Today's school dismissal was eerily quieter than usual.
There was a lot of noise outside the corridor, but the owls in Class 4 were all well behaved. They packed their bags quietly and spoke in low voices, as if a tsunami was about to hit them from deep inside.
In the center of the vortex, Xie Lan threw his schoolbag behind him and turned to walk out.
Dou Sheng also followed behind with a bag hanging on his shoulder.
Both of them had a copy-pasted look of depression on their faces.
The stalemate stretched from the classroom to the front playground before Dou Sheng slowly opened up a gap.
"So—when did you first start to doubt?"
Xie Lan said nothing.
"I shouldn't have given away any clues. I've already informed Che Ziming and the others, and Mr. X has also agreed to it. I've even unfollowed him. We've compared everything from the set to the tableware in the Roujiang video. How did you see the problem?"
No wonder the list couldn’t be found, we unfollowed each other.
Witty bitch.
Xie Lan remained silent, and Dou Sheng frowned unconsciously.
After a while, he spoke again calmly: "You are quite strategic. You can even come up with such a trick. In order to expose my true identity, you even want to come on stage for inspection?"
Xie Lan looked forward, "No way."
"I used to think you were thin-skinned." Dou Sheng curled his lips.
Xie Lan smiled and replied, "I once thought you were a human being."
"..." Dou Sheng was a little unhappy, "Why are you still cursing?"
The distance between them kept changing with their disordered footsteps. When they walked out of the school gate, Xie Lan paused. "What on earth are you feeling guilty about? Why didn't you tell me your ID?"
Dou Sheng paused subtly after hearing this.
This matter with my cousin is neither a big deal nor a small one.
He never said anything because he felt that someone like Xie Lan might care. Not everyone can just laugh off the gender misunderstanding of a million people. He is thick-skinned and his fans are used to it, but it is hard to say for Xie Lan.
He knew his fans too well. If he suddenly clarified that his cousin was a man, they would say that he did whatever it took to keep his beloved girl. It would be better to keep quiet for half a month and then "inadvertently" mention that she had returned to England, and then let it go. It would be useless to let Xie Lan know now. It would not have any effect except to make him upset.
Besides! You can't blame him for mistaking a man for a woman at first. In that photo with a hairpin, Xie Lan looked pretty, fair-skinned and cute. It's not too much to mistake her for a little girl, right
Dou Sheng quickly recalled the comments section of his video, which should have been relatively clean, so he wrote lightly: "It was just for fun at the time, don't be too nervous."
Xie Lan turned his head and looked at him, his eyes narrowed slightly, "Are you serious?"
Dou Sheng hummed.
"You're kidding." Xie Lan sneered, "Forget it, I'll figure it out myself."
Neither of them spoke on the way home.
They sat together in the last row, each facing the door. Dou Sheng put on his headphones and scrolled through Bilibili, while Xie Lan stared out the window with an expressionless face.
He was a little confused.
He hadn't felt this awkward when he first saw through Dou Sheng's fake identity. He could sense that Dou Sheng was in a complicated mood, probably feeling guilty, and a little embarrassed and unhappy about being exposed in front of him. He was also a little angry, and seemed to have a subtle sense of being unjustified.
Zhao Wenying baked a sweet chiffon cake for midnight snack, but Dou Sheng just passed by the kitchen, glanced at her indifferently, said he was not hungry, and went upstairs. Xie Lan took a bite perfunctorily, and when he heard Dou Sheng close the door upstairs, he also got up and said he was going back to his room.
Zhao Wenying followed him upstairs and knocked on Dou Sheng's door. "Did you two have a fight?"
No one answered.
"No." Xie Lan stood at the door and said vaguely: "Aunt Zhao, go to bed early."
Zhao Wenying sighed in surprise, "No way, two teenagers can have a quarrel?"
She laughed for a long time, "Okay, we are all brothers living under the same roof, don't hurt our feelings if there is some awkwardness."
Xie Lan said quietly, "I won't quarrel with liars."
The door suddenly opened, and Dou Sheng asked, "Who are you calling a liar?"
His voice was really a little angry and fierce. Xie Lan was stunned and immediately asked back, "It's not you?"
"Hey, okay, okay." Seeing the situation was not good, Zhao Wenying immediately squeezed in between the two of them to stop them. However, a 1.6-meter-tall woman standing between two 1.8-meter-tall boys could not block their view at all. She could only raise her hands weakly and wave them back and forth like a windshield wiper.
Although there were very hard-working adults between them, the two could still feel each other's ferocity at such close proximity.
In addition to being fierce, there is also the tension of a young boy's temper surging at the critical moment.
