After Wen Xinyi’s video finished playing, the trainees made some mental eliminations and realized only two people were left.
There was no need to say much about first place, it was definitely Quentin. The overwhelming gap between votes announced during the last ranking announcement was still astonishing even now.
From the start of the show until now, the top one spot had remained as stable as Mount Tai. The ones that left room for suspense had always been second place and third place.
However, now that Qi Yang had decided to withdraw from the competition, second place should have steadily fallen onto Wen Xinyi’s head.
But unexpectedly, Yan Qiao, whose votes had been hovering between fourth and fifth place, made a comeback by a narrow margin, surpassing Wen Xinyi by a margin of 500 votes, breaking into the top three for the first time and seizing the crown of second place.
Yan Qiao, who was sitting in the second row, appeared calm on the surface, but his fingers were tightly digging into the cushion, his knuckles turning white from the tension.
He heard whispers from the people behind him, words like “Only two people left, right?” “Quentin and… Yan Qiao?” “He is in second place?” drifting into his ears, making his throat dry and his heart pound at a speed comparable to the moment he first got an A rating in BKL’s monthly test.
He wondered if anyone could understand his feelings. Going from fourth place to second place might not seem like a big change, and it was just one ranking, not the final result…
But he was very happy, or perhaps, very satisfied.
Yan Qiao hadn’t forgotten that he had come to this show aiming for the center position. Unfortunately, he had thought he was a max-level grandmaster returning to a newbie village, only to unexpectedly encounter another max-level grandmaster in that same newbie village.
His max level was painstakingly cultivated to level 100, but Quentin’s max level was that the level cap was only 100.
It was like the final boss from after a game update, whose level cap had been raised, traveling back to before the game update, and directly crushing the confident player and leaving him dizzy and hopeless.
So Yan Qiao consciously adjusted his target down to NO.2. In his opinion, the reason Wen Xinyi and Qi Yang had higher votes was largely due to a boost from their old fans.
He himself was an undeuted trainee, and BKL had forbidden trainees from exposing themselves privately, so Yan Qiao had never appeared in the public eye before participating in the show.
Despite such a disadvantage, the vote difference between Yan Qiao and the top two wasn’t large. He believed he could eventually break into the top three and take second place.
Now that he had gotten his wish, he quietly let out a long breath, and his thumping heart gradually stabilized.
At that moment, his gaze fell on Quentin directly in front of him, watching the head of fluffy blonde hair that looked like a dandelion under the illumination of the screen light. The sense of satisfaction filling his heart became even more settled.
It’s great. The one taking first place was Quentin. He would follow in Quentin’s footsteps and debut together with him as second place.
Perhaps sensing his gaze, the blonde young man looked back. His green eyes were a deep, dark expanse in the dim, backlit environment, the line between light and darkness cutting across his explosively handsome face, making him look like the arrogant and aloof final boss in a manga.
…Of course, he wasn’t truly arrogant and aloof. It was just the automatic filter in the eyes of a pursuer constantly watching the back of a strong rival.
Yan Qiao stared openly at Quentin’s face, raising an eyebrow slightly. “What’s wrong?”
There wasn’t much expression on Quentin’s face, but when their eyes met, a faint, subtle hint of scrutiny vaguely emerged.
The young man next to him, with an arm slung over his shoulder, also turned around, seemingly oblivious to the atmosphere as he leaned in and grinned at Yan Qiao. “Tch, I knew I hadn’t misjudged you. You’ve always been good at playing with people’s feelings since childhood.”
Yan Qiao: “…?”
He shifted his gaze to the video that was playing and saw a little boy wearing a kindergarten uniform holding a large bouquet of wrapped roses, naturally handing out the flowers one by one to the little kids full of anticipation surrounding him.
Each child who received a rose thanked him in a sweet, high-pitched voice.
“Thank you, Qiaoqiao~”
“Wow, so pretty. Tomorrow I’ll bring candy for Qiaoqiao!”
Xue Mingzhu pinched his throat, mimicking the children’s speech: “Qiaoqiao is the most handsome boy in our class, I like Qiaoqiao the most. Tch.”
Yan Qiao: “…”
Quentin tilted his head, mimicking in a flat, expressionless tone: “No, I’m the one who likes Qiaoqiao the most. My flower is the prettiest.”
Wen Xinyi’s shoulders were shaking from the effort of holding back his laughter, and he joined in without hesitation: “But my flower is the biggest. Qiaoqiao even smiled at me when he gave me the flower. Qiaoqiao likes me the most, right?”
He had extensive experience with children, so he was also quite skilled at imitating the way they talked. Unlike Xue Mingzhu, who deliberately tried to be disgusting, or Quentin, whose tone was completely flat.
But was imitating that kind of talk perfectly really something to be proud of?
And was this level enough to make Yan Qiao feel embarrassed? Ha, far from it.
Yan Qiao raised his left hand and hooked it around Wen Xinyi’s neck, used his other hand to push aside Xue Mingzhu’s hand resting on Quentin’s shoulder, then reached his right arm forward to pull Quentin in, pressing him against his own chest. In this posture of having an arm around each of them, he calmly curled his lips into a smile at Xue Mingzhu.
Then, using that kind of tone for letting someone down gently, he said tactfully, “Sorry, liking me is useless. I already have them.”
“…”
Xue Mingzhu raised his fist and looked down at Quentin, who was lying on Yan Qiao’s lap, meeting his eyes. “What a punchable guy. Can I hit him?”
Quentin lay there serenely, like a steady out pancake, his eyes already closed.
Wen Xinyi politely raised his hand to apply and accused, “Please add me in. He’s riding two boats, which is terrible. Turns out QiaoQiao is a scumbag?”
