Un-edited so please don’t kill me if you find anything wrong, please gently commenting so I can fix it. Thank you.
“Is everything ready?” Mrs. Flores turned.
Li Sinian lowered his head and replied, “Yes, I have arranged everything.”
“Have you checked everything on the island? Have you… found your father?” Mrs. Flores’ eyebrows that delicately drawn raised high.
Li Sinian replied with poker face: “I searched both inside and outside the villa, and also sent people to search the mountain, but there is no sign of him anywhere.”
Flores didn’t look at him: “I just wanted to teach him a lesson. He blamed me for hiding my background and had a big fight with me. Because I am angry, even when I know that some of them had bad intentions, I let him go on the island.”
The lady is forty or fifty years old this year. She is well maintained, with only her neck and elbows revealing her true age. Her face was bright and beautiful, still like a young girl, her loose hair was pulled together and her emerald eyes were full of leisurely melancholy.
“I want him to know that there are no good people in this world, not just me. No one is unselfish.” She curled her lips into a smile, “That is why I let him go to the island, who would have thought he would be stupid, exposing other people’s activities and never come back. How could he be so naive?”
“It’s fortunate that you are like me,” Mrs. Flores looked at the sea in the distance, “I am afraid that you will follow your father, stupid enough to believe in justice and light side that not even children believe in. Remember Li Sinian, your name means ‘blessed by Heavens’, under Heaven’s blessing, only by rejecting everyone can you live alone to eternal life.”
Mrs. Flores said to herself: “I just want to prove to him that I am right. I want to tell him that in this world, everyone is born with original sin, and he will never see hope and redemption. I want to show him layer by layer the ugliness of human’s nature. The world is like this, it’s not my fault that you and I have come to this point, Li Heng.”
(T/N : So, I guess it is a combination of guilt and anger that makes Mrs. Flores organise the game. Not exactly a good reason but grief is a powerful emotion. Anyway, Li Heng is Sinian’s father’s name just in case you forget.)
***
“Have you got everything ready for your trip?” Mrs. Chen pushed open the door and came in. She brought a bowl of porridge and placed it on Mr. Chen’s table. “What are you looking at?”
Old Chen took off his reading glasses and put down the invitation letter in his hand: “Why did you come in?”
The old lady smiled: “You haven’t eaten much for dinner. I’m afraid you’ll be hungry at night, so I bought you a bowl of porridge.”
Old Chen silently picked up the bowl and put a spoonful of porridge into his mouth.
“But it is also your fault,” the wife sighed, sitting on the edge of the bed while folding his clothes and scolding him, “You know how Xiao Zhou is, he is ignorant. But you are a father-in-law and you are shouting at your daughter-in-law at the dinner table. Can’t you control your temper?”
Old Chen paused and put down the bowl.
The old lady didn’t notice it and continued to babble: “We don’t make any money, the family is supported by Zhuang Zhuang and Xiao Zhou and they give us more than 1,000 yuan a month to honour us. Even if the daughter-in-law is like this, can you just accept it?”
Old Chen picked up the invitation again and looked at the prize on it.
(T/N : Yes there is a prize for winning, 20 million. Well I guess people mostly come to kill others instead of winning the game lol.)
***
“Are you ready?” The man beside the bed was wearing a three-piece suit with a gun hooked between his fingers.
The other man lay shivering in the corner.
There was an envelope in the seam of his closed window. Inside was an invitation letter.
“What should I do?” He widening his eyes in despair and thought, “what should I do?”
“I really don’t know,” he tried to convince himself and also tried to convince the man beside the bed with his back to him, his teeth rattling, “what happened back then has nothing to do with me, I’m just running errands, applying for approval, affixing an official seal, what the hell is going on has nothing to do with me!”
The man in the suit gave a snort of disgust: “It doesn’t matter what you said, it is time to pay the piper.”
(T/N : My guess is this is the 2nd one who died, the one who run away and get shot before the game begin.)
***
“Are you ready?” Liu Xin pushed the gold rimmed glasses on the bridge of his nose, brewed a pot of Chaoshan Kung Fu tea* and poured one out to hand it to Du Chaosheng. Du Chaosheng’s face was half hidden in the heat but you can tell his mood is not good.
