Chapter 2#
Ji Landong couldn’t make sense of why this person would say that.
He chose to ask the mushroom: “Is this also part of your ‘Villain Redemption Package’?”
System: 「…」
Li Xingyun shuddered and clenched his jaw. He snatched the pill bottle and threw it aside, then pulled Ji Landong into his arms.
He held on hard.
Ji Landong didn’t particularly mind. Anyone in this line of work had been grabbed and held a few times — a touch here or there didn’t take anything away from you.
His pale fingers curved slightly. He lifted his hand and ruffled the prickling red stubble on the other man’s head.
“New here?” Ji Landong looked down. “You’ve latched onto the wrong person. I’m just a nobody coasting along — a head case with nothing to offer.”
Li Xingyun wrapped his hands around Ji Landong’s.
Ji Landong’s hands — once valued at thirty million. The luxury brand he’d endorsed had sold out of its men’s rings overnight. During holidays at home, he would sometimes feel like it, and cook himself. Online there was still a variety show clip: those same hands crooking a finger to coax Li Xingyun over for a free meal.
Pinching a just-fried milk cake and stuffing it into Li Xingyun’s mouth — burning him so badly he’d fled in circles around the room — then pinching the ear of the young heir, who by that point had nearly filled both lobes with piercings.
…All of that was over now.
Ji Landong asked: “Do you want some water?”
Li Xingyun shook his head in silence.
Ji Landong hadn’t actually meant to pour him any — he only had the one bottle of mineral water, and he still needed it for his pills. “So — are we clear, then?”
“Clear on what?” Li Xingyun asked.
“You’ve got the wrong person,” Ji Landong said. “Whoever you’re looking for — I’m a head case. Human garbage. A murderer.”
Li Xingyun’s eyes snapped up.
Li Xingyun’s eyes were a web of bloodshot red. Anyone could see he hadn’t slept properly in a long time — wrung dry, utterly spent.
“…You’re not,” Li Xingyun said. “Gē, I’ve thought it through. I believe you had reasons. You’re not.”
Ji Landong gave a quiet laugh. “Wow.”
Li Xingyun flinched right along with it.
He couldn’t hold himself together any longer. He gripped Ji Landong’s wrist and hauled him toward the door — only to be cut off by several thickset tattooed men blocking the way. Built solid, planted firm, tools in hand.
Their shadows fell black beneath the blazing sun.
Li Xingyun’s expression shifted. “Who are you people?”
“They’re here watching me,” Ji Landong helpfully explained. “The thing is — dig deep enough into this industry, and it gets filthy. A fallen man with nowhere left to run doesn’t get to be a person anymore.”
Ji Landong said this with some authority — he’d been born into this industry, after all. His biological father was an award-winning director. His birth mother was a modeling agency rep. His stepfather was a well-connected photographer with his own studio and a constant revolving door of guests.
Li Xingyun’s brow knitted tight. His lips pressed into a hard line. The color began to drain from his face.
Not from fear — Li Xingyun wasn’t afraid of a fight. He’d been picked up by Ji Landong precisely because he’d gone toe-to-toe bare-fisted against a group of late-night thugs and gotten beaten half to death for it.
He was just… left with only one thought.
How had Ji Landong’s body gotten this wrecked.
Li Xingyun’s grip went rigid. He held tight to those scarred, roughened fingers and pressed a thumb to the pulse point, catching in his peripheral vision the shape of the man he was pulling along with him.
In the six months since, to find Ji Landong, he’d exhausted every method he knew. Lost count of how many places he’d chased down.
Then he finally found a private clinic.
Ji Landong was sick. Li Xingyun had pressed the doctors again and again, and gotten only that much.
The medical record said Ji Landong had auditory hallucinations, visual hallucinations, impaired cognitive function, and a severe tendency toward self-harm. He was also a deceptively convincing patient — anyone who didn’t know him well would be easily fooled into thinking he was perfectly fine.
Li Xingyun’s throat tightened. Speaking was an effort. His mouth moved several times before any sound came: “Gē.”
Ji Landong glanced down. “Mm?”
“You should let go of me,” Ji Landong suggested. “Tell them you came to the wrong place — that you have the wrong person — and they’ll let you leave.”
