Amateur talent show? Top mentors are my students.

When the incident happened, He Xu was extremely grateful—it was just filming, and the knife was just a prop.

So there was no bleeding that time.

But the pain is absolutely real.

Although the blunt knife did not pierce his skin, the impact of having a hard object violently stabbed into the soft tissue of his waist was enough to make He Xu curl up into a ball.

He lay on the ground, his mind blank.

The edges of my vision were turning black, and all I could hear was my own rapid heartbeat and heavy breathing.

It looked like someone had hit my right side with a hammer.

Then the dull pain began to spread outwards, following the curve of the ribs to the back, and then down along the abdominal muscles.

"...Damn it." He heard his own voice squeezed out from between his teeth, barely a whisper.

The knife fell from his loosened fingers onto the cushion.

Jonathan reacted much faster than him.

The veteran actor stopped his movement almost the instant He Xu fell to the ground, his knees hitting the ground with a thud, and he squatted down beside He Xu.

His movements were faster than ever during training, his eyes sweeping from He Xu's pale lips to his hand pressed against his waist.

He didn't touch him, but his voice was extremely low, carrying a tension He Xu had never heard before: "He, don't move. Can you hear me?"

"……Um……"

"Where are you injured? Your back?"

He Xu nodded, then immediately regretted it—that movement aggravated the muscles on his side, and a sharp pain exploded from the wound.

He tensed up abruptly, his fingers gripping the hem of his shirt until his knuckles turned white.

Jonathan didn't ask any more questions.

He looked up and shouted towards the training field, "Mike! Call an ambulance! Blunt force injury to the side of his waist, not sure if there are any internal injuries!"

He Xu lay on the ground, listening to Jonathan's voice coming from above his head, muffled as if through a layer of water.

He cursed under his breath—he thought Jonathan was making a mountain out of a molehill.

But he also knew that Jonathan was right.

Because he really can't move right now.

When Mike rushed over, he was holding a phone and had already dialed for emergency medical services.

He Xu heard him give the address and describe the injuries in a very fast voice, then hang up the phone, squat down, and exchange a glance with Jonathan.

"...He, the car will be here in ten minutes." Mike's voice was calm, but He Xu could hear the tension he was trying to suppress. "Keep in your current position and don't move."

He Xu managed to say in a weak voice, "...I'm OK."

Jonathan glanced at him but didn't say anything.

The ambulance arrived faster than He Xu had expected.

When two paramedics rushed into the training field with a stretcher, He Xu felt like he was being treated as a fragile object.

They were lifted onto a stretcher, strapped into seatbelts, and had masks put on them. Every movement was carried out with an almost exaggerated level of caution.

He wanted to say, "I can still walk," but the mask was already on his face.

So he gave up.

The lights inside the ambulance were blindingly white. The paramedic asked him how much pain he was experiencing. He Xu thought for a moment and then held up four fingers.

"Four?"

"...It's four now. It might have been seven just now."

The paramedic looked down and wrote a line on his whiteboard: "This is a relatively good sign, indicating that the pain is subsiding."

He Xu lay on the mobile stretcher, his hand slightly gripping the hem of his clothes around his abdomen.

A young paramedic in uniform sat next to him, holding a whiteboard, glancing down at him every two minutes, as if to check if he was still alive.

He Xu turned his head to look at him, his voice muffled beneath the mask: "...I can still speak. You don't need to keep looking at me."

The paramedic was taken aback by his words, then looked down and wrote a line on the whiteboard without replying.

As the ambulance came to a stop and He Xu was pushed out, he glanced to the side—a white building with a blue sign, the emergency room sign shining brightly in the twilight.

A general hospital in Los Angeles looked completely different from the private clinic he had visited before.

Large, noisy, with people coming and going.

The noise was even more noticeable when he was wheeled into the emergency room.

The sound of shopping cart wheels rolling over the paving stones, the incessant ringing of the front desk phone, someone sobbing quietly in a corner, someone shouting into their phone in Spanish, and a child crying nearby—all these sounds were incessant.

He Xu lay on the stretcher, staring at the row of fluorescent lights on the ceiling, feeling his consciousness switching from "injured" to "what the hell is this place?" mode.

-

Then he discovered that this place really was a ghost town.

He didn't know if it was because his injuries weren't severe enough, or because the efficiency of medical care in the United States was simply too low.

He Xu lay on the mobile hospital bed with an ice pack pressed against his side. The pain had subsided from the intense intensity of being "stabbed in the side" in the previous twenty minutes to the range of "a persistent soreness and swelling after being injured by a heavy object".

It wasn't easy, but at least he could think. And once a person can think, their patience starts to slip away rapidly.

He turned his head and glanced at Jonathan, who was sitting on the plastic chair next to him.

The old actor was looking down at his phone. More than forty minutes had passed since he got off the ambulance. The three of them—He Xu, Jonathan, and Mike who came with him—were "diverted" to the emergency waiting area and left here.

"...How much longer do I have to wait?" He Xu asked, his voice tinged with a sense of helplessness.

Jonathan didn't even look up: "Emergency room lines are normal."

"Normal? Forty-seven minutes." He Xu's voice carried an extremely suppressed calm. "I've been lying here for forty-seven minutes, and not a single nurse has come to check on me."

Jonathan finally put his phone down.

He leaned back in the plastic chair, his hands crossed over his stomach. He had recovered from the panic he had just experienced, but his brow was still furrowed.

"...That's how the emergency room system works in the US," he began, his voice a half-tone lower than usual. "They prioritize patients. If you don't have major bleeding, shock, or loss of consciousness, your priority is relatively low."

"I know the priorities," He Xu said, "but I'm lying here, and my wound is still hurting—so am I just supposed to stay here forever? I might as well go back to my old bed, at least there's a proper bed there."

Mike stood three steps away next to the water dispenser, holding a cup of water in his hand.

He walked over and placed the water glass on the small table next to the hospital bed: "He, if you're feeling unwell, I'll go and urge them to hurry up."

"No need, thank you." He Xu's voice remained flat. "There's no point in urging me."

Jonathan's brow furrowed even more.

He stood up and took two steps toward the corridor, his steps slow but carrying a suppressed restlessness.

He walked over to the front desk and spoke a few words to the nurse in the blue uniform.

He Xu couldn't hear the specifics, but judging from Jonathan's tense jawline and the nurse's shrugging and waving, the conversation was clearly unpleasant.

When Jonathan returned, his face was even more somber than before: "They said we'll have to wait some more."

"How long will it take?"

"have no idea."

Looking at his unusually serious face, He Xu suddenly found it a little funny.

He leaned against the hospital bed, turning his head to look at Jonathan: "You look more impatient than I am."

"Of course I'm impatient," Jonathan's voice was rough and suppressed. "When I met you, you were perfectly fine. Now you're lying here, and I can only sit here staring at the ceiling. Could you sit still in my shoes?"

He Xu sneered.