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

The migrant workers who had been playing drinking games paid their bills, and the young man in slippers dispersed. Old Hu was tidying up the beer bottles on the next table, the glass clinking against each other.

At the end of the alley, a stray dog ​​barked twice, then something was thrown at it, and it stopped barking.

After downing half a bottle of Moutai, Xu Changlin became more talkative.

He drew a circle on the oil stain on the table with his chopsticks.

Have you read the final scene of the script?

"I've seen it."

Tell me about it.

Lu Yuan pushed the peanut shells aside. "Shen Yibai was cornered in the trading hall, and Chu Tianxing led the enforcement team to break down the door. All accounts were frozen, everyone turned against him, and guns were pointed at him."

"Yes." Xu Changlin marked the circle with a bamboo stick. "This scene is the crux of the whole film. Song Yun wrote three drafts but was not satisfied, so Director Su redrew the storyboard. After I received it, I couldn't sleep and lay in bed thinking about it for two nights in a row."

He put down the bamboo skewer, picked up the cup, and said, "The difficult part isn't being unafraid of death. Anyone can act that way; just grit your teeth and glare. The difficult part is—"

He paused for a moment.

"At that moment, Shen Yibai was completely oblivious to his own death. There was only one feeling... absurdity. It was like a chess player who had played chess his whole life, only to have the final move not overturn the board by his opponent, but by an earthquake. It had nothing to do with chess skills, nothing to do with technique, it was just that the sky had fallen."

Xu Changlin shook the cup.

"I've been acting for thirty years and I've never encountered this kind of psychological distortion."

The food stall's stereo switched to the next song, and the subwoofer's hum made the stool legs vibrate loudly.

Xu Changlin looked at Lu Yuan.

"You've never experienced true death. How are you going to fool me in that final scene?"

The bamboo skewer stopped moving. Lu Yuan put the kidney in his mouth, chewed it, and swallowed it.

"Professor Xu, what do you think a truly hopeless situation looks like?"

Before he could answer, Lu Yuan unscrewed the thermos and took a sip of goji berry water to wash away the barbecue taste in his mouth.

"A dead end isn't when a gun is pointed at your head. At that moment, your adrenaline surges, you become clear-headed, quick-witted, and your mind works like lightning. That's not a dead end, that's stress response."

He pushed the peanut shells off the edge of the table.

"The real dead end is yet to come."

His speech slowed down, and there was a sense of sluggishness as if his memories were being retrieved through some kind of narrow gate.

"You've realized you've run out of chips. You've gone through every possible strategy, and every path leads to a wall. You've played the cards you should have played, you've made the bids you should have made, you've even offered the price you should have offered—it's all useless, absolutely useless!"

"At that stage, there is no fear. Fear requires a 'what if,' a feeling that things can turn around. When you're certain there's no turning around, the source of fear is cut off."

"What's left?"

Lu Yuan looked down at the goji berries in the cup.

"It's very quiet. All the engines in your brain have shut down. The last thread of struggle snapped. You lean back in your chair, staring at the ceiling, not thinking about anything. Not thinking about anything at all."

He took a sip of his drink.

"It's like drowning. There's no choking, no struggling. You just slowly sink down, the water rising from your chest to your neck and then to your mouth. You know there's still air above your mouth, but you're too lazy to breathe it in."

A drop of grease from the grill falls into the charcoal fire, hiss.

Xu Changlin's wrist was suspended, the cup three centimeters off the table, resting there.

He stared at Lu Yuan's profile; the young man's expression was calm.

How could a background extra know that people trapped in a deadly situation are no longer afraid?

How can we know that the source of fear is "what if"?

How could you know that nothing was left in the end?

Xu Changlin's back felt tight. It started between his shoulder blades and went all the way down to his waist.

The sodium lamp tube of the street lamp at the alley entrance is old and flickers every ten seconds or so, its brightness unpredictable.

Lu Yuan leaned back in the plastic chair, the alcohol rising from his stomach. His eyes were unfocused, fixed on the flickering lamp, peering through it at something farther away—or somewhere even earlier.

The moon was bright on the last night of his past life. In the safe house in Zagreb, two walls had been blown through by C4. He leaned against a load-bearing pillar on the third floor, a 9mm bullet wound in his left upper arm, the bleeding unstoppable. Beneath him lay shattered glass and concrete debris, outside was a crossfire blockade from three directions.

He remembered what he did at the time.

I looked up, staring at a water stain on the ceiling. The stain's outline somewhat resembled a bird. I stared at it for a long time.

In this life, Lu Yuan sits in a smoky, open-air food stall, his canvas shoes covered in sunflower seed shells spat out by someone. This body is twenty-four years old, with no gunshot wounds on his arms and his major arteries intact.

Xu Changlin saw something on this 24-year-old young man that didn't belong to his age. It was thin, transparent, but it was there.

Only someone who has truly died once would think this way.

Lu Yuan lowered his head, his expression returning to normal. He gently rubbed the cat's chin with his fingers.

"Tired?"

Old Hu cleared away the last table, and the charcoal fire dimmed.

Xu Changlin picked up the deformed plastic cup; there was still a mouthful left inside.

The rim of the cup touched the cup that Lu Yuan had placed on the edge of the table.

"Brother."

Lu Yuan looked up.

"If you need anything in the industry from now on, just come to me."

Lu Yuan glanced at him for two seconds.

"OK."

......

Time flies, and in the blink of an eye, it's time for the final scene of "Black Gold".

In the abandoned stock exchange on the outskirts of the city, Su Qinghan hadn't slept for twenty hours, with the seventh version of the storyboard manuscript spread out on the table.

"The final scene. One take. Eight minutes."

She stood in the center of the room, the stack of storyboards in her hand crumpled in her fist.

"Dialogue, movement, melee combat—never cut anything. If you can't get it right in one take, start over."

......

In the rehearsal area, Lao Jin, shirtless, demonstrated the final hand-to-hand combat routine to Xu Changlin.

A mid-air scissor throw, followed by a ground grappling move, a powerful swing to break the guard, and a series of takedowns, culminating in a shoulder throw over the head. Highly entertaining and visually appealing.

Xu Changlin followed along once.

The scissors levitated through the air and landed. The moment the right foot touched the ground, the center of gravity shifted almost imperceptibly. The left hand rose from the side and pressed against the lower back.

Xu Changlin forced himself to finish the next series of falls, and sweat poured down his face.

The time when an object fell from a height, the piece of iron grazed Xu Changlin's shoulder. The extreme stress response triggered the accumulated strain over the years.

Old Jin wiped the sweat from his bald head, his brow furrowing deeply.

Su Qinghan walked over.

"Director Su, if we cut the spinning and grappling from this routine, the rest won't be able to sustain the rhythm for eight minutes... but if we don't cut it, Teacher Xu's back will be in danger—"

"I won't cut it." Xu Changlin stood up from the mat, his right hand still on his waist. "Xiao Zhong, go to the car and get the injection."

Xiao Zhong took a half step forward, then pulled back, his face full of embarrassment.

"Teacher Xu, after the injection, the pain will be blocked. What if the injury is aggravated during the movement?"

"I've been acting for 28 years, what joint haven't I been in? Go get it."

Su Qinghan tapped her fingers twice on the seventh version of the storyboard.

Without action scenes, the tension of a single, continuous take is halved. With action scenes, Xu Changlin can't hold his own for eight minutes.