The entertainment industry: My 99 future timelines!

Closing the door shuts out the world downstairs.

Liu Yifei removed her disguise once again.

The room was dimly lit, with the afternoon sunlight slanting through the window frame, casting interplay of light and shadow on Liu Yifei's delicate profile.

She didn't sit in the only chair Li Xu offered, but instead stood by the window in the room, her fingers unconsciously stroking the cold window frame.

Stripped of all pretense, she appears more frail and real than on screen.

The ethereal, otherworldly aura that belonged to the "Fairy Sister" was replaced in Li Xu's cramped room by a more concrete sense of tension, typical of a nineteen-year-old girl.

She stood in Li Xu's cramped room, filled with books and movie posters on the walls, and surprisingly... they fit in well.

Before Li Xu could speak, Liu Yifei took a deep breath and said first, "Junior Li Xu, let's talk."

Li Xu didn't reply, but leaned against the edge of the table piled with books, arms crossed, waiting for what would come next.

His reaction startled Liu Yifei for half a second.

There was no shock, panic, or overwhelming sense of being flattered as expected.

The way this twenty-year-old junior looked at her was as if he were looking at an ordinary negotiating partner, and in terms of his aura, he even seemed to be the one with the upper hand in the negotiation.

"Teacher Liu, what are you talking about?"

While Liu Yifei was still in a daze, Li Xu finally spoke, his tone carrying just the right amount of teasing, "Why don't we talk about what you, a top-tier actress and national goddess, are up to, disguised during the Chinese New Year, coming to my small county town to visit an unknown sophomore at the Beijing Film Academy? What exactly are you trying to do?"

"What, human trafficking? It's not your place to traffic an nobody like me; it's me who should be trafficking a top-tier female celebrity like you!"

Liu Yifei couldn't help but let her lips twitch slightly.

This reaction is very unusual, but it is definitely very "Li Xu".

It also fits the image of the "Tyrant of Light and Shadow" who will stand at the top of the world film industry in the fragments of her memory.

Ignoring Li Xu's joke and maintaining a dignified and aloof tone, Liu Yifei took a step forward from the window, her gaze falling on Li Xu's computer screen. "Li Xu, I'd like to see your work, the latest kind, is that alright? I have something to tell you after I've seen it."

Liu Yifei's tone sounded like a suggestion, but her eyes clearly showed her insistence.

Li Xu raised an eyebrow upon hearing this, but said nothing more.

He turned to the side, gripped the mouse, turned on the computer, and opened the folder containing the short film titled "Corner" that he had just edited that morning.

Double-click to play.

Liu Yifei leaned closer.

The distance between the two suddenly closed.

She had a very faint, refreshing fragrance, mixed with a hint of the smell of firecrackers and fireworks that wafted in from outside the window during the New Year in a small county town, which gently drifted into Li Xu's nostrils.

On the computer screen, the progress bar for the short film "Corner" flickers little by little.

Liu Yifei was initially a little distracted.

She had never been alone with a boy in such a small space before, so close that they could even hear each other breathing.

But soon, the image on the screen captured her full attention.

The short film is in black and white.

A boy in a school uniform squatted beside the ruins on the edge of the city, peeking through the gaps in the rusty iron plates at the busy crowd at the construction site across the street.

There are no lines.

Only the sound of the wind, the faint sound of traffic in the distance, and the boy's heavy breathing could be heard.

The light and shadow are cut extremely sharply.

The shadows of the ruins swallowed most of the boy's body, with only a beam of light shining obliquely on his hand, which was gripping the rusty iron plate tightly, its knuckles white.

The five-minute film is somewhat slow and depressing, but it has an extremely captivating quality that makes it impossible not to immerse the viewer.

Liu Yifei held her breath as she watched.

She wasn't ignorant about opera.

On the contrary, in recent years, she has seen too many directors and too many cameras.

But Li Xu's short film's visual language... is exceptionally different from others.

Liu Yifei couldn't pinpoint exactly what was different.

But there was something that captivated her gaze, drawing her into its depths without her even realizing it.

The progress bar reached the end, and the screen went black.

The room was quiet for a few seconds, with only the slight hum of the computer fan.

Liu Yifei slowly exhaled, turned her head, and looked at Li Xu.

Her eyes were bright, as if they had been washed with water.

"It's perfect! I knew I didn't choose the wrong person!"

Liu Yifei subconsciously recalled the sudden "encounter" she had experienced that morning.

This is also why she, a top-tier actress, would absurdly appear in front of Li Xu's house on the fifth day of the Lunar New Year.

-

morning.

Liu Yifei, who just finished the initial recording of a Hunan TV program yesterday, is still asleep in her hotel room.

But just as Li Xu awakened her memories of the future timeline, countless fragments of future memories flooded into her brain at the same time.

"Huff...huff huff...!!!"

Suddenly waking up from a nightmare, feeling the pain in my brain.