Li Xingyun looked down. Stared at his own feet.
The Ji Landong of right now… seemed, somehow, much more at peace than he used to be.
No more arrogance. No more swagger. He came across as almost mild-tempered — the kind of amiable senior who made a good impression.
Ji Landong stood quietly in the sun.
His thin eyelids drooped slightly, settled over his eyes like a veil.
Beneath that faded, striking face: the hard press of bones beneath skin.
A heartbeat that had come unraveled.
The sun blazed overhead — white light driving into his eyes, the ache of it deep and merciless.
“What if…” Li Xingyun said quietly, “what if I don’t let go?”
Ji Landong’s brow drew together faintly.
Li Xingyun forced his eyes shut. He knew Ji Landong was sick. He’d come here knowing that. He’d prepared himself for everything.
Including Ji Landong not recognizing him.
“I’m the… owner of a newly established media studio,” Li Xingyun said. “I’m a fan of yours. I want to sign you. Gē — can you let me have this?”
He said this, then gave Ji Landong no chance to answer — dragged him toward the door without ceremony. The brutish men moved to block him. Cash hit them in the face, thrown without apology.
Li Xingyun held their gazes. His pupils were pitch-black. Something close to shadow moved in them. “I’m taking this person.”
“Think it over carefully,” Li Xingyun said. “Whoever paid you to stand here and watch him — I’ll give them ten times that. Get out of the way.”
Ji Landong let out a soft laugh.
Li Xingyun bit down on his back teeth, heat rising in his face — but all he could taste from the root of his tongue was bitterness.
He didn’t know what Ji Landong was laughing at. But that easy, careless laugh brought back a memory from years ago: he’d been held and locked up, retaliation from the money behind a motorcycle racing circuit, and Ji Landong had come for him.
Young Master Li hadn’t quite grown out of his hero phase yet. He’d been sprawled in the back seat of an MPV, wolfing down cake, muttering to himself in dissatisfaction: “So you basically just… paid a ransom to get me out? I thought you were going to ride in single-handed, storm the whole compound…”
That had earned him a light thump on the head — not hard — and then Ji Landong’s warm, dry hand had gathered him close, wiped the cream from the corner of his mouth, and Li Xingyun had been entirely content to press in and demand a kiss.
They’d kissed in the car. Ji Landong had looked exhausted, leaned back in the seat, running his fingers gently through Li Xingyun’s hair, his bloodshot eyes curved.
That day… what had Ji Landong said to him?
“When something can be solved with money, that’s the simplest kind of problem.”
Ji Landong had told him: there weren’t that many dramatic reversals in the world. Not that many heroes. If money could fix it, that was already pretty good.
Ji Landong had also told him: there were plenty of things in the world that money couldn’t fix.
When you were truly backed into a corner. No choice left. You had to pick the worst option.
Li Xingyun had pressed him to explain what the worst option was. But no matter how he asked, he never got a single word out of him — Li Xingyun had no way of imagining it on his own, of course. He was a young heir born with a silver spoon, whose greatest ordeal in life had been quarreling with his father and storming out with nothing.
…
Now, for the first time, Li Xingyun had some slight acquaintance with that unfamiliar territory.
He paid off the people blocking his path. Then a well-dressed, courteous representative appeared — contract in hand — smiling as he asked President Li if they might step aside to talk.
The subject was straightforward: Ji Landong was someone their employer wanted to destroy.
Whoever went to the trouble of engineering a cheap script just to humiliate someone wasn’t short of money — and people who weren’t short of money weren’t easily moved by it.
So if he wanted to take Ji Landong away, he’d need to give their employer a reason to be pleased.
Li Xingyun helped Ji Landong to sit, eased him carefully onto a stool by the door, and held his breath: “Gē.”
Ji Landong seemed not to have been outside in a long time. The sight of the sun had him in good spirits — he was watching a line of ants moving house along the ground. “Mm?”
Li Xingyun looked up and held his hand. He was thinking, actually — back to the day Ji Landong had come for him. Beyond the money, what had Ji Landong given up?
Why had he looked so exhausted that day.
