Chapter 159: Ch 159: Ratings and Tickles

While whatever was shifting in Lin Xuanyu remained his private weather, the rest of the squad had not moved on from farming.

The three alphas and their paired omegas occupied the wait the way they occupied most unscheduled stretches—by filling it with ordinary talk that made the premise of a love variety show look, from certain angles, slightly unnecessary. Harmony held. Laughter rose and fell without urgency. No one in that cluster was checking the path from the village every thirty seconds.

However, the staff were.

Eyes kept drifting toward the lanes that should have produced a familiar goatee, a louder voice, and the particular brand of chaos that officially belonged to the next segment. The longer the empty path stayed empty, the tighter the production cluster drew in on itself. Anxiety passed between them in glances, half-finished sentences, and the restless shift of weight from foot to foot. Phones came out. Phones went back into pockets. Nothing on any screen improved the view of the road.

PD Xu Cui’s secretary finally sighed and looked away from the village. When he turned back to his colleagues, weariness sat plain on his face, edged with something sharper—the specific irritation of a person whose entire morning schedule depended on a man who had simply stopped answering the world.

"Did he respond?"

Exhaustion and a thin thread of annoyance shared the question. He already knew the likely answer. He asked anyway, because hope was a habit that died slower than evidence.

The staff member crouched near him—thumb worrying at his own teeth in a nervous rhythm that had worn a small shiny spot into the nail—shook his head.

"No, sir. I’ve been spamming him since earlier, but...."

A wry smile finished the report better than any list of unanswered messages could have. The silence on the other end of those texts had a weight. It was not the silence of a phone left in another room. It was the silence of a man who had seen the notifications and chosen to focus something entirely different instead.

The secretary dragged both hands down his face and groaned into his palms. The sound was muffled and heartfelt. Then, as if a secondary fuse had lit somewhere behind the despair, he looked up again with a fragile spark of hope that he did not fully trust.

"What about the assistant director? Have you contacted him?"

He did not pretend affection when he asked. He hated the assistant director with a thoroughness that required no daily maintenance—greasy ambition, the forest incident, the particular talent for making everything worse while calling it initiative. Unfortunately, hierarchy did not consult personal taste.

When PD Xu Cui went missing from a live schedule, the assistant director was the only other person on site with the formal authority to rearrange a segment and keep the machine from stalling in public view. Hatred was a luxury. A responding superior was a requirement.

The staff member only stared at him for a beat, the look of someone about to deliver news that would not improve anyone’s mood. Then he sighed, tapped through his phone with the resigned efficiency of a person who had already rehearsed this reveal, and turned the screen outward.

Spam. Timestamps stacked in an ugly column. The assistant director’s name sat at the top of every ignored line, exactly as silent as the PD. Message after message, the same one-way traffic, the same absence of even a dismissive emoji.

The secretary’s expression went flat with disbelief—the silent equivalent of, "you’re kidding..."—and the staff member only shook his head and pulled the phone back.

Both hands returned to the secretary’s face. The groan that followed was louder, closer to genuine collapse. He folded forward until his knuckles rested on his knees and let the air out of his chest in one heavy line.

"We’re doomed."

The words came out slightly muffled by his palms, which did not make them less accurate.

"Indeed we are," the staff member agreed, with the helpfulness of someone pouring water on an already damp mood. He did not soften it. There was nothing left to soften. Another sigh left him, quieter, almost private. "If only we knew something PD Xu Cui would immediately react to...."

The secretary’s head snapped up.

Weariness left his features so fast it might have been chased off the face by force. His eyes brightened with the particular light of a man who had just been handed a weapon and recognized the edge on sight.

"You’re right." He was already rising, joints protesting the sudden ambition. "You’re a genius!" The standing happened fast enough that the crouching staff member felt secondhand vertigo watching it. "Give me your phone."

Revitalized. Focused. Not requesting so much as claiming the next necessary tool before doubt could reorganize and talk him out of the only plan that had a chance.

"O-oh. Uh... Okay....?"

The staff member handed it over on autopilot, still half-catching up to the shift from doom to action. The secretary had the call placed before the phone had fully settled in his grip. The line rang. Rang again. PD Xu Cui did not pick up. The secretary, armed with the one lever that had ever reliably moved his boss, simply started over—same number, same insistence, no dignity left to protect. On the fourth attempt, the connection finally opened with a soft click.

"What do you want?"

Annoyance filled the question, but the volume stayed barely above a whisper—odd enough that the secretary filed it without having time to examine why a man known for projecting across entire sets was suddenly speaking like someone afraid of waking a room.

"I want you to get here and lead the show."

He answered with the bluntness of a man who had spent the morning being ignored by every rank above him. Every ounce of accumulated irritation fit into the single sentence.

Silence on the other end suggested mild shock at the tone. Then PD Xu Cui chuckled, the sound more teasing than angry, as if the secretary’s nerve were entertainment rather than insubordination.

"Oh? What’s this? What’s with your tone, huh?"

The secretary registered, belatedly, that he had spoken to his superior like a peer with a grudge and a deadline. Fortunately Xu Cui was many things—mischievous, ratings-obsessed, intermittently missing in action—and a petty tyrant over staff tone was not reliably one of them. The secretary cleared his throat, regrouping toward something that still had a spine.

"PD."

"Hm?" Another soft rustle traveled through the speaker—fabric, a shift of weight, the ambient quiet of a room that did not sound like a field and definitely did not sound like a man preparing to appear on camera.

The secretary drew a breath and used the only ammunition that had ever cut cleanly through Xu Cui’s distractions.

