A Slight Smile is Very Charming

Part 12: White Robe Red Shadow

YuGong comes back on and says weakly: “I’m hurt.”

MoZhaHim (Don’tHitHim) despises him: “A guy like you can get hurt from falling on your butt?”

YuGong says angrily: “I’m hurt inside! I’m talking about inside!”

Wei Wei: “>o<, you guys are roommates?”

Wei Wei has suspected that they know each other and live together in real life from their speech; they’re probably also fourth year students because she has seen them talking about graduation internship work. But Wei Wei has never been interested in how other players in the game are in real life, so she never asks, but she blurts it out this time.

MonkeyWine: “We are in the same dorm.”

As expected!

Wei Wei looks at NaiHe subconsciously; so the Great Master is also a university student like herself? Why does it feel surreal? The Great Master should be…….

>_<

She can’t think of how he should really be……

YuGong says: “Third sister-in-law, NaiHe often doesn’t come home at night. You should keep an eye on him.”

MoZhaHim: “He doesn’t come home in the morning either!”

Wei Wei is dumbstruck.

NaiHe explains: “I will come back immediately when the dorm room is not filled with half a month’s worth of your socks.”

MoZhaHim talks back immediately: “You might as well continue to stay outside.”

Wei Wei is speechless. She has heard stories of guys washing their socks together after they have scattered over ten dirty pairs each. She can’t believe the guys here are exactly like this. She suddenly remembers YuGong and the others talking about hacking into other people’s computers, so she asks curiously: “Could it be that you guys are in Computer Science?”

“Bingo!”

What a coincidence = =

Wei Wei replies: “……Me too.”

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“……”

“You’re our junior (female) classmate then!”

YuGongClimbsAMountain: “It’s over. The ratio of guys and girls in Computer Science is 9 to 1. Seeing how tough and valiant she is, could she actually be a junior male classmate?”

Wei Wei: “>o<”

Wei Wei feels a little embarrassed: “Am I really that tough? As in my intro……”

Her words shock YuGong.

YuGong responds: “No, no. It’s good. It’s definitely rousing the apathetic (so loud that even the deaf can hear).”

Rousing the apathetic……

Wei Wei feels as if she’s been hurt inside; if YuGong’s literacy teacher found out that he used “rousing the apathetic” this way, would the teacher cry out loud?

MonkeyWine suggests: “It’s good, but I think it’s better to change the phrase ‘leave the man behind.’ There are four guys here, so how will people know whom you’re abducting? The audience will be confused.”

NaiHe says: “They won’t be confused. There’s no need to change it.”

MonkeyWine: “???”

NaiHe: “There is no value in abducting you guys.”

Therefore……

They PK vigorously again; it’s three against one this time.

Wei Wei stares at the sky speechlessly. She hasn’t even abducted anyone yet, and those who are supposed to be abducted are already in a quarrel with each other.

Nonetheless, after joking around countless times and Classmate YuGong working while he’s hurt, the initial filming for the video is completed after two days.

Wei Wei also writes the plot after the abduction. For the sake of prolonging the video’s time length, Wei Wei writes a super melodramatic storyline, borrowing from many TV series.

The below is a brief summary:

The white robed musician is abducted and taken back to the mountain stockade (the game has a thieves’ nest location). The female thief admires his refined and handsome looks, so she tries all kinds of ways to make him happy. The white robed musician doesn’t get moved by her; he keeps his silence every day and only plays his guqin dispiritedly by the lotus pond at the back side of the mountain.

The female thief finally decides to let him go, but she secretly follows after him as she can’t bear to see him leave. The white robed musician encounters a monster on his way; seeing how he is about to lose his life, the female thief jumps out to save him. The musician is touched by it and accepts the female thief. They get married happily, but on the wedding night, imperial guards show up at their door (YuGong and the others shouted outside the thieves’ nest saying that he will teach new gamers, so a bunch of newbies came and became free extras) and charges inside. The thieves (NPCs originating from the thieves’ nest, who are only at level 20) turn to fight the musician; the female thief stands in front and protects the musician, but the musician suddenly pulls out a sword from his guqin and stabs her heart from behind without hesitation.

It turns out that the musician is an imperial envoy. The thieves have had a great advantage from living at a complex landscape making it hard to extirpate them. Therefore, the musician goes undercover.

The ending is the essence of the melodramatic storyline.

After the female thief dies, the white robed musician suddenly realizes that he has already fallen in love with her; he embraces the female thief’s dead body and jumps off the cliff of Sunset Summit.

……

Alright, Wei Wei admits that she is being mischievous >o<

Wei Wei thought that everyone would bash the script, but everyone actually felt that it was not bad after reading it. However, if she thinks about it more thoroughly, Great Master NaiHe probably thinks that it’s not bad because——he doesn’t have many lines.

YuGong and the rest of them is probably because——they didn’t think that they would have another scene appearance near the end and that it would be roles on the protagonist side, so they can’t help but cheer in joy!

Wei Wei can’t help but be speechless again; Computer Science students truly lack artistic senses……

But when NaiHe sends Wei Wei the completed video after post production, she terribly regrets and takes back her criticism on them for not having “artistic senses.”

She, YuGong, and the rest are the ones who don’t have artistic senses; it definitely doesn’t include the Great Master!

