A song called "The You of the Past" has prompted the entire internet to beg me not to leav

Xinghai City, hillside villa.

After taking a hot shower, Lin Yan changed into a set of dry and comfortable pure cotton loungewear and sank into the huge beanbag chair in the living room as if she were sprawling out in mud.

Shen Qingqiu was dealing with a mountain of documents in his study, trying to get through the video conference of multinational CEOs worth hundreds of billions within two hours.

Lin Yan breathed a sigh of relief, grabbed the controller, and prepared to restart his progress on "Black Myth," which had been interrupted for three days due to his honeymoon escape.

Just then, the phone lying next to me started vibrating wildly.

Caller ID: Lao Liang.

Without hesitation, Lin Yan pressed the hang-up button, then silenced his phone and tossed it into the crevice of the sofa.

"He dares to talk to the boss after get off work? Old Liang doesn't want his year-end bonus." Lin Yan muttered, focusing intently on the TV screen, controlling the Destiny Man to smash the toad demon in front of him with a stick.

But what he didn't know was that at that moment, the internet was experiencing a massive earthquake, a tsunami-level event.

Just an hour before the helicopter landed in Xinghai City, Lao Liang, behind Lin Yan's back, pulled off a big heist.

He threw the audio clip with severe ambient noise that David had sent back directly to the top mixing team at the "Don't Want to Go to Work" group.

Those mixing engineers, who were considered the most arrogant in the industry, almost all stood up the moment they heard the recording.

They tacitly avoided making any unnecessary arrangements or adding even a single piano chord.

Using only the most advanced equipment, the excessively harsh wind howling was carefully filtered out, while preserving to the greatest extent possible the surging of the waves, the crackling of burning firewood, and Lin Yan's original voice, which was extremely textured and ethereal.

Subsequently, without any prior promotion or press release, Lao Liang directly used the group's official Weibo account to release the audio file titled "The Brightest Star in the Night Sky".

The caption only included an extremely irritating "eating melon seeds" emoji, along with the sentence:

"Our boss was just humming this while vacationing on a deserted island. Feel free to listen, it's free."

In the first five minutes after the Weibo post was published, there were only a few hundred scattered comments in the comment section.

But ten minutes later, servers of top global streaming platforms such as NetEase Cloud Music, Tencent Music, and Apple Music sounded red overload alarms almost simultaneously.

"Holy crap!! This was just a casual hum? You call that just something to listen to?!"

"No accompaniment! Not even a beat-up guitar! Pure a cappella! The very first line gave me goosebumps!"

"Just what kind of crossover monster is Lin Yan?! This masterpiece is absolutely the main hit on any superstar's new album, and he just went to a deserted island and casually sang it to the ocean?"

"The line, 'Whenever I can't find meaning in my existence, whenever I'm lost in the darkness,' just blew the skull off the heads of suffering working people!"

"This white noise a cappella piece cured my years of mental exhaustion! Lin Yan, how are you going to repay me for the tears you owe me?!"

Just one hour later, "The Brightest Star in the Night Sky" swept across all music charts at home and abroad like a terrifying digital virus, with an unreasonable and irrational attitude.

This song dominated eight of the top ten trending topics on Chinese social media.

#LinYanDesertIslandDivineSong#, #NightSkyStarPureVersionFirstRelease#, #500,000PeopleCriedByLinYan'sSinging#... all of these entries are followed by a glaring dark red "Explosive" character.

Even more alarming feedback came from overseas.

On the other side of the ocean, on the North American Billboard Hot 100 chart, those pop dance songs and rap songs that cost millions of dollars and were produced by top Grammy producers were completely outmatched by this Chinese a cappella song with only the sound of ocean waves.

The data skyrocketed, forcing the ranking system to break away from conventional data entry methods.

Within two hours, it soared to the top of Spotify's global daily chart. Within three hours, it swept through the top ten of Billboard's real-time trending charts!

Inside a top-tier recording studio in North America, several top producers with dreadlocks stared blankly at the spotless audio track data on the screen, as if they had seen a ghost.

"Bang!"

The monitoring headphones, worth over 100,000 yuan, were smashed hard onto the mixing console.

