“Where is he? Why did it suddenly go quiet?”
“Gu Yi?”
“Why did he suddenly stop halfway through ‘Clear Skies’?”
“Gu Yi… did he pass out again?”
Gu Yi stared blankly at everything before him.
Just moments ago, he had been having dinner with his coworkers. The instant he opened his eyes, he found himself in a hospital ward. The ceiling and walls were spotless, and the faint smell of disinfectant drifted through the air. The bed was narrow, with two more empty beds beside it, all made up with white sheets and covers.
The door was slammed open with a loud bang. Before Gu Yi could react, a tall, middle-aged man pointed at his nose and started berating him.
“Gu Yi, are you causing trouble again? Zhu Yu is doing perfectly fine—he’s even appeared on a Qingning TV variety show. But you end up in the hospital every three days! Your fans are making a scene and demanding an explanation from the company!”
“If you pull something like this again, don’t blame me for turning my back on you!”
After giving Gu Yi a thorough scolding, the man slammed the door shut and stormed off.
…
Gu Yi blinked. It took him more than half an hour to sort out what was happening.
He had transmigrated.
The original owner was also named Gu Yi. He was a member of Vic, a boy group under Xingyao Entertainment. The man who had appeared in the ward was Gu Yi’s manager, Shao Jing. Besides Gu Yi, Shao Jing was also responsible for another seven or eight members of Vic.
Gu Yi knew virtually nothing about the entertainment industry. He had assumed that, as a member of a boy group, the original owner would at least have some name recognition. But after searching online, he discovered that Vic had a staggering two hundred members!
Even the undergraduate students he taught back home weren’t that numerous!
Among those two hundred members, the original owner could be described as utterly unknown—the back of the back, or, as people in the industry put it, an iron-back. He survived on the two-thousand-yuan monthly base salary the company paid him. The only time he had ever made it onto a trending list was when he lost so much weight that he collapsed and had to be carried into an ambulance.
This time was much the same. The original owner had been interacting with fans when he suddenly collapsed before finishing a song, terrifying the handful of fans watching his livestream.
Though there were only a few dozen people in his livestream, an idol fainting on camera was newsworthy enough to attract attention.
Gu Yi had made the trending lists again. No wonder Shao Jing was furious.
In the entertainment industry, Xingyao Entertainment was little more than a third-rate company. Vic didn’t follow the traditional route of training, debuting, and building a fanbase. Instead, the company took a hands-off approach and left each member to fend for himself. Those who managed to gain popularity were given television dramas and variety shows. The resources weren’t exactly top-tier, but they were enough to help members climb into the third or fourth tier of the industry. As for members like the original owner, who couldn’t make it big, they were all sent off to do livestreams.
It was no exaggeration to say that, across the entire entertainment industry, there were fewer actors, singers, and idols of the same age combined than there were members of Vic. Even if Xingyao Entertainment poured all the resources in the industry into them, it still wouldn’t be enough to feed a single Vic.
Xingyao Entertainment’s treatment of its artists was notorious throughout the industry. Fans periodically dragged the company’s owner out to condemn him. This time, after Gu Yi fainted and made the trending lists, the comments section of Xingyao Entertainment’s official account was flooded with fans of the group’s top members cursing the company. There were hardly any people genuinely speaking up for Gu Yi.
Even so, Shao Jing still believed Gu Yi should take the blame.
He managed nine members of Vic. One of them was Zhu Yu, who was gradually making a name for himself in the industry. The others, even if they didn’t earn as much as Zhu Yu, had at least accumulated a few fans and could occasionally attend small events.
Gu Yi was the only one who had been losing the company money ever since joining the group.
When Gu Yi first joined Vic, he had caused quite a stir. The group had a huge number of members, but purely in terms of looks, no one could compare to him. Shao Jing had even fought with other managers for the chance to sign him.
Unfortunately, Gu Yi had nothing but a pretty face. His singing and dancing were poor, which might have been forgivable—after all, not every top member of Vic had attracted fans through talent. But Gu Yi’s biggest problem was that he was wooden and didn’t know how to interact with fans. He was also withdrawn. After appearing onstage a few times, he lost all the fans he had initially attracted with his looks.
To make matters worse, he had apparently gone insane and started imitating other people by dieting. He had starved an otherwise perfectly good face into something barely human, embarrassing Shao Jing so badly that the other managers mocked him behind his back.
If Shao Jing had been the owner, he would have kicked Gu Yi out long ago. Unfortunately, one of Xingyao Entertainment’s major sources of income was the termination fees paid by its members. Whenever an artist couldn’t take the hardship and demanded to terminate their contract, the company’s finance department simply waited to collect the money. As a result, unless absolutely necessary, Xingyao Entertainment would never willingly suggest terminating a member’s contract.
…
Gu Yi glanced at his hands, thin as chicken claws, then looked at the sunken, emaciated face in the mirror and shook his head.
Was this really considered good-looking? He genuinely couldn’t understand the beauty standards of the entertainment industry.
In his previous life, Gu Yi had graduated from one of those notoriously difficult majors. After diligently studying all the way to a doctorate, he had finally secured a teaching position at a university. Before his career had even gotten off the ground, he had been kicked into the unfamiliar world of show business.
Unwilling to believe it, Gu Yi searched the full name of that university. As expected… there was no information about it at all.
Finding a teaching job was impossible. In this life, his education stopped at high school. Not long after graduating, he had used his looks to sign with Xingyao Entertainment. That had been five years ago.
Besides, even if he wanted to terminate his contract, he would first have to pay a five-million-yuan fee.
