wires was because the production team felt that putting together bigger spectacles would generate more buzz, and He Mingchen had also thought it would let Ji Xing experience it.
Changing to the new plan now didn’t affect the plot, so naturally, no one objected.
The modified shooting plan went very smoothly, finishing much faster than the estimated filming time. Moreover, Ji Xing’s dazed state, brought on by the shocks he received today, coincidentally and perfectly matched the feeling of a young master being hit by a car.
Just like that, Ji Xing muddled through and completed his first day of filming tasks.
After wrapping up work in the afternoon, he didn’t hitch a ride in He Mingchen’s car back to the hotel; instead, he chose to take the production team’s minibus back together with Xiao Lin.
“Did something happen today? Your mood seemed kind of bad.” Xiao Lin spotted the abnormality the moment he saw him.
“It’s nothing,” Ji Xing said absentmindedly.
“I’ll go with you to the site tomorrow after all. There’s too much going on at the set, and I won’t rest easy if I’m not following you.” Because of recording the variety show, the trainees’ assistants weren’t allowed to follow too closely, otherwise they would easily end up on camera. While at the production base, Ji Xing always had Xiao Lin wait in the public lounge. Today filming on location started, so he had given Xiao Lin the day off, never expecting that the other person would still arrive early at the site to wait for him to finish work.
“No need, you’d just be sitting around waiting over there anyway, there’s nothing much going on,” Ji Xing said again.
Seeing that he didn’t really want to talk, Xiao Lin didn’t press further. After returning to the hotel, he delivered some newly bought snacks to Ji Xing’s room, chatted with him for a bit, and then returned to his own room.
As soon as Xiao Lin left, Ji Xing immediately took out his phone and pulled up that danmei novel titled The Domineering Movie Emperor’s Reckless Love. Previously, due to various reasons, he hadn’t been able to read it carefully. But by now, he wished he could pick up a magnifying glass and study it word by word.
The opening chapters of this novel featured Ji Xing and He Mingchen spending a passionate night together. This was followed by their interactions on the show: first, Ji Xing expressed his desire to join Pei Yun’s team, which stirred up He Mingchen’s jealousy, and then came He Mingchen’s mad, obsessive possessiveness.
As Ji Xing read, he took notes with a pen, trying to find every single hint regarding his pregnancy in the text. Finally, after reading a full thirty thousand words of mature content, the “him” in the novel experienced morning sickness.
By that time, the Ji Xing in the story had already been repeatedly subjected to forced love by He Mingchen for over two months.
Two months, plus the initial period when they first entered the cast, that totaled about three months, right?
Ji Xing hurriedly picked up his pen and jotted it down: morning sickness in the third month of joining the cast.
After finishing this note, he went to a search engine and looked up how long after pregnancy morning sickness typically begins. The conclusion he got was around forty days. Reportedly, a few individuals experienced it earlier, while others experienced it later, but the vast majority of people showed reactions around the forty-day mark.
Ji Xing continued to log: morning sickness at forty days.
Combining these two pieces of information, the Ji Xing in the original text likely conceived about a month and a half after joining the cast. That way, forty days later, morning sickness symptoms would happen to appear.
That’s great!
If he had seen this information a day ago, Ji Xing would undoubtedly have been extremely worried. But learning about this today, he felt immensely fortunate, simply because based on the plot progression of the original text, he shouldn’t be pregnant yet.
Since it was something that hadn’t happened yet, it meant he still had a way to prevent it.
Having figured this out, Ji Xing decided to carefully study the first half of this novel, namely, from the current timeline up to the exact moment he became pregnant. If he could find a way out from the text, he might successfully avoid getting himself pregnant.
Driven by this goal, Ji Xing read through the first half of the content meticulously several times. Because it contained no shortage of detailed descriptions of He Mingchen doing this and that to him, by the time he finished reading, Ji Xing felt practically dazed.
However, it wasn’t a total loss. He noticed that although the He Mingchen in the novel possessed a relatively strong sense of possessiveness, he ate soft approaches rather than hard ones. The first time the man went mad in the original text, it had been triggered by Ji Xing’s deliberate distancing.
Following this logic, from now on, wouldn’t it be fine as long as he went along with He Mingchen in everything?
Ji Xing vaguely felt that this logic wasn’t quite right, but by then he was too exhausted and had no energy left to think. Before long, he collapsed onto the bed and fell asleep.
Amidst his grogginess, Ji Xing heard someone knocking on the door. He originally didn’t want to pay attention, but the knocking kept ringing continuously. With no other choice, he had to get up and drag his feet over to open the door.
When he opened the door, a tall and upright figure stood outside, it was none other than He Mingchen.
“Teacher He?” Ji Xing asked, his eyes sleepy and dazed. “Why are you here?”
“Weren’t you feeling unwell today? I brought you some medicine, drink it while it’s hot,” He Mingchen said, handing him a white porcelain bowl containing a dark, traditional Chinese medicine-like liquid.
A warm feeling washed over Ji Xing’s heart. He took the bowl and thanked He Mingchen. Looking down, just as he was about to drink the medicine, he caught a whiff of its heavy medicinal scent and asked He Mingchen, “Teacher He, what kind of medicine is this?”
“This is a miscarriage-prevention medicine; I brewed it specially for you.” He Mingchen’s expression remained as calm as ever.
“Prevent…” Ji Xing’s face turned white. “You must have made a mistake. I’m not pregnant, I…”
Just as he was speaking, he looked down and noticed that his lower abdomen had somehow swelled significantly, growing large enough to stretch his pajamas quite tightly.
