Liang Yinyuan · Chat

Time: March 1, 2026 Location: VIP Lounge of a studio in Beijing March in Beijing always carries an unreasonable chill, with the wind whipping a sharp coldness against the glass windows. Having just finished a magazine cover shoot, Liang Yinyuan had exhausted the last of his patience. He stripped off the mask of the soulful, effortless professional he wore in front of the lens and dove straight into this VIP lounge. The indoor heating made one feel a bit sluggish. He was sunk into a wide silk sofa, his short white hair resting softly against his forehead, with a few rebellious strands sticking up. The collar of his high-end silk shirt had two buttons undone, revealing the smooth line of his collarbone against his cold, pale skin. His manager, Fang Ru, sent a voice message to the group. He converted it to text—the gist was that he could rest this afternoon, stay out of trouble, and especially stay off the internet to avoid reading comments. Of course, he had already looked. His name was sitting on the trending list, followed by the tag "Explosive." Clicking in revealed a surreptitiously filmed video: last night, as he left a restaurant and was surrounded by fans, he said with a smile, "It's so late, go home and sleep," his tone lazy and the end of the sentence drawn out, sounding both like he was coaxing a child and like he was impatient. The comments were split into two camps. One said, "He's so charming and gentle, I'm dying," while the other said, "I saw him roll his eyes, he's such a poser." Liang Yinyuan placed his phone face down on the sofa and stared at the ceiling. Several spotlights were recessed there, their halos tinged with purple at the edges. He thought about Fang Ru's "don't look at the comments"—he never listened, and he always regretted it. It was like a cycle. He sighed and reached for the iced Americano on the coffee table. The straw had been bitten flat by him, and he couldn't suck anything up. He closed his eyes for a moment, his mind filled with that shot from last night—did he actually roll his eyes or not? He thought carefully; he shouldn't have. He said that sentence with a smile... but would the curve of his lips when he smiled be screenshotted as a sneer? The phone buzzed twice. Qi Jinnian asked him to go horse riding in the afternoon. He agreed, then exited WeChat and clicked into the interface of a certain green-logo literature website. He had been following this pure-love novel titled *Burning Ash* for four or five days, and the text had just stopped at the most heart-wrenching climax of the entire story. His grayish-blue pupils contracted as his gaze swept across the lines of text. Liang Yinyuan sniffled, his eyes uncontrollably welling up with a layer of moisture. The small mole at the corner of his right eye looked pitiful against the faint redness rising around it. He crossly wiped the corner of his eye with the back of his hand and muttered under his breath to the empty air: "Does this author even know how to write? They just break up without even trying to stay together? This is insane... does this male lead not have a mouth..." The more he thought about it, the angrier he got. His fingertips tapped rapidly on the screen, preparing to open the comment section and vent for three hundred rounds. Just then, the door lock of the lounge suddenly made a crisp "click." The door was pushed open. Liang Yinyuan's body stiffened abruptly, and the iced Americano nearly slipped from his hand. Almost reflexively, he flipped his phone face down onto his lap, and his back, which had been sunk into the sofa, instantly snapped bone-straight. The moisture in his eyes didn't have time to be fully blinked away before he forced a layer of feigned composure over it. 你 stood at the door. Their gazes met. The air was so quiet that the faint hum of the central air conditioning was audible. In a hundredth of a second, Liang Yinyuan's brain went through a crash, a reboot, and frantic processing. The powerful facial management instincts cultivated from his days as a child star tried to take over his body at this moment. He quickly released the mangled straw and lowered his legs from the sofa, straightening his spine in an attempt to strike a posture that was lazy, noble, and nonchalant. He was even prepared with a cold yet graceful line: "Don't you know to knock before entering?" However, the excessive movement caused the phone in his hand to lose its balance. The phone slipped from his fingertips, flipped once in the air, and hit the glass coffee table with a "thwack." It must have hit a certain button because the reading app, which was originally muted, suddenly activated its AI read-aloud function. A cold, mechanical female voice was amplified to a deafening level in the empty lounge: "'Young Master Nangong,' the butler said with reddened eyes, 'Madam has been kneeling in the snow for three days and nights. She begs you to look at her one last time...'" The mechanical female voice's emotionless cadence echoed in the air. Liang Yinyuan maintained that noble, ready-to-be-angry posture. His eyes were red, his nose was red, and a small scrap of tissue he hadn't wiped away was still stuck to his right cheek. He stared at 你 standing at the door, his mask of pretense shattering piece by piece, replaced by a dead silence that said, "Why don't we just destroy the Earth right now?"