Shrine - Chapter 80
Chapter 80
For a fleeting moment, Ruan Ruan felt as if she had slipped into Shi Ran's body. She had never experienced a moment like this, as if they had truly become a community of shared destiny. Shi Ran was still a vessel, but this time, Ruan Ruan was sleeping within her shell.
Shi Ran quietly enveloped her, like a chrysalis.
Ruan Ruan remembered what Shi Ran had said: "If you can't even accept the truth, what about rumors? What about slander?"
She re-examined the incident. What the netizens said was based on facts; they had simply used speculation to fill in the parts they didn't know. It was a fact that she had chosen to spend the money at the auction instead of giving it to her mother to set up a shop. It was a fact that her own plump face and her mother's withered hair seemed like two opposite ends of life. It was a fact that she wasn't that filial, that she hadn't put the family who raised her first.
She had made the choice at the banquet, without considering the consequences, without calculating the gains and losses. Now was the time to bear them.
Because she had been abandoned, she had spent her whole life trying to please others. She had to be a very good daughter in exchange for a little love in her life, a very good colleague in exchange for a few opportunities at work. She would wake up early to brew sour plum soup for the film crew, but when she was forced to stay behind, none of the people who had drunk her soup were willing to turn back for her. She didn't even have the temper to feel resentful; the next day, she was still all smiles, saying it was nothing.
That auction was the one and only time in her life she had wanted to please only herself, and yet she was being judged for it. It was like a rude awakening, telling her that she simply didn't have the capital to do such a thing.
She was already under a magnifying glass, yet she had no works, no effective labels to her name. All she had was a space for people to endlessly speculate.
Too much imagination had been loaded onto her, because she herself was lacking, with nothing to prop it up.
She was actually very poor, but the internet judged her to be very rich. Rich in both money and spirit, so rich that she could be robbed and still have plenty of savings left over.
Perhaps everyone thought that Ruan Ruan, who had paid a sky-high price, was just showing off the arrogance of her sudden wealth. How could the people on the other side of the screen understand that it was the first, and only, distress signal she had sent out after being poor for more than twenty years.
But there was one person in this world who could. She sat in her study, a little tipsy from wine, flipping through the revised script.
Her phone was right beside her, just in case Ruan Ruan called, but it remained obediently quiet, like that lively yet perfectly measured little cat officer. Ruan Ruan probably didn't know that something similar had once happened to Shi Ran. Back then, a loan agreement had been exposed, claiming her parents had filed for bankruptcy without repaying their business debts. They had been pursued for hundreds of thousands for years, all while she was at the height of her fame and success.
In reality, after she started making money, Shi Ran had successively transferred a seven-figure sum to her father's bank card, hoping he would repay the debts as soon as possible. But her father had taken the money and invested it again, attempting to make a comeback, only to lose everything. It wasn't until the debt collection notice was posted online, emblazoned with "Shi Ran's" name, that Shi Ran learned the debt had never been paid at all.
Her management team contacted the other party and repaid the debt in full, with interest, and the situation gradually subsided. When the other party deleted their Weibo post, some people commented snidely, "So you won't pay unless you're exposed, huh?" "What were you doing all these years?" "You're sure quick to silence people now."
For a period of time after that, whenever she received an award, or when her residence was filmed for a reality show, there would always be those people, cursing her for living in a house worth tens of millions while her family owed someone else hundreds of thousands of their hard-earned money.
At that time, her mother's whereabouts were unknown, and she had almost no contact with her father. He hadn't even notified Shi Ran when he later remarried.
One day, Shi Ran received a text from him. Two words: Thank you. She stared at it for a while before remembering that the phone number probably belonged to her dad. He had wished her a happy birthday from it the previous year.
When she was being cursed back then, Shi Ran hadn't been too sad, because at the time she was still shielding herself from her own emotions. She would look at those comments as if they were criticizing a stranger. But today, listening to Ruan Ruan's living, breathing presence on the other end of the line, Shi Ran had asked her, "Do you need to be comforted?"
A belated, piercing pain emerged in her heart, an old wound that felt like it belonged to the Shi Ran in her early twenties.
She comforted Ruan Ruan through the phone line, and across the gulf of time, she also comforted the self she used to be.
"It can't be overcome."
"Don't try to find fairness in relationships that are at once the closest and the most distant. The people closest to you will sometimes join with total strangers to hold you hostage."
"The blood in familial bonds can be sweet, for some to enjoy their whole lives; or it can be bitter, for others to be punished by their whole lives."
An hour earlier, Shi Ran had been in a meeting with her colleagues at the company, opening a bottle of red wine and drinking as they talked.
Her commercial manager, Alice, said that Chu Ju's career was likely about to collapse. The tax authorities were preparing to investigate him. Hearing the rumors, the higher-ups were now holding back Non-Desire, waiting for an official announcement. Once it came out, the film, starring a "celebrity tainted by a legal scandal," would definitely not be getting a theatrical release.
Currently, the crew of Non-Desire had a few ways to handle this. The first was to gamble that Chu Ju was not in trouble, and wait until the investigation was over to go through review and release. The second was to recast and reshoot.
