Trainee Ch.58

Chapter 58: Halftime Break (2)

Thanks to Li Xu’s earlier “warning shot,” Lai Yudong thought he was mentally prepared for anything—no matter what remote corner he’d be dragged into next, he wouldn’t be surprised.

That was, until Li Xu nimbly climbed out of the first-floor bathroom window.

“……”

Lai Yudong stood frozen at the window, dumbfounded.

You can do that?

“What are you spacing out for?” A fiery-red head popped out from outside the window. Seeing his roommate stuck in place with no follow-up action, Li Xu clicked his tongue and explained patiently, “This route avoids the cameras. Much safer—don’t tell me you’re too scared to climb out a window?”

Lai Yudong shot him a speechless look, then used action to prove that his lack of coordination only applied to dancing.

The two of them successfully slipped out of the dorm building, but that was only the beginning.

Li Xu led Lai Yudong with practiced ease, dodging security personnel and steering clear of the usual commuting paths. It was a rest day, so it wasn’t likely anyone would be foolish enough to lie in wait—but to be safe, detours were better.

Lai Yudong had to admit, Li Xu’s ability to avoid cameras was on par with 007. Even with his built-in “barrage system,” Lai Yudong couldn’t remember the locations of all the cameras this clearly.

Eventually, the two of them stopped in front of a wall wrapped in greenery.

Lai Yudong craned his neck, cautiously testing: “Don’t tell me you’re planning to—”

“Exactly what you’re thinking.”

Li Xu placed a foot on the nearby iron railing. The wall wasn’t very high; with just a few quick moves, he climbed to the top and pushed off, flipping easily over the other side.

It was hard not to suspect that skipping class had been his major in school.

Separated by the railing, Lai Yudong looked at him, suddenly hit by the uncanny impression of visiting someone in prison.

He couldn’t understand how things had escalated to this point.

Whether it was climbing over to mess around with him, or politely refusing and leaving, neither seemed like the best choice.

Lai Yudong tried to guess his intention: “No signal? You sneaked out to use the internet?”

The corner of Li Xu’s mouth twitched. “Do you think I’m some internet-addicted kid?”

“Huh, aren’t you?”

“Of course not!” Li Xu snapped, “Quit dawdling, come on. I’m not going to sell you off.”

After a moment’s thought, Lai Yudong mimicked Li Xu’s moves and climbed over. With his long legs, it was even easier for him—just a little push up, one lift of his leg, and he was over.

Now they weren’t just sneaking out of the dormitory building—they had completely escaped the filming site, forcibly unlocking a brand-new map outside the dungeon.

No wonder Li Xu had deliberately said what he did in front of the camera—his plan was to give their long disappearance a reasonable excuse. Otherwise, viewers would be searching everywhere for the two of them, only to know they had gone to the bathroom together… and then vanished into thin air.

“Here, wear this.”

Lai Yudong took the knitted hat, mask, and sunglasses that Li Xu pulled out of his pocket, helplessly bundling himself up tight. He was becoming increasingly curious what exactly this “good roommate” of his was plotting.

At this point, if Li Xu said they were teaming up to assassinate a video-streaming platform, Lai Yudong would probably believe it.

Five minutes later.

The two of them stood side by side at a deserted bus stop. The remote filming location was rarely visited, and the atmosphere was strangely eerie.

“What are we doing?” Lai Yudong couldn’t help asking.

Li Xu calmly replied, “Waiting for takeout.”

Lai Yudong: “Makes sense.”

Lai Yudong: “…Wait, hold on. Takeout??”

Li Xu, hands casually in his pockets, said matter-of-factly: “Yeah, I ordered a two-person set from Kaifeng Cuisine. Too bad today isn’t Crazy Thursday.”

“……”

A string of words that felt worlds away from their current reality popped out one after another. Lai Yudong stared wide-eyed in shock, trying to read some trace of a joke from Li Xu’s face—only to find that he actually seemed serious.

It was over the top, but… when it came to rappers, nothing was really out of the question.

Unable to hold back his curiosity, Lai Yudong asked, “Where did you even get takeout from?”

Li Xu dropped another bomb: “Got a fan to order it.”

“A… fan?”

“Mm, your fan.”

Lai Yudong: “?”

Good grief. Some idols got exposed for secretly dating fans and caused a huge scandal—yet here was this rapper, secretly contacting a fan just to order takeout? And not even his own fan, but someone else’s?

Wasn’t this… a bit ridiculous?

If word ever got out—

Would it be a bloodbath? Would this count as a career-ending scandal?