“What is going on here?” Ji Xing was so frightened that his face drained of all color.
“You’re carrying our child.” He Mingchen reached out, pressing his hand against Ji Xing’s lower abdomen. His tone was clearly gentle, yet hearing it made one feel extremely uneasy.
Ji Xing instinctively wanted to run away, but he felt his body grow light as he was effortlessly lifted by the man and dragged back into the room.
“No!” Ji Xing cried out, begging for mercy.
“You need to be a good boy.” He Mingchen pulled off his tie with one hand and bound Ji Xing’s wrists.
“Ah!”
Ji Xing snapped his eyes open, realizing that everything just now had been nothing more than a dream.
Thinking of his heavily distended lower abdomen in the dream, he hurried to look down and check, only letting out a sigh of relief when he confirmed that his belly was still completely flat. It was probably because he had read that novel too many times last night that he ended up dreaming of such an absurd plotline.
After this toss and turn, all his sleepiness was gone, so he simply dug out that novel once more.
This time, he read straight through to the ending in one breath. The author of the original text seemed to favor angst, arranging a miscarriage sequence right before the conclusion. In the novel, He Mingchen went too far, causing Ji Xing to suffer excessive mental stress that led to a miscarriage. Ever since then, He Mingchen repented and mended his ways, going through a harrowing chasing-the-wife crematorium arc before finally ending up together with Ji Xing.
However, Ji Xing quickly spotted a problem.
The text stated that when Ji Xing had his miscarriage, the child was already six months along, at which point the variety show had wrapped up its filming two months prior. If Ji Xing remembered correctly, the show’s total broadcasting schedule was four months; calculated by this timeline, the child must have been conceived shortly after the show began.
Where did the discrepancy lie?
He dug out all the pregnancy-related plots in the novel to review them and discovered that the problem didn’t lie in the timeline, but rather with the author. The author who wrote the danmei piece had probably used a private headcanon, setting Ji Xing’s first morning sickness at the three-month mark of pregnancy.
So, based on the original text, it was impossible to rule out the possibility that he might already be pregnant right now?
Ji Xing: ……
He had celebrated for nothing.
While Ji Xing was agonizing over his stomach, Pei Yun wasn’t idle either, though he was agonizing over the incident with Xiao Huang. As Xiao Huang’s mentor, Pei Yun had watched his own team member fall off the wires and suffer a miscarriage on the spot; the blow this incident dealt to him was by no means small.
“Tell me, how could I have been so clueless?” Pei Yun tossed back a glass of wine, his tone filled with intense remorse. “When he had his first heat stroke, I should have insisted on sending him to the hospital. If we had just gone to the hospital, things wouldn’t have been kept under wraps until the very end.”
He Mingchen raised an eyebrow. “Weren’t you there when he had his surgery?”
“Me? Sigh!” Pei Yun let out a heavy sigh. “I did go to the hospital to see him, but he had already bribed and arranged things with the doctors and nurses beforehand. Plus, since I’m not a family member, nobody told me he was hospitalized because of an unstable pregnancy.”
At the time, Xiao Huang claimed he was going in for an appendectomy surgery, and later changed his tune to say he only needed to stay in the hospital for a few days of IV drips, so Pei Yun hadn’t thought much of it. There were flaws every single time, yet somehow he failed to notice a single one.
“He’s an adult; he knows what he’s doing and has considered the consequences. You’re merely a mentor in name and didn’t even formally guide him for more than a few days, so there’s no need to blame yourself. After all, the child isn’t yours.” He Mingchen paused, then looked at him. “It’s not yours, right?”
“Of course not! I take safety precautions every single time, okay? Besides, how could I possibly hook up with one of my own trainees?” As soon as Pei Yun said this, He Mingchen’s expression turned extremely subtle.
“Tell me, why did he have to take such a risk?” Pei Yun sighed regretfully.
“Opportunities are rare, I suppose. Not everyone can casually get the chance to participate in a show like this. I’ve watched Xiao Huang’s acting; he’s a very talented actor, what a pity.”
Pei Yun downed another glass of wine, worried to death.
With Xiao Huang running into such an incident, public opinion was bound to brew into something unpredictable, and he still had to figure things out regarding the trainees. Now that the team was missing one person, it meant they were missing one role, and they needed to find a replacement as soon as possible.
“Old He, why don’t you let your little snail help me out again?”
“Get lost.” He Mingchen refused with crisp, unhesitating finality.
“If you won’t lend him, you won’t lend him. I need to learn my lesson too. Next time I take on trainees, I’ll definitely have to ask clearly beforehand whether they’re pregnant, to avoid running into this kind of mess again.” Pei Yun looked deeply emotional. “Especially when encountering high-risk actions like hanging on wires.”
The hand holding He Mingchen’s wine glass abruptly paused, reminding him of Ji Xing’s abnormal behavior on the set today. He had never heard of Ji Xing being afraid of heights before, and the youth’s demeanor didn’t look like it was caused by a fear of heights at all; it looked much more like there was an alternative reason.
“By the way, do you have any friends in psychological counseling?” He Mingchen asked.
“Ha, I’m not that fragile, I don’t need psychological counseling,” Pei Yun waved a hand.
“I’m not asking for you.”
“Oh.” Pei Yun glared at him. “You want psychological counseling?”
“No, just want to ask about something.”
“I have a cousin who does research in that area. It’s too late today, I’ll help you ask about it tomorrow.”