Chapter 23: Ning Zechen's Brutal Truth

Hu Xiu never did figure out exactly how Zhao Xiaorou had managed to extract Ning Zechen's WeChat. Inside the Snowpiercer venue, surveillance cameras covered practically every corner — the zombie zones were the lone exception, and even those had minimal monitoring — while field controllers kept constant watch over the internal environment. And yet Ning Zechen had still written his number directly onto Zhao Xiaorou's palm, a gesture of such deliberate intimacy that any camera catching it would have cost him a two-thousand-yuan pay deduction without discussion.

After working until seven-thirty in the evening, Hu Xiu took the subway over, fully intending to spend the night listening to Zhao Xiaorou recount a week's worth of WeChat flirtation. She knocked on the door carrying cake and milk tea.

She opened it and found Ning Zechen.

He was wearing a white T-shirt and gray shorts, mouth full of half-finished salad, looking entirely at home.

The physique visible beneath that white T-shirt was a different proposition from Qin Xiaoyi's entirely. Qin Xiaoyi in white carried a certain clean, youthful freshness. Ning Zechen in white radiated something unambiguously different — a warm, animal vitality, sexuality worn so naturally it seemed incidental. He turned at the sound of the door, flashed a grin that managed to be simultaneously bright and completely vacant, and Hu Xiu understood at once: this silly, contented boy had been making himself at home here for several days already.

He looked her over with cheerful bluntness. "I thought you dressed like that deliberately to get Diao Zhiyu's attention, but it turns out it's just how you are."

The name landed on Hu Xiu like a splash of cold water, and warmth immediately climbed her face. She was wearing a brown fine-check blazer over black slim-fit trousers — one spot on the hem dirtied from the subway, which made the whole thing read slightly worn, slightly lived-in.

A voice drifted from the direction of the bathroom. "Dressing formally when you're working at a hospital is entirely normal. And don't be fooled by the rustic impression — that blazer cost over two thousand yuan. She really does not hold back on herself."

"Still not my type though," Ning Zechen replied, with the easy candor of someone who had already made himself family. "I prefer yours."

He dropped back onto the sofa and sprawled with complete physical confidence, legs wide, and stuffed an entire palm-sized lettuce wrap into his mouth at once, cheeks bulging out like a hamster storing provisions for winter, before working it down in a few powerful swallows. He chased it with a long pull of carbonated drink, the liquid audibly rushing down his throat in a manner that could only be described as feral.

Hu Xiu stared.

What arrived next was considerably more lethal.

Zhao Xiaorou emerged from the bathroom — fresh from the shower, wrapped in silk pajamas that left both shoulders and the full length of her legs bare, moving through the room with the unhurried, luminous ease of a movie star who has never once in her life been uncertain of the effect she produces. She crossed toward the bay window, stretched and turned in the lamplight like something decorative and perfectly placed, then settled onto Ning Zechen's lap with the lightness of a bird finding its branch.

"Feed me."

"How about what's already in my mouth?"

"Disgusting..." The laugh that followed shifted into something lower, warmer, entirely private. "You're so dirty. But — I love it."

Hu Xiu quietly assessed the situation and concluded it was time to leave.

The table told its own story: Caesar salad, two varieties of grilled meat power bowls, pesto pasta, three glasses of juice arranged by color — red, yellow, orange. Zhao Xiaorou had always ordered as though feeding a small party, grazing throughout the day and discarding whatever remained. With Ning Zechen in residence, apparently devouring everything in his path with unrelenting enthusiasm, the food waste problem had sorted itself out entirely.

A dozen small questions surfaced in Hu Xiu's mind — about how people lived like this, how friendships survived it, where professional ambitions went when life arranged itself so differently from the expected — and then she recognized the questions for what they were: the anxious calculations of someone who had absorbed too many conventional assumptions. She let them go. Never mind.

