A real killer playing a villain; the guy surnamed Zhen in Detective, run!

"Scene Twelve - Action!"

Hit the board.

The lights inside the shed changed abruptly. Neon tubes lit up, alternating between red and green, and shadows etched angular shapes on the brick walls.

Old Jin's gesture came to an end.

The gates of the Asura Field have been opened.

Thirty-four people moved at the same time. The four martial artists in the first row clashed, their lead jabs flying past each other, the air currents from their punches causing the counterfeit money props on the table to flip.

A burly man tumbled off the railing on the second floor and landed on the cushioned floor. A prop beer bottle was shaken off the table and shattered into a shower of shards of molten glass on the ground.

The sound waves, the collision of flesh, and the impact of metal objects surged to their maximum value within a second.

As Lu Yuan took his first step, his right foot stepped out, a prop chair flew from a 30-degree angle to his right, the back of the chair grazing the back of his coat, missing him by less than ten centimeters.

Step two. Step three.

The two stuntmen were wrestling a meter to his left. One of them was thrown over his shoulder, his back hit the ground and bounced, and the trajectory of his heel was twelve centimeters away from the outside of Lu Yuan's knee.

He started reciting his lines.

"You think these people are risking their lives for you?"

"They won't even know how they died."

Step four. Step five. A beer bottle flew overhead and shattered on the wall half a meter behind him. Shards of glass bounced onto the back of his collar.

Behind the monitor, Su Qinghan leaned forward, her hands braced against the edge of the table, almost touching the screen.

The image of Lu Yuan in the camera lens and the violent scene around him created a visual disconnect she had never seen before. There were more than thirty people fighting, but this person seemed to have been projected from another time and space. The time was different, and the rules were different.

Step 6. Step 7.

"The real winners never sit at the poker table."

The muscles around the scar were tense.

He fastened the slipknot of the inner cuff strap with his right hand.

Lu Yuan took his eighth step.

A stuntman from Scarface's left threw a straight punch following a set move. Scarface fell backward with the force of the punch, his body rolling along the ground at great speed, heading directly in front of Lu Yuan's right foot.

The distance was less than half a meter.

Scarface's right arm suddenly stretched forward, the buckle on the strap popped open, and a seven-centimeter-long rusty steel nail fell between his fingers, the tip pointing downwards. Using the momentum of the roll and the explosive force of his waist and abdomen, it pierced straight into Lu Yuan's right instep.

Jiang Yan's pupils contracted; she saw it. It was too late. From her seat to Lu Yuan, there were six people and an overturned card table in between. Her mouth opened, but her vocal cords hadn't even had a chance to vibrate.

Lu Yuan is reciting his lines.

The lips are moving, and the sound is coming out.

"And those who sit at the card table..."

His left leg did not pause, dodge, or show any reaction.

Before landing, the left foot turned inward at an inconspicuous angle, while the right toe swung up less than two centimeters following the natural swing of the gait.

My toes caught on something.

The props team laid out load-bearing steel cables. A section of the safety rope that was originally used to secure the second-floor railing had come loose and was lying on the ground, being stepped on and kicked into a corner.

The steel cable was lifted by his toes and cut across the path of Scarface's charge.

Scarface's neck slammed into the suddenly snapping steel wire.

The forward momentum and the resistance of the steel wire created an extreme shearing moment in his neck. His upper body was abruptly thrown to a stop, while his lower body continued to slide forward. His spine curved into a reverse arch angle.

The steel nail in his hand, in the instant his body twisted violently, changed direction by 180 degrees.

puff.

It was driven into the muscles on the inside of his own thigh.

The screams drowned out all the sounds of fighting. It was the uncontrollable howl that erupted when a nail pierced muscle tissue, sending the highest level of pain signals to the brain from nerve endings.

Blood seeped from his trouser leg, spreading into a small, dark red puddle on the ground.

Lu Yuan landed his ninth step.

"—They're all just pawns."

The lines have been finished.

He stopped at point B, turned around, and glanced down at the scar curled up like a shrimp on the ground, and the spreading bloodstains.

"Click—!"

Su Qinghan sprang up from her chair with such force that the chair tipped over and crashed to the ground. She snatched the megaphone from the stagehand's hand:

"Genius! Lu Yuan, you didn't even pause when you walked through the bloodstains! That disgust! That attitude of not even bothering to look! One take! I'll fight anyone who dares to delete this!"

She was still in a state of excitement. She didn't see that the blood flowing from the scar was real.

Lu Yuan's past life instincts kicked in. He loosened his grip on his coat pocket, his shoulders slumped, and the curve of his back returned to the relaxed state of an ordinary extra.

He ran over there.

"Big brother! Big brother, are you alright?!" He squatted down next to Scarface, gesturing wildly in the air. "Is this blood real? Props team! Who dropped a nail in the props team?! Someone's dead, you know that?!"

His voice rose eight octaves, and he sounded as flustered as a new intern.

Scarface lay on the ground, glaring at him.

Lu Yuan's face was filled with fear and heartache.

The medical team rushed over, put people on the stretcher, and applied hemostatic pads.

The scene was chaotic for a few minutes.

Su Qinghan finally noticed from the monitor playback that the color of the blood was wrong. The prop blood in the shards of sapped glass was diluted beet juice, a deep purplish-red. The blood on the ground was bright red, with darkened edges due to oxidation.

Real blood! Her face turned pale.

Jiang Yan was already squatting beside the bloodstains. She put on latex gloves and used tweezers to pick up the object.

7 cm. Head removed. Both ends polished. Surface shows signs of rust and grinding.

This isn't something you'd find in a prop room.

She put the steel nails into the evidence bag, stood up, and scanned the entire room.

Zhao Xiujie is not here.

He didn't come to the set today. But his chubby assistant was in the production crew area twenty minutes ago.

It's gone now.

Jiang Yan took out her phone.

"Xiao Liu, check the surveillance footage from all entrances and exits of Studio 5 today. I need the attendance list and identification information of the extras. Focus on checking the temporary workers."

She hung up the phone and took one last look at Lu Yuan, who was squatting in the corner comforting Lao Liu. The little orange cat was still terrified by the screams and its fur stood on end. Lu Yuan was coaxing it, "It's okay, it's okay, we're just filming, it's fake."

Jiang Yan looked down at the steel nail in the evidence bag.

I looked up again at the back of the figure stuffing cat treats into the cat's mouth.

She went through the replay one last time in her mind.

The steel cable was positioned not far from where Lu Yuan's toes originally landed. His toes shifted by no more than two centimeters to reach it. His gait remained unbroken, and his lines flowed without pause.

In the fraction of a second that a person was stabbed in the foot with a sharp weapon, without looking, dodging, or interrupting any ongoing action, he used a two-centimeter toe displacement to kill the attacker.

Jiang Yan put the evidence bag into her inner pocket.