Chapter 7

Xuan Leron finally heard his number called.

He walked in and bowed to the row of people in front. He was too nervous to even know what the audition process would be like.

The people opposite him were huddled together, whispering.

Xuan Leron glanced over. He didn’t recognize most of them, but they had to be the creative leads or producers, right?

A young man sat in the center. He was wearing a mask, but his eyes and brows were striking. He looked unfamiliar.

Xuan Leron searched his memory, but couldn’t place him.

A rookie actor?

Xuan Leron immediately dismissed that guess—

Even though that guy wasn’t sitting dead center, everyone else’s gaze kept drifting toward him, as if he were the one making the decisions.

One of the casting directors followed the script: ‘Xuan Leron? Go ahead and introduce yourself.’

‘Got it!’

Xuan Leron’s voice was louder than he intended; it almost startled himself.

Sang Yu chuckled.

The casting director read the room and immediately played along, showing goodwill toward Xuan Leron: ‘Don’t be too nervous. Start whenever you’re ready.’

‘My name is Xuan Leron, 26 years old, 182cm, 57kg. I graduated from the Qingyang Drama Academy acting program. I’ve previously appeared in…’

He started reciting his self-intro. He’d practiced these lines over a hundred times in front of the mirror; he could say them in his sleep.

Sang Yu listened.

He put the first checkmark on his resume. The guy’s delivery was decent.

He hadn’t cared about Domestic Entertainment before. This audition was his first deep dive, and he realized actors were… strange.

Yes, strange.

Whether it was the people he sought out or the ones other companies ‘gifted’ him, the actors all had a wild variety of flaws.

‘Bad delivery’ was just a broad category; it had sub-branches—

Those who mumbled;

Those with thick regional accents;

Those who ran out of breath mid-sentence;

Those without accents, who spoke clearly and had breath, but read lines like they were reading a shopping list;

…

Honestly, meeting these people made Sang Yu feel like he’d been cast as a middle school language teacher.

He was grading papers.

It was absurd. An outsider could so easily pick out the flaws of the pros.

Xuan Leron was okay.

Next, he had to pick a role for him to test. Which one?

Sang Yu stared at him for a while, had an idea, and turned to whisper to the original author, Chihong Chen, sitting next to him.

Chihong Chen jumped, quickly tilting his head to catch Sang Yu’s words.

·

Xuan Leron’s Adam’s apple bobbed.

His resume wasn’t exactly impressive.

Despite graduating from a top school, getting cast in good projects was completely out of his control.

In Domestic Entertainment, an ‘average guy’ who isn’t famous has zero audience appeal, mostly because the audience doesn’t even know who he is.

Plus, he’d taken a wrong turn right after graduation and signed with the wrong agency, so he basically had no career development. He only had 500,000 followers on Weibo.

Don’t let that number fool you; 80 or 90 percent were bot accounts bought by his old agency. The agency had given up on ‘boosting’ him long ago.

He had to nail this audition…

‘Xuan Leron, have you read the novel?’

The young man in the mask held the mic. Xuan Leron didn’t hesitate; he instinctively bowed and nodded: ‘Yes, I have.’

‘Tell me, what are the strengths of Chen Le?’

Xuan Leron froze.

Chen Le? The male lead?!

At the start of the novel, Chen Le is a laid-off office worker.

He accidentally stumbles into the ‘Underworld Embassy on Earth’ and ends up working as a customer service rep and field agent for the Underworld’s ‘Demolition Office,’ handling grave relocation services!

These relocations are actually the manifestations of the grudges of the wrongfully dead.

Chen Le thinks the people asking about demolition are just crazy, but he stays for the good benefits.

After experiencing some things and learning the truth, Chen Le’s first reaction is to quit.

But because he’d helped some vengeful spirits, his reputation spread, and the wrongfully dead kept coming to him, giving him no peace.

During that month he spent trying to quit, Chen Le was determined to stay out of it.

But after seeing the family of a dismembered victim turn white-haired overnight, listless and nearly getting into a car accident, Chen Le couldn’t just watch. His conscience wouldn’t let him be.

He went from being forced into it to doing it voluntarily.

In later cases, Chen Le didn’t just help victims find their remains; he helped the police solve crimes and punished the perpetrators.

In Xuan Leron’s view, the novel itself was well-written.

But now…

What did this mean?

Xuan Leron didn’t have this in his prepared notes, so he had to improvise, stuttering a bit due to extreme tension.

‘Chen Le… Chen Le is a normal person, someone who received a good education.’

He bit the bullet and kept going.

‘At first, running away and staying out of it is a normal human reaction—anyone’s first instinct in that situation is to hide.’

‘His strength is his empathy. He isn’t a born hero; it’s a quality born out of the needs of the living.’

‘He complains, he regrets, he slacks off, and sometimes he hates being the hero for those ghosts and people just as much as he hates his job.’

‘But he sticks with it.’

‘Because his core personality is built on the kindness, justice, and bravery he was taught. If he has the means, he’ll definitely step up!’

Xuan Leron was shaky at first, but he found his flow. After all, he really had read the novel and understood the plot.

