The next day, Song left the house early.
Fang Ye was woken by the sound of the door closing. Groggy with sleep, he stared at the shut front door for a long while before realizing that Song Zhuchen, that guy, hadn’t remembered at all that there was now an extra cat in the house.
So, the current situation was: I’m all alone in my designated rival’s home, Great Actor Song’s home?!
Exciting! In that case, I’m going to have a good look around and see whether our upright and honorable Entertainment Industry Disciplinary Committee Chief, Great Actor Song, is really as spotless in private as he seems.
Fang Ye rose from his luxurious kingsize cat bed (thanks, Papa Qi Yan), and a rumbling purr immediately sounded, especially loud in the empty villa living room. Only then did Fang Ye realize that from yesterday afternoon until now, he hadn’t eaten a single bite.
But breakfast… Fang Ye turned to look at the equally luxurious food bowl beside him. The variety of food inside was surprisingly rich. Qi Yan had no idea what this little cat liked to eat, so he’d simply bought every kind of premium cat food and cat treats there was, and then Dr. Qin had put a little of each into the bowl. All sorts of aromas collided passionately in the bowl, luring Fang Ye into a daze. He completely forgot to complain about breakfast having no coffee, toast, fried bacon, youtiao, rice porridge, or beef noodles, the whole cat sprinted toward the food bowl at a hundred-meter-dash speed.
Crunch. The first piece of cat food entered his mouth. Setting aside the question of cat food versus human food, in this stark contrast Fang Ye confirmed only one thing Zhong Jianli was truly a dog, a wicked member of the exploiting class, a capitalist through and through. The cat food he bought couldn’t compare to a single item in this bowl!
Not, a, single, one!
Having eaten and drunk his fill, Fang Ye raised his fluffy little tail and began patrolling the house. The house was huge, and to Fang Ye’s surprise, for someone as bland as Song Zhuchen, the interior design style wasn’t the black-white-gray minimalist coldness that was standard for domineering CEOs, but was unexpectedly warm and livable. The whole house was in Fang Ye’s favorite American country style, soft and cozy, perfect for lazily lounging at home reading, lazing in bed, and napping.
Although it was completely at odds with Song Zhuchen’s public persona, Boss Cat Fang was very satisfied with it after all, the house now belonged to him, and a certain Song was merely a lowly poop-scooping servant who had submitted to his rule.
The second floor was Song Zhuchen’s living quarters. A spacious master bedroom had been decorated with extreme tenderness, in stark contrast to Song Zhuchen’s own persona: light wooden floors and American-style walnut furniture, with the sofa by the floor-to-ceiling windows piled with all kinds of soft cushions that made you want to sink right in.
Most outrageous of all, Song Zhuchen’s bed was actually a classical four-poster bed and what left Fang Ye slack-jawed was that he had actually hung bed curtains from the posts! Deep blue velvet, exuding an ambiguous, suggestive air amid the luxurious opulence.
“Song Zhuchen, oh Song Zhuchen,” Fang Ye stood up on his two hind legs, pawing at the long tasseled cords tying the curtains, “acting all ascetic and desireless on the surface, who would’ve thought you’d be this classically repressed in private!”
Come to think of it… a bed made this pretty… Fang Ye’s round eyes darted around, and without hesitation he leaped onto the bed, only to be disappointed to discover that there was only a single pillow on it.
Fang Ye sat on the bed hugging the tip of his own tail, thinking carefully. In such a large house, he really hadn’t seen any traces of anyone else living there. The guest bedroom was empty, and all the daily necessities even the water cups and slippers, were for a single person.
“Song is such a pervert. Living alone and still making his bed this fancy!” Fang Ye idly swept his tail over the pure white, soft quilt, then his attention was drawn to a small wooden table beside the bed.
The placement of this little table was strange. Not only was it pressed tightly against one side of the bed, it also happened to occupy the very center of the entire bedroom, forcibly blocking all the usable space on that side of the bed extremely inconvenient.
What kind of homeowner would create such inconvenience for himself? Fang the cat walked toward the little table with a dignified, graceful catlike gait. The bare tabletop held only a single nanmu wood stand shaped like a lotus flower, and on it rested a bulging, dark-yellow brocade pouch. The tips of the stand’s eight lotus petals seemed to point at something. After his intensive training around Zhong Jianli during this period, even though Fang Ye didn’t recognize the object, he could easily tell that something with such an eerie design could not possibly be a mere decoration.
Fang Ye carefully hopped next to the nanmu stand and sniffed gently. There was a faint smell of burnt paper residue. Following the direction the lotus petal tips pointed, he indeed saw eight yellow talisman papers on the wall. The patterns drawn on them in cinnabar were complex and hard to understand. Fang Ye jumped up high and studied them closely for a long while, but still couldn’t decipher their meaning. Besides that, the room also held two small crystal balls, one black and one white, which together with the lotus stand and the talisman papers formed the shape of a bagua.
“What kind of strange formation is this?” Given the existence of someone as superstitious as Zhong Jianli, Fang Ye prudently didn’t touch Song Zhuchen’s arrangement. He just found it odd Song Zhuchen was a wealthy biology PhD, and the Song family’s business was high-end medical care. No matter how you looked at it, he didn’t seem like someone who would have the slightest connection with talisman paper, nanmu lotuses, and crystal balls.
