Qi Yue (Entertainment Friend)

Qi Yue (Entertainment Friend) is introduced as Shen Tang’s rival within the entertainment industry, but her importance quickly exceeds that of a conventional competitor. She begins from a position of mutual disdain with Shen Tang, yet becomes one of the few people who treats Shen Tang as a companion rather than as a scandalous commodity, a romantic rumor, or a convenient source of publicity. Their relationship turns the apparent rivalry between two unsuccessful actresses into a durable friendship built through practical help, shared leisure, concern for safety, and repeated contact through games.

Identity and Background

Qi Yue is an obscure actress known to Shen Tang as a professional rival. When they meet, Qi Yue has just returned from elsewhere and removes her sunglasses with a visibly jaded expression, asking whether Shen Tang has forgotten her after only a few days. Shen Tang searches her memories and recognizes her as another unknown in the industry. The two women occupy similar low-status professional positions, but they have developed opposing judgments of one another: Qi Yue looks down on the vulgar, sexually suggestive approach associated with the original Shen Tang, while Shen Tang’s former self looks down on Qi Yue’s apparently complacent acceptance of failing to become famous.

The contrast is partly a class contrast. Qi Yue comes from a wealthy family, and the story presents her entertainment career as something she can pursue without staking her entire future on it. If acting does not produce success, she can return to inherit the family business. Shen Tang, by contrast, is burdened by the consequences of her public reputation and has considered leaving the business altogether. Qi Yue’s relative economic security gives her a different relationship to failure: she can remain in the field as an experiment, while Shen Tang experiences the industry as a source of livelihood, humiliation, and relentless rumor.

Friendship Beneath the Rivalry

Qi Yue’s first substantial function in Shen Tang’s life is social rather than professional. When Shen Tang encounters Sha Ma Te and needs to explain her presence, she describes her current work as a side job for another boss. Qi Yue accepts the explanation because she knows Shen Tang’s family circumstances and understands that those circumstances are no secret within the company. She then tells Shen Tang to get into the car and offers to take her inside, turning a potentially awkward encounter into a simple act of assistance.

Their friendship becomes most visible in ordinary outings. Shen Tang makes an appointment with Qi Yue to visit a spa; before the spa, they eat together and watch a movie. The sequence matters because it gives Shen Tang a form of companionship outside contracts, publicity, and family performances. Qi Yue is not merely present during a crisis. She shares meals, entertainment, and time with Shen Tang, allowing their relationship to develop through the unremarkable habits of friendship.

Qi Yue also serves as an emotional counterweight when Shen Tang is attacked by another woman. After the woman leaves, Shen Tang and Qi Yue remain standing together, trying to understand why the encounter happened. Qi Yue’s restrained conclusion is that the woman probably simply dislikes Shen Tang. Her response does not dramatize the insult or promise revenge; instead, it helps reduce the scene to the hostility it actually contains. This practical, unsentimental manner suits the friendship that grows between them.

Care, Danger, and Communication

Qi Yue’s concern becomes clearer when Shen Tang fails to respond to her. After Shen Tang has been occupied elsewhere, she checks her phone and discovers that Qi Yue has called five times and sent eight messages. The repeated attempts show that Qi Yue is attentive to Shen Tang’s whereabouts and wellbeing, even though she does not express that concern through grand declarations. Shen Tang’s startled reaction also reveals that Qi Yue’s messages are important enough to expose what Shen Tang has momentarily forgotten.

That concern carries particular weight because Shen Tang has been in a bar that Qi Yue considered safe, while acknowledging that no place can guarantee absolute safety and that people’s intentions are complicated. Qi Yue’s judgment is therefore neither naïvely trusting nor needlessly alarmist. She assesses the practical risk, continues trying to reach Shen Tang, and remains part of the network that helps Shen Tang return safely to ordinary life.

Qi Yue’s support is not limited to physical or emotional care. When Shen Tang is drawn into gaming, the same friendship begins to operate through a digital social space. Miao Miao invites Shen Tang to play King of Glory, and the game exposes a pattern of gendered hostility when a jungler insults Shen Tang after she asks for help while being repeatedly attacked in the bottom lane. Qi Yue is not the speaker in that exchange, but the broader gaming environment helps explain why Shen Tang’s friendships matter: the game gives her a place where identity, skill, rank, and social loyalty are constantly tested rather than simply assumed.

Social and Narrative Role

Qi Yue’s presence links several of the story’s contrasting worlds. She belongs to the entertainment industry, where Shen Tang has been made into an object of scandal through labels such as “loose tea bitch,” “plastic surgery freak,” “compensation scammer,” and “troublemaker.” Yet Qi Yue’s interactions with Shen Tang are not organized by the company’s publicity machinery. She does not exploit Shen Tang’s notoriety to pair her with another celebrity, and she does not treat her as the malignant figure whom everyone in the industry avoids. Instead, she sees the person behind the reputation, even while retaining the memory of the original Shen Tang’s behavior and their former antagonism.

Qi Yue also connects Shen Tang’s public life with the story’s private and recreational spaces. She can accompany Shen Tang to eat, watch a movie, and visit a spa; she can offer transportation and a way into a private setting; she can send persistent messages when Shen Tang becomes unreachable; and she participates in the surrounding social network through which Shen Tang’s gaming life expands. These actions make her a recurring ally whose importance lies in continuity. She provides the kind of dependable contact that is easy to overlook beside contracts, scandals, banquets, and danger, but whose absence would leave Shen Tang much more isolated.

The character further complicates the story’s treatment of female rivalry. Qi Yue and Shen Tang begin with clashing judgments shaped by professional status, taste, and class privilege. Their relationship does not require the disappearance of those differences. Qi Yue still comes from wealth, and Shen Tang still carries the consequences of a scandal-driven public identity. What changes is the meaning of their opposition: disagreement becomes familiarity, familiarity becomes assistance, and assistance becomes friendship. Qi Yue therefore represents a relationship that escapes the entertainment industry’s competitive logic without pretending that the competition never existed.

Development and Lasting Significance

Qi Yue’s arc is defined less by a dramatic transformation than by the gradual reclassification of her relationship with Shen Tang. She enters the narrative as a rival whom Shen Tang only partly recognizes, and she becomes a companion trusted with leisure, practical explanations, and personal safety. The repeated contact is especially significant because Shen Tang’s life is unstable: her contractual marriage, scandalous reputation, uncertain career, and dangerous encounters continually threaten to turn every relationship into an arrangement. Qi Yue’s calls, invitations, and willingness to help create a relationship that is not founded on payment or publicity.

Her significance also persists through recurrence. Later, when Shen Tang plays King of Glory with Gu Huaian and other teammates, gaming remains a medium through which affiliations and identities are negotiated. Qi Yue’s earlier role in bringing Shen Tang into ordinary social activity helps establish the wider pattern: games are not decorative diversions but a recurring channel for friendship, conflict, rank, and performance. Against the harsh public labels attached to Shen Tang, Qi Yue offers recognition in a more private register. She begins as the woman who does not approve of Shen Tang’s former image and ends as one of the people most plainly willing to remain beside her.