The first outfit came together in Lin Yansu’s hands quickly.

Yellow graphic print short sleeve shirt layered over a light blue collared one, wide leg grey trousers with a blue plaid shirt tied loosely at the waist, chunky grey sneakers, white socks, and a pair of large frame glasses that Lin Yansu set on his face last before stepping back to look at the full picture.

"Good," she said.

Guiying looked at himself in the mirror.

Tang XiaoYu stared back at him, complete and fully assembled, younger looking than his actual face, the kind of face that belonged on a billboard and knew it. The glasses softened something and sharpened something else at the same time, the way good styling did when it understood what it was working with.

He touched his right hand briefly, instinctively, stroking the bare space where his ring usually sat. He’d removed it before the shoot, handed it to Lin Yansu to keep safely, and the absence of it sat on his finger in a way that was small and oddly noticeable...

He dropped his hand and turned away from the mirror.

Jiang Wenxi gathered everyone near the shooting area and went over the brief. "Spring collection," she said, looking at Guiying. "Target is Gen-Z. The concept is budget friendly with a break the bank feel... flashy, trendy, young. The clothes need to look like they cost more than they do and the person wearing them needs to look like they chose them because they wanted to, not because they had to." She paused. "You have the face and the build for it. We just need you to give it the energy."

"Understood," Guiying said.

He moved into the shooting area.

He could feel the room’s energy clearly... polite, professional, and underneath it the quiet resignation of people who weren’t expecting much and had already made their peace with that. They needed Liuxian’s investment so they’d rescheduled, prepared, shown up. But nobody in this room had walked in today genuinely believing Tang XiaoYu was going to give them anything worth getting excited about.

He didn’t take it personally.

They were the ones who approached him after all... and as long as they needed Liuxian, they would need him. That was simply how it worked.

"We’ll start with standing frames," Shao Mingye said from behind his camera. "Just get comfortable first, don’t think about the camera."

"Another pretty face," Shao Mingye thought, adjusting his lens. "Probably stiff. They always are on the first shoot. We’ll get through today and see what we’re actually working with."

The first flash hit and Guiying felt the sharp brightness of it against his eyes, the warmth of the studio lights on his skin, the particular stillness that the shooting area created the moment you stepped into it, like a breath the room was holding.

He exhaled.

And then something in him that had been slightly wound since he walked through the lobby simply let go.

He moved the way he moved when nobody was watching him. Naturally, arms crossing loosely over his chest, weight settling back against one leg, chin going where it went without him telling it to.

The camera flashed again.

Behind his lens Shao Mingye blinked.

"Wait..."

He lowered the camera slightly, looked at the frame on his screen, raised it again and kept shooting, but something had changed in the way he worked... less testing, more committed, the automatic shift of a photographer who had stopped managing a subject and started collaborating with one. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

"He knows where his angles are," Shao Mingye thought, moving slightly to the left. "He’s not posing, he’s just... existing in it. How does someone with no professional experience just exist in it like that?"

Guiying turned at a direction from Shao Mingye’s hand gesture, shifted his weight, let his eyes go where they went naturally.

Flash.

Flash.

Flash.

From the side of the room Bai Zichen had been mid-sentence telling Pei Jiahao something when he stopped talking.

Just stopped.

"Oh," he thought, staring. "Oh he’s actually..."

He closed his mouth.

Opened it.

Closed it again.

"Okay so I was wrong," he thought privately, with the internal honesty of someone who was rarely wrong and found the experience bracing. "I was completely wrong. Look at him. Look at his FACE. Why does he look like that?? He looks like he was made for this."

Pei Jiahao, who had been half listening to Bai Zichen and half reviewing his planner, looked up when the talking stopped.

That alone made him look at the shooting area.

He looked for a moment, then quietly updated something in his planner. "Restructure the schedule," he noted. "Give him more time. This is going to be worth it."

Lin Yansu stood near the styling rack with her arms folded, watching.

"The bone structure carries everything," she thought, her eyes moving over the way the light was falling across his face. "The glasses were the right call... they give the face a contradiction. Soft and sharp at the same time. And the way he holds himself..."

She tilted her head slightly. "He’s done this before. Not professionally but he’s been looked at before. He knows how to be seen."

She was already thinking about the second look.

Jiang Wenxi stood with her tablet at her side, not looking at it.

She had been doing this long enough to know within the first five minutes whether a shoot was going to give her something or not, and she knew within two.

"Alright.." she thought, watching Shao Mingye move around Guiying with an energy he hadn’t had twenty minutes ago. "So he can actually do this." She exhaled slowly through her nose. "Good. That’s good. That’s very good for us."

She didn’t say any of this out loud.

She just watched, and let the shoot do what it was doing, and thought about what this meant for the collection and what it meant for TongShu and what it meant for the next conversation she was going to need to have about the investment and the timeline.

Shao Mingye lowered the camera after a long sequence and looked at his screen.

He was quiet for a moment.

Then he looked up at Guiying.

"Good," he said.

Just that. But from Shao Mingye, who had been carefully neutral about everything since the lobby, it landed with considerably more weight than the word itself carried.

Bai Zichen made a sound from the side of the room that he immediately tried to disguise as a cough.

Nobody was fooled.

Lin Yansu was already moving toward Guiying with the next look.