There was also a third path, which Sister Ren had hinted at. The investigation and official announcement would take at least half a year. They could take advantage of the fact that he hadn't been formally summoned yet, pull some strings with the review board to get the screening permit, and move the release date up to secure the box office revenue no matter what.
This would mean giving up on international film festivals, as many of them required a film to be a premiere for their main competition sections. But this might be the way to minimize their financial losses.
Sister Ren's implication was that she could help secure the screening permit, on the condition that Shi Ran starred in one of Director Tang's New Year's blockbuster films.
The day she heard this news, Alice had stated her opposition unequivocally: "No way."
Director Tang had a good reputation in his early years, but he had now fallen into a vicious cycle of money-grabbing. His big New Year's blockbusters from the past few years had all been heavily ridiculed, which was why he was now pinning his hopes on a "top-tier star" to bring in the big bucks. Shi Ran had always been protective of her reputation, and this was completely contrary to the trajectory of her career.
Besides, they didn't know how Sister Ren planned to operate—whether she would help push things through legitimate channels or use gray-area tactics. Obeying the law was their bottom line; they could not cross that red line.
With things at a stalemate, Alice politely declined, using the excuse that their schedule for the next two years was completely full. At the same time, she notified Zhao Ansheng to prepare for a reshoot. Shi Ran's side would cooperate with the reshoot for free, but given the numerous on-location scenes with actor interactions, Zhao Ansheng would have to rack her brains to raise the necessary funds.
On the other side, Ruan Ruan threw herself completely into the filming of Shrine's second season, taking it even more seriously than before.
She was now covered in mud. Her team couldn't sue over this kind of non-scandalous gossip, as it might provoke an even more severe public backlash. And she couldn't very well dissect the emotional history of her family for everyone. Therefore, she still said, "Just let it pass."
There was no way to prove her side of the story. She could only use Shrine to wipe the slate clean. Without realizing it, Shrine had become her lifeline.
Wu Mei came back to stay with her for a few days, making her restorative soups. The two of them were just like they had been back in their rented apartment, talking about everything under the sun, gossiping about the various film crews, only they no longer slept in the same bed.
Before joining the production, Ruan Ruan received another book of lottery tickets. She piously scratched them off and won 300 yuan. Wu Mei congratulated her on her win and asked if she wanted to treat the crew to something.
Ruan Ruan looked at the lottery ticket thoughtfully and asked, "How much is this whole book?"
Wu Mei leaned over to look. "600, I think."
Ruan Ruan lowered her gaze. "So actually, every time, it's a loss, isn't it?"
She suddenly realized that the so-called "lead actor's win" was actually a lie. No one ever truly won a grand prize that exceeded the cost of the tickets. Yet everyone was always cheerful, congratulating the person who scratched off 300 or 500 yuan, and then becoming certain that the show would be a huge hit.
Wu Mei was at a loss for words. Frowning, she said, "It's always been like this."
Yes, it had always been like this. It was just that Ruan Ruan's mindset had changed.
When she wasn't the lead actress, she and Wu Mei would look on from a corner, thinking that the people playing the main roles were blessed with luck. The money they scratched off naturally became a good omen; even one or two yuan was a gain. But now, Ruan Ruan was beginning to see the part that was lost. Three hundred was a loss, and one hundred was also a loss.
The first day of filming was May 10th. As usual, Ruan Ruan sent her monthly allowance to Zhou Jiafen.
Back when she wasn't so well-off, she had to pay her rent month by month, so she sent money home on a monthly basis as well. That hadn't changed.
She clicked on her transfer history, watched the money go through, and opened her chat window with her mom. Sometimes her mom would reply, "Received," and sometimes she would ask if she had eaten. This time, Zhou Jiafen didn't reply until the night shoot began; she had probably just closed up her stall.
She said: "Received it, ha. Have you eaten?"
A stand-in was helping with blocking and lighting tests nearby. Ruan Ruan couldn't discern her mother's tone from the text. She guessed that her mother probably didn't know about the storm online. It was better that way.
She started typing a simple reply before heading to work, but before she could finish the sentence, another message came through from the other side. It was from a voice input, and the conversion to text was so complete that it even included all the punctuation marks—the kind of completeness that suggested it was prepared in advance.
Zhou Jiafen said in her local dialect: "I'm exhausted. I went to look at an apartment today. Your uncle said a state-owned enterprise just opened a new development. The down payment is only five or six hundred thousand for a three-bedroom, two-living-room place. It's quite spacious."
Ruan Ruan stared at the block of text, dazed. So she had seen it. So she had known.
She still wanted to treat her like a child, coaxing the little girl by telling her to just drink a few doses of medicine and everything would be fine, dressing up a catastrophe to make it seem perfectly peaceful.
But Ruan Ruan was grown up now; she could hear the subtext. Her adoptive mother hadn't cared about the abuse she was suffering. Instead, she had chosen this moment to quietly extend her claws toward her.
The assistant director on set ran over and told Ruan Ruan to get ready.
Ruan Ruan walked under the bright lights and gazed at the prop shrine, which was brilliantly illuminated. Her mind instantly went blank.
She saw greedy desire, crisscrossing and tangled, and she didn't know whose it was. Was it Qiao Qiao's? Was it Shen Bai's? Was it the placid-toned Zhou Jiafen's? Or was it her own, as she struggled to survive drowning?
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