After they had eaten, Ning Zechen caught Hu Xiu looking at him and seemed neither embarrassed nor surprised. "Sorry — I eat the same way backstage too. Between leaving a scene and the next call, sometimes there's only five minutes. If you don't eat fast, you go hungry for the next two or three hours." He paused, as though something had just occurred to him. "Oh — I never introduced myself properly. Wang Wei."

Such a thoroughly ordinary name. Hu Xiu held a two-second silence in its honor. "I'll just call you Ning Zechen."

"Whatever works." His eyes had already moved to the cake she had brought, and his expression settled into uncomplicated appreciation. "That cream square looks incredible. It's been a long time since I had a break like this — this is what life is supposed to feel like. Standing on set every single day, my back is practically broken. Finding someone as beautiful as Rourou really is the best luck I've had."

His eyebrows communicated several additional things his words did not bother to say. In Hu Xiu's reading, Ning Zechen's satisfaction was not entirely attributable to the food.

Zhao Xiaorou slid from his lap, twisted to pull a fleece blanket from the back of the sofa and drape it loosely over her shoulders, then settled back with one leg resting across Ning Zechen's. His fingers moved along that leg in long, unhurried strokes, fluid and easy as water in the low lamplight.

Hu Xiu developed immediate goosebumps and directed her gaze firmly elsewhere — which Zhao Xiaorou noticed instantly. "Hu Xiu, if you'd asked Qin Xiaoyi for his WeChat when you had the chance, you might be the one enjoying an evening like this right now."

Milk tea came out of Hu Xiu's nose. Her face went the color of a steam locomotive at full pressure. "No, no, no, absolutely not—"

"Don't be taken in by the denial. Her head is completely full of indecent thoughts. Qin Xiaoyi carried her out of the Haunted House. With that level of physical proximity, if she hasn't had at least one erotic dream about it, she would be defying basic human nature."

Ning Zechen laughed and leaned back. "Diao Zhiyu loves pulling stunts like that. He's been playing Qin Xiaoyi for so long he genuinely thinks he's some kind of Prince Charming."

He stretched lazily, the white T-shirt pulling across his chest before springing back into place, and cast an easy glance around at the PR gift boxes and luxury packaging stacked throughout the apartment — seeming, if anything, deeply satisfied to be surrounded by such comfortable extravagance.

"My feelings for Qin Xiaoyi are entirely pure." Hu Xiu had absolutely no intention of telling Zhao Xiaorou or Ning Zechen about the dream — the one where she was being chased by zombies and Qin Xiaoyi scooped her up and ran, and they burst out at the forest's edge into a wash of sunlight and he kissed her, all of it as innocent and golden as something from an animated film. That particular piece of information would not be leaving her possession. The public humiliation alone would finish her.

Her feelings for Qin Xiaoyi were genuinely clean. Even entertaining the idea of dating him, she couldn't seem to access anything further — she had mentally processed him into someone so untouchable that even imagining holding his hand made her heart rate double with embarrassed, entirely wholesome feeling.

Zhao Xiaorou surveyed Hu Xiu's visibly burning cheeks and gave a small philosophical shrug. "Won't take his WeChat. Won't invite him up when he sees you home. Can't even produce a single erotic dream. Such Platonic devotion is truly tragic and heroic. I'm going to write your story down and enshrine it in a nunnery."

Ning Zechen laughed with his full chest.

His character inside Snowpiercer was a man of deep fidelity — someone who had loved Lin Qiumei since childhood, who concealed his identity while seizing power in Rong City, performing roughness and cunning like a second skin, frequently resembling an extremely well-armed outlaw.

The Ning Zechen sitting on this sofa, off the set entirely, also resembled an outlaw — specifically the kind so thoroughly saturated in physical confidence that he appeared to have allocated no processing power whatsoever to higher functions.

He studied Hu Xiu where she sat, held stiffly upright on the side sofa. "Is it because of a boyfriend that you won't do anything with Diao Zhiyu?"

"No, that man isn't—" Hu Xiu started quickly.

