Lin Fan and Shen Ming were set to join the film crew on the same day — the twenty-third of this month. The cameras would not roll until the twenty-fifth. Those two days were planned carefully: costume fittings, makeup tests, blocking rehearsals, and a full table read to make sure every actor knew their lines and their marks. It was the small, busy work that made a movie tick. Without that gap, chaos would spread across the set like spilled ink.
The shoot itself would last four months. For the first two and a half months the crew would stay on a huge domestic historical set — fake courtyards, painted skies, wooden walkways built to look like palaces. The art department had poured months of work into those props. Then the production would move to Country A for the rest of the filming. Some scenes needed real stone walls, wide open plains, and old temples that domestic studios could not reproduce convincingly. The director insisted on authenticity. So the team would go abroad, bring the actors, and finish the final stretch in another country.
Right now, Lin Fan was still overseas shooting a commercial. He would return only the day before the twenty-third. For Mu Bai, that timing was convenient. She would not have to face him until the crew assembled. That bought her a little time — time to think, plan, and set small traps to keep as much distance as possible between him and Shen Ming. It was time she needed to make sure the male lead had no easy way to claim closeness with the female lead once filming started.
Mu Bai had her reasons for wanting that distance. She had to get into the right role: not only the agent, but the agent who watched, protected, and kept the actress away from unwanted attention. If she met Lin Fan now while she was unprepared, her coldness could come off as strange. He might ask questions. He might probe. She could not let that happen. Once the cameras started and Shen Ming moved onto the set, Lin Fan would be focused on work and promotions. He would pay less attention to the surrounding drama. That too worked in her favor.
She stacked the next bundle of contracts on the desk and began to read. The paperwork was endless: location agreements, talent contracts, nondisclosure clauses, costume approvals, payment schedules, and clauses about travel and accommodation for the overseas leg. Each paper required a signature in specific places, initials in the margins, and a final seal. She moved through them quickly. Her pen scratched the page, neat and exact. Paper, stamp, pen — over and over like a mechanical dance.
She worked like a machine. Her fingers moved steadily. If someone watched from the doorway they might have thought she was a ghost — a figure whose hands blurred with speed. It was not that she enjoyed this speed. She had learned to be efficient by habit. Efficient meant control. Control meant fewer surprises. Fewer surprises meant safety for the plan she was building.
Even so, her thoughts did not stay on contracts alone. While her hand signed, her mind sketched strategies. The first priority was divorce. Lin Fan had to sign the papers quickly, cleanly, and without making a fuss. The less attention the divorce drew, the better. Public scenes of drama would only complicate things and give gossip writers more fuel. Mu Bai wanted a private end. No tabloids, no staged breakdowns, no crying on live television. She had no wish to give him any spotlight. He did not deserve it.
She did not love Lin Fan. The idea of being bound to a man made her chest tighten. There was a practical reason: she loved women. That fact in itself settled much of the matter. But beyond preference, there was something more personal and sharper. She felt wrong appearing in front of Shen Ming as a married woman. It was an odd instinct, not logical but deep. The thought of Shen Ming seeing her name linked to Lin Fan felt like a small betrayal. That guilty prick under her skin was enough to make her impatient.
She pressed her pen harder and signed another page. The signature flowed: the same line she used for corporate deals, acquisitions, and hire agreements.
"Sigh…" Mu Bai didn't know what was wrong with her nor did she want to know. She just kept thinking about when to bring up the divorce to Lin Fan and how to make him sign the papers as soon as possible without giving him any time to react or scheme something sinister.
The late sun pushed through the floor-to-ceiling window and spilled a dim orange light across the office. The beam drew long lines over the desk, over the neat piles of contracts, and finally across the white wall where Mu Bai's tall shadow stood like a sentinel. The color softened the room in a way that almost made the hard edges blur. For a moment the office felt less like a boardroom and more like a stage painted with sunset.
Only one sound broke the quiet: the soft scratching of her pen on paper. It was a bright white pen that clicked and glinted in her hand as she worked. Her fingers moved with steady, practiced motions. Each signature left a confident curl and a firm stroke. The pages disappeared into neat stacks as she moved from one contract to the next. For anyone who walked in at that moment, the speed would have seemed almost impossible — the pen tracing lines so cleanly that it looked like a machine had taken over her hand.
At last she reached the final page. The room seemed to hold its breath as she paused, lifted the pen, and wrote her name in a single smooth motion. The signature sat on the paper like a finished seal. Her eyes sharpened for a moment, taking in the neat black ink that now made the contract official.
She leaned back in the soft leather chair and let it turn so she faced the window. Outside, the city towers caught the afterglow. Windows flashed like small stars, and glass facades burned with that last flare of orange before night fell. The whole view looked like a city wrapped in fire — not the cruel, destructive kind but a slow, even burn that warmed the horizon. The sight should have calmed her, but instead it set a different image alight inside her mind.
The orange glow from the sun made the world look like a furnace, like everything around her had been set alight. The color pulled a memory from the back of Mu Bai's mind so clearly that for a moment she was standing again on another plain, another sky. Her eyes tightened and a cold light gathered in them as the scene of her first battlefield in the Interstellar Federation rose up before her.
She had been only eighteen then — still a girl by many measures, but already marked by destiny. At the orphanage she had been quiet and small, a shadow among other children, until the day the assessors came. They ran tests that felt to her like long, bright knives: puzzles that bent thought, machines that measured reaction to pressure, screens that gauged how her mind shaped and focused energy. The results were impossible to miss. Her mental strength read out at SSS tier — the same rare rank as the royal empress. Her differentiation, the line that showed future growth, flashed a top-tier Alpha. Those two codes together made people stop talking and start planning.
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