When the plane landed, it was drizzling in Milan.

There weren't many people in the arrivals hall of Malpensa Airport, and the lighting was warm.

Lu Zhixian pushed the luggage cart out, with Old Zhao following behind, clutching his phone and replying to his seventeenth work message.

The person picking them up stood outside the exit, holding a sign with the VALENTE logo.

The man was in his early thirties, wearing a dark suit and a meticulously tied tie, with a perfect smile.

"Mr. Lu? Welcome to Milan. I'm Marco, Vice President of Public Relations for VALENTE Asia-Pacific." His speaking speed was slightly fast, with a New York accent.

Lu Zhixian reached out and shook his hand.

"Marco, it's a pleasure to meet you. The flight was smooth, but I must say, the rain in Milan feels different from the rain in Beijing."

Marco's hand paused for a moment.

It wasn't an issue with the strength of the handshake; it was that his expression had changed.

It was subtle, but Lu Zhixian caught it—his eyebrows rose half an inch, and the professional curve of his lips softened into a genuine smile.

He hadn't expected a Chinese singer's English to be at this level.

The pronunciation was clean, and the grammar was natural.

"Your English... is excellent." When Marco said this, his tone had already switched from "hosting a client" to "chatting with a colleague."

"Thank you." Lu Zhixian remained expressionless.

This was all his hard-earned money.

It was a forty-minute drive from the airport to the hotel.

Marco sat in the back seat, opened his tablet, and introduced the photoshoot schedule in English.

The shoot would span three days: the first day for studio shots, the second for location shots, and the third for backup shots and media segments.

They went through the styling plans, venue information, and team configurations for each day, one by one.

Lu Zhixian communicated entirely in English, asking several professional-sounding questions about the lighting details along the way.

After Marco finished answering, Lu Zhixian added, "So the first day is 'make me look expensive,' and the second day is 'make me pretend I'm a tourist in Milan'?"

Marco burst out laughing.

Sitting in the passenger seat, Old Zhao's phone screen stayed lit, but he hadn't scrolled for fifteen minutes.

He listened to the two people in the back seat conversing entirely in English, unable to interject a single word.

While waiting at a red light near the hotel entrance, he took advantage of Lu Zhixian looking out the window to quickly type a WeChat message.

[When did your English get so good?]

Lu Zhixian's phone vibrated. He glanced at the screen and saw the sender was Old Zhao.

He didn't reply.

His expression management was perfect; the corners of his mouth didn't even twitch.

The hotel was near the cathedral, a ten-minute walk away.

It was a boutique hotel VALENTE collaborated with long-term; the storefront wasn't large, but once inside, every detail told you that a single night's stay cost a month's salary.

After finishing the check-in process, Lu Zhixian entered his room, set down his luggage, and walked to the window.

The street scene outside was very quiet.

The cobblestone streets reflected light from the rain. In the distance, the spires of the cathedral were tinged with a layer of dark gold in the evening light.

He took a photo.

He saved it to his phone's album, locked the screen, and placed it on the nightstand.

The first day of the shoot.

The lineup of the styling team was even larger than Lu Zhixian had anticipated.

Over a dozen people in the team moved about the studio; the pace was fast but not chaotic.

The makeup artist was a French woman in her forties.

She pressed Lu Zhixian into a chair, held his chin to look him over twice, and then turned to say something in French to the assistant beside her.

She spoke very fast, and Lu Zhixian couldn't understand French.

But he saw the assistant smile, and the makeup artist herself smiled too, before she picked up a foundation brush and dipped it into a tiny amount of product.

Lu Zhixian had a rough idea of what was happening.

Translated, that expression meant: little work, big pay.

The first set of photos was for the new season's coat collection.

A long black coat with a popped collar over a dark gray turtleneck; the overall tone was very somber.

The photographer was a British man in his fifties, bald, with a notoriously bad temper in the industry.

It was said that the last time a model had satisfied him was three years ago.

First shot, the shutter clicked.