Liu Yifei gasped for breath as she propped herself up in bed, looking around at her surroundings, her mind in a daze.

"What about those memories? The future?"

"Or is it that I've developed a mental disorder due to the recent intensive pre-Lunar New Year promotional campaign, coupled with the constant barrage of malicious rumors?"

He muttered to himself.

Feeling the pain in her head, Liu Yifei, who had just woken up from a dream, was momentarily unable to distinguish between reality and illusion.

A short while later, as she sorted through the many fragments of memory in her mind, she finally realized that she had probably encountered some strange event.

Because the fragments of future memories in her mind were so specific and so clear.

Although these fragmented memories are scattered and span a vast period of time, they are almost entirely focused on romantic relationships, with only a very few relating to her future career development.

But Liu Yifei still found a lot of useful information in these future scenes:

She "saw" herself standing in the icy, snow-covered northern frontier, her fingers red with cold, yet held tightly in a warm, dry hand. The howling wind and the man's deep laughter filled her ears: "Yifei, look, doesn't this resemble that snow scene from our first collaboration, the one where you did eighteen takes?"

She "saw" herself sitting in a glittering awards ceremony, her palms sweaty.

Then, her name was called out, and a deluge of spotlights rained down on her. She was suddenly lifted up by the person next to her and spun around amidst deafening cheers and a shower of shimmering lights...

There were also noisy film sets with glaring lights.

In the editing room late at night, a heated argument erupts, and a script is thrown to the floor.

On the red carpet of an international film festival, on the glittering autograph wall, tongue-twisting foreign names were read out again and again, accompanied by countless applause and exclamations.

And what she remembers most vividly.

She "sees" herself dressed up at a wedding, sitting in the front row of the guest section, smiling and clapping.

At the end of the red carpet, that familiar figure, dressed in a crisp black suit, gently placed a wedding ring on the finger of a woman in a pure white wedding dress.

After the wedding, when the bride and groom toasted the guests, he looked at her with gentle eyes and politely said, "Yifei, thank you for coming."

These scenes jump around dramatically.

Liu Yifei could clearly sense that this memory of the future was absolutely real; it must have actually happened in the future.

Because while watching this future memory, she could feel the various emotions of "another self" from beginning to end, as well as the suffocating heartache at the end.

All these fragmented memories revolve around the same "male protagonist" name—Li Xu.

Liu Yifei was a name I had never heard of before.

After half an hour.

Liu Yifei used her connections to find Li Xu's information, and she was struck dumb.

The person Li Xu in my dream actually exists in reality!

Li Xu, a student in the Cinematography Department of Beijing Film Academy, class of 2005, is currently in his second semester of his freshman year. He is her junior and lives in xxx, Hunan Province.

The person who provided the information to Liu Yifei even attached a blue-background ID photo of Li Xu.

The boy in the photo is wearing an ordinary white shirt, and his hair is slightly longer than that of an average boy, hanging messily over his forehead.

He had high brow bones, a straight nose, and lips pressed into a slightly stubborn line.

What's most impressive are those eyes; even through low-resolution images, you can feel a sharp, undisguised gaze that looks directly at the camera, and a certain...untamed wildness.

Liu Yifei recalled the radiant man in her "future memories," a man with whom she had many emotional entanglements. She tried to match his appearance with the youthful boy in the photo in front of her, and suddenly felt that illusion and reality were slowly overlapping.

Reality seems to be being brutally invaded by the "future"!

Overwhelmed by this immense shock, Liu Yifei didn't have time to think. She took her assistant and drove straight to Li Xu's house on the highway without stopping.

She needs answers.

We need to see this bizarre and fantastical dream for ourselves.

We need to see what the people who will have many profound entanglements with her life in the "future" are like now.

At the same time, she also needs Li Xu's help, especially now that she is being besieged and attacked by Hua Yizheng, who is spreading rumors about her!

then.

"Knock knock knock".

Li Xu met Liu Yifei outside her home on the fifth day of the Lunar New Year.

-

I snapped out of my reverie.

Liu Yifei slowly exhaled, looking at Li Xu with clear and firm eyes:

"Li Xu, let's get straight to the point. I learned about you and your talent for some very personal and inexplicable reasons."

"I think there's something very special about your cinematic language. I think you're a genius, a top-tier director who hasn't been discovered by the industry yet but is destined to shine."

Li Xu frowned slightly, his eyes scrutinizing him. "So?"

"So I want to collaborate with you. I'll invest in you and let you make a movie, with me as the female lead."

The room was silent for a few seconds.

The sunlight outside the window shifted slightly, falling gently from the center onto Li Xu's face, illuminating one side of his cheek and leaving the other side in shadow.

Li Xu's face remained expressionless, but deep in his eyes, that sense of absurdity couldn't help but resurface.

"Invest in me?"

Subconsciously repeating Liu Yifei's words, Li Xu's tone was undisguisedly sarcastic, "Teacher Liu, are you sure you know anything about me?"

