black. The plane was gradually pulled down and submerged in the darkness. After tumbling and gliding on the ground for nearly ten minutes, she finally got out of the cabin.

Liang Kongxiang stretched her neck to find a comfortable position, pulled her long hair out of Cao Lengyu's arm, and then looked around. The surroundings were spacious and open. Their group was walking towards the exit in a large procession. Several dark brown men with messy hair were sleeping by the roadside, staring at them with their cloudy eyes.

There were two large buses at the entrance, and staff were carrying several large boxes of props onto them. Everyone had had enough seats, and even some of the actors were helping out. After they finished carrying the props, they stretched and patted their legs outside the bus, then got on and lay down by the window, fast asleep.

The bus, its undercarriage blackened, swayed and rattled into town. A few girls, unable to withstand the shaking, got off the bus, found a garbage dump, and vomited violently. With disheveled and miserable faces, they complained to Director Cao with utter despair, "This isn't filming...it's like we've come to face a tribulation."

She burped, and there was a sour smell coming from her mouth. The people around her pretended to be disgusted and pinched their noses to move away from her.

"Don't say such discouraging things," Liang Kongxiang pulled out a pack of toilet paper and handed it to her, teasing her, "Wipe yourself. Someone who's going to win an international award can't handle this little bit of hardship?"

"Alright, alright," Cao Lengyu chuckled from the side. This silly child, starting to recite classical Chinese, she quickly interrupted, telling her to go back and rest properly: "You have a notice tomorrow morning, go to sleep early."

The town was densely populated, and many locals secretly peered at them from second-floor windows. A government receptionist led them to an apartment building, one of the newly built houses in the area, all uniformly painted white. The buildings weren't tall, and the stairwells were narrow, but the rooms were decent, clean and tidy, with a large bed and a wardrobe—not the kind of place that could harbor mice and cockroaches. Liang Kongxiang felt relatively reassured. She pushed the door, which creaked slightly. It was a bit thin; she wondered if it would be safe at night…

She lives on the second floor, and when she opens her window, she can see the distant sea. If it weren't for her safety concerns late at night, she would probably be walking barefoot on the beach right now.

She sat by the window for a while. A shop in the distance still had its lights on, the light shining through the glass door onto the dark street. A long, yellow, rectangular object knelt on the wooden door opposite the shop. Soon, the only shop went dark too, and a tall man was locking the door, his back to Liang Kongxiang. Half of his body looked somewhat like Jiang Jiaoming…

Liang Kongxiang suddenly recalled that long ago, Jiang Jiaoming had said his ideal life was decades later, running a photography studio with her in a seaside city, not caring about customers, only taking pictures he liked, spending his whole life with her and the camera. Occasionally, sitting on the river in spring, picking flowers, would also be quite nice…

The man had taken a few steps forward, but as if he had eyes in the back of his head, he quickly turned around and caught Liang Kongxiang's gaze. He then impatiently said something to her and turned into another street.

"He's pretty fierce." Liang Kongxiang smiled, took out her camera from her bag, returned to the window, and took a picture with the flash on the crisscrossing streets. In the distance, people were still strolling on the beach, children chasing each other barefoot, completely soaked, their arms outstretched, letting the wind fill their clothes as they ran forward.

I cleared my mind and watched for a while before falling asleep.

The town is separated from the filming location by a huge cornfield. It is said that after passing through the lush cornfield, there is a vast open space where the crew built a small wooden cabin for filming.

The scenes filmed over the past two months have been almost entirely concentrated in the cabins and small town. The female protagonist and a group of outlaws come to Sisa Port to build a new society and live their lives in a new way.

The next day, before dawn, there was a loud knocking on the door.

Chang Xin brought in a cup of black coffee, placed it on the table, and then quickly closed the window. "Sister Kong Xiang, you still need to close the window when you sleep at night, otherwise bugs will fly in. These bugs are really venomous." Before closing the window, she peeked out and looked around, then turned back excitedly and said, "You have such a great view!"

Liang Kongxiang had just finished washing up and was wiping her face when she finished her coffee with a smile and patted her head: "Let's go, let's go do our makeup."