"Don't even bring it up." Zhao Xiaorou bit down on a piece of salad with audible crunch. "Even with Hu Xiu's questionable fashion instincts, she wouldn't touch that greasy-faced man. The one you saw was a blind date her father arranged — he won't leave and she can't make him go, and he's apparently been colluding with my ex-husband on top of it. Her father is a piece of work — because his own mother cheated, he's been emotionally blackmailing his daughter into early marriage ever since. But when parents say you're not getting any younger, it's time to settle down, what they actually mean is —"

"— you can't keep drifting through life so freely. It's time you understood what hardship really feels like and learned to function inside the world's constraints. The children who actually take that kind of parental advice seriously are probably all fundamentally good people — disciplined masochists who have found a way to flourish inside competitive misery."

Ning Zechen considered this. "Well. It doesn't really matter either way. Married women, women with boyfriends — we don't have any issue with them coming in and having romantic interactions with us during the game. It's all performance. There are plenty of married women who chase after Qin Xiaoyi, and he treats every single one of them with proper care and consideration."

Something lurched slightly in Hu Xiu's chest at this.

Ning Zechen settled deeper into the sofa cushions, warming to the subject. "We encounter every type imaginable — students, internet celebrities, people with obvious surgical work, those who go straight for coquettish, arrogant married women, second-generation wealthy heirs who book private sessions, the occasional actual celebrity."

"We recently ran an Arhat Game session where all sixteen participants were men. One gay guy took a particular liking to me, insisted on dancing together, then took me to the department store and asked me to help him pick out earrings."

"Thankfully Lin Qiumei and I are paired in the performance, otherwise he probably would have wanted to propose by the end of the night."

"Honestly, just because I work out doesn't make me gay. Desperation, it turns out, has absolutely no sense of demographic targeting."

Zhao Xiaorou dissolved into laughter. Hu Xiu laughed too — but something was beginning to accumulate in her chest, a quiet, gathering weight.

Ning Zechen offered her some salad. She waved it off without thinking. He noticed her expression and leaned forward slightly. "Aren't you curious what type of person Diao Zhiyu tends to attract?"

She said nothing. He continued on his own, unbothered.

"He's enormously popular with young women. The teenagers and early-twenties crowd don't call him Minister Qin the way you do — they all call him big brother."

"Married women too. They make eyes at Diao Zhiyu with extraordinary subtlety when they think no one is watching. And then there are the lolita types, and then the normally composed, slightly guarded types — ones like you — who all end up completely infatuated with him, one way or another."

"Is he... very popular?" The question came out smaller than she intended.

"Obviously. When you came for the group session, that was probably your first time, right? Once you meet the regulars, you'll understand what I mean."

"Among Snowpiercer's customer base, there's a group we call the Tycoon Ladies Club — four or five women who come together regularly, dozens of sessions under their belts. Sometimes they book two in a single day, not for any particular storyline objective, just to surround themselves with attractive men. Probably not the happiest situations at home."

"Once the Tycoon Ladies Club brought ten additional wealthy women for a full private booking. Both Qin Xiaoyi actors were working that night — playing Qin Xiao and the American military police respectively. Nobody was attempting any tasks. The handsome men were simply surrounded, covered in hands from every direction, barely able to move."

"Those older women wear thick perfume that can't quite cover a certain... staleness underneath. We comfort ourselves by deciding they genuinely like us. It keeps the shift manageable."

Something hot and defensive stirred in Hu Xiu. "Can't you refuse?"

"Why would we? Why would we be upset?"

"Do you really care that little about your own dignity?"

"Miss, you're still not quite understanding the situation. Making them happy means tips. You remember that QR code?"

"Our base daily wage is a few hundred. If we make the right people happy, we walk out with eight hundred to a thousand in tips on top of that."

"That's basically a host club."

"Everyone gets what they came for. Playing the scene with you is performing. Playing the scene with them is also performing — and we get paid either way. What exactly is the objection?"

The weight in Hu Xiu's chest settled lower with each of Ning Zechen's words, becoming something she recognized with slow, reluctant clarity. "So... it's all just acting."

