Makeup

The next day, when the livestream started again, viewers saw the bandage on Yu Mao’s forehead and, as expected, immediately exploded.

It took only the time it took to read the production team’s statement for the discussion to go from accusations to curses.

[@Star Brilliance Official Weibo: We are very sorry to inform everyone that during last night’s rehearsal, Mentor Zhao Xuan, while speaking with contestant Yu Mao, became emotionally unstable and shoved her, causing Yu Mao to lose her balance, fall, and get injured, resulting in a cut on her forehead. The production team immediately took emergency measures and quickly sent contestant Yu Mao to the hospital for treatment. She is now out of danger.

The production team has already taken serious action against Mentor Zhao Xuan. He also feels remorseful for this behavior and has provided Yu Mao with appropriate financial compensation. In view of the seriousness of this incident, the production team has decided to terminate its cooperation with Zhao Xuan.

We understand that the safety of every guest and staff member involved in the program is of utmost importance. To this end, we will strengthen safety supervision during the filming process to ensure that every part of production meets safety standards. We will also provide safety education and training to all guests and staff participating in the program.

We promise to learn from this incident and ensure the safety and health of all participants. We will continue to monitor contestant Yu Mao’s recovery and provide the necessary support and assistance.

This statement is hereby issued.]

The production team made no attempt to cover up what had happened last night; they didn’t spare Zhao Xuan a shred of face. Ignoring the official boilerplate, netizens distilled it down to two points:

1. Zhao Xuan shoved Yu Mao down and caused the head injury.

2. Zhao Xuan got kicked off the show.

The production team’s decisive abandonment of Zhao Xuan won everyone’s approval. Few people bothered to vent their anger on anyone else; instead, they all rushed straight to Zhao Xuan’s blog and cursed him out to his face.

Yu Mao’s hardcore fans, especially, were currently under the spell of their filter, loving their little cat to the point of life and death. Their combat power was terrifying; they had already escalated from insulting him in every way possible, from appearance to character, to cursing his whole family, and then to digging up his ancestors’ graves.

Yu Mao couldn’t see such a magnificent scene. If she had, she would probably have said, quite satisfied, that he had it coming.

From the very first day of the show, when Zhao Xuan put Nan Changgeng in an awkward position, that man had already been sentenced to death in her heart. Even if he hadn’t jumped out this quickly, she would still have taken revenge after leaving the show.

This only came a little earlier. Unfortunately, it would cost her time with Changgeng, and that made her somewhat unhappy.

Today was the first public performance, and the whole atmosphere of the program had grown tense. The contestants were all caught up in excitement and anxiety, throwing themselves into their makeup with great fervor.

In the makeup room, Xu Yang pouted miserably at her reflection in the mirror, sitting on a stool and bouncing one leg after the other.

She hated makeup. Hated it especially.

There were only so many makeup artists on this lousy show, nowhere near enough to cover every contestant. They had to apply their own base makeup first, then let the makeup artists make detailed adjustments.

She had already learned from the other contestants and put on a layer of foundation herself, but for everything else she was completely at a loss. She did not want to spend several more hours painstakingly creating a face that looked no different from bare skin.

A shadow flickered in the mirror; some cat quietly drifted past behind her.

Xu Yang spun around sharply. Following the direction it had gone, she looked to her left and saw that Yu Mao, unable to sit still on a stool, had already moved next to Nan Changgeng and crouched down beside her.

Those bloodless lips, that pale face—it was obvious at a glance that she hadn’t put on a thing.

Nan Changgeng was powdering her face. Seeing this, she glanced down but said nothing; instead, she freed one hand and rubbed Yu Mao’s hair.

Yu Mao tilted her head up and stared unabashedly at the woman’s makeup movements.

After a moment, Nan Changgeng put down the powder compact, took a lipstick in a lighter shade, opened it, and twisted the tube up with her finger.

Then she turned around, lowered her head, and reached out to pinch the girl’s chin. A faint smile lingered at the corner of her lips, while her gray-blue eyes, shadowed without light, resembled the undercurrent beneath a churning sea; they always seemed to hold some deeper meaning.

Yu Mao’s pupils trembled slightly. Her gaze skimmed over the strands of hair hanging down beside Nan Changgeng’s face and met the dark swells carrying that gray sea, as if she were seeing heaven and earth turned upside down.

A slightly moist touch brushed over her lips, sliding lightly from left to right before settling on her lower lip and leaving behind two slick, itchy traces.

“Better. You’ve got some color now.”

Nan Changgeng nodded in satisfaction, let go of her hand, and put the lipstick back.

Xu Yang watched their actions. Her eyes suddenly lit up. She grabbed a lipstick at random, smeared it across her own mouth, then checked herself in the mirror from side to side, unable to help smiling.

Nice, nice; this lazy trick was great, and she wasn’t the only one doing it, so it probably wouldn’t stand out.

Except for the viewers in her own livestream room, no one noticed her peeking.

More netizens were drawn to the interaction between Nan Changgeng and Yu Mao, and some keenly sensed that today was unusual. Unlike their usual affectionate, pet-and-owner-like interaction, this time the atmosphere was strangely tinged with something ambiguous; it drifted lightly like mist, faintly visible and yet possibly just an illusion.

The girl’s skin was a sickly pale. A shallow red fingerprint remained on her chin from the brief pressure. She pressed her lips together lightly, then couldn’t help extending the tip of her tongue to lick at the gnawing itch.

“Don’t lick it; it’ll smear.”

Nan Changgeng poked her on the forehead. Her index finger was long and slender, and her tone carried a hint of playful reproach.

The cool touch on her forehead was like a drop of rain falling into water, leaving ripples that slowly spread.

