AFH – 001 – Applaud for the film emperor!

3 August, 2020 seshyApplaud for Happiness

Translator’s note: Hi, I’m Seshy.
I’ll be translating Applaud for Happiness (which I’ll be calling AFH).
The next update won’t be for a while because I want to build up a stock of ~5 chapters before posting the second chapter.
I’m posting this first one to make it clear that I’m taking on this project, so another translator won’t start posting while I’m building up my stockpile of chapters.

I’m discovering this story as I translate it, and took on the project based on the good reviews it had.
So future chapters will be as much as surprise for me as they are for you guys.

Since my Mandarin isn’t good enough yet for me to translate with it, I’ll be using machine translation, supplemented by a dictionary and my knowledge of Chinese grammar and my basic vocabulary.
This project is meant as a fun way for me to work on improving my Mandarin.

One thing I had trouble translating will appear as ‘fragmented world’ in this chapter.
It could also have been translated as ‘world fragment’.
Considering the context, I chose ‘fragmented world’.

The ‘Qi’ in Shen Qi’s name means ‘seven’.
People will be discussing his name briefly in this chapter, so I’m explaining it here to avoid confusion.

-o-

Under the scorching sun, Shen Qi was walking along the countryside with his suitcase in tow.
His upright posture, fashionable clothing and good looks, as well as the staff members carrying cameras trained on him all made it clear that this was clearly an actor recording for a show.

Shen Qi looked around and expressed his admiration:

“This really is the countryside.
The air is so clean.
Look at how blue the sky is and the white clouds…”　　

The cameraman adjusted the perspective.
In the shot was a delicate side profile with beautiful traits, handsome almost to the point of taking your breath away.
The two following scenarists next to him couldn’t help but show their love-struck faces.

Shen Qi opened his arms towards the sky in an attractive and artistic gesture.
In the next second, he quickly turned his head and put on his hat rather woefully.

“Ah, it’s hot.”

The contrast between the two kinds of behaviour was so strong that the scenarists and director, including the cameraman, were laughing.

Shen Qi didn’t care.
He shot a dazzling smile at the camera.
“The scenery is beautiful, but it’s way too hot.
Let’s get out of here.
I’m hungry from the drive over and I’m wondering what kind of food Brother Xie and the others had prepared.”

After he said that, he headed deeper into the village with big strides, pulling his luggage along.

The camera and the scenarists followed.

Shen Qi was a famous member of Team 3, an expert at taking on roles and pretending to be someone else.
He specialized in backstabbing and overthrowing so-called ‘protagonists’ who had accidentally landed in a fragmented world, and returning the world to its original course.

As the member at the top of the list of Team 3 for seven consecutive times, he was the representative of Team 3, the glory of Team 3.
No counter-attack mission has ever failed.

So after Group 7 and Group 3 jointly came up with a new project, he was entrusted with an important task and took on the project—

The objective for the assigned mission was a fulfilling love.

Simply put, he had a target he needed to take care of.
 He had to change a tragedy that the other person should not have suffered in the first place by turning a bad ending into a happy ending.

Shen Qi had meant to refuse but the team leader had cried and cajoled him, so he had had to take the job.

As the most experienced member of Group 3 or even the senior of all the groups, it wasn’t a difficult task for Shen Qi to form a strategy for a mission target, and it wasn’t like he hadn’t done so in the past.

But unlike his colleagues, he never uses one of those smart systems.
After the failure of his first mission with a system, he had never used a so-called intelligent system again, leaving only a framework of middling nor non-existent intelligence, entirely at his beck and call.

He wasn’t a big fan of systems that dictated what to do and how to do it.
It was annoying.

This was the first world of the new project.
The target he was going after was a film emperor surnamed Jiang and named Changshen.
In a life without Shen Qi’s appearance, he’d become romantically involved with a minor star.
Yet this little starlet was ambitious, just trying to use Jiang Changshen’s connections to get to the top.
He resolutely abandoned the film emperor after his rise to power, getting married and having children with an actress of lesser fame.
The film emperor was disheartened by this betrayal; he ceased to exist and lived a lonely life after that.

All Shen Qi had to do now was to get to the film emperor before the little star and weave a perfect love with him.

He was now a newly-minted young actor, also known as a popular little idol.
He had only one movie and two TV shows under his belt.
The movie was a youth movie, and he got a lot of attention as the third male lead because of the value of his superb face.
And the two TV shows, one was just a cameo and didn’t make much of a splash, and the other hadn’t officially aired yet.
He was here today for this variety show, partly to draw fans, and partly to promote this drama starring him.

Of course, that was just the obvious part of his identity.
He was the younger brother of one of the top entertainment executives in the business and as for his name, it was Shen Qi.

Shen Qi never used anyone else’s body, nor did he possess anyone else’s, except on his first mission.

Every time he had entered a fragmented world after that, he would spend a large amount of points carefully editing and designing a suitable identity character for himself.

Right now, he was in just the right position to access Film Emperor Jiang Changshen.

Ever since he had opened his eyes, Shen Qi had been investigating all aspects of Jiang Changshen.
The system could give only the most basic descriptive outline, not even a detailed process.
Not to mention that human nature was very complex, and this fragmented world was still an entire world that could not be summed up in a sentence or two.

Luckily, Jiang Changshen was a celebrity and the film emperor.
Everything about him was easy to find out.

Jiang Changshen was thirty-six years old.
In today’s entertainment industry, this was the right age for male celebrities, especially actors.
Younger actors couldn’t get the title of film emperor no matter how good they were, as if you had to get past thirty to compete for the title.
Some even had to work until their 40s or 50s, like Jiang Changshen, who won the Best Actor award the year before last.

He was from a modest background and a single-parent family.
His parents divorced when he was a child and his father took the third child out of the country.
His mother was a music teacher.
She raised him