Chapter 25 – Envy

After the Rebirth of the Film Emperor
kirie
45 Chapters

Chapter 1 - The 22 year old Ji Zhinong Chapter 2 Chapter 3 - The 32 year old Wen Che Chapter 4 - Choosing Roles (Wife) Chapter 5 - Both short and fat like an AA battery Chapter 6 - You really aren’t picky!  Chapter 7 - You ate all the makeup Chapter 8 - Which side was actually the one acting cheap? Chapter 9 - “(╯-_-)╯” Chapter 10 - The little substitute has his own plans Chapter 11 - “You can’t get dirty.” Chapter 12 - Embarrassing, really embarrassing Chapter 13 - Shameful fetish Chapter 14 - Little good-for-nothing Chapter 15 - Public ridicule Chapter 16 - @JiZhiZhiDidYouGetPopularToday Chapter 17 - GossipConsumer Chapter 18 - “In love.” Chapter 19 - Don’t let anyone bully him Chapter 20 - You’re going to finish the entire field of strawberries! Chapter 21 - The first person to bravely sink a ship Chapter 22 - The sugar daddy using cheats at the scene Chapter 23 - A meticulous and cute little girl Chapter 24 - Even you are mine! Chapter 25 - Envy Chapter 26 - The scene of death from embarrassment Chapter 27 - I might just be a wicked criminal beyond redemption Chapter 28 - “I’m willing to prove his innocence.” Chapter 29 - Perhaps he was a god Chapter 30 - Defy world opinion Chapter 31 - Detergent Li Shaoyao Chapter 32 - “Just got family punishment” Chapter 33 - I’m the matsutake mushroom on the chopping block. Chapter 34 - “I don’t eat fellow mushrooms.” Chapter 35 - An old score (End of Part One) Chapter 36 - How shabby (pt. 1) Chapter 37 - How shabby (pt. 2) Chapter 38 - How shabby (pt. 3) Chapter 39 - How shabby (pt.4 ) Chapter 40 - How shabby (pt. 5) Chapter 41 - How shabby (pt. 6) Chapter 42 - How shabby (pt. 7) Chapter 43 - Past relationship (pt. 1) Chapter 44 - Past relationship (pt. 2) Chapter 45 - Past relationship (pt. 3)

Translator: kirie

Proofreader: celare

Editor: alexie

The matter of Zhang Yunan admitting his name change to others was ordered by Li Shaoyao and carried out with Yang Yi and the production crew’s cooperation.

It took a day for Ji Zhinong to realize this had happened. He didn’t even get to hear gossip about himself while it was still fresh.

How come Qin Kaiyu made it sound like he had intentionally planned it?

“I’m afraid Mr. Qin has misunderstood . To be honest, if you didn’t jump before my eyes today, I would’ve forgotten about you.” Zhinong sized Qin Kaiyu up a few times and said without care for his emotions, “Your cheap attention isn’t worth my time.”

Qin Kaiyu didn’t get upset either. He still remembered vividly how Ji Zhinong humbled himself into the dirt two years ago for his love. He was sure that Ji Zhinong was only loosening the reins to grasp them better.

“If my attention is cheap, then why did you insist on getting married to me initially? Why did your heart ache so much that your sickness relapsed and you ended up in the hospital after I broke off our marriage?”

It would’ve been better if he had not mentioned this, as it made Wen Che remember how the original Ji Zhinong died.

So killing a human life was nothing more than an accomplishment to brag about in Qin Kaiyu’s mind.

“How did your parents teach you that you, as the young master of the Qin family, take pride in breaking your promises?”

Only now did Qin Kaiyu feel humiliated. “You!”

“Your current fiancé is just five meters away. What intentions do you have talking to me now?” Ji Zhinong grabbed Qin Kaiyu’s collar and pulled it towards himself. “Don’t tell me, you want to continue our previous relationship?”

“Cut!”

Not far away, the director yelled stop. “Yunan, what’s wrong with you?! Where are you looking? Do you not even know how to look into the camera now?”

Zhang Yunan had already NGed several times today. The director’s patience was exhausted, and his tone wasn’t particularly kind.

Although He You wasn’t easy to get along with, at least his professional skills were there. Zhang Yunan could be said to be the biggest deadweight actor in the entire crew, especially when compared with the current Ji Zhinong.

Zhang Yunan still had some respect for the director and hurriedly apologized. His gaze, however, still glowered resentfully towards Zhinong.

Qin Kaiyu only refocused and wanted to put some distance between himself and Zhinong after he noticed this gaze. He didn’t expect Ji Zhinong to actually be pretty strong and had to tug at his collar for several seconds before it was let go, which forcibly turned this misunderstanding into reality.