Dou Sheng was very fierce, and Xie Lan was even more fierce. They glared at each other, and neither of them was willing to give in first.
In the end, Dou Sheng looked away first and said coldly, "Think whatever you want. I don't want to bother with you."
"Whatever you want." Xie Lan turned around at the same time, "The falling flowers have feelings, but the flowing water is ruthless."
Dou Sheng, who had already stepped one foot into the threshold, almost tripped.
Zhao Wenying was shocked and said, "Lanlan, who taught you this? Which one of you is Luohua?"
"It's him."
"It's him."
Dou Sheng kicked the door shut, and said, "You just recite idioms blindly with the dictionary."
"No one, our business." Xie Lan couldn't help but blurt out a sentence in English, and then he calmed down and said, "From now on, we will each take care of our own business!"
Dou Sheng said from inside: "Everyone should clean up the snow in front of their own door!"
"Sweep whatever you like."
Xie Lan returned to the room panting and closed the door.
Fucking bitch.
Annoyed, he put on his headphones, turned on the local news, and picked up a piece of paper and a pen to take notes.
The hostess's tablet voice rang out.
"A 25-year-old handsome guy turned from love to hate and angrily deleted his girlfriend's doctoral dissertation."
"The programmer was dissatisfied with his loli girlfriend's over-clinging and sent her to kindergarten."
"Two groups of stray cats were fighting in Hongqi Lane, attracting dozens of elderly people to watch."
I can't follow a single sentence, and I can't do the listening comprehension when I'm in a bad mood.
He looked down at his paper. The first two sentences were left blank, and the last sentence was written in a mess.
—The big cat and the second cat were fighting, which attracted ten Zhao Wenying to watch.
What a mess.
Xie Lan fiddled with his phone for a while, then his eyes fell on the small pink TV, and his excitement suddenly paused.
Open the app and search for "the most handsome man in the world".
Sure enough, there is one, with 1.01w followers and an ordinary bean as the avatar, the same as on WeChat.
Xie Lan clicked it casually.
Dou Sheng has been an up-master for two years and has contributed more than 100 videos, covering games, life, music, animation, digital learning... He has contributed to all kinds of videos.
The content of the videos is very diverse, or rather, very arbitrary. Two years ago, the first video was a sharing of photography techniques, followed by two game reviews, both of which had 50,000 to 60,000 views. By the fourth video, which should be considered a "debut" work, it was put in the learning area, with 8 million views, 3 million likes, and 1 million coins, which was terrifying.
—《From 500 in the school year to the top scorer in the high school entrance examination in one year》
Xie Lan was stunned for a while when he saw the title.
The video is an automatically played PPT, which uses a template with a phoenix tree leaf pattern. The map is organized according to the review methods and the amount of questions to be answered at each stage. The method of each stage corresponds to a transcript. As the methods are adjusted faster and faster, the exams are getting more frequent, and the curve of rising scores is terrifying, from 500 to 220, 130, 80, 40, 20, 5, 3, 2 - the last time was the high school entrance examination, and he ranked first in the city.
Xie Lan stared at the final screenshot of the score for a long time, then realized that he had completely immersed himself in the story and started sweating.
Then a hand appeared on the screen, a very familiar hand, making a "yeah" gesture.
There are two lines of words in the fade-out shot:
- There is little material in junior high school, so if you have a good method, you can learn it quickly.
- But the prerequisite is to gather energy and have light.
This video remains Dou Sheng's most viewed video to date.
After that, Dou Sheng's videos became more and more varied.
There are daily vlogs, travels with Zhao Wenying, following the trend to review dirty buns, playing horror games late at night, and writing lyrics to cover anime op...
He wanted to film a real-life documentary about his small business, so he set up an egg pancake stall seriously for two weeks last summer vacation. Later, he closed the business due to pressure from the Urban Management Bureau.
I wanted to film the life of a stray cat, so I tied a GoPro to Mimi. I broke three cameras but only managed to gather eight minutes of footage.
He wanted to capture the sound of heavy rain hitting the leaves of the sycamore trees, so he waited for a rainy night, bit the electric baton in his mouth, and went out without an umbrella, carrying the camera. Miraculously, amid the overwhelming sound of heavy rain, he was able to record the subtle and crisp difference of the rain hitting the sycamore trees.
Dou Sheng has had a hundred strange ideas, so there are a hundred strange videos.
very free.
Xie Lan flipped through them one by one, the background music, storyboards, scenes, sense of story, foreshadowing and turning points... the videos are getting better and better.
But he soon saw a slight fluctuation.
It started about three or four months ago, and the types of videos started to become monotonous, basically all game reviews.