“Relax, I was kidding. I ordered it off a delivery app,” Li Xu said lazily, dropping the act. “How would I even have the ability to reach your fans? What am I supposed to do, mass-text them, ‘I’m trapped in Climbing to Stardom, send me 50 yuan and I’ll repay you handsomely later’?”

Lai Yudong let out a sigh of relief. “Good. I was worried you’d get cyberb*llied.”

“You really do think too far ahead,” Li Xu muttered.

In just a few minutes, a delivery rider in a bright red company uniform pulled up in front of them on an electric scooter. He set down the insulated box strapped to the back, then pulled out a large kraft paper bag along with two drinks.

After double-checking the order, he hopped back on the scooter and drove off, leaving the roommates standing there with the takeout.

If he hadn’t been one of the participants himself, Lai Yudong would’ve thought this scene belonged in some absurdist comedy movie.

He couldn’t pinpoint what was funny about it—but the whole thing just felt ridiculous.

“So,” Lai Yudong said, holding up the paper takeout bag with a helpless smile, “you brought me out here just to feed me?”

Li Xu shot him a sidelong glance. “Didn’t you say you wanted to eat?”

“When did I ever say that?” Lai Yudong couldn’t recall ever saying something like that to him.

Li Xu clicked his tongue. “During the livestream.”

“……”

Lai Yudong thought back—sure enough, when he was reading the comments at the start, he had casually mentioned wanting fried chicken. He hadn’t expected to have an Aladdin’s lamp as a roommate, who only had to rub his phone and instantly made it happen.

No wonder Li Xu had been sneaking around the hallway earlier—it was just him looking for a spot without cameras to watch the stream.

Even so, Lai Yudong couldn’t understand why Li Xu went this far. He was being way too good to him. Even if he thought of it as goodwill between fans of the same idol, it still didn’t make sense—by that logic, shouldn’t he have brought Xu An out instead?

He had nothing to give in return, which made him feel a little embarrassed.

“The extra food is just incidental. Think of it as a trivial little reward,” Li Xu said, sitting down on the empty bench at the bus stop. His sunglasses slipped halfway down the bridge of his nose, and through the lenses he gave the dazed, blond-haired boy a glance. “But the heart-to-heart part? That’s real. Although saying it like that does sound a bit corny.”

He tugged down his mask and took a sip of Coke, his voice muffled: “Let’s just call it a casual chat.”

“Alright.” Lai Yudong quietly sat down as well.

Don’t be fooled by Li Xu’s cocky, nothing-bothers-me exterior. He was terrible at hiding emotions, but his thoughts were much more delicate than he let on—otherwise, he wouldn’t have hidden in the bathroom to cry.

The key point was, he was so stubbornly prideful. If he had cried in front of the cameras, the contrast alone might have won him fans.

When someone with that kind of personality personally asks for a heart-to-heart, you had to take it seriously.

From the kraft paper bag, Li Xu pulled out a burger. The rustle of the greaseproof paper filled the silence as he unwrapped it.

“Miura,” he said, “I suggest you don’t play up the bromance.”

Lai Yudong: “……”

So much for all that mood he’d carefully been building up.

“I’ll break it down for you—not saying I’m 100% right. You can listen if you want, or ignore me if you don’t.”

Li Xu completely disregarded Lai Yudong’s subtle expression, offering his analysis with a straight face:

“A boy group can shoot up in popularity by playing the bromance angle. Just look at Qu Junwei and Cheng Jinghao, those two idiots—stuck together all day like glue, acting like they’d rather share the same bed.”

Lai Yudong looked surprised. “Aren’t they just… close friends?”

Though he hadn’t interacted much with them personally, their love-hate dynamic was well-known from the very first stage up through the second performance. To him, they seemed like a pair of bickering rivals who actually respected each other deep down.

“Friends, my ass. It’s all for the CP fans to eat up,” Li Xu rolled his eyes. “One’s a returning contestant who relies on fanservice to pull in fresh blood, the other’s a nobody who saw the other’s pre-show popularity and decided to ride the wave. It’s mutually beneficial, that’s all.”

“R-Really?”

“Of course. What kind of idiot would genuinely want to be lovey-dovey with the rival who kicked him out of Class A during the very first stage?” Li Xu gave a mocking laugh. “Just wait and see—they’ll go full-on angst next, bleeding their CP fans dry for purity points. Question is, who makes the first move.”

Lai Yudong half-understood, nodding slowly. “So complicated.”

