You've Got Some Nerve

Xie Xinzhou is a cellist whose symphony orchestra landed a small gig—a quintet performance at a wealthy family’s banquet. The orchestra manager told the five musicians to handle it as a private job, settling payments directly with the client at market rates. The banquet was a dramatic mess. A mistress and the legal wife splashed red wine at each other, clawing and biting, until the wife’s lover joined the brawl. Someone flung a paternity test into the air, letting it flutter down; someone pushed another into the pool; red wine soaked the carpet; cupcakes were hurled at the floor-to-ceiling windows, smearing cream everywhere… Amid the chaos, the wreckage, the curses and screams, Xie Xinzhou kept playing his cello—the first movement of Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B minor. Then, a young man with ash-gray hair, who had been watching him from the shadows for a while, strolled over with a champagne glass in hand. Grinning brightly, he said, “Your colleagues all ran off, but you’re the calmest one left. Guess I’ll pay you then?” “Sure,” Xie Xinzhou replied. “I’m Yu Wu. Nice to meet you.” “Xie Xinzhou. Eighteen thousand eight hundred.” “……” Yu Wu’s smile froze. “How much!?” Just then, someone stumbled into Yu Wu from behind, sending him lurching forward. A whole glass of champagne splashed onto the cello—an instrument that looked expensive enough to buy ten Yu Wus—before he slipped and, along with the person behind him, crashed onto the cello. **CRASH—** “Now it’s one million one hundred sixty-eight thousand eight hundred,” Xie Xinzhou stated coldly, looking down at him with unwavering calm. Yu Wu stopped smiling altogether. “Hold on. Let me go pick up that paternity test. It says I’m the real heir.” He never cared about this messed-up rich family—until this ridiculously handsome musician demanded 1,168,800 from him. Now he has no choice but to fight for it. (A Rich Heir’s Debt-Redemption Journey) (Not Really) * Aloof, socially awkward musician who looks at everything like trash (bottom) A sly, talkative otaku younger manga artist (top) Summary screenshot date: 2023.11.25

The story begins with a $30 special-effect comment popping up in Yan Zhuo's livestream: "Host, do you still love Qin Du Liang?" Yan Zhuo casually replies with a smile, "Loved." Meanwhile, at the Isle of Man TT, the World Superbike Championship, Qin Du Liang—fresh off his bike—pulls off his helmet and balaclava, shaking out his hair before heading to the pit area for a break. As he sips water and scrolls through his phone, he stumbles upon a clip of that very livestream. He nearly chokes. Wiping his mouth, he grits his teeth. The words he once heard weren’t “loved.” They were: “I swear I’m not gay.”

A co-driver handles a racer’s daily routines in life. On the track, they are the racer’s brain, eyes, map, and also the racer’s… “...and also the racer’s dad,” Zhong Su said. * As Xia Qianchen’s co-driver, Zhong Su was given endless warnings by the team manager a week before joining— Xia Qianchen is fussy and precious. He demands ice-cold milk when he wakes up, his car must be washed daily until the paint gleams like a mirror, and his co-driver must have a pleasant voice while staying silent. Zhong Su chuckled. “Such trivial things. I’ll take care of him.” * “I’m not fussy. I have standards.” Xia Qianchen—a prodigy racer who rose to fame in his youth, a madman who takes 300 km/h turns on the Nürburgring, a stage-3 chuunibyou who believes no one can defeat him in his own soundtrack. He is the ruler of the Kunlun Tianlu at 3,100 meters above sea level. He is the little lunatic who, after losing GPS signal in a sandstorm, kissed his co-driver and whispered, “This is no man’s land. We might very well die together here.” * We’ll win the Targa Rally together. We’ll race the Medog Highway once and dominate the mountain ranges. We’ll drink under the moonlight on desert dunes. We’ll traverse the canyons and peaks of our homeland, experiencing “four seasons in a day.” We’ll drive through every place written in textbooks, no longer seeing the world through pictures. “Where to next?” “Somewhere we’ve never been.”