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

The video was uploaded by Lao Du at 2 AM.

He chose a good time. The ad was placed late at night, and the algorithm recommended it during the morning rush hour, so his headline was the first thing commuters saw when they opened their phones.

The hitman from *Black Gold* is extremely frugal in private! He haggles at the market and goes on late-night shopping sprees for discounted goods!

The video is five minutes and twelve seconds long.

The first paragraph describes a farmers' market.

In the scene, Lu Yuan, wearing a faded windbreaker, stands in front of Master Liu's meat stall. The hood is half-covering his face, and his jawline is sharply defined in the sidelight.

He stared at the red numbers on the electronic scale across the cutting board and spoke.

"Let's just forget about the three cents."

The audio track had been enhanced by the Old Poison Team, making every word clearly identifiable. The tone of voice left no room for negotiation, with an extremely low vocal cord vibration frequency—exactly the same as when Shen Yibai was interrogating him in the interrogation room.

In the video, Mr. Liu's boning knife slips from his hand and crashes onto the cutting board.

The first wave of comments: "?????? Is Master Liu alright???"

Next, Lu Yuan's gaze fell on a close-up of the pile of scallions in the corner of the cutting board. He didn't say anything, just glanced at it. Chef Liu reflexively grabbed the two thickest scallions and stuffed them into the bag.

In the middle is a supermarket. A close-up of a piece of Norwegian salmon, priced at sixty-eight. Then the camera zooms out, showing Lu Yuan putting the fish into his shopping cart. As he passes the fresh food section, he turns back, bends down, and scoops out two bags of cat litter from the bottom shelf.

Finally, the streets at night.

Lu Yuan sprinted under the streetlights, carrying a cardboard box for a cat tree that was almost wider than him, with cat litter tucked under his arm. His running form was agile, but the box was too big, and he almost crashed into a roadside tree when he turned a corner.

The back view is ridiculously funny

The old poison's captions were extremely carefully chosen, subtly referencing "poor and stingy," "petty," and "persona collapse" at every turn.

The article concluded with the line: "The ruthless, award-winning performances on screen are so meticulously crafted that even three cents are scrubbed off in private... Is the charisma that audiences pay for genuine skill or just a manufactured image?"

Released. Waiting for it to explode.

Old Poison leaned back in his office chair, a half-smoked cigarette dangling from his lips, staring at the backend data jumping up and down.

During that last surveillance-level counter-surveillance operation in the south of the city, he was outmaneuvered by an extra drinking goji berries, rendering six of his positions useless, his drones useless, and his men chased for three blocks by a butcher with a boning knife. He held onto that grudge for two months.

Today I've received both principal and interest.

The video had been viewed over five million times by 9 a.m.

Marketing accounts smelled blood and acted faster than sharks.

"Shocking! The second male lead who grossed 2 billion yuan is even more ruthless than an old lady when it comes to bargaining at the market." "A cold-blooded killer in the movie, but so stingy in real life that even butchers are afraid of him." The headlines are all outrageous, and the accompanying pictures are all cropped from the frame with the fiercest look in Lu Yuan's eyes and close-ups of green onion leaves.

The rhythm is picking up!

Twenty minutes later, Lao Du refreshed the comments section.

The wind direction is wrong.

The top-rated comment, with 3,000 likes, comes from a user named "Technician No. 6":

"Wait a minute! @Everyone, look at 1 minute 37 seconds! I magnified the meter eight times! This guy not only got a 30-cent discount, but Master Liu also gave him two free scallions! He saved at least 1.2 yuan! 1.2 yuan! Do you guys know what you can buy with 1.2 yuan? You can buy a scoop of loose cat food!"

Attached image: A screenshot of a taximeter zoomed in to its maximum resolution, with red numbers circled in highlighter.

The second most popular comment, with 2,800 likes:

"Sisters, look at 4 minutes and 1 second!! The paw that his sixth member is sticking out of his pocket has fish scales on it!! Rewind 30 seconds, and he's grabbing a piece of salmon from the seafood section!! I checked the packaging, it's imported from Norway! 68 yuan a box!!!"

"I found the same tattered windbreaker he was wearing on 1688 for 29.9 yuan with free shipping."

"A 29.9 yuan windbreaker paired with 68 yuan worth of imported salmon. For the cat."

"My God."

The third most popular comment, with four thousand likes, included nine images:

"Come on, let me show you a pie chart of your spending. Tonight, Lu Yuan's expenses—cat tree, cat litter, canned cat food, and salmon—are 373 RMB."

"My meal: Pork ribs rice (with complimentary scallions), 11 RMB. Cats spend 33.9 times more than humans. This isn't stinginess, it's selflessness for the cat."

Old Poison stared at the screen, his fingers hovering over the keyboard.

Something's wrong! The direction is completely wrong!

Forty minutes later, the comments section had completely spiraled out of control.

Fans scrutinized the scene down to the molecular level. Someone even extracted a close-up of Lu Yuan's gaze while staring at the scallions from the market scene and created a GIF comparing it side-by-side with Shen Yibai's gaze during interrogation in the movie—

"Left: Pressuring for details about where the funds in question went. Right: Pressuring a butcher for scallions. Same look, different actions."

The post was shared over 10,000 times.

And then something even more ruthless came along.

At 1 p.m., one of the crew members from the "Black Gold" production team, who had been holding back for too long, posted two photos in the super topic.

First picture: Lu Yuan is squatting in a corner of the film set, holding a cheap, transparent plastic cup filled with goji berry water. Xu Changlin stands next to him, holding the same plastic cup—filled with Moutai liquor.

The caption reads: "Teacher Xu has been assimilated by Lu Yuan. This cup is a disposable water cup from the props department, costing three cents each."

Second photo: Lu Yuan sits on a lounge chair with his back to the camera, a thermos cup resting on his lap, his right hand picking goji berries one by one from the rim of the cup. In the background, the million-dollar set lighting trails are blurred into a series of light spots.

The caption read: "I watched him count three times. Six. Six every time."

When these materials are pieced together with Lao Du's videos—bargaining at the market, carrying a cat and running wildly up a scaffold late at night, counting goji berries on set, drinking Moutai from a plastic cup—a complete chain of behaviors emerges.

A long comment has appeared in the comments section, which has been shared over 50,000 times:

"Don't you think that's the scariest part? Shen Yibai on screen is cold to the bone, even a three-time Golden Horse Award winner was driven to the point of breathlessness by him. After playing a role with this kind of mental intensity, a normal person would either see a psychologist or commit suicide."

"But what about this person? His way of desensitizing himself is to argue with Mr. Liu at the market over three cents, to run around on an empty street late at night carrying a cat tree, and to squat in a corner counting six goji berries. Old Xu was right! These are the anchors he throws into the world. It's not about being stingy, it's about living."