BXBX NOVEL Chapter 34: 034
Chapter 34
"Woohoo! Chi Qiao, come quick and see!" he shouts, hanging onto the doorframe, to two people who just walked up.
Chi Qiao's expression remains neutral. Several suitcases are in front of him, including Yao Shuo's. Yao Shuo is still on the fifth floor, his heavy panting and shouting audible even from here.
"I'm dying... How is there another floor... Ah..." Yao Shuo felt his life slipping away when he reached the third floor with his luggage, only to realize he had to climb to the sixth floor where they lived.
Chi Qiao looks at Ye Xing with an exasperated expression, then gestures, "I'll go down one more time."
Hearing this, Ye Xing trots over, also wanting to go down and see the commotion.
The two go down a floor to find Yao Shuo leaning against the wall, hands on his knees, unable to lift his head. Seeing this, Chi Qiao immediately tells Ye Xing, "I'll pull him from the front, you push from behind."
Ye Xing nods, "It's just move-in day today, but how will you manage after practice when returning to the dorm?"
"...?" Yao Shuo is too exhausted to speak, but his stubborn head still manages a reaction.
Meanwhile, the scene switches to the third floor.
Pei Luming finds his room, piles his suitcases at the door, and runs towards the stairs, calling out to Gao Xiayu behind him, "Bro! We're across from each other!"
He runs back to double-check, then returns to the stairwell, "Wang Silu, you and Chen Wu are across from each other, we're all next to each other!"
Pei Luming's boundless energy forms a stark contrast to Yao Shuo.
By this point in the broadcast, several people have appeared on screen. To prevent viewers from getting confused, character prompts and small arrows appear above their heads, like bus tickets floating above them.
The prompt above Pei Luming's head keeps changing.
"Pei Luming"
"Youngest Pei Luming"
"This is Pei Luming"
"Energetic Pei Luming"
Next are scenes of various trainees moving into their dorms, along with a brief introduction to the campus environment.
Today is the trainees' first day in the complex, with no training schedule.
Liu Yue glances down; most of the danmaku comments are busy trying to recognize faces, with Ye Xing being the most asked about.
"This one is so handsome!"
"Ye Xing Ye Xing Ye Xing Ye Xing Ye Xing!"
"Welcome everyone to the Ye Xing fanclub, visual and main vocal, invest now!"
By the time she watches the trainees' progress on their first day of classes, Liu Yue can pretty much guess who will make it into the debut group.
Sometimes the production team might not even do it intentionally, they just edit in the trainees with interesting moments, or focus on one trainee for a particular event. This is what editors and producers have to choose when faced with hundreds of hours of footage.
But it's precisely this selection that can determine the fate of many trainees.
The reality is, trainees with more screen time get exposure, and exposure generates fans. The opposite is true for trainees with little screen time.
Liu Yue has watched many survival shows, and many manipulate rankings through editing. She feels this show is similar.
But as she keeps watching, she notices something different. This show seems to allocate screen time to every trainee. The result is that viewers can only remember people by their faces or specific events, but can't remember many.
She's even feeling a bit dizzy from it all.
The first episode is three hours long, editing together the trainees' practice situations over a month. Unlike the constantly high-pressure atmosphere of other survival shows, this one feels more like raising children.
"Do the trainees' courses include tutoring? Why is there even English?"
"So funny, Pei Luming crying while saying he doesn't want to go to school."
"Sang Mo got scolded by the company staff sister because his monthly test scores dropped hahaha why do you even manage this?"
"They still have to go to school? So cute!"
"I thought becoming a trainee meant not having to go to school anymore."
"Some even have to take high-speed rail and flights to come."
"English speaking class time is when Chen Wu suffers the most."
"Acting out my classes."
"They even have to learn Korean!? You guys have it tough!"
The first half leaves Liu Yue feeling dizzy, but towards the end she realizes she remembers quite a few people besides Ye Xing.
Among them is the trainee called Sang Mo. He's very handsome, but not in the youthful way Ye Xing is. His aura is very similar to Chi Qiao's - cool personality, loves to dress up, tall, attracting a lot of attention as soon as he appears.
Every time the camera cuts to him, the danmaku comments increase.
He and Chi Qiao are then dubbed the "Campus Peacocks."
Even though they all wear the same white practice clothes, these two always find ways to add color to their outfits, strutting around like peacocks, visiting different rooms and showing off.
Whenever these two appear, the danmaku calls them peacocks.
Sang Mo is the purple peacock, Chi Qiao is the colorful peacock.
As they keep calling them this, the danmaku changes to:
"Peacocks! You two aren't practicing properly and running around again!"
"Peacocks hahaha, who came up with that name!"
"Little birds, you're off playing basketball again, keep it up and Yao Shuo will scold you again."
The first episode ends with their pre-check, and the viewers who were originally gleefully enjoying themselves start agreeing with the teachers' words, feeling that they indeed haven't been very serious.
Sitting in the middle, Liu Jiajia's face looks grim, her brows furrowed, "Wait till Jiang Producer comes back, let's see how you deal with it."
"They deserve to be scolded, the peacocks are always off playing basketball."
"But their practice time is already limited, they can only practice in the evenings and on weekends, they're playing basketball because the teachers aren't here."
"Give the scolding a rest, didn't you see earlier that many are newly joined trainees?"