He looked up from behind the lens and glanced at Lu Zhixian.

Second shot. Third shot.

He put down the camera and stood still two meters in front of Lu Zhixian.

"Have you modeled before?"

Lu Zhixian shook his head.

The photographer stared at him for two seconds, walked back, raised his camera again, and muttered something.

"It's simply a loss for the modeling industry."

A styling assistant nearby heard this and stifled a laugh, only to be glared back into silence by the photographer.

During a break in the shoot, the creative director arrived.

Isabella, an Italian woman in her early forties with sharp short hair, wore a perfectly tailored navy blue blazer and walked with a stride larger than most of the men present.

She first went to look at the sample shots that had already been taken.

She scrolled through seven or eight photos on the monitor, nodded twice without speaking, and then walked up to Lu Zhixian.

"I first saw you in that video. The guitar, the spotlight, the sky behind you." Her English had an Italian accent but was very clear.

"I once thought your quality was like a silent fire. Now I can confirm that you are even more outstanding in person."

Lu Zhixian looked at her and thought for a second.

"Thank you. But I think you might need to see me cook first; then you might change your mind about the 'silent' part."

Isabella was stunned for a moment.

Then she laughed, a genuine laugh. After laughing, she pointed at him and turned to say something to Marco, who was also laughing.

Old Zhao stood in the corner, holding a cup of local coffee, witnessing the whole thing.

He took a sip of the coffee; it was very bitter.

But the expression on his face was even more bitter than the coffee.

It wasn't that he was unhappy; he was confused.

He had known Lu Zhixian for so long, yet he never knew the man's English was good enough to crack jokes with people.

On the afternoon of the second day, the brand side added a set of conceptual shots on short notice.

The location wasn't in the studio, but in an alley in Milan's old city district.

No lights were used; it relied entirely on natural light.

Lu Zhixian wore that black coat, leaning against a wall with half his face in the light and half in the shadows.

The photographer crouched down, adjusted the angle, and snapped a photo.

He looked at the playback, said nothing, stood up, and handed the camera to Isabella.

...

After finishing work on the third day, the team ate at a restaurant near the hotel.

It was a long table with twelve people, and Lu Zhixian sat in the middle.

In English, he chatted with the photographer about the philosophy of composition, discussed with the stylist how the feel of the fabric influenced body language, and complained to Marco about Milan's traffic.

Someone asked him what he usually did besides music, and he said he cooked.

"What kind of cooking?"

"A bit of everything. Lend me your kitchen for an hour, and I'll give you a reason to fire your chef."

The whole table laughed.

After the gathering dispersed, Marco walked up to Old Zhao and said a sentence in stumbling Chinese mixed with English.

"I've hosted many Asian artists. He is the first one who made our entire team want to be friends with him."

Old Zhao nodded, his expression calm.

In his mind, he estimated the number of English sentences Lu Zhixian had spoken over these three days—at least over three hundred, without a single stutter or grammatical error, and even his timing for deadpan jokes was perfect.

...

On the last day of the shoot, before dinner.

Old Zhao received a notice of a temporary schedule change from the brand side.

After reading the email, his finger paused on the screen for three seconds.

The brand had added a segment: media interviews. Three international fashion media outlets, fifteen minutes each, all in English.

This segment hadn't been discussed beforehand.

He walked to the door of Lu Zhixian's room and knocked twice.

The door opened, and Lu Zhixian was chewing on half an apple.

"The brand added a last-minute media interview with three international outlets, all in English," Old Zhao said, pausing. "You... won't have a problem, right?"

Lu Zhixian took a bite of the apple.

"What time?"

"Ten o'clock tomorrow morning."

"Fine."

He closed the door.

Old Zhao stood in the corridor, looking at the closed door, and took a deep breath.

Then he went back to his room and began preparing contingency plans in advance.

Translators, teleprompters, and scripts for awkward silences—he had all three plans ready.

What he didn't know was that none of these three plans would be needed tomorrow.