Chapter 38: Chou Manman’s Debut
After downing three puddings, Xiang Xue finally recovered from the excitement of tasting pudding for the first time.
The viewers saw that she had finally started streaming Empresses in the Palace Episode 14 again, and they also breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t that the live stream room viewers disliked watching Xiang Xue’s eating stream; on the contrary, they especially loved watching Xiang Xue go to the kitchen to ask Xiang Chuan for things to eat. But the visual impact of the pudding on everyone was a bit too strong, and some torment of “seeing but not being able to eat” surged into their hearts, so they could only try to put this thing out of their minds and enjoy the audiovisual satisfaction brought by the TV drama.
Xiang Chuan quietly moved to Chou Manman’s side and asked in a low voice:
“Didn’t you come to discuss acting with Xiao Xue? Why are you just watching the TV drama?”
“Ah haha…”
Chou Manman shrank her neck a bit embarrassedly. “At first we were discussing it, but the TV drama was too exciting, so…”
So she got hooked, right? Xiang Chuan raised an eyebrow.
“Actually, little sister Xiao Xue doesn’t really understand the principles either. Little sister Xiao Xue just performs based on feeling, but…”
As she spoke, Chou Manman couldn’t help but close her eyes, recalling more than an hour ago when Xiang Xue, looking a bit embarrassed, stood in the center of the entertainment room and, at Chou Manman’s request, performed directly once.
[One, two, three, begin!]
Amazingly, as Chou Manman’s countdown ended, the stiffness on Xiang Xue’s face and body seemed to vanish, replaced by elegant demeanor and arrogant expression. Chou Manman felt that what she saw before her eyes was not a somewhat immature junior high student, but the proud and immensely powerful Empress from Empresses in the Palace.
Xiang Xue only performed for two minutes at the time, but those two minutes felt like two hours to Chou Manman. The last time she felt so immersed due to acting skills was when she was little and watched the live performance of Romeo and Juliet in the Twelfth Fleet!
If she and Xiang Xue weren’t one in the Senior High School Department and the other in the Junior High Department, Chou Manman would want to immediately poach Xiang Xue into her (not yet established) Performance Club.
However, the primary issue now was that Chou Manman, who was preparing to establish a Performance Club, still hadn’t learned any acting techniques.
Chou Manman looked at the big screen with annoyance. Although the TV drama’s resolution had significantly improved in clarity after using the image quality restoration peripherals specially provided by the Historical Research Institute, some close-up focused lenses still couldn’t restore the blurry backgrounds. Even so, this TV drama was attracting more and more Third Fleet residents to watch. The viewer count in this small live stream room had long reached the limit of 3000 people. The live stream room maintenance team and the Historical Research Institute were working overtime these two nights to handle the live stream room’s data transfer. If they lifted the viewer limit and the threshold of needing an invitation from viewers to watch, this live stream room—accurately speaking, this TV drama—would definitely become popular throughout the fleet in a very short time.
Besides the novel Ancient Era style background, what was most attractive was the vivid and realistic performances by the actors in the TV drama.
On the big screen, the gorgeously dressed women, with every gesture and glance, showed no trace of affectation. If it weren’t explicitly stated that this TV drama was a story from the Ancient Era filmed in ancient times, Chou Manman would even suspect it was directly filmed with an invisible camera in the Ancient Era and then edited.
This realistic performance could almost rival the Twelfth Fleet’s signature performance program Romeo and Juliet. No, this TV drama also had realistic background sets, allowing people to immerse more deeply. In this aspect, it was already far better than Romeo and Juliet at drawing the viewers in.
Unknowingly, Episode 14 had finished playing. Chou Manman came back to her senses: Oh no, she got absorbed, and forty minutes had been wasted.
So she began to hold her head and think hard, even casually agreeing when Xiang Xue invited her to stay overnight.
When she came back to her senses, she found herself being dragged by the sisters Xiang Chuan and Xiang Xue to the guest room on the third floor to pick out pajamas for guests to wear.
“Xiang Chuan, what do you think is the best way to improve performance level?”
Chou Manman asked in a half-numb state. Her CPU was now somewhat overloaded.
“Hm?”
