Over the following days, Lin Xun kept finding herself staying for meals at Old Mrs. Jiang’s place, always for one reason or another.

One time it was a burnt-out light bulb the old woman couldn’t manage to change herself, so she’d come upstairs specifically to ask for help. Lin Xun changed the bulb, and somehow ended up being fed dinner and asked for her phone number.

The second time, the old woman claimed she couldn’t get the digital TV to work and was making a scene about it at home. Shen Yu called Lin Xun about it, his calm voice carrying a thin edge of stiffness and frustration.

And so on.

By the end of the week, Boss Lin had visibly put on some weight.

She’d been thin her whole life. During adolescence she’d shot up in height without filling out at all, standing 165 centimeters but barely clearing ninety jin. A few extra pounds on her now actually did wonders for her complexion.

Lin Xun hadn’t noticed the change herself until one day Tang Huan walked past her workstation, stopped, and reversed course to stare at her.

After a long moment, Tang Huan said, in a tone thick with implication: “Are you seeing someone?”

Lin Xun looked up from her pile of scripts with an expression that said: what are you on about now.

Tang Huan reached over and poked her cheek. “Your face right now is like a flower that’s been wilting for ages and finally got some rain. Honestly, you look so good it’s making me jealous.”

“What kind of nonsense is that,” Lin Xun said, swatting the finger away with mild disdain. “No boyfriend. I just made a friend, I guess.”

“A friend?” Tang Huan’s eyes gleamed. “How old? Where do they live? Local household registration? What do they do?”

“Lives downstairs from me,” Lin Xun said, perfectly straight-faced. “Probably in her eighties. Local registration, yes.”

Tang Huan sucked in a breath and looked her up and down. “Didn’t see that coming, Boss Lin. Quite the taste you’ve got. Old man… does he bathe regularly?”

Lin Xun couldn’t help rolling her eyes.

“It’s an old woman. She keeps inviting me over for dinner, and her cooking is genuinely incredible. It’d be a waste if she never opened a restaurant.” If anything had been nourishing her, it was probably the stir-fried pork, steamed chicken wings, and poached fish.

Tang Huan looked at her thoroughly satisfied expression and scrunched her face in distaste. “Sometimes I genuinely don’t understand what you’re working so hard for. You don’t buy luxury goods, you don’t fool around with men, you can’t even be bothered to eat a decent meal. You are one of the ten great unsolved mysteries of the world.”

“I’m pretty curious too,” Lin Xun blinked at her. “You grind yourself into the ground every day, work yourself like a slave, and all that effort to earn money is for… fooling around with men?”

“…”

─ ⊹ ⊱ ⊰ ⊹ ─

By the time the second audition with Ruili came around, Lin Xun finally got to meet Yuanshan in person.

Unsurprisingly, he was thirty minutes late again.

When the recording studio doorbell rang, Lin Xun glanced up from her scripts. Through the glass door stood a man who looked to be around thirty, fairly tall, with refined, delicate features and a fashionable way of dressing. A pair of gold-rimmed glasses sat on the bridge of his nose.

She’d seen photos of him online. Between his looks and his voice, his Weibo following was probably eighty percent women.

Once she confirmed it was him, Lin Xun picked up her bag and stood, giving him a calm wave. “Yuanshan laoshi? I’m Lin Xun, from Nightingale Studio.”

Her manner wasn’t warm exactly, but she gave him face and made no mention of last time.

Though any normal person who’d been late twice without a word of apology ought to at least look a little sheepish.

Yuanshan simply nodded at her, expression neutral. His gaze landed on her dark hair and fair face and lingered there, briefly, just a beat longer than it should have.

There was something in his look, cool and distant, yet with an unsettling air of knowing.

A few seconds later, without bothering to say hello, he turned and walked straight toward the booked recording room. Ruili had made the reservation this time. Apparently it was the studio he always used.

Exceptionally talented people tend to have an attitude. That’s true in every industry.

Lin Xun couldn’t be bothered to take it personally. She picked up her script and followed him in at her own pace. Professional ability mattered more to her than personal character.

Inside the recording room, she handed Yuanshan the day’s audition script, gave him a brief rundown of what she needed from him, then walked into the adjacent control room.

The sound engineer was already there, monitoring headphones on, adjusting levels. Lin Xun sat down beside him, put on a second pair of headphones, and spoke through the intercom across the glass: “I sent you the script beforehand. I assume you’ve looked it over?”