The first rays of golden sunlight pierced through the lush green cornfield, the ears of corn gleaming and swaying in the morning breeze. A group of crew members in film uniforms carried boxes in twos and threes along a path surrounded by greenery. Beyond the grove, a small brown dot could be seen in the distance—that was the painstakingly constructed wooden cabin.

Only when you get closer can you see its full appearance. Go up three wooden steps, and in the half-meter-wide area in front of the door, there are two small stools on either side. The room is dimly lit, and in the right corner there is a long wooden table with its legs collapsed. The tabletop is tilted to one side, and behind the table, in the moldy green corner of the wall, there is a large spider web, on which hangs an eight-legged spider clinging to the thin silk, swaying precariously.

“It’s much more dilapidated than I imagined,” Xiang Hang said, standing next to Liang Kongxiang. He lightly swept his index finger across the table, rubbed it between his fingers, and showed it to Liang Kongxiang. “If you add some water, you can build a wall.”

Liang Kongxiang chuckled at his words and turned to look around. Directly opposite the entrance was a long table about half a person's height. In a dusty vase in the corner of the table was a flower that had been withered for who knows how long, its species no longer discernible. Flies buzzed and vibrated their wings as they circled the brownish-green branches before flying toward Liang Kongxiang.

"Smack!" Chang Xin slapped her hands, but failed to kill the fly. Annoyed, she stared at its retreating figure as it flew out the door, muttering, "I wonder which pile of dung it landed on..."

"Your assistant is really great," someone said, stepping over the threshold and striding in. "Where did you find such a charming girl?"

“Elite Sister,” Liang Kongxiang raised her hand in greeting, glanced at Chang Xin who was blushing from the praise, and said with a smile, “Sister Chen found it.”

Chang Xin, who seemed to know everything, said: "It seems that Producer Wang went to the local government early this morning to get some documents, and Producer Zhang is probably still in his apartment."

Kong Jingying hummed in agreement, then said to Liang Kongxiang, "We weren't on the same plane yesterday, so I didn't have a chance to catch up with you." She held a fan in her hand, gently fanning herself. She glanced at Xiang Hang behind her and raised her chin to greet him. The two had worked together twice before, so there was no need for formalities. The group chatted for a few minutes inside.

Outside, the camera crew was setting up their equipment, and the assistant director and script supervisor were using megaphones to direct the clearing of the area. Liang Kongxiang and a few others walked out of the wooden house.

When everything was almost arranged, the script supervisor slammed the clapperboard with a "click".

Cao Lengyu sat in front of the monitor, staring intently at the screen. After the empty shot was completely filmed, the props team removed everything from the room, leaving it empty. After tidying up for a while, they began filming scenes of the actors living inside.

At noon, everyone temporarily set up a shed on the side and rested together. From a distance, Zhang San saw a group of men and women, who looked listless from the sun, lying lifelessly on the mats. He, on the other hand, walked over in a few steps with great energy and patted the grass a few times: "Wake up, everyone! Look what I brought you!"

Liang Kongxiang was sitting on a small stool in front of the wooden house reading a script. Hearing the noise, she looked up. Behind Zhang Bingjie was a tall boy with prominent veins on his dark skin. He pushed a cart full of things over. The cart was covered with a quilt. When the quilt was lifted, there were more than two hundred cups of milk tea neatly stacked inside, with ice cubes at the bottom.

The crew swarmed around him, each one seemingly come alive, repeatedly expressing their gratitude, "Producer Zhang, who is this handsome guy?!"

Some people started gossiping even before they had a chance to drink from their straws, and their eyes lit up when they saw the boy pushing the cart.

"Don't thank me, thank your General Manager Jiang," he said, mentioning Jiang Jiaoming and then subconsciously meeting Liang Kongxiang's gaze. He quickly turned to look at the boy he had brought, jokingly scolding the girl who kept asking questions as a lovesick fool, and introduced him: "The boss, otherwise why would I have come all this way?"

"Can you understand what we're saying?" He looked more like a mixed-race person, with transparent green eyes and a chilling aura about him.

“I understand.” Louis pulled the covers over himself and glanced at Liang Kongxiang.