“That’s why you can’t just blindly latch onto someone and play it up. Especially don’t be dumb enough to let someone with bad intentions cling onto you,” Li Xu said around a bite of his burger. “If you start a CP with someone less popular, and their core fans push the narrative, you’ll end up being the one drained dry.”

“What’s more, most of the existing CP pairings are trying to drag you into their scandals—stuff like ‘Yi Bo San Zhe,’ ‘Zi Xu Wu Yu,’ ‘Feng Chang Yu Xi.’ You’re practically turning into the industry’s No.1 CP commodity. Spend a little more time in domestic RPS circles and you’ll see: in most cases, the one labeled as ‘flower’ in the pairing is just a walking blood bank. And plenty of people already have their eyes on you as fresh meat.”

“Not that there aren’t CPs trying to cast you as the ‘flower(bottom)’ too. What was it called again…” Li Xu rummaged through his memory for the tongue-twisting ship names. “Oh right—‘White Ash Tree’ and ‘Equation of Dai Shu.’”

He broke it down one by one:

“The face-visual line is fine—‘as long as the looks are there, the kingdom stands.’ The face-con fans won’t be swayed much by drama between their idols. The only thing that’ll make them leave is if your looks start to fade. But here’s the thing—if you try to ship yourself with the Crown Prince, the two of you overlap in positioning, and your skills and backing can’t compare to his. In my opinion, that’s basically asking for death. You can try to grab a slice of the pie, but if you get greedy, it’ll blow up in your face.”

“Bai Xuanhe is actually a good candidate, but he already has his own big CP—‘Bai-Jin.’ You’d have to wait until Jin Xiheng gets eliminated and the Bai-Jin ship sinks before you could move in. Still, their second performance will probably reel in another wave of fans, so it won’t collapse anytime soon.”

“Actually, you don’t have to limit yourself to just one person. A love triangle works too—advance when you can, retreat when you must. The only risk is it might get reduced to a healing back-garden type of thing. Like that pretty popular ‘Eagle-Taming Project’ or ‘Yan and You Xin.’ To put it simply, it turns into ‘all-Su’ and ‘all-Qu.’”

“Anyway, that’s the gist. You think it over.”

Lai Yudong: “……”

Listening to you is like… listening to you.

Wait—why does none of this make sense to him?

Was this some kind of talent-show scripture only the initiated could read?

It felt like he’d just pushed open the door to a whole new world.

“From what I’ve observed these past few days of your fan circle ecosystem, you mainly feed off solo fans. And the endpoint of selling CPs is always filtering those solo fans into purer, hardcore solos. So if you skip the middleman and go straight to building up your solo fanbase—you save yourself a few years of detours. Jackpot.” Li Xu took another bite of his burger. “Besides, I don’t think you have the heart to torment your fans just for purification. Better to stabilize your solos. They’re the ones who can grow into the long-term diehard fans. Especially when, in the third stage, people can only vote for one contestant—your OP is what matters most.”

“What’s OP?”

“One pick. So—did you get all that?”

Enlightened all of a sudden, Lai Yudong let out an “ah”: “Got it. You’re my toxic solo stan.”

“…There aren’t any cameras here. Do you believe I won’t beat you up?”

“You probably couldn’t take me.”

“?”

Seeing that Li Xu really looked like he might punch him, Lai Yudong hurriedly cut the joke short with a smile.

“Even if I don’t quite understand all the twists and turns in this, thank you for telling me.”

Li Xu raised his brows. “So what you’re saying is?”

“Don’t worry, I have no such plans, and I never will.”

Lai Yudong looked straight at the red-haired boy holding half a burger, his tone soft yet firm.

“When it comes to relationships, I follow my own principles—everything depends on how I truly feel about the other person, not on constructing some relationship just because others want to see it.”

Almost like a sigh, he added quietly:

“I don’t like that.”

Meeting those utterly sincere, flawless dark eyes, Li Xu began to understand the fans who traveled from far away, staying up until dawn just for a fleeting glimpse of him.

In a talent show—and an entertainment industry—so muddy and tainted, his roommate was like a clear stream, always treating everything with the most genuine attitude. It was as if he was holding a diamond heart in both hands, perfectly transparent, yet wrapped in an unbreakable layer of tempered glass.

Willing to bare his heart, but never easily swayed by the outside world.

Li Xu gave a flat “oh” in response, took a long sip of Coke, and said dully:

“There’s one more thing I want to tell you.”

“What is it?”

“From now on, in front of the cameras… can we not act so close?”

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