He even provoked Qin Kaiyu, “Yunan got jealous. Hurry and coax your fiancé, lest your marriage is ruined again during your second wedding.”

Qin Kaiyu was suffocating with anger, but under the gazes of Zhang Yunan and others from the production crew, he didn’t have the courage to retaliate in the end. He turned to comfort Zhang Yunan, which was more urgent.

Yang Yi passed over a disinfectant wipe timely, and Zhinong took it, wiping his hands thoroughly and extremely disgusted. “Touching him is dirtying my hands.”

As soon as the filming was over, Zhang Yunan threw a temper tantrum.

Qin Kaiyu explained, “It’s him who didn’t give up and took the initiative to approach me.”

Zhang Yunan had enough of his quibble. “I saw everything. You were the one who walked towards him! Do you still like him?!”

“No.”

“If not, then why are you getting so close to him?!” He grabbed onto Qin Kaiyu’s elbow in fear of losses and gains.1As in he’s afraid of not being able to gain what he wants and losing what he has “Do you think he’s better than me? You dislike me, don’t you?”

For the past half a month, Zhang Yunan heard others praise Ji Zhinong more than once: they complimented him on being talented, photogenic, and kind to others. But these beautiful adjectives had all once belonged to Zhang Yunan—no, they belonged to “Ji Yunan.”

Ji Zhinong took away his position in the Ji family, took away his surname, took away the praise that originally belonged to Ji Yunan, and even crushed Ji Yunan’s pride and confidence.

“I don’t dislike you. I just talked with him a little, that’s all. What are you being so sensitive for?”

“You talked to him? How could you talk to him? Don’t you know that the person who’s going to marry you is me?!”

Qin Kaiyu couldn’t empathize with Yunan at all. He just thought that Zhang Yunan was making a mountain out of a molehill and said sharply, “When my engagement with Ji Zhinong was still valid, you weren’t completely innocent either. Did you forget? Two years ago, on the day I got engaged, you even kissed me right in front of him. By comparison, he just talked to me. There’s no need for you to throw a tantrum over this!”

Yunan: “Are you on his side and retorting me right now?”

Qin Kaiyu shrugged, saying, “I just feel like you’re too sensitive, that’s all.”

Right when they were about to start arguing, someone knocked on the dressing door. “Yunan, are you ready?”

Qin Kaiyu: “If you want to become other people’s topic of conversation and a laughingstock, you’re free to argue with me!”

Zhang Yunan: “…” He turned his head and responded to the person outside.

Qin Kaiyu walked forward and tidied Yunan’s hair, coaxing him a little in the end. “Do your job well. If you have anything else to say, let’s talk about it after going home.”

When Zhang Yunan pushed open the door to the dressing room, there were some colleagues who were currently chattering about something. Seeing him come out, they immediately shut their mouth.

At the end of December, the production crew edited a minute long trailer to cooperate with the promotion. The male lead naturally appeared first in the preview, and the other important supporting characters also appeared in turn.

Because Ji Zhinong was officially promoted as the male lead earlier, virtually no viewers had expectations for this drama.

With the successive clarification of the exposé material and the broadcast of the variety show, Zhinong’s reputation was recovered a little, and viewers weren’t that against him as an actor, at the very least.

Everyone watched the trailer with the lowest of expectations. They didn’t expect that they would completely change their minds in the end!

[Damn! I intentionally watched a bit of the preview. Is the male lead really Ji Zhinong? How come it’s as if he turned into another person?!]

[I knew that this was a huge production, but I didn’t think that the quality would be so good! I always thought Ji Zhinong was a bad apple, but unexpectedly, he really helped support this work.]

[Did he become a believer of some kind of metaphysics2abstract philosophical studies, a study of what is outside objective experience — Merriam Webster? How come it’s as if he suddenly got enlightened?! His acting is so outstanding!]

[Wow, just one expression got me crying. It’s making me think of the other Lu Yun3“The other Lu Yun” is the Lu Yun that Wen Che acted as in the first film.]

[But there’s still too much of a gap between Ji Zhinong and Wen Che to compare them. Though judging from the trailer, he still deserves praise. Hoping the actual film will be this stunning as well.]

The reversal of his reputation was within the director’s expectations. The only person who was taken by surprise was Zhang Yunan.

He didn’t think that the viewers would forget Ji Zhinong’s unbearable past so quickly.

At this rate, when the movie was really broadcasted, wouldn’t Ji Zhinong be loved by more people?

If Ji Zhinong got lucky and won a Best Male Lead award with this film, then wouldn’t he really be defeated?!