Yu Mao’s lashes fluttered once. Then she opened her eyes wide, swallowed quietly, and used her teeth to press and scrape against the inside of her lower lip. After a long moment, a soft breath spilled from her throat.

“Changgeng… does it look good?”

At this, Nan Changgeng lowered her head again and studied the girl’s face seriously.

That face was certainly beautiful, as if it had been carefully carved by hand; its delicacy was almost like computer modeling. Her eating habits were poor, and her body clearly wasn’t healthy, yet strangely that didn’t affect her skin at all. It was so fine and smooth that pores were almost impossible to see.

A face like this would seem pretty ordinary in a 2D world, but transplanted into reality, it inevitably gave off a faintly artificial, human-made kind of uncanniness.

Nan Changgeng’s brows suddenly pinched. A thought flashed through her mind, but she couldn’t catch it clearly. Looking at Yu Mao again, she only felt that she looked a little like she was wearing a perfectly featureless human-skin mask, so she reached out and pinched her cheek again.

Yu Mao didn’t move. Her lashes trembled lightly, and her eye sockets seemed to hold two transparent black jewels soaked in water, glimmering with a clear bit of reflected light.

Her body was small, curled into a little ball, crouched there beside Nan Changgeng’s feet.

Young, soft, translucent; not quite like a being that belonged to the human world.

The woman’s mind drifted slightly. Her fingertips slid upward and brushed Yu Mao’s eyes and brows.

They were naturally shaped brows, standard and well-proportioned; they looked fluffy, but the color was rather pale, a yellowish dry tone like malnutrition.

Like the worn, aged colors of an ancient painting, long years soaked into it, carrying a damp, yellowed antiquity and a thin layer of dust.

But honestly, this touch of lip color didn’t really suit her face; it was too bright a red, as if thick oil paint had been smeared across a pale ink-wash painting.

And yet Nan Changgeng was rather pleased with it, as though that streak of crimson had forcibly grounded the pale figure, tying it to the mundane world and making it feel far less unreal at a glance.

“I think it looks very good. You can stand up and look in the mirror.”

Yu Mao nodded, then shook her head. “As long as you like it.”

Nan Changgeng laughed softly, with a trace of helplessness; she wasn’t surprised at all. She bent a finger and flicked the tuft of hair sticking up on Yu Mao’s head, her tone teasing. “Careful, or you’ll get a stiff neck.”

With that, she lifted her head as if nothing had happened and returned to her makeup, blue eyes falling onto the mirror.

Yu Mao froze. Her lips parted a little, and she forgot to blink as she stared up at her. The trace left by the woman’s fingertips was still slowly crawling across her cheek, a dense, wriggling itch that seemed about to spread deeper into the flesh.

She was opening every pore of her senses to feel the shift in emotion Nan Changgeng had briefly revealed.

Something seemed different from before.

After a pause, her eyes moved slightly. She lowered her head and set her gaze level on the hem of the woman’s top.

It was a burgundy cashmere suit, its texture fine and warm, with a deep undertone that suited her cool, pale skin very well. The jacket wasn’t buttoned; the hem hung down over her legs, with a small fold tucked inward.

Yu Mao breathed quietly, feeling air move through her chest. Everything outside seemed extremely far away; even the arms folded over her abdomen and thighs felt distant now.

So she forgot her hands. She leaned in with only her head, leaned in again, then opened her lips and used her white little teeth to catch that corner of fabric and tug it loose, slowly smoothing it open.

Nan Changgeng noticed and lowered her head; just then, she met the girl’s upward glance.

Yu Mao clearly saw the faint tremor in those gray-blue eyes; two deep seas, and with the slightest sway they became so vast and surging, flooding with a haze she couldn’t understand.

Her open mouth closed unconsciously. She loosened her teeth, leaving only a red lip print merged into the burgundy fabric.

Her round cat eyes widened; black and bright, still innocent as ever.

Nan Changgeng’s breath stalled slightly. Her heart seemed struck by an electric current, sending through her a brief, intense jolt that went numb almost at once.

She didn’t get a chance to speak.

With a crisp clack, something heavy and plastic seemed to hit the floor. She turned toward the sound and, in the mirror directly behind her, met Chen Xia’s eyes.

A brief pause.

Chen Xia’s cool, delicate features were now somewhat dazed. Through the mirror’s reflection, she stared at the unobtrusive red mark on Nan Changgeng’s hem, one hand suspended in midair; on the floor, a bottle of cosmetics rolled over to Lin Baiyu’s feet.

A fair hand reached down and picked it up.

“Are you getting Parkinson’s or something? You can drop that too? Good thing it didn’t break.”

The familiar bright voice brought her back to herself. Chen Xia turned her head and saw the cosmetics bottle placed back on the table, but she had no heart to check it.

Right now, all that remained was shock.

It was like being a lonely, wretched closeted girl secretly nursing a crush, forced to guard her sexuality’s secret in broad daylight, only to turn around and see two sapphics kissing behind her. That level of shock.

No, seriously… were they that bold, or were straight girls fearless? What straight girl could pull off something so ambiguous? The camera had been filming them the whole time, hadn’t it!

“What are you spacing out for? Like a block of wood.”

A head suddenly got shoved from the side, and Chen Xia’s thoughts were interrupted again. She pouted at Lin Baiyu unhappily. “You’re the block of wood, you huge blockhead with a missing screw!”

It was the kind of bickering schoolchildren got into; no one knew how much grievance was hidden in those words.

Lin Baiyu rolled her eyes, but out of the corner of her eye she caught the two people on the right and only then noticed the prolonged, one-up-one-down stare between Yu Mao and Nan Changgeng; the atmosphere carried a strange air.