"If you keep this up, your ratings will go down."

Blunt. Straight. No cushion between the warning and the wound.

"HM???"

The sound that came back was nearly a shout, shock cracking the whisper-discipline for a fraction of a second before whatever restraint PD Xu Cui was practicing clamped down again. The almost-scream compressed back into controlled air. Silence stretched between them, long enough to feel like calculation, short enough to feel like a man watching imaginary graphs collapse behind his eyes.

Then, serious, stripped of tease. "I... Wait for me."

The secretary exhaled the kind of relief that rearranged the shoulders and returned blood to fingers that had been clenched too long. As expected. Ratings first. Always. He patted his own chest once, more superstition than ceremony, and hung up without waiting for further negotiation or a revised ETA. The smile that found his mouth was pure mischief, the private satisfaction of a subordinate who had finally landed a hit that mattered.

That’s what you get for stressing us out.

He returned the phone to its owner with a brightness that had not existed five minutes earlier, and then turned toward the guests.

"Guys—PD is about to get here."

The secretary announced it with a smile that still carried the residue of relief. The three pairs of alphas and omegas answered with thumbs-up in near unison, the gesture casual and complete. Message received. No one demanded an estimated minute count.

However, he bowed his head again anyway.

"We’re really sorry." The apology was for the wait, for the empty path, for every stretch of dead air that should have been a segment and had instead become farming small talk. Guilt sat under the words even now that a solution was in motion.

"Nahh, it’s fine." Qin Yuran flashed him a bright smile that left no room for prolonged self-flagellation. The others followed her lead in a loose chorus of the same reassurance—"don’t worry," "it’s alright," "we’re good"—until the secretary’s shoulders loosened a fraction more.

Su Wanyan glanced at Mo Xingxue. Their eyes met. The same recognition passed between them, and both of them chuckled—quiet, shared, already halfway to confession. Su Wanyan turned toward the secretary and the wider cluster of staff and guests.

"We’re also sorry." She bowed her head as she said it, the gesture aimed at everyone who had been left standing in the field without an explanation.

Mo Xingxue followed the bow a half-beat later. When she straightened and found confused faces waiting, she offered a small smile that carried bashfulness and guilt in equal measure.

"Actually," she began, "we asked him to look after the children."

The field absorbed the sentence in silence first.

Then shock landed all at once—eyes widening, a few mouths parting, the collective expression of people recalculating an absence they had blamed on whim or poor time management. PD Xu Cui had not simply vanished. He had been assigned to an important duty.

The stupor lasted only a moment. Understanding rolled through the group in a wave of softer noise.

"I understand."

"Ohh! That’s why~!"

"That makes sense—I would too."

Su Wanyan and Mo Xingxue could only answer with wry smiles of their own. The verdict was unanimous enough to be almost embarrassing.

Qin Yuran draped an arm around Su Wanyan’s shoulders, grin already in place.

"I see! If I were him, I would also abandon my duties." The tone was playful. But every word underneath it was sincere.

Zhao Yichen piled on without hesitation, his arm settling over Qin Yuran’s so that Su Wanyan was briefly claimed from both sides.

"For real. In fact, I wouldn’t do anything else. PD Xu Cui is strong for even showing up and spending less time with the girls." He meant that too. The respect in it was genuine, if delivered like a joke.

Su Wanyan laughed and shook her head, still pinned between them. "Nah. You two wouldn’t do that," she teased.

The protest was immediate and unapologetic them.

"You don’t think we’re sincere about that?!" Qin Yuran said it directly into her ear, causing Su Wanyan wince.

She had not recovered when Zhao Yichen added, at the same range, "Wow! She’s looking down on us, Qin Yuran!"

Enhanced hearing, it turned out, had a downside. The potion had sharpened perception across a useful range of situations. It had not installed a volume filter for friends who decided both ears were fair targets. Su Wanyan clapped her hands over her ears, a wry smile fighting through the wince.

"Ack—keep it quiet, you two. The morning doesn’t need your loud voices this early."

That was a mistake.

Qin Yuran and Zhao Yichen looked at each other. Agreement passed between them without words. Then their free hands found her sides.

"Ack—! Wait—!"

She had not budgeted for a coordinated tickle assault on a public field. The potion’s gifts remained irrelevant; tickling still bypassed every improvement the Perfect Foundation had offered.

"Huhh?? What’d ya say???" Qin Yuran deliberately raised her voice, fingers relentless.

"Yeahhh!! What did you say?? We can’t hear you with our LOUD voices!" Zhao Yichen followed, equally committed.

Su Wanyan lasted only seconds before she collapsed laughing onto the ground, the two alphas still working without mercy.

"Ack! Stop it—sto—hahaha—"

Persuasion failed. The tickling did not.

A short distance away, the three omegas shook their heads fondly. Mo Xingxue, Song Meiyu, and Han Jiho watched their respective disasters with matching wry smiles and made no move to intervene. Their alphas being chaotic was, at this point, less of a crisis than a scheduled feature of any stretch of free time.

The secretary looked at the heap of laughing limbs on the dirt, at the omegas who had chosen fond endurance over rescue, and wiped an imaginary tear from the corner of his eye.

We’re so lucky we got considerate—and kind—guests.

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I’m so sorry for not uploading for a while, y’all. This author is a mess fr TvT!

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HI, Y’ALL! So, I just wanted to tell y’all (in case y’all didn’t know) but we have a discord server! You can join if you’re curious about announcements or if y’all have any questions. It’s on my profile y’all!