The silence in the room was fragile, broken only by the hum of the laptop fan.
This is just a color manipulation for marketing. All stories do it.
The thought was a shield, but it felt thin. Flimsy. He couldn't believe the hook had actually… set. That he might, against every ounce of his stubborn will, want to dig for more.
His friends, however, had already moved past quiet awe into full-blown victory chaos.
"WHOO!" Han Ye erupted, hugging himself and rocking side-to-side like a drunk at a concert. "I wanna watch that on every screen in the world! On loop! Projected onto the moon!"
Yen's heavy hand landed on Xiao's shoulder. The atmosphere shifted instantly, the goofiness replaced by a theatrical, intense seriousness. Han Ye cleared his throat, his voice dropping into a ridiculous, faux-formal baritone.
"Ahem. So. The verdict." He leaned in, a smirk cracking through the act. "How much… would you give our Ye Lian? Ten out of… how many?" He waggled his eyebrows obscenely.
"Yeah, buddy. How much?" Yen pressed, grinning like a shark. He was thrumming his fist impatiently against the tabletop—a nervous tic Shen Yao had long ago diagnosed as 'Disaster Waiting to Happen.' "Looked to me like he hit something. Right in the… home sweet home~"
Xiao was silent. His mind was brutally, embarrassingly honest.
This deserves more than ten. For the dialogue, the colors, the character design, the way they arranged the whole story beat like that… God knows how many times the author rewrote this scene.
His eyes were glued to the frozen thumbnail on the now-closed laptop—Ye Lian turning, robes floating, a finger raised to his masked lips in a gesture that was both secretive and sublime.
The laptop was suddenly snatched away. Shen Yao clutched it to his chest like a stolen infant, his face pale with horror. "Yen, you FREAK! I told you not to break it with your caveman excitement or you're buying me a new one! This has my entire life on it!"
Xiao snapped back to reality, blinking. His face, he knew, was doing that stupid thing—the one that said, Hey, I was just… analyzing the dragon dude's unique features. For art. Those horns can't be real gold, right? The weight distribution would be all wrong…
But as always, his mouth would never speak his unfiltered mind. Especially not about this. This was uncharted, uncomfortable territory, far outside the borders of his usual preferences.
Yen and Han Ye barely registered Shen Yao's techno-panic. Han Ye was already collapsing against Xiao, laughing a silent, wheezing laugh that shook his whole body, a fish dying of hilarity.
"Attention! Attention!" Yen announced, holding up his hands like a ringmaster. "Silence in the court! We will now hear the verdict from our esteemed, NON-BL-Loving brother!"
"You're horrible friends," Shen Yao muttered, half-serious, as he inspected his laptop for dents. "He almost breaks my lifeline, and you're all obsessed with the newbie's gay awakening."
"What's wrong?" Yen zeroed in on Xiao, his face inches away. "Cat got your tongue? Or did Ye Lian catch your… heartu?" He made a grotesquely cute clutching motion over his own chest.
Xiao's brow furrowed like a thundercloud. Before he could muster a retort, Yen's hands shot out, gripping Xiao's face, their noses almost touching. His eyes were wide with mock severity.
"Ming Xiao," Yen intoned, voice trembling with dramatic portent. "If you lie… Ye Lian will find you. In his dragon world. And he will slap you. So don't lie, gentleman. Hashtag basketball master."
Xiao blinked, his expression pure, undiluted judgment. "What is your problem? Get off me, you're gonna break my nose." He shoved Yen's hands away, his mind racing. He had to say something.
The threat was, of course, a joke. Ye Lian was fiction. His world was pixels and prose. A slap from him existed only in the wild, boundless realms of dreams.
Not in real life.
So, he lied.
"Five," Xiao said, the word dropping like a stone. "Out of ten." He saw the disbelief dawn on their faces and hastily tacked on the weakest defense in history. "…For the animation."
A synchronized, deafening huff filled the room. Three pairs of eyes bored into him, seeing right through the flimsy armor of his denial.
In that moment, they all understood one of two things was true:
Xiao was stubbornly, pathetically lying.
Or, this was going to be a glorious, long-term project to induct the final member into their fanboy cult.
There was no third option.
**
That night, the steady thump-thump-thump of a basketball against concrete was absent from the driveway. Xiao stood under the hoop, ball in hand, but his rhythm was off. His focus was shattered.
