The Great Director 1984

"It hurts! It really hurts!"

Amidst utter darkness, a streak of white light slowly spread out.

Yan Xu’s eyelids opened with effort. What greeted him was not a beautiful landscape, but a piercing, blinding glare. The brightness stung his eyes, a sensation both sour and indescribable, making his eyes instantly water in self-defense.

“It hurts too much!”

Slowly, Yan Xu lifted his arm and reached for his head. After a period of confusion and haze, memories of what happened before he lost consciousness flashed distinctly through his mind.

He had been in the director’s office, discussing the next day’s shoot. When the lead actress barged in to have a “deep talk” with the director, Yan Xu, sensible as ever, volunteered to check over the set props for the following day.

But as soon as he entered the studio, someone shouted—a voice he couldn’t quite place—and a wooden staircase wall came crashing down. Yan Xu was the unlucky one caught beneath it.

Normally, shoddy, anachronistic set pieces like that wouldn’t cause much harm even if they collapsed. From the front, the set looked solid and convincing, but it was really just an illusion created by clever lighting; the walls were assembled from thin planks, and some sections were nothing more than painted cardboard.

However, the previous day, the temperamental male lead, in a fit of overacting, had punched a hole clear through the wall. The props master had to patch it in a hurry with a solid plank. That very plank was now the culprit responsible for striking Yan Xu on the bac