Chapter One Hundred and Five: You're a damn fool! You're an absolute fool! Chapter One Hundred and Six!

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P.S. Thanks to Book Friend 131114185912120 for the donation, and to Brother Thanks, Brother Love Burns Bright, and Brother Long Shao for their donations. My heartfelt thanks! And many thanks to Brother Gravel for the monthly vote!

One more thing: Black Car here. The update schedule is going to change a little, so please check the author’s notes. Thanks, everyone. I’m posting this chapter at this hour so you won’t have to wait too long; the schedule may change again later. The World Cup is nearly here, after all, and I need to adjust my own routine too. Staying up until the middle of the night just isn’t working. I hope you’ll understand. Thank you all for your support!

In the room of an ordinary farming household, a table stood at the end of the kang bed, an oil lamp glowing on top. Zhao Gang, political commissar of the Eighth Route Army’s 386th Brigade, Independent Regiment, was dozing on the kang.

“Heh-heh! Old Zhao, you’re still up?” Li Yunlong entered his room dressed like a country landlord and immediately spotted Zhao Gang sitting cross-legged on the kang, waiting for him.

“How could I sleep when my regiment commander has gone missing?” Zhao Gang said in a pointedly sarcastic tone.

“Didn’t Monk tell you?” Li Yunlong looked genuinely puzzled.

Zhao Gang simply rolled his eyes. Who did Old Li think he was fooling?

“Damn it, that boy’s getting more and more out of hand! Before I left, I specifically told him to let the political commissar know…” Li Yunlong lied without batting an eye, then grinned shamelessly. “Maybe he forgot. I’ll give him a proper dressing-down in a bit. Old Zhao, he dares forget something I entrusted to him? He’s treating our political commissar like he doesn’t matter at all!”

“Enough of that. Where did you go?”

“Nowhere. Just took a stroll up the mountain.” Still making things up.

“You’re still lying!” The astute Commissar Zhao already knew the truth. “I even had Zhu Ziming, the security officer, search all over the mountain for you! You’ve gone too far…”

At this point, the scene would cut to a close-up of the two of them.

This was the scene where Li Yunlong went to meet Chu Yunfei, then caused a huge commotion at the Gathering Immortals Tower. When he got back, Zhao Gang caught him.

Unable to keep up the lie, Li Yunlong said, “Look, I hadn’t even finished explaining. I did go up the mountain at first, but then I started feeling a bit off, so Monk and I slipped into town. We country folk get all turned around as soon as we enter the city—can’t tell north from south. I don’t have a watch, so I didn’t know what time it was. That’s why I got back late.”

His excuse was enough to make anyone choke with anger. Commissar Zhao was thoroughly exasperated.

And Li Yunlong wasn’t finished. He grinned and added, “Besides, you can’t put all the blame on me. You deserve a little criticism too. If you weren’t so stingy, you could’ve let me borrow your Roman watch for a couple of days. Then I’d have known the time, and I wouldn’t have come back late.”

Zhao Gang was so irritated he started laughing. “You really are a shameless scoundrel! I haven’t even finished criticizing you, and you’re turning it around on me! Forget it. I’m done. Say something three times and it loses all meaning—I’m starting to sound like a nag even to myself. I’ll say it one last time, Comrade Regiment Commander: you should always stay with your troops. You shouldn’t go off on your own. That’s a lack of organization and discipline!”

Li Yunlong was a sly one. Seeing that the matter was more or less behind him, he immediately tried to buy Zhao Gang off.

“Heh-heh-heh. Come on, little brother, don’t go on. Look how much your big brother thinks of you. I brought back roast chicken and liquor!”

There hadn’t been any liquor in the original scene, but we could add some. Fenjiu, too, with a label so large it couldn’t be ignored!

Let’s lend a hand to this struggling company. They’ve had such a rough time of it, and they’ve been so unfairly maligned!

All right, enough about how much money the company paid Wu Xiang. Let’s talk about this scene. Wu Xiang’s instructions were rather… peculiar.

“Teacher He, treat Teacher Li like your old man—your husband, that is. Right, you two should play this like a married couple: the wife waits for her husband, then gives him a good scolding!”

Peculiar, right? But Teacher He accepted the direction, and Teacher Li had no objections either.

People back then didn’t overthink everything. They were all pretty innocent. “Comrade” simply meant “comrade.” Don’t read too much into it, and you’ll understand what Wu Xiang meant: Li Yunlong and Zhao Gang were supposed to have that kind of relationship.

“Okay!” They’d already done several takes of this scene, and it would still need editing later. Anyway, we had to make sure that Fenjiu stood out. Let’s move on—now for the juicy scene!

What juicy scene? Xiuxin and Li Yunlong, of course. This was one of the rare romantic scenes Old Li got.

Same room, same kang. Old Li was about to change costumes!

Xiuxin, of course, was played by Yan Ni.

“Listen, the movements shouldn’t be too big, but there should be something there. The feeling should be like first love—yes, that stage when you don’t know anything yet. Very innocent, very silly.” Wu Xiang gave Teacher Li and Yan Ni his direction.

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“Giggling…” Yan Ni couldn’t help laughing.

“Oh, I know!” Teacher Li was even beginning to speak like Li Yunlong, with that bandit-like edge to his voice.

“Remember, first love!” As Wu Xiang gave his instructions, he found himself thinking about his own relationship with Hai Qing.

Come to think of it, maybe the two of them had started out just like this—rather silly and innocent. Never mind. The more he thought about it, the sillier it seemed, though it had been fun.

Maybe Wu Xiang was feeling lonely. Hai Qing hadn’t arrived yet: she had scenes to shoot, and she didn’t have many shots in this episode anyway.