Why had his face been so unnaturally pale, cold sweat along his throat and neck — had it really been as Ji Landong said? Running on empty, no sleep, too many days in a row. Just tired.
Li Xingyun touched Ji Landong’s face.
He steadied his voice: “Just sit here, Gē. Wait for me. I’ll take you back to the… back to the studio in a moment.”
“I’ve signed you,” Li Xingyun said. “From here on, I’m on your side. The two of us — we’re bound together.”
Ji Landong half-joked: “Why would you go and do something that miserable to yourself?”
Li Xingyun tried hard to pull the corners of his mouth up, shook his head, slipped off his jacket and draped it over Ji Landong. “Brainless fan. That’s just how it is — nothing unusual about it.”
Li Xingyun got to his feet and followed the well-groomed representative to the nearby “office.”
The System mushroom wriggled out from between the stones.
Even it couldn’t help its curiosity. It asked Ji Landong: 「When you went to get Li Xingyun back then — did anything else happen?」
The System was a Villain Redemption System. As the name implied, it only entered the world at the end stage, when the time came to settle the villain’s redemption score.
So it didn’t know the specific details of what had come before.
The good news was that Ji Landong’s redemption score had ticked upward — from 0% to 9%, still creeping slowly higher. It looked as though it would soon break into double digits.
That was normal enough, given that Ji Landong had been locked in this room for over a month before Li Xingyun arrived.
Today was the first time he’d seen the sun in more than a month.
The System asked Ji Landong: 「Did you get hurt getting Li Xingyun out? What did they make you do — drink? Hurt you?」
“Hmm?” Ji Landong thought back. “No.”
Film Emperor Ji had still had some small measure of standing in those days.
No one had hurt him.
Ji Landong said: “They just made me sit in a waiting room and watch a projected video. Over and over. A few hundred times.”
The System was somewhat startled: 「What video?」
“Security footage.” Ji Landong picked up a shard of broken glass, felt its edge, set it aside for another piece. “Surveillance footage — of me killing someone.”
A short clip. Under ten seconds — which made it easy to loop, dozens of times, hundreds of times. And because it was projected, there was nothing to smash.
Only light. Dust. White walls.
The System was struck silent.
Ji Landong held a piece of glass up toward the sun.
Broken empty beer bottles — there were plenty of them in the rubbish heap. With some patience, you could find one sharp enough.
They hadn’t left anything useful in the room.
Might as well thank this strange red-haired fan who had spoken for himself and dragged Ji Landong outside.
Ji Landong asked the mushroom: “When I was fifteen — I didn’t want to be a villain. Do you believe me?”
System: 「…Put the glass down first.」
Ji Landong was perfectly civil about it. He smiled. “Do you believe me?”
The redemption score lurched upward suddenly — completely anomalous. The System was sent into a sharp and frantic alarm, and hastily changed its approach: 「I believe you! Ji Landong, calm down. If you were wrongly accused, don’t you want to set the record straight? Prove to all those bastards—」
Ji Landong shook his head.
The glass shard — just barely sharp enough — cut through skin and flesh with patience. Blood seeped out.
The redemption score froze at 59.6%.
Ji Landong seemed faintly embarrassed. He offered the System some consolation: “That’s almost passing, isn’t it? Not that far off. Talk to your superiors, work something out.”
To hell with passing — the System had never been this frantic. It was madly pulling up data patches: 「Ji Landong, wait — I’m going through the records. I’m starting to think you might have been wrongfully accused.」
The System asked: 「Ji Landong, you’ve been in pain for a long time, haven’t you? You’re exhausted. All these years — you’ve been exhausted.」
「Nobody ever asked you why. And you’ve wanted someone to ask you — haven’t you? Ji Landong, I’m asking you now. Tell me what actually happened back then. Tell it to me. I’ll believe you. Think of me as a mushroom.」
The System had no idea which thing it had said right — or wrong — and the artificially inflated redemption score wavered once, then dissolved into nothing.
Ji Landong’s eyes dropped. His expression was still calm. He looked at it quietly.
The System realized the bleeding hand was empty.
Ji Landong had pressed the glass shard between his ribs. He was courteous about it, and apologized to the System: “I don’t really want to talk about it.”
He said: “It hurts.”