Entertainment: A song that brought his deceased wife back to life.

The second episode of "I Am a Singer" featured a challenger competition.

The studio was packed from the first floor to the third floor, with even the fire exits blocked. The air was thick with the slightly restless heat of more than three thousand hearts beating simultaneously.

Luo Qianyu drew the third performance order today and has already finished singing. Her performance was solid, and her switching between true and false voice in the chorus, which Xu Qing had been correcting for two weeks, was almost flawless.

Xu Qing, who ranked fifth, also stepped down.

The two of them were huddled in a corner of the waiting area. Luo Qianyu sat on a folding chair staring at the monitor, while Xu Qing stood behind her, holding a half-empty bottle of mineral water.

On the monitor screen, Haili Amu was standing in the center of the stage.

This veteran singer, who has been in the industry for 23 years, chose an extremely technically dazzling folk-pop fusion song. The bass drum and electronic sound wall were stacked in three layers and smashed outwards. In the chorus, he hit three high Cs in one go—each one so bright it was almost white and piercing. His voice was like a string twisted to its limit, turning the whole song into a military exercise for his vocal cords.

The audience responded enthusiastically, with screams erupting one after another, and even the last row on the third floor stood up.

Haili Amu finished by making his signature microphone gesture and walking off the stage with his head held high.

Luo Qianyu turned her head and glanced at Xu Qing.

"How is it?"

"It's a technical job." Xu Qing took a sip of water.

Luo Qianyu understood—in layman's terms, it was just two words: soulless.

When Haili Amu returned to the waiting area, he was surrounded by staff who offered him water and towels. His voice was so loud that it could be heard throughout the entire corridor.

"I've practiced this song for three months, it's my secret weapon for the challenge match. If that mystery guest can handle my performance, I, Haili Amu, will change my name."

The singers next to him smiled politely, their smiles varying in intensity.

Luo Qianyu looked away, didn't reply, and continued watching the monitor.

The host walked onto the stage.

"The last one—the first challenger of the season."

The whispers in the room rose like boiling water.

The production team took the secrecy surrounding this challenger to an extreme level—no name, no nationality, and even rehearsals were conducted separately with the venue cleared. Even the interns in the control room only knew four words: "overseas artist."

In the control room, Hong Yan's hand holding the thermos cup trembled slightly, and the goji berry tea spilled onto his trouser leg, but he didn't notice.

The lights went out.

The studio, which housed more than 3,000 people, was plunged into darkness at the same time, with only a spotlight in the center of the dome shining like a white pillar of light on the stage.

A person walked out from the side of the curtain.

White T-shirt, old jeans, and a pair of faded canvas shoes.

Her golden, tousled hair fell casually across her forehead; she had no styling, no in-ear monitors, and no musicians accompanying her.

Just one person.

All the singers in the waiting area stared intently at the monitor.

Haili Amu frowned, holding his water glass: "Who is this? Dressed like that on stage?"

No one answered him.

On stage, the blond man stood under the spotlight.

He didn't look at the teleprompter, didn't do any opening remarks, just tilted his head slightly, spoke into the microphone, and said a sentence in broken, distorted Chinese.

"I've come... to find someone. Someone I haven't seen in six years."

The pronunciation was so strange that some people in the waiting area almost burst out laughing.

Then he switched to fluent English, and his voice suddenly softened, as if he were whispering to someone across a distance of three thousand people.

"My guitarist."

The entire room fell silent for a moment.

He closed his eyes.

All the synthesizers, drum kits, and effects on stage were turned off before he took the stage—this was at his own request, and even the band director was helpless against this "overseas artist."

Only a grand piano and two acoustic guitars remained on the stage.

But he didn't touch any of the musical instruments.

There is no prelude.

He spoke directly.

"Hey, slow it down—"

The moment the first note rolled out of his throat, the air in the waiting area seemed to be gripped tightly.

This is not singing.

This is something more primal, more violent—the sound surges up from the very bottom of the chest, with a metallic graininess and an inhuman thickness, like an invisible hand reaching directly into the listener's chest and stirring it up.

"What do you want from me——"

He lowered the key, by a full two keys.

It's not that he can't sing high notes—anyone with ears in the room could tell that the ceiling of his voice is far higher than that—he's deliberately pulling back, like a beast that has retracted its claws into its paw pads, singing only with the softest part of its throat.

It is respect.

Respect for every singer on this stage.

The air in the waiting area seemed to solidify, and Haili Amu's hand holding the water cup began to stiffen.

"There might have been a time, and I would give myself away——"

The transition from true voice to falsetto occurs on the last syllable of "away".