As soon as the topic was discussed, people would gradually realize that the real young master was indeed the real young master, an existence a fake couldn’t surpass at all.

Just thinking about this made Zhang Yunan feel like his head was going to explode!

He took out a cigarette in irritation and sucked in a few breaths forcefully. The mirror in front of him reflected his tightened face, which resembled that of an ugly, skinny monkey, when he smoked.

This made him think of his biological father from the Zhang family.

When the mystery of his birth had just been unraveled back then, Zhang Yunan had gone to see the couple from the Zhang family.

He didn’t go to the house but the drug rehabilitation center. Zhang Lai had been shut inside and forcibly rehabilitated. When Zhang Yunan went to see him, Zhang Lai’s drug addiction had just gone into effect, and he was in so much pain he was rolling and crawling on the floor, drooling everywhere. He was covered in skin ulcers, emitting a sewer-like stench.

Zhang Yunan couldn’t resist throwing up on his first encounter with his biological father.

He practically charged out of the drug rehabilitation center in escape. Mother Zhang, who chased him out, wanted to comfort him, but Zhang Yunan yelled at her to get lost.

From that day, he told himself continuously that he absolutely couldn’t return to the Zhang family and absolutely couldn’t be recognized by the Zhang family. That would be like quicksand—as soon as he stepped in, he would never be able to climb out!

At this moment, he suddenly saw the shadow of his biological father Zhang Lai in himself. He didn’t want to admit it, but he knew that he was becoming more and more similar to Zhang Lai.

No one could go against blood and genes.

He never had concerns about his appearance before, but seeing himself become more and more like that couple now, his sense of inferiority spread crazily like a poisonous weed.

He threw the cigarette he was holding three meters away as if he had been electrocuted.

He absolutely couldn’t suffer from that kind of bad habit. He was raised in the Ji family. He was the third young master of the Ji family. No one could take away his position.

He’d kill whoever came to take it away!

Zhang Yunan picked up his phone, which was on the side, and entered a string of overseas numbers.

After the call went through, he heard himself say, “Do you have the video of Ji Zhinong at the hotel?”

The person on the other end was an unscrupulous paparazzi, who was disdained in his field and a wanted criminal that could only escape overseas.

He had bought those unsightly photos of Ji Zhinong from this very paparazzi. At that time, Zhang Yunan only had to spend a few hundred thousand yuan4for reference, a hundred thousand yuan is 15,500 usd and have some unethical marketing accounts work slightly to completely ruin Ji Zhinong’s reputation.

In reality, the paparazzi not only had photos, but also an HD video. Zhang Yunan had personally seen it. It was a video from a year ago of Ji Zhinong tossing and turning under a certain boss of a board of trade. Because it involved someone they couldn’t mess with, the face of the other main lead of the video was cut out from the very start.

The entire video was three minutes, and the paparazzi wanted thirty million.

Back then, he only needed to spend a small amount of a couple hundred thousand to suppress Ji Zhinong, so Zhang Yunan didn’t buy this video. After all, thirty million wasn’t a small amount of money.

But now, he agreed without even thinking.

As long as this video was publicized, he could push Ji Zhinong back into the mud pit he had lived in for 22 years and hold down his shoulders and his head firmly. He would leave him doomed forever and keep him from ever reversing his fortune!

Author’s Note:

Next, he’ll have to face the biggest hidden danger left by the original Ji Zhinong.

Little Wen Che, whose life had finally improved: Sigh, I have it so hard!

  • 1
    As in he’s afraid of not being able to gain what he wants and losing what he has
  • 2
    abstract philosophical studies, a study of what is outside objective experience — Merriam Webster
  • 3
    “The other Lu Yun” is the Lu Yun that Wen Che acted as in the first film
  • 4
    for reference, a hundred thousand yuan is 15,500 usd

kirie

Hi there! I'm Kirie. I enjoy reading, listening to kpop, and translating. uwu

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2 thoughts on “Chapter 25 – Envy”

  1. 😨 I really feel so fxcking terrible for the old Zhinong. Like, I enjoy reading transmigration stories, but sometimes the original lives are really too tragic and I all want is for those people who tortured the original soul, a real life person as real as our mc, to viciously suffer. Even if some crap holes (Qin Kaiyu) still won’t understand how badly they hurt him when they drove him to death. *Sigh
    Thank you so much, translator kirie, I’ll go cool off now. 😓💕

    Reply
  2. didn’t they say he was coerced? or was that another story I’m thinking of? x.x

    that jerk, Zhang Yunan had it made. why mess with Ji Zhinong?

    thanks for the chapter <3

    Reply

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