I Was Taken by the Female Lead After Transmigrating into a Book - Chapter 104

After returning to the hotel, most of the film crew followed Huo Wu to the hospital for filming, based on the previous sample recording. Only a small portion of the team remained at the hotel to record the rest of the work.

With fewer people following her, Bai Feifei finally felt a bit of relief. She made a point to ask Ji Meng specifically about Huo Wu’s diet restrictions these days. Huo Wu had lost too much weight, and it always made Bai Feifei’s heart ache.

This ache was something she almost couldn’t contain on set this afternoon. Every time she saw Huo Wu, she would unconsciously want to touch her arm or her face. Several times, as she was caressing her, she wanted to hug Huo Wu tightly, wishing she could teleport them to an empty corner, prepare all of Huo Wu’s favorite foods, not let her do anything, and just make her rest well.

“Food?” To her surprise, Ji Meng laughed, and her voice on the phone had a cold, emotionless static sound. “Don’t bother. She can’t touch a single bit of oil for the next few days. If she’s really hungry, she can have some coarse grains or protein. For the remaining twenty-something days, she has to maintain her current state the whole time.”

Bai Feifei was stunned. “What?”

“Didn’t she tell you?” Ji Meng was curious but quickly understood something. After thinking for a moment, she instead comforted Bai Feifei, “I remember your last day of filming is a few days earlier than hers. After you leave, she still has a lot of scenes to reshoot in the same state that were delayed before. Li Ke barely managed to get them all together. Otherwise, she would suffer even more.”

But Bai Feifei was not comforted at all.

There were snacks prepared by both of their assistants in the fridge, but Bai Feifei only realized after opening it that aside from the ones she had opened, Huo Wu didn’t seem to have touched any of them.

Not liking to eat them was one thing, but not being able to eat them was probably the main reason.

Even a body of iron couldn’t withstand this kind of abuse, but Bai Feifei couldn’t say anything to stop it.

The waiting was agonizing. Bai Feifei later contacted Bai Xue and asked about the training camp. Bai Xue gave her an answer, but it was almost the same as what Ji Meng had said, with one extra detail: freshly ground coffee beans were better for the body than regular black coffee from outside.

So Bai Feifei calculated her bank balance. After subtracting the two months of hospitalization fees she needed to pay for Jiang Yueming and other miscellaneous expenses, she was pleasantly surprised to find that she could afford to buy a decent coffee machine in installments.

When Fu Xiaoxiao came to find her, she was still researching coffee machines. The paper next to her was filled with notes. Fu Xiaoxiao glanced at it casually and said in surprise, “Honey, what are you buying this for? It’s so expensive! Are you trying to rob a bank?”

Bai Feifei vaguely brushed it off and asked Fu Xiaoxiao for her opinion, but neither of them knew much about coffee, let alone coffee machines. After a while, Fu Xiaoxiao seemed to notice something. She took Bai Feifei’s phone and pointed to a picture. “I think I’ve seen this one somewhere…”

It was a review left by a buyer who had taken pictures of every detail of the product, including the outer packaging. Fu Xiaoxiao saw the special logo on the bottom right and slapped her forehead. “Oh! I have an identical one in my storage room! I think someone gave it to my mom as a gift, and she told me that if I drank more coffee, I might be smarter than the pig next door. I got mad and hid the machine in the storage room.”

Fu Xiaoxiao’s storage room was actually her garage. But she drove and owned very few cars, so it wasn’t full. The space for two cars was later used for miscellaneous items.

Bai Feifei looked at the coffee machine she most wanted to buy but had to put aside because of the five zeroes in the price. She said in a voice filled with anticipation, “Please.”

Fu Xiaoxiao immediately got a leave of absence from Bai Xue that night and rushed to the airport.

Bai Feifei kept all of these things from Huo Wu. But when Huo Wu finished work, she found that the food she was eating still had a little bit of warmth.

Broccoli was such a delicate vegetable. It would get soft if it was cooked for too long and tasted bad when it got cold, and it couldn’t be reheated. But when she ate it, both the flavor and the texture were very fresh and delicious. She paused for a moment, and her taste buds, which she had forcefully suppressed for a long time and had almost lost their sense of presence, finally began to revive. She could truly feel “hunger” and “craving.”