“Commander, how’d you get such a huge blister on your foot?” Xiuxin, played by Yan Ni, came in to find Li Yunlong wiping his foot. She spotted the blister at once.

This was a scene from the original television series, but with Yan Ni playing it, Wu Xiang decided to take advantage of her particular strength and have her speak in the Shaanxi dialect.

That was the idea: an attractive village women’s association leader delivering her lines in fluent Shaanxi.

“Let me have a look!” Xiuxin was forward about it, reaching straight for his foot.

“Hey, hey, don’t—” But she got a look anyway. “I’ve spent so much time up in the mountains, my feet have gone soft. Barely walked any distance and I’ve got a blister.” Old Li was embarrassed.

“Where’s the pair of shoes I made you? Why’d you give them to Monk? I saw you do it!” Xiuxin was angry.

“Heh-heh. I didn’t think anything of it.” Old Li grinned, still embarrassed.

“You ungrateful wretch! I pricked my fingers making those soles, and you just handed the shoes over to that smelly monk! With a mug like his, he doesn’t deserve my shoes!”

This Shaanxi version of Xiuxin had quite an impact—on the ears, at least.

Old Li had to apologize. “Xiuxin, I really didn’t know.”

“I picked them out especially from a whole bundle and gave them to you!”

“Oh, Xiuxin, why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“Cut!” Wu Xiang called out. At that point, Teacher Li had already been swept up in Yan Ni’s Shaanxi accent. He’d started speaking it too!

“Giggling…” Yan Ni laughed and waved both hands at Teacher Li, as if to say she wasn’t making fun of him.

“Oh, that’s embarrassing!” Teacher Li’s face had turned red. He’d worked so hard to grow a thick skin, too.

But it was a small mishap, nothing that would delay filming.

“Adjust the camera position. We’ll run through that line again in the next shot, then move on.”

“Okay.”

“Sorry. I’ll watch it next time…” Teacher Li had simply caught the accent from her. Dialects were funny that way—sometimes they were contagious.

They changed camera positions to film the blister being pricked. A wide shot would cover their conversation; then the editor could cut around the earlier slip so it wouldn’t matter at all.

As soon as they finished the lines, they moved to a close-up. Yan Ni deftly heated an embroidery needle in the oil-lamp flame, then began to prick the blister.

No dialogue, just the task at hand. The cameras shifted again, angled across from each other to capture the two actors in close-up. Then came the next lines.

“Commander, what do you think of me?” Still in Shaanxi dialect, Xiuxin sounded wonderfully down-to-earth.

“Very good, very good. You’re hardworking and politically aware.”

“Anything else?”

“Also, you make good shoes, and you’ve got a good heart!” Old Li was a little embarrassed. His usual bandit swagger had vanished, replaced by a shy awkwardness.

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“…” Yan Ni gave him an unhappy look, as if she thought someone was being a little too reserved. “Commander! What’s wrong with you? You’re a strapping man, five feet tall, so why are you stammering? I’m a mountain woman, uneducated, and I speak plainly. I’ll tell you straight, Commander: I like you!”

The confession came just like that, and Old Li was dumbstruck.

“Heh-heh-heh…” He started with a foolish laugh. “Xiuxin, we’re still fighting a war! Something could happen to me any day…”

Yan Ni immediately smacked his hand, with a surprising amount of force.

“What are you saying? Don’t say such inauspicious things! You’re a hero—how could you die? Besides, what kind of hero doesn’t have a wife? If you’ll have me, I’ll be your wife! When you’re tired or hungry, I’ll take care of you. I’ll wash your clothes and cook for you. I—I’ll warm your bed!”

As soon as she finished, Xiuxin covered her face with both hands.

“Good!” Wu Xiang silently praised Yan Ni’s performance.

That line hadn’t been in the script, but Yan Ni had added it, and it worked beautifully—really beautifully!

Sometimes an actor’s spontaneous improvisation could be brilliant. It might change the script a little, but it could suit the actor perfectly. Every person, every actor, was different. As long as the overall framework wasn’t affected, the script could be adjusted a bit.

The most famous example of this was Aunt Song Dandan. And Wu Xiang’s girlfriend, Hai Qing, was a master of it too. Even Liu Liu, a screenwriter who later became good friends with her, often complained about that very thing.

Old Li was a little dazed because this wasn’t quite how the script went. But the script itself had him getting flustered at that point, so there was no real contradiction.

“Xiuxin, Xiuxin…” But they couldn’t let the scene go dead. Teacher Li moved on to the next line.

“You—you don’t like me?” Her hands slowly came down. Yan Ni had realized something might be off, but the director hadn’t called cut, so she kept acting on instinct.

“I—I—if I should fall in battle one day, then…” Teacher Li improvised a line.

“You big fool! You’re such a fool!”

And that was the line that came out here!

Xiuxin suddenly spread her arms and threw them around Teacher Li.

“If anything ever happens to you, I’ll wear mourning clothes for you!”

“Xiuxin! Xiuxin!” At that moment, Teacher Li caught the emotion too and returned her embrace.

“Mmm, huff…” They were holding each other so tightly it looked almost as if they might cry, but it was only an embrace, nothing more.

Still, the scene had to develop, so their movements grew bigger and bigger.

“Ow!”

“What’s wrong?”

“The needle—the needle pricked my foot!”

“Okay! Cut! We’ve got it!” Wu Xiang finally called out. The scene hadn’t quite matched the script, but it had worked.

“Great! Sister Yan, that improvisation just now was excellent. Just let me know beforehand next time.”

“Director Wu, I thought I’d messed it up! I couldn’t remember all those lines, so I just made it up. Ha ha ha…”

“…” Wu Xiang could only sweat at that. Filming really was interesting!

Well, they’d got it. It was a good scene, too.