"Fuck! We spent a month building a whopping 300 tracks of electronic synthesizer, and it's still no match for him blowing sea breeze across the Pacific?!"

"God...this is a devil that doesn't need industrial packaging at all!"

……

Meanwhile, inside the villa's living room...

Lin Yan's game character had just been defeated by the BOSS in the Northwest, and a large "vegetarian" character appeared in the center of the screen with extreme irony.

Before he could even curse, the door was suddenly pushed open, and Old Liang rushed in, sweating profusely and with a fanatical look in his eyes, holding the unfortunate tablet computer high in his hand.

"Boss! We're on the charts! We're on the global charts!" Old Liang's voice cracked from extreme congestion. "One a cappella performance! You've turned the tables on the global music scene! You've truly become a legend!"

Lin Yan frowned, pressed the pause button on the controller, and turned to look at Lao Liang.

"What chart-topping? I've been so bored these past few days, I haven't had time to write songs."

Old Liang swallowed hard, his fingertips trembling as he pressed the play button on the tablet.

"The brightest star in the night sky, can you hear me...?"

The extremely familiar sound, accompanied by the low rumble of the South Pacific waves, echoed softly in the living room.

Lin Yan's face instantly turned as black as the bottom of a pot. He narrowed his eyes and locked onto Lao Liang with an extremely dangerous look.

"You sent a drone to secretly film me?" Lin Yan gritted his teeth.

"It wasn't me! It was David's fanatic fan! He even released the latest miniature reconnaissance aircraft to find you!" Old Liang frantically waved his hands to shift the blame, then his face turned red with excitement.

"Boss, the process isn't important! What's important is that this song has completely boosted our second-quarter financial report! The click-through rate in just these two hours is almost equivalent to half the profit from that $30 billion contract!"

Lin Yan took a deep breath, slumped onto the sofa, and rubbed his temples vigorously, feeling as if his head was about to explode.

He went to great lengths to travel to a remote, desolate island in the South Pacific, abandoning his phone and cutting off internet access, all just to enjoy a comfortable vacation and experience the ultimate laid-back life where he would never have to write songs again.

Ironically, he was sitting on the beach humming a tune to his wife when a reconnaissance plane recorded it and it even topped the global charts.

"What a tragedy."

Lin Yan collapsed backward, his voice filled with grief and indignation at this damned fate.

"I went to a deserted island for my honeymoon, and I'm being forced to work! Can't this world even leave a way for the likes of salted fish to survive?!"

Looking at his boss's grief-stricken appearance, Lao Liang's lips twitched uncontrollably.

Everyone in the entertainment industry dreams of using a hit song like this to defy fate, but this guy, who climbed to the top of the global music scene, actually thinks it's interfering with his gaming!

"Boss, what about the global promotion and distribution of this song later on..." Old Liang asked tentatively, his voice filled with menace.

"Publicity my ass! No music videos! No chart rankings! No gigs!" Lin Yan grabbed the controller and roared, "Get out of here right now! If you dare disturb my ribs meal because of this crap, I'll exile you to the African branch to grow bananas tomorrow!"

Old Liang fled in panic, clutching his tablet, but when he turned around, the smile on his face was even brighter than when he received his year-end bonus.

Just then, a soft footstep sound came from the stairs.

Shen Qingqiu, dressed in a loose-fitting silk nightgown, carried a plate of freshly heated braised pork ribs and walked downstairs with a smile on her face.

"What's gotten into you again, our music tyrant?" Shen Qingqiu teased softly, his eyes sparkling, as he placed the ribs on the coffee table.

The familiar aroma of meat instantly evaporated Lin Yan's grief and indignation. He dropped the controller, picked up a piece of pork rib, stuffed it into his mouth, and mumbled indistinctly.

"Honey, I really can't survive in the entertainment industry anymore. No matter where I lie down, I still get trending on social media. Let's go back to the countryside tomorrow and rent a plot of land to grow vegetables..."

Shen Qingqiu sat on the armrest of the sofa, looking at his unpretentious appearance, the tenderness in her eyes almost filling the entire living room.