The number of game reviews is very stable and not prone to errors, but it is much inferior to the previous youthful and energetic ones. The root of all this is a vlog in mid-December last year. The mood in the vlog was obviously not high, and the comment section was filled with thousands of comments.
- Don't feel bad, I'll definitely be in the top 100 next year
- Why? Didn't they spread the word that the uploaders of the miscellaneous investment categories would be given beans
- I don't understand, the total data exceeds gzys
- The main theme of gzys's video is completely copied from Douzi
- It does not constitute plagiarism, don't talk nonsense, this is at most following the trend, it disgusts you but you can't do anything about it
- Have you seen gzys's Weibo post, "Thanks to the humility of the same type of up master", I can screw him
- Alas, gzys cooperates well with official activities and his personality is stable. In fact, many passers-by think that Douzi is too crazy and naughty.
- Only family members know the goodness of beans. I feel sorry for them.
Xie Lan spent a lot of effort to finally figure out that gzys was "Young Master Ye Shen."
A quick search revealed that he had 1.1 million followers and was one of the top 100 up-loaders last year. His submissions were as diverse as Dou Sheng’s, and he even wrote that he was a high school student in his personal information column. His earlier videos were basically based on Dou Sheng’s topics, but he gradually developed his own content after he was ranked among the top 100.
After studying all this, Xie Lan suddenly felt his legs go numb. He had been browsing Bilibili for more than two hours without realizing it. The white paper in front of him for the listening test was full of numbers and time nodes written down casually. He unconsciously sorted out Dou Sheng's career line.
After all, this is his major, and he is quite ambitious in this regard.
In the latest video, both Gongzi Ye Shen and Dou Sheng contributed "dialects". Ye Shen flew to more than a dozen cities to find passers-by to record dialects. The drone footage was upgraded. The beautiful mountains and rivers and the great people are really attentive. 1.24 million views, 120,000 likes, 80,000 coins.
Dou Sheng's video is very plain. In addition to the material recorded with Xie Lan that night, there are also some recordings of other classmates speaking in their hometown dialect without showing their faces. Using montage techniques, they piece together a discrete but unified story line about hometown, ancestors and roots.
Without the Big Cat filter, Xie Lan also feels that Dou Sheng's works are more artistic and his simple production ideas are more touching.
But in terms of current data, Dou Sheng is slightly weaker, with 980,000 views, 120,000 likes, and 70,000 coins.
Xie Lan frowned hard and hissed in disbelief.
Knock knock.
The door rang.
Xie Lan glanced at the 00:25 on the top of his phone and paused before speaking, "Who?"
"I."
Dou Sheng's tone had returned to normal, "Come in."
I don’t know if it was because it was late at night and no one was around to make any noise, or if Dou Sheng had calmed down, but the ferocious look of a big cat just now was gone.
"Well, I brought you the goods for the deal we made today."
As he spoke, he put down a stack of bound materials.
Xie Lan was stunned for a moment before he remembered that it was the "Classic Argument for Composition" that he got in exchange for helping Yu Fei catch a cat.
"Ah." Xie Lan said dryly: "Thanks, leave it there."
"Have you eaten yet?" Dou Sheng asked as he stood at the door. "I just went down to the refrigerator and took out a lot. Do you want some?"
Xie Lan was stunned, "What?"
Dou Sheng placed a plate of chiffon cake and a piece of cocoa milk on his bedside table and muttered, "Eat if you want to, leave it alone if you don't want to."
Xie Lan retracted his gaze, "Yeah."
After a while, Dou Sheng said, "I slept."
Xie Lan didn't say anything. Dou Sheng walked out and turned back, whispering, "I was a little angry just now. Don't be angry. I was wrong in the first place."
"I'm not angry." Xie Lan lowered his head and quickly wrote the British ballad Pussy Cat on a piece of white paper, pointing to the earphones, "I'm practicing Chinese listening. I'm busy."
"Oh." Dou Sheng curled his lips and helped him close the door.
After the people left, Xie Lan put down his pen after a while.
He walked to the bedside table, picked up the cake with a fork and ate it in a few bites, then took two sips of the cool cocoa milk, which drowned the turbid air in his chest.
Some people have finally awakened to their humanity and realized that they are wrong.
snort.
Xie Lan curled her lips at the wall that separated the two rooms.
For cocoa milk's sake—he said to himself.
I picked up my phone again and clicked on the dialect video of the most handsome man in the world, and slowly and gently placed my finger on the small like button, pausing—
The pink progress circle slowly circled around the coin icon, turned a circle, blinged, and then disappeared.
Three consecutive recommendations successful!
Xie Lan snorted at the Bean avatar on the screen, "I'm fine."