After Entering a Romance Reality Show Disguised as a Man to Win Over All the Female Leads - Chapter 21.1

As soon as she said this, the woman she had grabbed instantly sucked in a cold breath and turned to look at the middle-aged man.

The expressions of the other men and women around them also became slightly strange. They looked at Rong Yu as if they wanted to say something but stopped.

Comments:

[Although, but, I feel like these extras’ acting is way better than those eye-burning fresh-faced idols in TV dramas nowadays.]

[+1. Is this something we’re allowed to say? covers mouth]

The middle-aged man looked Rong Yu up and down, then lowered his head and lifted his chin at the young woman. “If she wants to go, then take her. She’s probably been dragged here to be…”

The man did not finish speaking. He pressed his lips together and swallowed the rest of the sentence with a dark face. His expression grew even uglier, but it was not directed at Rong Yu.

He turned his gaze to Rong Yu again. Behind his lenses, his eyes narrowed slightly, his expression somewhat sharp.

“You can still leave now.”

Everyone’s reaction was telling Rong Yu that this part might be dangerous.

If this really were a job interview, she absolutely would have left already.

But this was for a show!

She braced herself and nodded. “I’m not leaving. Can you take me to Room 103?”

The middle-aged man looked as if he wanted to say something but stopped.

In the end, the young woman beside him added with a complicated expression, “There’s nothing good about that place. The things in our research institute, if you really see them, then—”

“Huang Li,” the middle-aged man immediately cut her off.

The woman promptly closed her mouth, made a zipper gesture over her lips, and said nothing more.

The men and women around them also shrank their necks, as if they had thought of something. Their gazes toward Rong Yu were full of pity.

Looking at their reactions, Rong Yu did not know whether she should praise the extras for their good acting or say that the script was too creepy.

“……”

Her gaze swept over the expressions on everyone’s faces, and her heart grew even more uneasy.

She really did not want to follow the plot anymore. Could they let her leave?

The livestream viewers in the comments were already shivering along with her.

[Okay, research institute. There’s probably a laboratory inside too, right? Don’t tell me they called Baby Yu here to do experiments on her?]

[Ahhhhhhh, help. Research institute, laboratory, white coats—everything I’m most afraid of has gathered together.]

Rong Yu was afraid too.

When she was little, even injections felt painfully unbearable to her. The moment she saw people in white coats, she became scared.

If it were not for the program task, and for waking Lian Langsheng, she would have wanted to turn and run the moment she saw this group of white coats.

But since she had already gotten here, she could only force herself to continue.

Rong Yu took a deep breath. Her voice sounded a little weak. “It’s fine. Take me there.”

This time, the woman called Huang Li did not say anything more. She glanced at the middle-aged man. Seeing him nod in agreement, she said to Rong Yu, “Then follow me.”

Rong Yu nodded. “Thank you.”

At some point, the red-and-white alarm lights around them had stopped. The group of people in white coats no longer looked as anxious as they had just now, but they still walked in the same direction as before.

Only Huang Li brought Rong Yu in the opposite direction.

When they reached the room at the very end, Huang Li looked back at Rong Yu, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

It was 8:35 in the morning. The corridors on this floor were all made of semi-transparent anti-peeping glass, blocking sight but not sunlight.

Yet the inside of the room was pitch-black, so dark one could not see their own fingers.

After the woman opened the door, Rong Yu stretched her head out and looked inside, but she could not see anything.

She could only watch as Huang Li reached out and touched the wall beside her. With a click, she turned on the switch on the wall.

Lights instantly lit up inside the room, illuminating every corner clearly.

Only then did Rong Yu discover that this was not a room.

It was a stairwell.

On both sides inside the door were pure white walls. Below was a brown wooden staircase. The stairs extended downward to the next level, facing what looked like an extremely heavy cold-storage door with a combination lock.

No matter how one looked at it, it did not resemble a normal room.

To put it bluntly, it looked more like a morgue.

Huang Li clearly noticed that Rong Yu’s expression was not quite right, but even she herself swallowed. Her tone was stiff and unnatural.

“Uh, there are experimental subjects in this room. For safety, we used a special door. Since she invited you over, go down and knock. She’ll open it for you.”

Huang Li took a deep breath and added, “She’s inside.”

For some reason, when she said that, it sounded more like, Take care of yourself.

Rong Yu’s eyelid twitched, and she instinctively wanted to retreat.

Her hand touched the cold doorframe at the side, and she abruptly came back to herself.

This was Lian Langsheng’s consciousness body. No matter what happened, Lian Langsheng would not hurt her.

At most… she would just scare her a little.

Rong Yu closed her eyes briefly, thanked Huang Li, and stepped inside.

Almost the moment Rong Yu stepped into the stairwell, Huang Li impatiently shut the door behind her, not leaving her any time to think.