"What else would it be? Our entire job is making customers feel something. Especially the regulars — they're the ones who keep coming back, and tips depend on repeat visits."

"Don't be misled by the way Qin Xiaoyi plays it with a certain dignity intact during performances. He still pulls in ten thousand a month in tips easily."

Zhao Xiaorou had gone quiet, listening with full attention.

"What about you?" she asked.

"Roughly the same. The people drawn to me tend to be — well, like you. Comfortable financially, with time to spare, and carrying some personal desire they haven't found another outlet for. I'm quite the married women's heartthrob, apparently."

Zhao Xiaorou stood and went to the refrigerator for beer, circled it once with dissatisfied eyes, then reached past everything and pulled out a bottle of whiskey instead, twisting the cap open with a single practiced motion. "Wang Wei. I've told you before — no performing in front of me, just be straightforward. But don't break Hu Xiu's heart either. If you hurt her, I will dump you."

"Understood." Ning Zechen's tone shifted into something more direct, less performance. "But we also need to make sure she isn't building something on an unrealistic foundation. We're all veteran NPCs — Escape Rooms, Live Action Role Playing Games, Sichuan-Chongqing style, Beijing style, playing ghosts and monsters. By the time any of us landed at Snowpiercer, the novelty of players had long since worn off."

"Live Action Role Playing Games run on setting and plot. Immersive Theater runs on interaction and experience. We have our own unwritten workplace rules, same as any profession."

"We know how to work each scene — how to read different types of women, how to tease, how to draw someone forward, what each person responds to. We each have our own methods that have been refined over time."

"And we don't take players seriously. Not truly. Everyone comes a handful of times for the newness of it, and once the novelty fades, they stop coming. We know this. We've watched it happen dozens of times. So we don't allow real feeling to develop. It's protection — for ourselves and, if we're being honest, for the players too. Just like, if you ever find me in the way of something you actually want, I can exit stage left with no drama."

Hu Xiu had been growing increasingly restless on the side sofa. She stood up, moved to the floor, and sat cross-legged, finding something to do with her hands — folding gift boxes and smoothing out sheets of wrapping paper, one after another.

Perhaps she couldn't process all of it cleanly, all at once. The Qin Xiaoyi she had been quietly building in her mind — someone genuine, someone who lit up differently when she arrived, someone who had stopped drinking and crossed a street at night just to find her — had, in the space of this single evening, become something less certain. Something more complicated. The image hadn't collapsed entirely, but it had developed fault lines.

Qin Xiaoyi and Diao Zhiyu. Two sides of a cassette tape — play one side in the walkman and you heard one thing, flip it and heard something entirely different. The magnetic layer could always be recorded over, the original signal made indistinguishable from everything layered on top of it.

Disappointment rose from somewhere deep, slow and unavoidable. And beneath it, unexpectedly, something that felt like concern — a faint, unasked-for worry about what it meant for young men to give themselves over entirely to a world that rewarded performance and trained them systematically away from genuine feeling. Whether that was good for them, in the long run, as human beings.

He had said Rong City was a melting pot. He could have said the same about society at large. And Hu Xiu was not, in full honesty, a person who had been perfectly good and uncalculating throughout her own life either.

"Hu Xiu, don't be sad about it." Ning Zechen's voice came differently now, stripped of its earlier performance quality. "We all like you too — and there's something you should know. That mixed-race looking Qin Xiaoyi actor?"

She glanced up.

"He only met you once, and after he quit he asked me about you specifically. Said he thought you were genuinely sharp. So don't fixate only on Diao Zhiyu. Snowpiercer has no shortage of actors."

A brief pause.

"And there's something else you should know about Diao Zhiyu. He's warm with everyone inside the game — he'll play along with the ones chasing money, he can't help but look after whoever seems pitiful, he counter-teases the ones who tease him, and the ones who take by force don't bother him either. He won't pull away if you take his hand. He won't flinch if you wrap your arm through his."

"But there's one particular type that gets him completely, specifically, without fail."