There are no seams, no breaks, no trace of transition—like a piece of silk being blown up and down by the wind, the front and back are of the same texture.

The pianist sat in the corner, his ten fingers hovering above the keys, afraid to touch them.

It wasn't that he couldn't play—it was that he realized any accompaniment was superfluous at that moment.

This man's voice is a whole symphony orchestra in itself.

"Just don't give up, I'm workin' it out, please don't give in, I won't let you down——"

The chorus exploded.

The sound pressure surged like a tsunami, and Adam's voice displayed incredible elasticity in the four bars of the chorus—it took less than half a bar to go from the lightest breathy voice to the fullest mixed voice. The range of his vocal range and the changes in his timbre were repeatedly and intertwined in the same line of lyrics.

Someone in the first row of the audience started crying, not because they understood the lyrics, but because the emotional density in the voice was too high, and their brain couldn't process it in time, so they could only express it with tears.

"It messed me up, need a second to breathe——"

When he sang this line, he tilted his head slightly, and the spotlight fell directly on his face, which was filled with an undisguised and naked longing.

In the studio with more than 3,000 people, not a single person dared to utter a sound.

"Hey, what do you want from me——"

The last sentence, the voice lowered inch by inch, until it almost touched the line of silence, like someone standing in front of you asking something softly, and then turning and walking into the fog.

The entire room fell silent.

Four seconds, five seconds, six seconds—

An explosion erupted in a corner on the third floor, with applause pouring down from the highest point like a landslide, causing the entire building's floor to tremble.

People stood up on the first floor, then on the second floor, then on the judges' seats. The movements of more than three thousand people jumping up from their seats were so synchronized that it was as if they were being pulled by the same thread.

Waiting area.

Haili Amu's water cup slipped from his hand, bounced twice on the ground, and spilled water all over the floor.

He didn't pick it up.

He recognized the face.

Adam Lambert, with global album sales of 300 million copies, is the soul of the Queen band and has been hailed by the Western music scene as "the last true rock voice of this era".

Lowering the key by two keys to sing a ballad is like a B-2 bomber that doesn't use its cluster bombs but instead flies over your head and drops a flower.

But the weight of that flower was enough to collapse the entire building.

Haili Amu's face was as white as his name—Haili, the kind of white that never sees the light in the deep sea.

The three High Cs he painstakingly perfected over three months sounded like a child holding a lighter in the sun compared to Adam's a cappella rendition.

What difference does it make whether you order it or not?

Luo Qianyu sat on the folding chair, her fingertips gripping the hem of her skirt tightly, her knuckles turning white.

She opened her mouth, but found that she couldn't say anything.

It wasn't that I was intimidated—it was awe, resentment, and a burning competitive spirit churning within my chest, forming a tangled mess.

She turned to look at Xu Qing.

Xu Qing stood still, her expression indifferent.

But the bottle of mineral water in his hand had been silently squeezed and crushed in half.

"Xu Qing." Luo Qianyu's voice was so tense it sounded unlike her own. "You know him."

It is not a question.

Xu Qing didn't answer, but simply reached out and smoothed out the wrinkled hem of her skirt.

"Don't pinch the skirt."

Luo Qianyu stared at his profile for three seconds, then didn't ask any further questions.

But she clenched her fists even tighter.

-

At the same moment, on the other side of the ocean.

On the top floor of Deepsea Capital's North American headquarters, the Manhattan skyline unfolds like a starry night sky through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

Marcus stared at the 65-inch screen on the wall, where Adam was bowing in farewell to the audience amidst thunderous applause in the live broadcast from China.

The Cuban cigar in his hand was unconsciously crushed in two, and tobacco scraps fell onto his $30,000 custom-made trousers.

How did he get to China?

The assistant's voice came from behind, each word laced with a thin layer of icy fear: "Mr. Lambert changed his itinerary three days ago at the last minute. His management team said—"

"I'm not asking about the process," Marcus said, his tone surgical, precisely cutting off his assistant's sentence. "I'm asking how he knew that person was in China."

The office was silent for five seconds.

Marcus turned and walked to the table, took out an encrypted USB drive from the bottom of the drawer, and inserted it into the terminal.

A file popped up on the screen—"Siren-04"—the waveform jumped twice, like a fish out of water struggling to survive.

"Since Lambert insists on muddying the waters..."

Marcus stared at the twisted, wavy line, a slow, dangerous smile curving his lips.

"Then let him see for himself what kind of monster lives in the brain of the genius he's been searching for for six years."