Rong Yu looked back at the tightly closed door behind her, then looked at the heavy silver combination-lock door ahead that seemed especially secure.

Her hand hanging at her side could not help clenching and loosening. She carefully went down the stairs and approached the door.

When she had looked at it from upstairs, Rong Yu had not thought the door was that big. But after she walked up to it, she was shocked to discover that this door was a full three meters tall and two meters wide. It was more than twice the size of a normal office door.

She looked up and down at the door’s width, then guessed its thickness. After searching for a long time and not finding a doorbell, she could only raise her hand to knock.

But just as her hand was about to touch the door—

Click, click, click.

Three sounds came as the combination lock turned layer by layer from the inside. The sound of rotating and unlocking came through the door seam.

Rong Yu watched as the nearly one-meter-wide circular combination lock on the door before her spun and rolled. Then, with a soft bang, it sounded as if the bolt had been pushed open from inside, suddenly popping the door open a crack.

Rong Yu was only standing beside the door, yet from the opened gap, she already felt a bone-deep chill.

In the next moment, a clear, beautiful voice came from inside the door.

“Come in.”

That voice was not as indifferent as He Huaiting’s. It did not have Lin Mengxing’s light rise, nor Mu Shuiqing’s slowness. Its speed was neither fast nor slow, just right. Every word highlighted the speaker’s elegant manners.

It sounded very pleasant.

At once, Rong Yu could tell it was He Jiao’s voice.

A cramped, pale environment was best at triggering the human heart’s fear of the unknown. Rong Yu’s courage was not small, but looking at the empty space around her—paler and creepier than a hospital, where even the sound of breathing could echo for a long time—she felt genuine fright.

Now, hearing He Jiao’s voice was practically like rain after a long drought. Rong Yu instantly grasped onto this lifeline and pushed the door open without thinking.

In the next second, she saw a laboratory filled with enormous equipment and instruments.

Between the instruments were all kinds of syringes, reagent bottles, the body of a fish soaked in formalin, and countless documents and files.

But none of that mattered.

What mattered was that the wall behind this laboratory was actually an enormous sheet of glass spanning several hundred square meters. Behind the glass was a massive artificial aquarium. Inside, schools of fish swayed their tails and swam. It even simulated deep-sea coral and aquatic plants, looking extraordinarily realistic, like a projection screen playing underwater scenery.

The tank and laboratory were completely isolated from each other, but the glass had not the slightest color, as if an invisible layer of gas separated air and water, dividing the room into land and sea.

Even the livestream viewers, who were only watching through the camera, were still stunned by the scene before them.

[Holy crap?! I’m truly shocked.]

[No, seriously, Heartbeat Moment, if you have this kind of stage-design ability and can build such an amazing scene in one day, why the hell are you only becoming popular now!!!]

[Damn, it’s kind of beautiful…]

Rong Yu personally looked at the scene before her and was already too shocked to speak.

Also…

She looked around and did not see He Jiao anywhere.

But just now, she had clearly heard He Jiao’s voice.

As Rong Yu was thinking, she suddenly smelled an intense dampness, as if sea wind had rolled up moisture from the tide and rushed into the room.

The salty, wet smell of the ocean filled the entire room. In a daze, Rong Yu felt as if she had arrived at the seaside. She could even hear the faint sound of water striking against sand.

The next moment—

There was a click.

The room, white light glaringly bright, suddenly fell into darkness.

The abrupt contrast in light left Rong Yu unable to see anything for an instant. The loss of sight amplified all her other senses to the extreme.

The damp, cold aura around her seemed to instantly reach its peak.

Rong Yu instinctively stepped back, wanting to leave, but she suddenly fell into a soft embrace.

He Jiao was the character most similar to Lian Langsheng in Rong Yu’s writing, so naturally, she was also the character Rong Yu had carved with the greatest care.

She had exactly the same height as Lian Langsheng, the same elegant temperament, and an extremely similar figure.

Rong Yu was already so familiar with Lian Langsheng that she could clearly identify her just by her silhouette. Now, just by bumping into the person behind her, she could quickly distinguish the other party’s identity.

“He Jiao?”

She spoke softly.

But the person behind her said nothing.

A pair of hands reached out from behind her, clasped her wrists, and lifted her arms upward.

Rong Yu only heard the sound of two locks closing. Her wrists were restrained by cold devices.

Before Rong Yu had time to struggle, she heard He Jiao’s voice behind her head. Even the breath she exhaled carried a piercing cold, yet her voice was gentle.

“You just came in from outside. I need to disinfect and inspect you.”

When Rong Yu and Lian Langsheng had gone to school together, they had done experiments together too. When entering a laboratory, they did indeed need to wash and disinfect their hands.

But this was the first time she had seen someone’s hands lifted and restrained for disinfection.