Gu Yi didn’t even have five thousand yuan to his name.
He scrolled through the original owner’s phone. Apart from Weibo and photo-editing apps, the notes were filled with all kinds of ridiculous dieting plans he had found online. They contained no nutrition whatsoever and frequently required him to go hungry for several meals at a time. By the end, even the slightest movement made his heart race and left him sweating, until he had finally managed to work himself into the hospital.
He opened Weibo, and sure enough, a video titled “Vic Member Collapses During Livestream” was sitting on the trending list. Unfortunately, the original owner was so unknown that even the marketing accounts posting about it couldn’t be bothered to include his name.
“Uhhh, is that a human skeleton? Whose idol looks that awful?”
“There are plenty of bizarre-looking people in V Group, but this one… he’s honestly so ugly it’s almost impressive.”
“Can Xingyao Entertainment please start caring about V Group’s idols? They’re always sick or collapsing. Is this black-hearted company running a sweatshop?”
“That poor flop group. My Zhu Yu is one of V Group’s top members, and he still has to take taxis to his schedules by himself?”
After scrolling through the comments, Gu Yi closed Weibo. The original owner had never been good at dealing with people, and his relationship with the other members was only average. Even after his collapse became a trending topic, hardly anyone had sent him a message on WeChat.
Gu Yi thought that was probably for the best. He didn’t particularly like dealing with people either. If anyone asked what had happened, he wouldn’t know how to respond.
After spending two days in the hospital, Shao Jing drove him home.
Xingyao Entertainment might have been unreliable in every other respect, but it did pay into its employees’ health insurance and social security as required. Gu Yi’s medical bills hadn’t cost him anything. The apartment he lived in was also rented by the company. It was more or less like a communal dormitory, though the Vic members with even a little name recognition refused to live there. The only people who stayed in the dorms were those like Gu Yi—penniless and completely unknown.
After leaving the hospital, Gu Yi didn’t rush to make plans for the future. As far as he was concerned, the most urgent thing was to get his health back in shape. In his current condition—so frail that a gust of wind might knock him over—he wouldn’t even have had the strength to move lab equipment in his previous life. His advisor wouldn’t have wanted a doctoral student like that.
While recuperating, Gu Yi also browsed the latest news related to Vic.
Vic had a large number of members, and for most of them, being remembered by name by even a few fans was already something to be grateful for. Starlight Entertainment’s management of the group was quite simple: the two hundred members were divided into ten subgroups, from Team A to Team J. Every year, a popularity vote was held. The top ten in popularity and the top ten in earnings would enter Team A, while the bottom twenty in popularity would be sent to Team J.
Most Team A members could land acting roles, variety-show appearances, and endorsement deals. Zhu Yu, who shared an agent with Gu Yi, was currently in Team A. He was a regular on a variety show on Lime TV and had recently landed an endorsement deal for a makeup line.
As for Team J, it could be said that the entire team had nothing to do. Once someone dropped into Team J, moving up to Team C or higher was practically impossible. Even climbing to Team I or Team H was no easy task.
For the past two years, Gu Yi had been a permanent fixture in Team J. In his five years with the group, he might not have gained much fame, but he had still created a miracle in Vic’s history: he was the fastest member to fall from Team A to Team J. Combined with the fact that he had trended twice after fainting from hunger, Gu Yi could, in a sense, be considered a remarkable individual.
…
After eating properly for several days, Gu Yi stopped livestreaming and adjusted his schedule, doing his best to go to bed early and get up early. His health improved somewhat.
It had been years since Gu Yi had felt this comfortable. During his doctoral studies, staying up late and working overtime had been the norm, and his physical condition was nowhere near what it had been when he had first graduated from college. These past few days, he had eaten three regular meals a day, didn’t have to stay up writing papers, and even went out for a walk after meals. Gu Yi felt genuinely refreshed.
His agent, Shao Jing, had only called him once. Zhu Yu had been attracting quite a bit of attention lately, so Shao Jing was devoting most of his energy to him and had little time to spare for Gu Yi.
He didn’t question Gu Yi about stopping his livestreams, either. After all, Gu Yi had barely any fans. Shao Jing would much rather have him sit around at home doing nothing than suddenly make headlines by fainting during a livestream.
Gu Yi waited until the end of the following month, when his base salary finally arrived, before leisurely considering what he should do next.
Gu Yi wasn’t an ambitious person. After thinking it over carefully, he decided that as long as he didn’t aim to become hugely famous, being in Vic wasn’t so bad—apart from the low base salary. He had health insurance, social security, and his rent was covered. It was no worse than what he had earned while pursuing his doctorate.
The main advantage was that there was no performance pressure. It didn’t matter whether one person watched his livestream or a hundred thousand did. When the popularity vote came around, the members could also earn a share of the proceeds. Gu Yi only received a few hundred yuan each time, but at least he didn’t have to do any work.
In his previous life, the pressure had been immense. After finishing his bachelor’s degree, he went on to graduate school; after graduate school, he pursued a doctorate. Even if he had gone into academia, he would still have been required to produce research results. Now, at Starlight Entertainment, Gu Yi felt that he had entered retirement at a young age.
His current goal was very simple: to earn a monthly salary of five thousand yuan!
With two thousand yuan in guaranteed basic income, he would work hard as an idol to earn another three thousand. He didn’t have to pay rent or utilities, and his employer covered his pension and other benefits. That meant five thousand yuan in take-home pay. If he spent two thousand a month and saved three thousand, he could put away thirty-six thousand yuan a year.
He felt as though he had already reached the pinnacle of life.