It was a very magical feeling.

Huo Wu took a long time to eat the mouthful of broccoli. She looked at Bai Feifei, who was sitting next to her with her face in her hands. She said softly, “You made this?”

Bai Feifei’s eyes curved into a smile, and she nodded. “I followed Chef Xu’s instructions exactly, using a stopwatch. He even praised me for how pretty the colors were.”

Bai Xue’s introductions were always top-notch. The chef she introduced was at a state banquet-level.

Bai Feifei was a little apprehensive at the time, afraid that the chef would think she wasn’t smart enough. She used almost every bit of her reaction ability to make this meal. But the results were good. Huo Wu was satisfied with the food, the chef was satisfied with teaching, and the student was even more satisfied with her work.

“He and Bai Xue only met at Ms. Cheng’s banquet. He said at the time that he really admired you as a young person, saying there weren’t many people in the younger generation who could stick to one thing for decades without expecting anything in return,” Huo Wu said, eating slowly. But she also saw Bai Feifei’s involuntary swallowing as she sniffed the food.

She subconsciously stopped chewing. Her hand stopped as well. She said, “Did you eat?”

Bai Feifei said, “Mmm,” and didn’t answer directly. Instead, she said, “I haven’t put my portion out yet.”

She had prepared Huo Wu’s portion while she was washing up. Her heart was filled with an incomprehensible ache to make sure Huo Wu’s stomach was full, so she forgot that she had been busy all day and hadn’t eaten yet.

Huo Wu sighed and got up, walking to the kitchen.

Almost no one had ever used the hotel kitchen. Their meals were all prepared and delivered by their managers. The only appliances they usually used were the refrigerator and the kettle. But now, the kitchen was not only fully stocked, but even the seasonings to add flavor to the dishes were not store-bought products. They were mixed from scratch with lemons, pure rice vinegar, and other ingredients.

Huo Wu’s eyes swept over the subtle details that were almost impossible to notice.

Then she stood at the kitchen entrance and turned back to see Bai Feifei sitting there, stirring the black coffee that had just been delivered to her. Hot coffee was hard to drink. It was much easier to drink after it had cooled down and some ice cubes were added.

In that moment, she couldn’t say what specific thoughts were going through her mind. All that was left was an endless silence as she quietly watched everything in the kitchen.

Bai Feifei opened the lid of the coffee to let it cool down. When she saw that Huo Wu hadn’t come over to the kitchen entrance, she followed her. She saw the kitchen she had made a mess of.

She was silent for two seconds. Her focus was very strange. Looking at the messy footprints on the kitchen floor and the scattered vegetable scraps on the counter, she awkwardly picked at the door frame. “Actually, I’m not this messy every time I finish cooking…”

“It’s okay,” Huo Wu said. “I’ll clean it up.”

Bai Feifei was someone who loved to cook. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been able to understand everything Chef Xu said so quickly. Huo Wu only knew how to make the most basic home-cooked meals, the kind that didn’t require more than three steps to complete. So they were simple and not terrible, but they were by no means delicious.

But even with her lack of experience, she knew that it would not be easy to make a meal with at least ten different kinds of vegetables like the one in the bowl just now. The raw ingredients that were needed, the various tools—if Bai Feifei was not someone who loved to cook and knew about these things, she would never have been able to think of everything.

She liked to cook but didn’t like to clean up the aftermath. Huo Wu didn’t miss the hint of fatigue that flashed across Bai Feifei’s face and her effort to hide it. She just didn’t show more in front of her.

So when she said that, she saw the emotions that hadn’t disappeared from Bai Feifei’s eyes.

“Think of it as exercise,” Huo Wu said with a smile. “You always have to do some work to help with digestion after you eat.”

Bai Feifei only struggled for a second before she was convinced by Huo Wu. She took out her portion and brought it to the table, finally eating with Huo Wu. At this moment, she suddenly felt very content, but also as if something was missing.