Fang Ye shook his head, then continued patrolling his territory with a not-quite-proper catlike gait.
Next to the master bedroom was the study. There was quite a lot in the study, besides books on film and his own professional texts, there were surprisingly many books on all sorts of strange topics. Fang Ye even saw several folkloric works on Chinese folk secret arts on the desk. It wasn’t strange for a returned overseas Chinese to be curious about his homeland’s secret arts, and none of that was remarkable. What most baffled Fang Ye was that Song Zhuchen, a grown man, had an entire section of his bookshelf filled with children’s books, from fairy tales and comics to literature, covering virtually everything a child would read from age seven or eight when they first started reading, all the way up through adulthood.
Fang Ye: ?
Doing the math with his paws, Song Zhuchen wasn’t old enough to have an illegitimate child that big. No matter how advanced the Song family’s medical technology group was, that just wasn’t possible!
This guy was really strange. Fang Ye flicked his ear tips dismissively and continued his patrol.
At the end of the second-floor corridor was a closed door. Fang Ye pushed at it with his paw, but the door didn’t budge. He jumped up to the door handle and pawed at it hard several times. Hm? It was actually locked? A room that had to be locked even when living alone, Fang Ye’s spirit of gossip instantly blazed to life. What good stuff could be inside?!
But gossip was useless, he couldn’t open it. A simple, cute, weak, helpless, but ever-hungry little kitty like him really couldn’t open it.
Maybe Zhong Jianli could. That fraud was so good at playing mystic tricks, he was surely great at picking locks too! But first he’d have to find Zhong the Fraud. Fang Ye the little kitty darted back into the study, leaped onto the desk, deftly smacked a laptop open with one paw, and started searching the map.
He remembered that the day Song Zhuchen carried him back, the car had only driven a few minutes before arriving home, it shouldn’t be far.
But when it came to entering the destination, Fang Ye hit a snag. That broken-down temple probably wasn’t even marked on the map… After racking his brain for some landmark near the temple and coming up empty, Fang Ye could only try typing “Chiming Temple” into the search box.
And then he witnessed a miracle not only was Chiming Temple on the map, it was tagged as an internet-famous check-in spot.
Fang Ye: ??? So Zhong Jianli used to be a talent agent, huh!
After memorizing the route, worried there might be surveillance cameras at the door, Fang Ye sauntered over to the floor-to-ceiling window and squeezed his way out.
The window opened, and a beautiful hand reached toward the man sitting in the darkness, a gorgeous lollipop resting in its palm. The man shrouded in darkness pondered for a moment, then rose and took that hand. The thick blackness all around burst into colorful butterflies scattering at the instant their hands touched spring warmth, blooming flowers, a world flooded with light. The handsome man, returned to the light, solemnly slipped a diamond ring onto that hand.
“Meeting you was heaven’s arrangement. Forever is my decision.”
As the ad trailer finished playing, everyone in the room burst into spontaneous, enthusiastic applause.
“Brother Chen’s performance was absolutely spot-on!”
“Brother Chen’s eyes, my God, the moment he looked into the camera, I was electrified straight through to the earth’s core!”
“Both the melancholy and the deep affection were portrayed so perfectly. Truly worthy of a Best Actor title!”
Song Zhuchen had come to the studio early in the morning to shoot this jewelry commercial for B&V. The international top-tier jewelry brand B&V originated in Italy, and its global spokesperson had never before been an Asian star until now, when Song Zhuchen shattered that glass ceiling. Rumor had it that the CEO of B&V happened to be present at the awards ceremony where Song Zhuchen won the Cannes Best Actor award, was instantly captivated by his beauty, and called him God’s creation, the crystallization spanning Asia and Europe, the very limit of beauty.
Praise for Brother Chen’s looks no longer moved assistant Li Nian’s nerves at all. He handed a bottle of mineral water to Song Zhuchen, who was removing his makeup, then briskly began reporting on work.
“Brother Chen, President Lu of B&V says the jewelry set you wore just now is a gift for you.”
“No need.”
“I already declined. Our Brother Chen isn’t short on money, but President Lu insisted, saying he should have had a meal with you, but he has a flight to catch soon and couldn’t spare the time, so he can only give you this jewelry set as an apology and also as a congratulatory gift for Brother Chen’s first-ever endorsement.”
“Brother Chen…”
Li Nian kept hovering around Song Zhuchen until it made one dizzy. Song Zhuchen turned his head to look at Li Nian’s hesitating-to-speak expression and felt uncomfortable on his behalf: “If you want to ask something, just say it.”
“Brother Chen, why did you take this endorsement?” Li Nian had held back for a long time, but finally couldn’t help asking. Song Zhuchen was different from other celebrities and actors, he had no need to make money, and he acted purely out of passion. Brother Chen never took on ads, endorsements, or variety shows, anything unrelated to film. B&V was the one and only exception!
“Because jewelry is beautiful.” Song Zhuchen finished removing his makeup, and his clean face was bathed in a layer of clear, flowing light from the makeup mirror lamps. Li Nian was astonished to discover that a rare tenderness had appeared in Brother Chen’s eyes.