Variety Show
The apartment the little star rented was downtown, in a prime location, with excellent conditions and all the amenities. Naturally, the rent was steep.
It was close to the company, but a fair distance from the Film Academy.
For Zhou Jueming now, it was all rather impractical. It did nothing to meet his needs and was more of a burden than anything else.
So the next day, after mailing out the two signed contracts, he browsed rental listings online. He soon signed a lease with the owner of a place in a quiet, well-kept complex near the university district.
He contacted the original landlord and ended his lease a year early. After the deposit was returned, he still came away with a considerable sum.
The day Zhou Jueming moved into his new home, it rained, a rare occurrence in the north.
His new rental was a small suite on the third floor. A tall camphor tree stood outside the door. Through the window, he could see the rain washing the leaves a glossy green, and the drops carried the faint, distinctive fragrance of camphor leaves.
He had carefully packed away many of the little star’s belongings just as they were and brought them with him to the new apartment.
But that did not include his undergraduate textbooks or course materials. Zhou Jueming searched everywhere for them, but came up empty-handed.
With just over ten days until the start of term in early September, he enrolled in a full year of sophomore courses as soon as the system opened, then squeezed in several high-credit major requirements for his junior year during evenings and weekends.
GPA was the measure of a university student’s academic performance. A course’s credits and grade points reflected the quantity and quality of the student’s work, and the GPA was the weighted average of the grade points earned across all courses.
Zhou Jueming had carefully calculated what grades he needed in each course, then signed up for plenty of high-credit requirements. High grades in high-credit courses would have a much greater impact on his average.
That was the only way to make sure he could raise his GPA above 4.0 in a single semester.
After that, he ordered all the textbooks he needed for the semester, along with a few medical texts he used often. With nothing pressing to do for the next few days, he settled down to study the courses in his undergraduate acting program.
The experience wasn’t entirely new to him. He had loved traditional Chinese medicine since childhood and focused mainly on medical books and journals, but his reading was otherwise wide-ranging, from the humanities and arts to mechanics and chemical engineering. He was able to study courses like drama on his own without much trouble.
Zhou Jueming liked to sit by the window overlooking the camphor tree and leaf through his books. The room held the faint scent of medicinal herbs, and he rested a hand on a clean glass of warm water, losing all sense of time.
The first episode of the variety show was scheduled to film in early September, which clashed with the start of his classes. But students at arts colleges often had to travel for shoots, so when Zhou Jueming submitted a request for leave, it was approved without a hitch.
Two days before filming, a staff member from the show called to tell him the details of the schedule.
The caller sounded like a middle-aged man. He was still businesslike and meticulous, but there was none of the obvious disdain Zhou Jueming had expected. Instead, his tone carried a kind of respect he couldn’t quite put into words.
Perhaps the man didn’t follow entertainment news and treated him with the same consideration as the other amateur guests.
Zhou Jueming couldn’t help remembering the similar regard his seniors had shown him when he worked at the hospital, taking care to guide and value the junior staff.
On the morning of September 3, Zhou Jueming boarded a flight arranged by the show’s staff and headed to a neighboring province. That day marked the end of his second course of herbal treatment.
Before leaving, he studied himself in the mirror. His complexion had improved considerably. The rest and exercise he’d gotten lately had brought some life back to him, softening the stark gauntness and pallor.
He wore a soft, well-fitting pale blue shirt with black trousers. His hair had been dyed black again and trimmed short and neat, enough to satisfy him, at least a little.
Then he spent the flight reading through the show’s general format. It was a fairly standard setup.
The budget was limited, so there would be only three short installments. But the producers were generous with the time allotted for each: more than twenty days of filming. They were scheduled for September and November of this year, and January of the next.
The first installment focused on drugs, which were inseparable from medicine. The guests would visit sites and learn about the planting, cultivation, harvesting, and processing of Chinese medicinal herbs, as well as the synthesis and extraction of Western medicines and the factories where they were produced.
The second installment focused on training medical professionals. The guests would be sent to a medical university to experience and showcase the day-to-day life of its students.