Reading the script before entering the booth was basic professional conduct, whether you were a newcomer or a veteran voice actor.

Yuanshan said nothing. He sat down, lowered the condenser mic, and flipped the script open with a languid, unhurried air.

Lin Xun continued: “Please turn to the second paragraph on page three. That’s the climax of the whole drama. I pulled it out specifically. Take a moment to feel your way into it.”

He glanced up at her when she said that, then looked back down. His fingers leafed through the pages carelessly before landing, eventually, on the right one.

He’d barely read a few seconds when he raised his head again and asked, expression blank: “Can we start? I have other work after this. I’m pressed for time.”

Lin Xun said nothing. She lifted her wrist and checked her watch.

5:40.

He had been thirty-odd minutes late. He’d been in the recording booth for all of five or six minutes.

Lin Xun unconsciously ran her finger over the nightingale tattoo on the back of her left hand. Her voice came out flat and even, without a trace of irritation.

“Sure, let’s begin. Whether you make it to your next job on time, Yuanshan laoshi, is entirely up to you.”

The words didn’t land on him at all. He kept flipping through the script at the same unhurried pace.

Half a minute later, he cleared his throat and started reading from the page.

“…What a shame that our fates were never enough. Three lifetimes, and you never once had eyes for me. Perhaps, to you, your spiritual path and all living souls were always what mattered most.”

Listening through the monitor headphones to the dry track, Lin Xun had to admit his voice was genuinely exceptional.

It was nothing like Shen Yu’s naturally pleasing tone. Yuanshan’s speaking voice was actually unremarkable in ordinary conversation, but the moment he stepped into character, his technique showed. He worked his resonating chambers with precision, achieving a sound that was both penetrating and free of any oily affectation.

What was rarer still was his control over emotional nuance. By the end of that single line, the sense of brokenness and quiet disappointment was unmistakable.

Only…

Lin Xun cut him off, her face cold. “Have you not looked at this script at all? Those are Cangyue’s lines. She’s the female lead. The male lead is called Yuqingzi.”

Not having read the script was one thing. Not even knowing which character he was voicing was something else.

That was, frankly, a little too careless.

Yuanshan’s brow lifted slightly at that, then settled back down. He flipped through the script again with little care.

“What kind of ridiculous names are these. The men sound like women, the women sound like men. What a waste of my energy.”

Listening to that thoroughly impatient tone, Lin Xun pressed her tongue against the back of her teeth.

The sound engineer, catching the tension in the room, began pressing random buttons on the mixing board with no real purpose, not daring to breathe, the picture of studied indifference.

After a moment, Lin Xun closed her script, leaned forward, and said quietly to the engineer: “Could you give us a few minutes? I need to speak with the talent.”

The engineer looked like a man granted amnesty. He pulled off his headphones and walked out, thoughtful enough to close the door behind him.

“Go ahead,” Lin Xun said, pulling the intercom mic toward her and settling back against her chair, keeping her voice as measured as she could manage. “You’ve got a problem with me. Personal or professional? If it’s fixable, let’s fix it today.”

Even she, with her limited feel for interpersonal dynamics, could sense the hostility coming off Yuanshan.

After what Cheng Meng had said last time, Lin Xun had looked him up online. By all accounts, Yuanshan was at most a little arrogant. His reputation in the industry was otherwise solid.

Which meant whatever this was, it was directed at her specifically, or at Nightingale Studio.

Yuanshan heard her come straight to the point. His gaze drifted across her face, unhurried and blank, with no apparent interest in actually communicating. He didn’t even offer eye contact.

He stood up, tossed the script aside without a care, and headed for the door without once looking up.

“Since we’re not recording, I’ve got other jobs to get to. I won’t keep you company any longer. Money’s hard to come by these days, and some things just aren’t worth stomaching. Boss Lin, you’re very pretty, I’ll give you that. But if you think a face like that is enough to take shortcuts, I’d suggest changing careers while you still can. Audio dramas aren’t made for people like you.”

He walked out and let the door swing shut behind him, leaving Lin Xun sitting alone in the control room, blindsided, with no time to get a word back in.

A long silence followed. Boss Lin swore under her breath, and with a cold face and a stomach full of swallowed anger, she gathered the scripts spread across the console.

Then she went into the recording room and picked up the pages Yuanshan had thrown aside. They were covered in notes she had stayed up writing.

By the time everything was in order, most of the anger had burned itself out.