He added a few more points, and Sang Yu, sitting behind the long table, seemed quite satisfied. Finally, someone who actually had something to say.

‘Xuan Leron, let’s do a test scene.’

Sang Yu flipped through the pages. ‘The school bullying dismemberment case. Chen Le’s reaction when he realizes the victim’s family is taking revenge through eye-for-an-eye violence.’

The casting director smartly pulled up the lines for that scene and handed them over.

Xuan Leron instinctively reached out, bowing while his eyes widened, stuttering: ‘…Huh? Who am I playing?’

Sang Yu: ‘?’

‘Chen Le, obviously.’

He seemed a bit slow.

Sang Yu felt Xuan Leron’s look was quite fitting.

Sang Yu had been reading novels for days and realized that over the last decade, male lead archetypes had slowly shifted.

Leads could be delicate or ordinary, but the ‘comfortable to look at’ archetype now almost always required a handsome guy.

Readers in the comments joked: ‘These days, if you aren’t handsome, you can’t even transmigrate.’

Chen Le, the lead of A Demolition Office Is Not Ordinary, belonged to the former category.

He wasn’t a super-handsome guy; he was clean-cut, had a weak vibe, and was just an office clerk before joining the Underworld.

As for the romance, it used the popular ‘yasashii’ (gentle) trope to win over various female supporting characters.

—A Demolition Office Is Not Ordinary had a single female lead, but plenty of ambiguous sub-plots.

The original text would occasionally describe female characters with phrases like ‘skin like curdled cream,’ ‘delicate body trembling,’ or ‘biting her lip,’ which Sang Yu found distracting.

The character fashion was even more disastrous.

Purple polka-dot stockings, open-toed high-heeled sandals, grass-green long skirts, red silk scarves… it all made Sang Yu’s skin crawl.

Even when Sang Ying went through her weird fashion phase as a kid, she never dressed like that.

The author didn’t seem to know how to write romance either; whenever the male lead interacted with them, it was like he was possessed, which kept pulling Sang Yu out of the story.

For the adaptation, he wouldn’t allow multiple ambiguous sub-plots, and those descriptions definitely needed fixing.

Sang Yu was thinking about other things while Xuan Leron got ready to audition.

Sure enough, being professionally trained showed. Once Xuan Leron got into character, Sang Yu could see the difference between him and the others.

The perpetrator was too young, and the punishment wasn’t enough to comfort the victim’s family, which was why they chose the wrong path.

Chen Le was conflicted.

On one hand: he felt if he were in their shoes, he’d do the same. On the other: this eye-for-an-eye behavior was definitely wrong.

It was a tense scene.

There was one detail Sang Yu liked: when Xuan Leron played ‘Chen Le,’ he didn’t stand perfectly straight.

The degree was just right—not enough to look pathetic, just enough to show a sense of scholarly weakness.

Sang Yu watched while asking for Chihong Chen’s opinion: ‘Teacher Chen, what do you think?’

Chihong Chen: ‘It’s great!’

Chihong Chen didn’t hesitate.

Lately, he was sure he’d fallen into a pot of gold.

Not only did he sell the rights, he was also the show’s screenwriter—the kind that doesn’t get credited, but still.

He actually had a say in the script adaptation and the casting.

Chihong Chen would occasionally ‘hehe’ out loud, which was creepy. Because he laughed at inappropriate times, he’d already taken a few hits from his wife.

Xuan Leron was perfect!

First, he fit the character. Second…

Actually, looking at the live-action adaptations of works by top authors on the site, most S+ tier shows were ‘unwatchable.’

They’d take a character described as ‘peerlessly handsome’ and cast someone with squinty eyes instead of the phoenix eyes described.

They’d take a cultivation lead described as ‘handsome as Pan An’ with a tall, slender build, and cast a guy with a 6:4 body ratio, a big head, short legs, and a face like a skinny monkey.

Compared to that, Chihong Chen…

He was eating way too well!

He had become a loyal fan of Sang Yu. Even if Sang Yu used his new book to start a fire, he’d still praise it: ‘What a great fire!’

After finishing the scene, Xuan Leron, who hadn’t fully shaken off the emotion, heard: ‘Xuan Leron, do you have any other plans?’

‘No.’

At his level, he had to audition for almost every job. If he didn’t audition, no one would come looking for him.

Sang Yu nodded: ‘Alright, let’s find a time to sign the contract. Before we officially start filming, there’s martial arts training. I hope you can finish it as soon as possible.’

Xuan Leron’s eyes widened.

Martial arts training?

Chen Le did have fight scenes.

He’d get various small gifts from his ‘colleagues,’ and as long as he wore one of the talismans, he’d unlock advanced combat skills to track down killers.

Xuan Leron didn’t expect a production to set up specific martial arts training; it was time-consuming and expensive.

Usually, only major TV station-backed historical dramas did that.

In average shows, the martial arts director just teaches you on set, and you just wing it.

The two chatted for a bit, discussed some details, and settled the role.

Xuan Leron was in a daze.

Wait a minute…

He didn’t get to show off his ‘shrimp-like’ body—no, he didn’t get to show off his physique. Did they just cast him based on his face?

This feels way too unreal…