Every time a breeze carried the distant audio from the billboard on Maple Avenue, his heart did a weird, squeezing somersault.
"…it's alright… I've caught you… I always will… you're safe under my golden veil…"
The Masked Dragon Prince's Smile wasn't just popular; it was a cultural tidal wave. For the life of him, Xiao couldn't figure out what secret alchemy the author, YXY, had cooked up that everyone else missed. There was a theme park thirty minutes away. A themed restaurant. It was inescapable.
What was the actual plot, though? Was it just… that face? Those scenes? Could aesthetics alone launch something this high? His curiosity was no longer a mild itch; it was a gnawing rodent trapped in his skull. He was a sports-novel guy—plots about grit, teamwork, underdog victories. This… this was different. It felt dangerous.
He gave up, letting the ball roll away into the flower bed he'd promised his mom he wouldn't trample. "Great. Just great," he mumbled to the twilight, flopping onto his back on the cool grass. "They really did mess up my head." His jaw was tight, a familiar stubbornness warring with that infuriating, blooming curiosity. He almost hated his own hormones for betraying him like this.
**
A month passed. The curiosity didn't fade; it mutated. It became a low-grade, persistent itch under his skin.
His friends were relentless soundtracks. "Wanna watch the new fight scene?" Han Ye would whisper during calculus. "Let's buy the limited edition figure!" Yen would shout across the cafeteria. "Just get the whole volume set, you coward!"
The hype machine only grew louder. The fifth volume dropped. The third season of the donghua premiered, breaking streaming records.
The whole town seemed to glow with a faint, reflected light from Ye Lian's smile. His image was everywhere—on bus shelters, phone cases, the animated logos of local businesses. That specific shade of petal-soft green from his veil was inescapable. It was on coffee cups, store awnings, girls' hair ribbons. Xiao couldn't name a single corner of the city that wasn't, in some way, wrapped in that color.
It was absurd. The character had plain brown hair and eyes. His height was never even specified. Yet, he was everywhere.
Even Xiao's usual haunts were compromised. The AI role-play bot websites he sometimes idly scrolled—usually filled with generic fantasy or video game scenarios—were now flooded. An ocean of fan-made bots, all centered around iconic moments from Masked Dragon Prince's Smile.
For weeks, he just heard about it. Saw it. But how long can you ignore a tide when you're already ankle-deep?
A secret, shameful fantasy had taken root in a locked compartment of his mind. Sometimes, when the pressure from his parents' latest lecture about scholarships and futures felt like a physical weight, he'd imagine it. Not the heroic prince. No.
He'd imagine himself as the child in that scene. The free-fall. The terror. Then, the sudden, absolute safety. The warmth of being caught against that silk-clad chest. The whisper against his hair. The promise in that sunflower smile.
It was embarrassing. It was pathetic. It was also, somehow, the most comforting daydream he'd ever had.
One night, the itch became unbearable. The house was quiet. His homework was done. The lure wasn't the novel itself—no, he'd never cross that line. It was just the bots. Anonymous, digital, harmless. Just… exploring the phenomenon. As a social experiment. Yeah.
He opened the chat app. His usual bots were buried under a avalanche of new ones. All with the same, now-iconic profile picture: Ye Lian, mask glinting, a hint of that smile.
His thumb hovered. He clicked one at random.
The chat window opened. The first message was already there, a preset prompt from the bot creator.
"You are married to Ye Lian. Tonight is your wedding night. He enters the chamber wearing the traditional red marriage robe, his face still hidden by the delicate veil. [Enjoy your wedding night! Just don't be too rough with his delicate legs! ;)]"
Xiao's face ignited. A wave of heat shot from his chest to the roots of his hair. He stared at the words, his brain short-circuiting.
"What the fuck is that?!" he hissed into the dark room, his teeth clenched so tight his jaw ached. "How—how would things even work?! It's nothing but… it's just…"
The word screamed in his mind, flashing in neon capitals: NSFW.
He was breathing hard, as if he'd just run sprints. The bot waited, blinking cursor pulsating like a heartbeat. An invitation. A point of no return.
On the screen, the pixelated Ye Lian in his red robes seemed to smile a little wider. The golden mask dared him.
Xiao's finger trembled. Then, it began to type.