Lin Xun walked out of the recording studio, head down, turning things over in her mind as she went.

The collaboration was finished. There was no going back from this.

The rift was already there, and if she let that kind of attitude slide, the problems down the line would only get worse.

She didn’t know what Yuanshan’s issue was, but her instinct told her there was something behind it she wasn’t seeing.

Thinking of Ruili’s suspiciously generous offer, Lin Xun fished her phone out of her bag and called Zhou Zhou.

She ran her other errands at the supermarket, picking up some household things. When she passed the instant noodle aisle, she reached for a pack out of habit, then stopped herself.

She’d been eating dinner at Grandma Jiang’s almost every night lately. Her noodle supply at home had barely made a dent. She still had several cases left.

By the time she got back to her apartment building, Zhou Zhou was calling her back.

Lin Xun set her shopping bag down by the entrance, freed up her hand, and stepped over to the strip of greenery alongside the building to answer.

On the other end, Zhou Zhou’s voice came out halting, like toothpaste that wouldn’t squeeze.

Lin Xun asked, keeping her patience: “What exactly happened?”

“Uh… so I called Yuanshan, and he hung up on me directly. Boss, did you get into a fight with him? Is he badly hurt?”

He’d heard plenty of stories about the boss’s early days from Tang Huan.

“…” Yuanshan’s alarmed tone startled a dry laugh out of her. “Sorry to disappoint you. I didn’t lay a finger on him.”

She’d wanted to. He just made the mistake of running off too quickly after delivering his little speech.

“Good, good,” Zhou Zhou said, audibly relieved, then immediately started stumbling again. “Okay, but promise me first. Promise you won’t go looking for a fight after I tell you.”

Lin Xun’s patience ran out. “Talk.”

“I called a few more times before he picked up. From what I could gather, someone senior at Ruili’s audio department ordered him to take our offer directly. Not only did they push his rate down, they told him to drop the higher-profile projects he had lined up next quarter and focus entirely on voicing for us. And Yuanshan also said…”

Zhou Zhou trailed off and swallowed.

Lin Xun prodded him without heat: “Go on.”

He sped up. “He said everyone already knows how it works, and he was prepared to swallow the loss quietly. So why did you have to put on this whole upstanding act, trying to have it both ways, being a… ahem… while still acting like you’re above it all?”

“…”

Lin Xun could tell he’d censored himself just then, but that wasn’t what her attention was on.

“Senior staff at Ruili. Who?”

Zhou Zhou was equally in the dark. From the sound of it, Yuanshan suspected the boss had used her looks to get close to someone high up at Ruili, who then pressured him on her behalf.

But Zhou Zhou had handled every step of the outreach and negotiations himself. The boss didn’t even have Ruili’s contact information.

Lin Xun was quiet for a moment, then said: “Understood. Go home and rest. I’ll figure out the casting.”

She ended the call, thought for a moment, then rang Tang Huan. “Do you know who’s running Ruili’s audio division?”

Tang Huan caught the seriousness in her voice and took a moment to think. “Ruili is a subsidiary of the Ning Group. The audio division should be under Young Mr. Ning, a branch of the family.”

“The Ning Group. Which Ning?”

“The Zhoushan Nings. The ones acquired by the Shen family a couple of years back. Made their money in liquor.”

Lin Xun paused. “This Young Mr. Ning you’re talking about. His name wouldn’t happen to be Ning Lang, would it?”

“I don’t know his name, just that he’s young, probably around our age… Why, do you know him?”

“…”

A long silence.

“Yeah,” Lin Xun said. “We went to high school together.”

She left it at that, ended the call, and stood still for a moment before picking up her bags and heading inside.

She’d barely stepped through the entrance when she stopped.

Someone was sitting on the steps at the bottom of the dim stairwell. Black jacket, black trousers, long legs stretched out in front of him. Even seated, his height was apparent, his frame making the narrow staircase look smaller than it was.

A matte black laptop lay open across his knees.

The last of the evening light barely reached the landing. A cold draft moved through the corridor. The pale glow of the screen lit one half of his face; the other half dissolved into the deepening dark.

His face was narrow, with striking brow bones, a clean nose, a thin mouth, a defined jaw. Handsome to the point of something almost unsettling.

After a moment, Shen Yu closed the laptop. His voice came out slow and unhurried. “…I wasn’t trying to listen to your call. I forgot my keys.”

Lin Xun raised an eyebrow. So he wasn’t trying to listen, but he’d heard it all the same?