In her memory, it was a perfectly normal thing for the two of them to eat like this. Sometimes, they would chat the whole time, and sometimes, they would…

“What’s missing is an old TV playing commercials,” Bai Feifei said with her eyes curved. She smiled and said, “Preferably the kind with an antenna that would make a ‘hissing’ sound when the signal was bad. You just had to smack it twice to make it work again.”

That was their childhood. When Huo Wu left the orphanage and rented a place. The landlord had left an old TV behind that still had a signal. There weren’t many channels, but at least there was some sound in the room to ward off the loneliness.

Huo Wu smiled when she heard this. “Isn’t that what the rental room in the Xingfu Li neighborhood was like?”

The old, creaking TV in the room that belonged to Fu Sang and Wu Ling, and the way the two of them sat cross-legged on the floor, whether they were quiet or loud, was almost the same.

Two completely different scenes and settings, with only the same two protagonists.

Bai Feifei suddenly felt a sense of anticipation for the finished film. She said in a longing tone, “It’s like we really went back to our childhood. I really want to see what the finished film looks like.”

For many moments, she even thought the prototype for Fu Sang was herself, but the development of the whole story was completely different from her own. After all, she had never experienced such a severe and unprecedented form of school violence. There weren’t so many students who had died in such a short amount of time where she lived. There was no so-called upper-level protective umbrella, nor were there so many classmates who died a glorious death but were so evil they were hard to forget.

There was only a silly Fu Xiaoxiao and a lover, Huo Wu.

“It’s very similar to the childhood you remember,” Huo Wu said. She had finished her portion and didn’t even leave a single drop of sauce. She drank it all.

Hearing Bai Feifei say this, she looked up and said, “You have a talent that many actors would envy. When you get into character, you forget all the acting skills you’ve learned. This allows you to avoid the homogenization of acting forms and immerse yourself more in the role, so your performance is very real. Even the changes to the lines are more consistent with the character.”

At the beginning of a creation, the creators’ characters are mostly in a fixed situational mode. A film is a secondary creation, and good actors will give the character a second life and make the character come alive. The content of some overly colloquial lines will also be used and processed by the actor.

This has happened many times, and Bai Feifei may not even be aware of it, but she already has this instinct to give a character life.

And because of Bai Feifei, the overall progress of their scenes together would be faster, and Huo Wu could be more immersed.

She would even feel a sense of nostalgia.

She wasn’t nostalgic for the life or the hardships she had back then. She was only nostalgic for the person who had sat next to her at that time.

Bai Feifei didn’t say anything. She just smiled with her eyes curved. Then she leaned toward Huo Wu and said as if she were drunk, “But A-Wu, tell me the truth. Did you like me first, or did I like you first?”

Bai Feifei’s catchphrase was once “I like you so much” and “I super like you.” But that kind of liking was like liking a cat or a dog. It didn’t mean anything more.

She then continued, “Back when we lived in that small apartment in Yan City, did you ever think that after we got together, we would stay together forever?”

After getting together, stay together forever.

Huo Wu looked up and stared at Bai Feifei. “I did.”

Not only did she think about it, but she was once so convinced of it.

Bai Feifei yawned. She was overly exhausted. And after eating a full meal, which included carbs in her dinner tonight, she was feeling a bit “carb-drunk.” She was a little woozy. “Do you still think that way now?”

“Yes,” Huo Wu said, gently stroking Bai Feifei’s eyebrows. “If you’re tired, go to bed and sleep.”

Bai Feifei opened her eyes stubbornly. “I haven’t brushed my teeth yet.”

She slumped onto the dining table like a blob of mud. Her eyes were closed, but her mouth was still moving. “Will this thought never change in the future?”

She was still asking about the thought of “after getting together, staying together forever.” Huo Wu nodded, reached out to prop up her head, and laughed as she pinched her soft cheek. She said gently with a hint of a playful taunt, “What will you remember when you wake up?”

Bai Feifei closed her eyes and frowned, trying to show that she wasn’t asleep yet, just a little muddled.

So Huo Wu smiled and said as if making a vow, “It will never change.”