The third installment would take them to hospitals, where they would visit doctors and nurses in different departments, in large and small facilities alike, and see what their work was like.
The final installment also included an extra event. The script offered little detail, saying only that all the guests would return to base camp, an established hospital owned by the investor, for a final, mysterious assessment.
Each installment would bring in four retired medical experts or practicing physicians to serve as consultants and judges. The ten student and non-celebrity guests, however, would remain the same throughout.
The ten guests would keep learning, completing hands-on tasks, taking part in various projects, and giving demonstrations. The show aimed to combine education, entertainment, and outreach, making learning fun while highlighting the substance of medicine.
After landing, he met up with several of the show’s non-celebrity guests.
As they reached the exit, he instinctively stepped aside to let others pass. But one of the guests, a stylish young woman with a small backpack, bumped into him hard as she went by.
The heel of her shoe even scraped against his, leaving a brown mark. She had tried to kick him and missed.
The staff waiting to greet them handed out vehicle assignments. But when it was Zhou Jueming’s turn, there were, by a strange coincidence, no seats left. He would have to find his own way to the village, three hundred kilometers away.
Zhou Jueming hadn’t expected the little star’s “notoriety” to carry such weight. Even on a somewhat more serious show like this, someone had prepared a special welcome for him.
But it wasn’t hard to understand. The little star had offended the entertainment industry’s hottest top star, whose influence, along with that of the financial backing and supporters behind him, was beyond imagining.
Perhaps the higher-ups had told people to make sure he had trouble wherever he went. Or perhaps they were simply kicking someone while he was down, using their cruelty toward him to show they were on Chen Yueqian’s side.
Whatever the reason, he was now a rat everyone wanted to crush.
Zhou Jueming smiled faintly and called out to a staff member walking past.
The staff member was a young man in glasses. When he turned at the call, his face was openly full of disdain.
The little star had been blessed with a good frame: tall, long-legged, narrow-hipped and broad-shouldered.
And after Zhou Jueming had spent more than twenty days carefully tending to his health, the sickly pallor and gauntness had begun to fade. His skin had taken on a warm glow. Standing there at ease, he looked tall and sharp, and stood out among the crowd.
The staff member only came up to his shoulder. He turned, pursed his lips, and frowned at Zhou Jueming before asking impatiently, “What is it?”
Zhou Jueming pulled up a photo on his phone and held it out for the man to see. In an even tone, he said, “The contract states that the organizers are responsible for the guests’ travel and accommodations. I can understand a mistake on your part, and I don’t mind covering for the occasional slipup. But you need to give me the exact address of our first stop, or get me a car that will take me straight there.”
The staff member wore a plastic badge on a blue lanyard. He was actually a medical university student, volunteering over the summer.
He lifted his chin slightly and looked at the young man opposite him.
They’d been on an early flight. It was around eight or nine in the morning, and sunlight fell softly over the man’s face. His eyes were clear and bright. Even after being treated that way, he’d answered calmly and gently, without a trace of anger.
The student began to wonder if this was really the shameless, scheming green tea his friend had described. Why couldn’t he see any sign of that at all?
The vehicle arrangement really hadn’t been deliberate. By the time the list had reached him, Zhou Jueming’s name wasn’t on it. He’d simply followed procedure.
Disliking Zhou Jueming seemed to be the popular thing to do. There was hard proof of everything he’d done, so the student hadn’t asked a single question and had simply accepted the arrangement.
And this wasn’t the only thing. Zhou Jueming’s accommodations and meals would be especially “different” later on, too.
But as he met the faint light in the other man’s eyes, he felt a vague, inexplicable twinge of guilt. Still, the prejudice he’d started with held sway.
He snatched Zhou Jueming’s phone, opened the notes app, and typed in the location of the herb plantation park, a remote, hard-to-find place that private vehicles weren’t allowed to enter.
And among their group, there probably wasn’t anyone willing to vouch for Zhou Jueming and get him through the gate…
With a look that was half pity and half schadenfreude, he watched Zhou Jueming take back his phone, head lowered. Then he quickly turned, got into a car, and told the drivers of both vehicles to set off.