It turned out to be the boy she saw last night. Liang Kongxiang lowered her gaze and continued reading the script. Jiang Jiaoming wasn't on set, but his presence was very strong; the previous wave of thanks to Producer Zhang had been replaced by a chorus of "Thank you, President Jiang."

“You’re looking at it so intently,” Zhang Bingjie glanced at the script, which looked like it was covered in a hundred ants, densely packed. He inserted the straw and handed it to her: “Jiaoming bought it. He said you don’t like milk tea, so he had someone make you some ice water.”

Kong Jingying came out from behind the door and bumped into Zhang Bingjie handing ice water to Liang Kongxiang. She joked, "Oh, Mr. Zhang, you're giving me special treatment."

“There’s no special treatment here,” Zhang Bingjie smiled, pointing to the cart and a large group of people holding iced milk tea. “President Jiang is offering everyone water,” he called out to Louis, “and bring another cup for Sister Kong!”

A dark shadow fell on the script, but it was quickly removed.

Zhang San rhythmically patted his pants with his hand hanging down his outside thigh, then suddenly chuckled, "This Louis is actually quite handsome. Just looking at his physique, he even resembles President Jiang a bit. Right?"

Liang Kongxiang glanced at Kong Jingying.

"Such high praise?" Zhang San became interested, leaning against the wooden pillar and asking her with a smile as if he didn't mind the excitement: "I heard that he has a history with President Jiang."

“No, not really,” Kong Jingying said. She wasn’t very familiar with Jiang Jiaoming and was only judging him by his appearance. “But everyone has their own taste,” she teased Liang Kongxiang, who had been observing without getting involved. “What do you think, Kongxiang? Do you prefer a boyish guy like Louis or a mature man like President Jiang?”

Faced with Zhang San, Liang Kongxiang couldn't give either answer, so she joked, "I want both."

Kong Jingying raised an eyebrow: "I can't tell, how do you do it?"

"Back then, when he was dating, he was like a kid hiding treasure. He didn't reveal which girl he was dating for several years in college. He only told me about the breakup years later." In fact, if he hadn't overheard that day, he probably wouldn't even know that his ex-sister-in-law was right in front of him a hundred years from now, lying in his coffin. If he found out after being buried, he would probably be furious. "Whenever we argued, he would play games with a cold face and watch movies as revenge. I told him to go and coax her, but he said she wouldn't pay attention to him. When I asked him how he coaxed her, he wouldn't say."

"So heartless," Kong Jingying laughed. "Arguing drains feelings, and in the end, you'll break up anyway."

Zhang Bingjie smiled and said, "I have no idea why they broke up."

"This girl never contacted him again? That can't be right."

Kong Jingying and Zhang Bingjie both looked at her jokingly.

Therefore, gossiping about others behind their backs will bring retribution.

Just as we were talking about Cao Cao, he arrived.

“I could hear people talking about me from far away,” Jiang Jiaoming said, wearing a black short-sleeved shirt that accentuated his broad shoulders and the faint outline of his arm muscles. He emerged from the golden cornfield, veins bulging down his arms to the backs of his hands, a silver wristwatch gleaming in the sunlight. He took two steps up the stairs, glanced at Liang Kongxiang unhurriedly, and then asked Zhang Bingjie, “What were you talking about me about in secret?”

The unique scent of that person seeped into Liang Kongxiang's skin again. The script was shrouded in shadow, and the lines underlined with fluorescent pen dimmed, making them both clearly visible and indistinct.

"You're here early enough. Didn't you say you'd come a few days later?" Zhang San thought he could really keep his composure, but in the end, his patience only lasted a week.

"I'm rewarding myself with a vacation now that I've finished my work."

Kong Jingying called out to President Jiang and repeated the question she had just asked.

Jiang Jiaoming glanced back at the mixed-race boy standing next to the cart. Louis glanced at him coldly as if sensing something. The two stared at each other for a second. Jiang Jiaoming turned back and asked Liang Kongxiang, who had been sitting calmly the whole time, with a smile.

"I'm also quite curious, does Teacher Liang prefer someone childish or someone mature?"

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Author's Note: No prize for guessing. How will Kong Xiang answer?