Du Chaosheng sighed: “I don’t know who made it, it’s been so many years, why don’t you let it go.”
Liu Xin lowered his head and covered his eyes: “Some things can never be forgotten.”
“I went to the island later and a villa was built on the island,” Liu Xin took the initiative to tell him the good news, “I hid a box of drinking water on the island, do you remember the cave in the sea where we killed Li Heng? If something unextend happens, we’ll hide inside and wait for things to calm down before coming out.”
Du Chaosheng patted Liu Xin on the shoulder: “Let’s do it like this. If I don’t see clearly the purpose of the people behind the scenes, I will always find it difficult to sleep and eat.”
Liu Xin raised one corner of his lips and lowered his head to smile.
(T/N : Yeah, the one who hid the box of food and clothes in chapter 7 is Liu Xin. Now, you probably don’t remember, but the clothes did not fit Du Chaosheng and that DC wanted to trade the shirt because of that. I was lol’ed at that because well, Liu Xin purposely chose clothes that did not fit DC. Man, talk about being petty.)
***
“Is everyone ready?” the director shouted.
Everyone quickly said yes, after the scene’s name was written on the clapperboard, the filming officially began.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clapperboard
Fang Daichuan played the 3rd male lead in this martial arts drama. He was wearing a hood and layers of clothes, sweating like rain in the 40o.
(T/N : Author did not say but I am sure this is Celcius.)
“The temperature is higher than my body temperature,” Fang Daichuan fanned himself with the script, “How is my body going to dissipate heat?”
He was a little jealous of the movie emperor Pei in the same group, who had an RV to rest, an air conditioner fan and fresh fruit to eat. He looked down at the water in his hands, it was room temperature and it was hot from the sun.
“Don’t worry,” Xiao Zhou patted him on the shoulder to comfort him, “Deng-ge has picked up a good script for you. After the variety show explodes in popularity in the second half of the year, we will also have air-conditioning fans and fresh fruit!” She said and handed Fang Daichuan a small hand-held fan, that turn out to be a fucking hand-cranked one.
“What script? When will it be filmed?” Fang Daichuan couldn’t wait.
Xiao Zhou blinked: “It is still negotiated, they will give a reply next week, don’t worry, Chuan’er-ge, trust me. You will definitely became popular.”
***
“Is everything ready?” Li Sinian stood in the corridor on the second floor of the villa. Several workers raised their heads to carve statues. The God fought with Demons and the Lady Justice with black fleshy wings.
When the workers saw him coming up, they all smiled and said, “It’s all ready, are you satisfied?”
Li Sinian looked at the statues, expressionless: “Yes, I’m very satisfied.”
“Excuse me, I have to ask, what is the purpose of your villa?” Another worker on the side was hanging mural carpets on both sides, “You don’t look Chinese, we Chinese usually put these mural carpets in the tomb passage. It’s a bit unlucky to put it in the corridor.”
Li Sinian lowered his head and pulled out his phone, casually explaining, “I’m a director. I’ll use this place to film a scene.”
Then there was no problem, the worker nodded and continued to work.
“What kind of movie?” The sculptor had already polished the details and was currently wiping the dust on the stone with a damp cloth. Seeing that the owner was friendly, he casually asked.
The corners of Li Sinian’s lips curled into a smile that was not a smile, the light amber eyes glowed with a strange grey-green light under the sunlight: “The battle between gods and demons with a moral battle between good and evil.”
“Your movie has a religious theme? Who won in the end?” The worker sat on the scaffolding, took a final look at his work and sighed with satisfaction.
Li Sinian narrowed his eyes and looked at the waves outside the window: “At the end of the world, Twilight of the Gods, there is no winner, everyone’s dead.”
“Please write a sentence in the corner,” Li Sinian said suddenly when the workers were about to leave, “write:
“It’s better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven.”
How art thou fallen from heaven, O Morning Star, son of the dawn!
You’d rather be a king in hell than a slave in heaven.
Li Sinian looked at the end of the corridor. In the room near the sea, a woman tilted her head and carried a violin, revelling in the song of the wanderer.
(T/N : The mural first shows up in chapter 24. Yeah, Sinian, this trembling M, he already plans to end everything. Good things Chuan’er coming to save the day.)