"I, Li Xu, am a sophomore in the Cinematography Department of Beijing Film Academy. My resume only has a few student works on it, although my teacher praised it as a model essay last semester."

"But you, Liu Yifei, the Little Dragon Girl known to everyone, are one of the most popular young actresses in China right now."

"During the Lunar New Year, instead of staying home, making big-budget films by famous directors, or consolidating your popularity, you come here and say you want to invest in an unknown junior student, and even cast him as the female lead?"

Leaning slightly forward, Li Xu looked directly into Liu Yifei's eyes.

"And if I remember correctly, weren't you recently in talks for that Sino-US co-production blockbuster, 'The Forbidden Kingdom'? Jackie Chan and Li Lianjie are the two male leads, with a Hollywood team, and countless actresses are scrambling to get a supporting role."

"Why would you ignore such a pie in the sky and come to me with empty promises?"

Li Xu smiled, a cold smile: "Teacher Liu, are you crazy, or am I crazy? Or are we both crazy?"

Faced with Li Xu's barrage of sharp questions, Liu Yifei did not dodge.

She leaned back slightly, meeting Li Xu's gaze. The dignified aloofness on her face, befitting the popular national actress "Liu Yifei," suddenly loosened, revealing a hint of the genuine weariness of a nineteen-year-old girl, and a touch of... resigned honesty.

"Li Xu, although you're only a sophomore this year, we're actually the same age; you're half a year older than me."

"I believe that with your intelligence, you should be able to understand what the most terrifying thing is for an actress—especially one like me, who played Wang Yuyan at sixteen and Xiaolongnu at eighteen, and is already firmly nailed to the 'Fairy Sister' image?"

Liu Yifei was talking to herself.

"They're typecast! Confined to a fixed image!"

"Of course the audience will love my Wang Yuyan image at sixteen, my Xiaolongnu image at eighteen, and I will also love my appearance at twenty now. After all, I am good-looking, and I am not the kind of person who is beautiful without realizing it."

"But then what?"

In Liu Yifei's clear eyes, there was no trace of the ethereal "fairy" image at this moment, only the restlessness of a nineteen-year-old girl wanting to break free from the constraints.

"Then a few years later, when I'm twenty-five, they'll say I'm a bit too old to play a fairy, but I can play the fairy's older sister. When I'm thirty... I probably won't get many fairy scripts anymore, and the market will find new people to replace me."

"My agent, my godfather, wants me to take a steady and solid approach, and take advantage of my current popularity to take on more similar roles and build a strong foundation."

"Many TV drama directors and producers have given me scripts. Eight out of ten of these scripts describe characters as 'unworldly' or 'cold and beautiful'."

At this point, Liu Yifei suddenly chuckled softly.

There was no warmth in that laughter, only immense disappointment and a sense of powerlessness as if one's life had been written in advance.

"Li Xu, I'm only nineteen years old."

"But sometimes I feel like my life has already been written into a script, and I live in the imagination of all the audience members, perfect, but as thin as a piece of paper."

"And... although I know the audience likes to watch it, I don't like always wearing white clothes. I like to wear whatever I want."

"As for celestial aura? Ha, looking at that stuff for too long actually gets quite cold. Wouldn't it be better to borrow some earthy energy?"

The room was very quiet.

Only Liu Yifei's voice, soft and murmuring, fell into the afternoon sunlight and dust.

Facing Li Xu, the man from her future memories, she had a long and complicated relationship with whom she eventually parted ways and married someone else, but who also propelled her to the pinnacle of the film industry.

Liu Yifei poured out all the words that had been weighing on her heart for the past few days, no, for the past two years.

They completely forgot about maintaining distance and managing their image.

Only after she had said everything did she realize that she had probably lost her composure.

She subconsciously twirled a strand of hair that fell over her shoulder with her fingertips, but immediately stopped, quickly retracting this overly "girlish" gesture. Maintaining her dignified and aura as a popular actress, she said sincerely, her ears slightly red:

"Li Xu, I'm not here to do good deeds or charity."

"This is a gamble. I'm betting that your vision and methods can help me carve out a path. I'm betting that we can work together to create something different."

"I know that your camera is great at capturing beauty and authenticity, which is exactly what I need right now. It can help me break free from my current image constraints, truly transform myself, and go further and higher. We should collaborate."

The absurdity and mockery on Li Xu's face slowly faded.

He remained silent, taking a closer look at the girl in front of him.

Stripped of her "Fairy Sister" and "Top A-list Actress" aura, she is actually only nineteen years old, a few months shy of twenty, and younger than herself.

Since January of this year, he has been constantly bombarded with negative news.

Her words, though not particularly sophisticated, sounded very sincere.

"To be frank, Professor Liu, but I still have some doubts. What conditions do you plan to use to invest in me? How much money can you offer?"

"And how do you plan to convince your mother and godfather that you're acting so frivolously?"

Li Xu spoke slowly, his tone softening somewhat, but still cautious.