Xiang Chuan looked at her in surprise, thinking why she was asking an outsider like herself who was just a TV drama viewer, but seeing Chou Manman staring blankly at the wardrobe, she felt that if she didn’t say something, this friend she had just met on the first day might have a brain crash on the spot.
“Probably… sense of immersion?”
Xiang Chuan recalled a manga Glass Mask she had seen who-knows-how-many years ago, and still remembered vividly the various scenes of the manga protagonist training her acting skills.
Mainly because the expressions had some facial art.
“Sense of… immersion?”
The new term made Chou Manman’s brain start functioning again. She looked at Xiang Chuan, clearly hoping the other would explain the concept.
“Um… that is, completely immersing yourself into the script character’s era background, environment, personality, hobbies, and then… um… inferring the character’s inner state in each scene based on the character’s personality, and performing… something like that?”
After saying that, Xiang Chuan felt her own CPU was about to burn up. This content was still summarized from her ancient memories of Glass Mask. Discussing acting techniques was really too tormenting for her, a casual viewer who used TV dramas as mealtime entertainment.
But this brand-new concept suddenly enlightened Chou Manman. She took out her terminal, opened a document full of text, stared at a long paragraph of text and read it several times from the beginning, then closed her eyes and thought about something.
Just as Xiang Xue brought in a servant carrying bedsheets, Chou Manman took a deep breath, placing one hand on her chest to ease her nervousness.
“Believer, do not insult your hand like this; that is the most pious reverence. The deity’s hand is permitted for believers to touch; the closeness of palms far surpasses a kiss.”
She frowned, seeming somewhat unsatisfied.
“Hate ignited the warm fire of love in the ashes; if we weren’t meant to meet, why did we cross paths! Yesterday’s enemy, today’s lover—this romance is bound to sow disaster.”
There was sorrow between her brows, but her face was not as tense as before. After reciting this, she took another deep breath, brewing something, then opened her mouth and recited that line even Xiang Chuan, a stage play novice, was familiar with:
“Romeo, Romeo! Why are you Romeo? Deny your father and abandon your name; or if you will not, swear to be my love, and I will no longer be a Capulet. ‘Tis only your name that is my enemy; you would still be yourself even if you weren’t a Montague… Romeo, abandon your name; I will give my entire soul to compensate for that empty name outside your body!”
When reciting the last line, Chou Manman for some reason thought of Zhen Huan and Prince Guo from the TV drama she had just seen, feeling some emotions fermenting in her chest. Her voice rose accordingly, becoming loud and emotional, so much so that she couldn’t help but open her eyes.
The first thing Chou Manman saw was the stunned Xiang Chuan in front of her and Xiang Xue standing beside her with wide eyes. Only then did she seem to realize what she had done; her face instantly flushed red, her cheeks and ears turning bright red.
“I-I-I I’m sorry, I’ll just go back!”
With that, Chou Manman grabbed her small bag and prepared to rush out of the room and run home. Fortunately, Xiang Chuan and Xiang Xue once again demonstrated the sisters’ tacit understanding and stopped her in time.
Xiang Chuan: “It’s just a segment from Romeo and Juliet. You get like this reciting a few lines in front of us; how will you perform on stage in the future?”
Xiang Xue: “Sister Manman, what was that you just recited! I want to play too!”
Chou Manman: “Please let me hide in the corner…”
The three were frolicking when sparse applause suddenly came from behind. The three turned around to see that, unbeknownst to them, Lin Yu, the Xiang Weiguo couple, and Ma Chuanhua were standing at the room door, all with admiring smiles on their faces, instantly petrifying Chou Manman on the spot.
“Amazing, classmate Chou Manman. Your performance was outstanding.”
Ma Chuanhua praised sincerely. Lin Minzhi nodded too. Due to their duties, the two had more contact with cultural works and had naturally appreciated Romeo and Juliet multiple times, but they hadn’t expected the little girl before them to display acting skills that would put many Twelfth Fleet trainee actors to shame.
This generation of young people is really something! Ma Chuanhua sighed with emotion, then suddenly thought of something and looked at the stiff Chou Manman.
“Classmate Chou Manman, I heard you also want to apply to establish a club?”
The groundwork for establishing the club was finally done. Next was Xiang Chuan tricking little friends into joining the team.