Hu Xiu said nothing. She waited.

"The ones who come back for him again and again, carrying something real. Who only romance him inside the game, who never look sideways at anyone else. That type wraps him around their finger every single time — he's genuinely, specifically susceptible to exactly that."

A pause that held some weight.

"Which means, Hu Xiu, that you are precisely that type. Without question. Every time he sees you after he finishes work, he lights up. He quit drinking. He crosses the street to find you. I've watched it happen."

"I... don't know whether to believe any of that."

"I, Ning Zechen, do not lie outside of Snowpiercer. That's a personal policy."

The three of them went quiet after that.

The television played on — a 2018 historical palace drama, currently depicting the moment a scheming court maid fell to her knees before the female lead, weeping with theatrical despair over the wrong she had committed.

Ning Zechen finished a piece of cake and gestured at the screen. "That girl was my classmate, actually. She graduated with honors and went into acting. She has speaking lines now."

"Just a palace maid role?"

"Getting lines at all is already considerable — crew seniority takes years to build, and having your own dedicated scenes doesn't come easily." He set down his fork. "For performance majors from institutions like the Central Academy of Drama or the Shanghai Theatre Academy, the entry threshold was never low. For those of us who came out of ordinary programs, extra work was the standard starting point. We've all been around enough beautiful people in our small circles to develop a reasonable sense of who might eventually go somewhere. When someone average-looking suddenly breaks through into fame, there's almost always a specific reason behind it that has nothing to do with talent."

Hu Xiu watched the slender female lead moving across the screen. "What does it actually take to become a star? A lead?"

"Great fame depends on fate more than anything else. How beautiful you are, how hard you work — neither of those matters as much as timing and the specific alignment of circumstances. At the root of it, it's luck."

Zhao Xiaorou drew on her cigarette, exhaling slowly. "I believe some actors simply have an undeniable spark, and when I encounter it I know immediately they'll make something of themselves. Being able to inhabit any role while maintaining genuine audience appeal — that's the thing that can't be manufactured."

"The young actors coming out of the industry lately all seem to have aged prematurely somehow — deep nasolabial folds at twenty-something, faces that could already pass for someone's mother before they hit thirty." She tapped her cigarette. "I don't have a particular TVB bias, but Hong Kong actors do consistently have something distinctive beyond technical good looks. When I scroll through gossip forums and encounter those persistently unpopular yet somehow consistently problematic types, I always find there's an entirely explicable reason why they never quite arrive."

"I suspect," Ning Zechen said pleasantly, "that you are subtly and elaborately referring to me."

Hu Xiu followed Zhao Xiaorou into the kitchen while she was retrieving ice, letting the noise of the television cover the distance. "What exactly are the two of you?" she asked, keeping her voice low. "Boyfriend and girlfriend, or just — a physical arrangement?"

"We're dating. Don't make it sound sordid — I've told you before this is exactly the type I like."

"But what if he's performing even now? You could get hurt."

"My ex-husband was an actor. What is there left to be afraid of?" Zhao Xiaorou scooped ice without looking up. "This profession requires a certain discretion as standard practice, which suits me fine — I have no interest in going public with anything. Before we started, I was clear about one condition: no performing with me. Complete honesty, complete transparency. This past week has been genuinely enjoyable. Especially in certain specific respects."

Hu Xiu hesitated. "Does Li Ai need to know about this?"

The ice scoop paused for exactly one second.

"No particular reason to keep it from him," Zhao Xiaorou said, and her voice gave away precisely nothing.

They returned to the living room together in silence.

Ning Zechen, bored and unsupervised with the remote control, had migrated from news to home shopping. A model filled the screen, demonstrating a product in fishnet stockings, and he pointed with the candid appreciation of a man who had never once in his life considered filtering himself. "Wow. Fishnet stockings. Incredibly sexy legs."

Zhao Xiaorou took a long, considered sip of her milk tea with her eyes serenely closed.

"That's also how we tie up cured pork for Chinese New Year."