Yan Qiao: “…Why did you join in too? Don’t learn from Xue Mingzhu. That kind of high school girl tone is making me want to throw up.”
With all this ruckus, Yan Qiao’s video passed by lightly.
Compared to the others, aside from a few recorded clips, most of Yan Qiao’s video consisted of vlogs he had recorded himself.
Yan Qiao’s explanation for this was: “The vlogs were homework assigned by the company. My parents are busy with work, so they probably don’t have many old videos of me. These were clearly sent to the production team by the company.”
Finally, they arrived at the highly anticipated segment. Ta-da! QT’s turn!
Since it was close to bedtime, plus the eye strain from watching videos for a long time, Quentin, pulled by Yan Qiao’s arm, leaned back and lay down on the lap of the person behind him, immediately starting to rest with his eyes closed, not intending to get up.
His way of resting with his eyes closed wasn’t shutting both eyes. Since they were recording a show, he couldn’t just sleep in front of the camera. So he kept one eye open and one eye closed, alternating which eye rested.
Yan Qiao looked down and saw Quentin’s incredibly lazy posture. He considerately helped pull the young man’s hood up. The hood was quite large for Quentin’s head, and the shadow cast by the brim could cover his eyes.
He reached out and squeezed Quentin’s shoulder a couple of times. “Sleepy already?”
Quentin yawned, lifted his hand to push the hood up a little, and squinted at the flickering screen. “…Not really. It’s almost over anyway.”
Everyone present was curious about Quentin’s videos. Even though he was saved for last, this curiosity hadn’t diminished.
How did Quentin, who was excellent at both singing and dancing while also having original songwriting skills, grow to this level? He seemed to love music so much, and could play almost any instrument. Was he, like Cui Yan, pushed hard by his parents from a young age?
Where were his parents from? He was mixed-race with blonde hair and green eyes. Even foreigners rarely had such pure blonde hair, right? They heard that mixed-race children looked like dolls when they were little. What had he looked like as a child?
Someone like him must have been a prominent figure among his peers from childhood to adulthood, right? He must have been very popular and had many friends, right?
As a child, Yan Qiao had generously given flowers to all the girls in his kindergarten class. As a child, was Quentin surrounded by everyone in his class and given flowers?
When people chat, they always say things like “When I was little…”, “When I was in high school…”, “When I signed with the company…”, “When I participated in such and such competition…”, but Quentin rarely mentioned his own past.
So, even after recording the show for over two months, the sense of mystery Quentin gave off hadn’t diminished but had instead grown stronger day by day.
And Quentin himself was actually more curious than all of them put together.
Given that the system hadn’t sent any videos to the production team, where did the director get the videos? It couldn’t be AI-generated, could it?
If they had extracted footage from his past life… that was even more absurd. As a child, no one had recorded videos of him. His mother had worked hard to raise him alone, and the person he spent most of his time with was his grandmother.
But his grandmother hadn’t been in good health. Her phone was an old person’s phone without internet access. The old woman had grown up in poverty her whole life and hadn’t developed the habit of using videos to document her grandchild’s growth. She just silently watched with her eyes and then reached out a hand to touch the child’s fuzzy head.
So, Quentin himself didn’t know what he had looked like as a child. There were no photos, and no videos. Who could remember things from over twenty years ago?
A faint light leaked from the black screen, and a cacophony of voices gradually rose. The camera shook, sometimes focusing on the crowded scene of bustling people around, sometimes panning up to show the blue and white sky.
It took two seconds for it to focus on the large, ornate Christmas tree at the center of the crowd.
The trainees whispered among themselves in confusion.
“Am I hearing this right? What they’re saying sounds like… English?”
“What language is that? Who took this video? They’re jabbering non-stop. My CET-4 English is being severely tested.”
“It is English, right? This is clearly not China.”
Xue Mingzhu stared in shock and slapped Quentin’s thigh hard. “Holy crap, Quentin, you lived abroad when you were little?”
Quentin didn’t speak. He was also very shocked.
The video was marked as 2012. Back then, he had only been five years old. At five, he was still in the countryside, climbing over walls to sneak into the neighbor’s yard to steal fruits to eat. Back then, no one had lived in the neighbor’s house, and Jin Sui hadn’t come to the countryside for winter or summer vacation yet.
What did this foreign Christmas street scene have to do with him?
Suddenly, someone pointed at the screen in surprise. “No, this person isn’t filming the Christmas tree. Look, there’s a kid under the tree!”
“Where, where? This filming is too shaky…”
“Holy crap! I see it! There’s a kid sitting in that pile of gift boxes!”
“Where? Can you zoom in? This is too blurry!”
Before the trainees could crane their necks for long, the person holding the phone also seemed to realize they were filming too far away and slowly zoomed in.
But after zooming in all the way, the Christmas tree disappeared from the frame entirely. Probably because the crowd was too dense, the filmer was jostled this way and that, and couldn’t seem to aim at their target properly for a while.
However, the filmer’s expressive tone was very noticeable. Even though what they were saying couldn’t be heard clearly, the surprise and admiration in their voice easily transcended the language barrier, raising the trainees’ expectations endlessly.
Some trainees with good English tried to pick out words from the noisy clamor: “…Something about a Christmas mall event… something about gifts… angel… they keep repeating beautiful, baby, and sweet face.”
More people were already protesting to the production team: “Director Wang! We need subtitles! Even the college entrance exam listening test isn’t this hard on people!”
Fang Xu, who had been quietly staring at the camera lingering on the Christmas tree, suddenly remembered something and softly muttered to himself, “It seems familiar… like I’ve seen this somewhere before…”
Was it on a foreign website?