Great Master, oh, Great Master, there is nothing that you can’t master!

On the day that Wei Wei receives the video, she has night classes, so when she goes online after returning to the dorm room, NaiHe has already gone offline. He leaves her a message.

“Something has come up. I need to go offline now. I’ve sent the video to your inbox.”

Wei Wei hurries to open her inbox.

Post video production includes editing, music, subtitles, aesthetics, and etcetera. Wei Wei originally thought about doing it herself by trial and error; she thought that she probably has more free time as a second year student than fourth year students. But Great Master NaiHe said that he would do it. Since Wei Wei never doubts the Great Master, she agreed to it.

The video takes over ten minutes to download. Wei Wei opens it anxiously; she is stunned from just watching the first few seconds of it.

It’s incredibly beautifully crafted.

You could say that it’s simple; it’s no more than red words on a black background, but NaiHe found a great typeset for the words from somewhere, which makes it look majestic, powerful, and unrestrained. The words are graphically written stroke by stroke, and a glowing effect is used that strikes across the words; it’s simple yet magnificent; a great introduction.

Wei Wei re-watches the beginning a couple of times before continuing.

It’s obvious that the Great Master spent a lot of time on it. Whether it’s the editing, the subtitles, or the music, they all match well with the video, especially the music to Wei Wei’s surprise; unlike other participants who are using pop music, the Great Master uses music performed with ancient folk instruments; the abduction at the beginning is accompanied with a light tempo flute music, the rest of the scenes use mainly music played with a guzheng, matching the white robed musician’s image perfectly.

Mm, this sound of running water must be the guzheng. Wei Wei is not familiar with musical instruments; she spent most of her time in music classes secretly doing homework when she was in middle school. Today is the first time that she is focusing on listening to music like this.

There is nothing to nitpick about the music, so Wei Wei simply sits back and enjoys it.

Although it’s a tragic story ( ? ), Wei Wei watches the video happily; probably because she had mischief in mind when writing the storyline and they had many laughs during the filming. But when the scene of the white robed musician pulling out his sword comes, the guzheng music plays a murderous sound. The sword stabs into the back of the female thief’s heart and at the note of the guzheng, the music comes to a halt.

Wei Wei’s heart pounds in pain.

Wei Wei is still engulfed in the feeling of sadness when the story suddenly changes.

The next scene should be the white robed musician embracing the female thief and jumping over the cliff at Sunset Summit, but the video is suddenly showing the white robed musician and General Qing Shan (played by Classmate YuGong) standing together in front of a grave, silently gazing at it.

General Qing Shan says: “You didn’t have to kill her.”

The white robed musician keeps silent, but after a while, he says: “Instead of letting her live and hate me, it’s better for her to die.”

Wei Wei is shocked.

From the start of their speech, she realizes that the white robed musician is no longer the same character from her script.

He has become a stranger separated from her by fog.

The white robed musician lives quietly by himself in a small house at the foot of the mountain. Wei Wei recognizes that it is No Man’s Land at the bottom of Sunset Summit. Around the small house are a few clusters of jade green bamboo. The white robed musician sits within the bamboo forest, all day long, quietly playing the guqin, only getting up to walk to Sunset Summit; standing at Sunset Summit serenely watching the sunset.

General Qing Shan appears again.

“You’ve done a great service, and hereditary peerage (rise to nobility status) is at your fingertips, so why live in seclusion at an abandoned place like this?”

The white robed musician doesn’t answer. He continues to play his guqin while his spirit pet kitty runs around him cheerfully.

The scene changes with a ripple effect. A blurry image of the pond behind the mountain appears as if it is the musician’s memory; the white robed musician caresses his guqin while the female thief sits beside him. Wei Wei hears her voice at this moment.

NaiHe told her to record this the day before, saying that he might use it. The dialogue is for the part where the female thief lets the musician leave; totally melodramatic. Wei Wei felt super embarrassed while saying them; she recorded them quickly once and sent it to him. She didn’t think it would be used.

A sound filter seems to be used as her voice sounds muffled, from afar, and hollow.

“My grandpa was a thief, my dad was a thief, so I was born to be a thief. Other than being a thief, I don’t know what else I can be. I don’t know anything else except the people of this mountain stockade.”

“You hate me so much, but I have never killed anybody. I can’t be the worst, right? But I guess I’m still no good.”

“I also want to be like the girls at the bottom of the mountain and raise little chicks and ducks, work when the sun rises and go home when the sun sets, and live a quiet life. But it’s just a dream. It’ll never come true.”

“Leave. I’ll let you go.”

The scene changes back; General Qing Shan asks: “You have a great future, so why waste your life in this abandoned town?”

A clear and soft voice says: “This is my dream as well.”

All the dialogues in the video is shown in subtitles; only the last few are voice overs that come like thunder and disappear like lightning; the guzheng sounds again, playing mournfully before it fades away.

The last scene is the red clothed female thief and the white robed musician sitting by the pond side. The musician plays on the guqin while the female thief dances with her sword; the two of them radiate in happiness as the image slowly dims until it turns into black and white.

The scene pauses.

The musician’s sleeves from his white robe continue to sway from the breeze.

But the red clothed female thief’s face has already become pale.

Wei Wei’s heart is moved by it; her eyes suddenly become watery.