"It's fine, every survival show has some weaker ones, right? You've seen too many pre-recorded stages with audio editing, can't handle unedited ones?"
"I don't understand why Yao Shuo got such a low score..."
"What's not to understand, sis? This is about selecting a boy group, not a bunch of center positions."
The danmaku is also arguing, some being strict, others indulgent.
This is just the first episode, released without any prior promotion or warning. Most of the viewers are people who usually pay attention to Random Entertainment's trainees, but it still managed to heat up.
When Liu Yue opens Weibo to check, they've already set up super topics. Not only for the show, but some trainees even have support groups already.
"That's so fast..." Liu Yue marvels.
She's about to put down her phone when she suddenly remembers something, "I think I saw voting rules earlier..." It said to check the app.
Liu Yue grabs a wet wipe to clean her hands, then picks up her phone again.
The app's splash screen is the show's poster. In the menu bar at the bottom, there's an icon with a small sprout - obviously this is it.
When Liu Yue clicks in, the voting rules pop up. She quickly reads through them.
"...Each user gets one free round of voting per day, choosing seven trainees they want to see perform solo stages... The seven positions can't be repeated."
"Seven yuan per round, no upper limit... This money-grubbing company." Liu Yue is speechless after reading, but then says, "Whatever, at least they're not making me buy a membership or products."
Voting is only open for a week, as the first public solo stage selections have already been decided, so there's no voting channel open for that.
"I hate these votes where you have to pick several at once, it requires calculation." Liu Yue holds her forehead, already imagining her future.
When she exits the voting interface, a window pops up asking: "Ticket sales for the first public performance of '21 Heartbeats of Youth' are now open, click to jump to the page."
"Oh right right right!" Liu Yue almost forgot about this. She had noticed earlier while watching that Ye Xing made it into the top seven, meaning he has a solo stage.
Liu Yue's timing is perfect, catching the ticket sales just as they open. When she enters the seat selection interface, Liu Yue directly chooses a seat in the first row of the inner section.
When she went this time, she originally chose the stands, thinking of taking some photos and videos. However, with several staff members standing right next to her, Liu Yue didn't even dare to take out her camera.
If the preliminaries were like this, the first public performance would probably be even stricter. Liu Yue gave up entirely and chose a front-row seat in the inner field to watch the show properly.
But when it came time to pay, she realized—
"580 yuan?"
She had only focused on selecting a seat, not paying attention to the price.
Liu Yue's hand hesitated as she was about to pay, not because it was expensive, but because it was too cheap. She had only seen such low prices when chasing concerts in Korea.
After quickly paying, she returned to the seat selection interface. A pop-up reminded her that each person could only purchase one ticket, but she could still see a bit of the price indication map in the lower corner.
"89 yuan?" Liu Yue was shocked again.
She saw that one area's ticket price was listed as 89 yuan.
She quickly took a screenshot, intending to ask about it in the fan forum, only to find that someone had already asked, and the comment section had already discussed it for hundreds of posts.
"You say they have no conscience, their concert tickets are at most 580, cheapest 89. You say they have a conscience, but voting once costs 7 yuan... Random Entertainment, I really, you're killing me."
"I originally wanted to choose the inner field, but when I saw the mountaintop tickets were 89, I felt like I'd be failing my Chinese bloodline if I didn't take advantage of this deal."
"Sisters, that's not the point now. The point is, did you get the photo cards this time?"
"No Ye Xing, so I sold them all off, five yuan each."
"What? I didn't get any photo cards this time!"
"Ye Xing has a solo stage in the first public performance, so the next photo cards should have him!"
"Only inner field audience gets photo cards."
"...Damn!"
"You can return tickets and reselect within a week, hurry!"
Among the comments discussing concert tickets, one comment was upvoted to the top.
This comment included a picture, which showed the photo cards given out for this preliminary round, but they looked a bit different from what others had received.
"I saw the envelope said 'winter limited edition photo cards,' and wondered how they were limited. After opening, I found they were all wearing thick winter clothes. But everything changed when I got back to Harbin. I had just left the airport, thinking of throwing away the cards since they wouldn't make much money anyway and were taking up space in my pocket. But when I took them out of my bag for a look, they had become like this..."
"Holy crap?"
"????????"
"Wait, let me go find my photo cards?"
"What have my eyes just seen?"
Many people who had received photo cards kept comparing the pictures on their phones with their cards. The only difference between the cards in their hands and the ones in the picture was — the background.
The cards in their hands had no background, just a figure wearing winter clothes with the rest being transparent. But the picture on the phone had a background.
The one being shown off was Pei Luming's photo card. He was wearing a fluffy hat and smiling brightly at the camera, holding a handful of snow. But his selfie pose didn't look like a solo photo, there was space left beside him. In their hands, that part was transparent, but in that person's hands, the originally transparent background had appeared.
The photo card's face was actually — Pei Luming with the snowman he had built.
"This set seems to be temperature-changing cards too, just for low temperatures, so no wonder it's winter limited edition. When I was in Beijing it was still transparent, but after I came back and looked at it for a while, the background appeared."
"Holy cr——"
"Ahhhhh I would really go crazy for this kind of photo card!"
"Random Entertainment, please share your technology, I'm begging!"
"I'm heading to Galaxy now to dig through the trash cans, so many people threw their cards there today."
"Ah... such a pity, no Ye Xing this time!"