Her heart pounded wildly. She did not know what kind of script this was. She could only strain her eyes forward in the darkness, trying hard to adjust to the pitch-black surroundings.

From behind her came the sound of a folder being opened and pages rubbing as they were flipped.

This state of being unable to see her surroundings made her entire body tense uncontrollably. Especially when she knew the person behind her was He Jiao, that consciousness body who resembled Lian Langsheng by sixty or seventy percent.

She was currently having her hands suspended by a part of her beloved’s consciousness body, about to be inspected and disinfected.

As soon as that thought appeared in her mind, her whole body tensed, and her heart began beating faster.

He Jiao behind her seemed to have noticed her abnormality and began lowering her voice, speaking slowly.

“Relax. It’s just a routine inspection.”

She sounded so gentle, as if she were truly conducting official business.

…If Rong Yu’s hands were not currently hanging high, she might really have believed it.

The sound of pages turning behind her stopped. The woman seemed to have found the page she wanted to read and began walking to the front of Rong Yu.

Strangely, Rong Yu did not hear her footsteps. She only clearly heard a faint sound of something soft dragging across the ground and felt that damp, icy aura gradually approaching.

“This is disinfectant spray,” He Jiao said softly.

In the next second, Rong Yu heard a sound similar to a spray nozzle spraying something. Immediately after, a cool mist fell onto her body. The rich smell of disinfectant rapidly covered her whole body, even dispersing much of the salty, fishy sea smell.

Then, she saw a tiny red light brighten before her.

It was no larger than a red bean. The faint red light illuminated the object immediately next to it. It was something about forty centimeters long, resembling a security scanner.

The hand holding the instrument was slender and fair. The joints were not overly prominent, the nails round and long. There was not the slightest callus at the joints. At a glance, one could tell this was a hand that had been carefully cared for.

The red light on the instrument could not fully illuminate the entire hand. It only vaguely covered more than half of the back of the hand, where the blue veins were clearly visible beneath the well-defined skin.

That hand was merely holding the instrument, yet Rong Yu instantly imagined how, just now, the other party had used this hand to clasp her wrists from behind and lock her raised hands into the iron restraints.

Her heartbeat almost drowned out her eardrums. The blood rushing past her ears stirred up a faint buzzing, and even her breathing began to quicken.

As the instrument was lifted over her head, it made a long beep. The woman held the instrument and began scanning Rong Yu’s body from top to bottom.

Rong Yu was not touched by the cold instrument in the slightest, yet it felt as if someone were examining her entire body with a magnifying glass. There was nowhere to hide.

Rong Yu could not hear He Jiao’s breathing. She could only hear her own restrained gasps and heartbeat.

As the instrument slid past her shoulders and moved toward her chest, her heart beat faster and faster.

Her beating heart drove her whole body into trembling. The surging heat in her blood made her fingertips numb. It was as if she were being scorched by the blazing sun at the equator, yet the temperature of the woman before her remained cold and piercing.

Aside from that hand, she could not see anything.

It gave Rong Yu an unknown sense of panic.

Instinctively, she called the other girl’s name again.

“He Jiao!”

But at that moment, the instrument, which had been moved to her waist, let out an alarm.

The woman’s hand pressed the instrument silent. Then she reached out and searched Rong Yu’s waist, taking her phone from her pocket.

The phone, low on battery, was still in low-power mode. But in this darkness where one could not see their own fingers, it still lit up the other party’s noble, beautiful features.

Compared to the adult Lian Langsheng, He Jiao’s appearance had a little less hostility and a little more pure elegance. This elegance and quiet grace were fused into her bones.

Just like now, she took out Rong Yu’s phone right in front of her. When the screen detected a face, it immediately lit up, exposing that magnificent, beautiful face completely under the faint beam of light.

The blond-haired, blue-eyed He Jiao stood at the boundary between girlhood and womanhood. In the darkness, her youthfulness faded away, and her delicate features became bright and dazzling.

The dim light of the phone screen cast a hazy blue shadow over her, blending with the water-reflecting glass behind her.

She was like a mermaid accidentally illuminated by moonlight, revealing pearl-like beauty in the dark night.

For a moment, Rong Yu stared, entranced.

She stood there in a daze, not knowing how to speak.

The livestream viewers, however, could only widen their eyes with all their might and stare fixedly at the screen, wishing they could jump inside to see what was happening.

They were using a camera, which could not compare to the human eye. On the screen, they could hazily see a weak glow appear on He Jiao’s face, but they could not clearly see her face or the surrounding situation at all.

They could only hear the two people’s voices and Rong Yu’s rapid breathing.

[Damn, when I’m rich, I’m definitely going to sponsor an infrared camera for the program team.]

[I just finished praising you and now you’re drifting? Can’t you fucking use a camera that can actually see things clearly? Holy crap, I’m really angry.]

[Doesn’t matter. I can imagine it.]