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

He started humming a melody.

It's not singing, but humming in the lowest register, with the vocal cords barely vibrating and the airflow driven entirely by the chest cavity and diaphragm.

That extremely low-frequency resonance was transmitted through her ribs to Luo Qianyu's back, as if someone were pressing a tuning fork against her spine.

Luo Qianyu's breathing began to involuntarily follow his rhythm.

Once.

Twice.

On the third time, she closed her eyes, opened her mouth, and a very light and deep sound slid out from the bottom of her throat.

It wasn't the kind of shrill high notes she had practiced before, but rather like a thin mist, slowly seeping out from the deepest part of her chest, with a hoarse, grainy quality and a moist, watery feel, contradictorily intertwined.

Xu Qing's hand tightened slightly on her ribs for a moment.

Luo Qianyu felt it; the back of her neck instantly turned red from the heat.

She suddenly grabbed a pencil and wrote on the paper: "Do you always have to hug me from behind to teach me? This is the sixth time!!"

Xu Qing let go of her hand, walked around to her, picked up the paper, looked at it for two seconds, and a very faint smile appeared on his lips.

He picked up his pen, underlined "sixth time," and wrote beside it: "You're still counting?"

Luo Qianyu's face turned red from her neck to the tips of her ears.

She crumpled the paper into a ball and threw it at his face, grabbed the sheet music, turned around abruptly, dragged the chair to the farthest corner from him, and began to silently read the score with her back to him.

Xu Qing didn't chase after them.

He picked up the crumpled paper, unfolded it, glanced at it, folded it, and stuffed it into the breast pocket of his shirt.

The study was silent all afternoon.

The only sounds were the scratching of pencils on paper and the occasional soft rustling of paper strips sliding from one end of the table to the other.

Luo Qianyu wrote: "I don't understand the way the note transitions in the twelfth section."

Xu Qing replied: "Don't go in, just slide in. Imagine your voice is water overflowing from the rim of a cup."

Luo Qianyu: "That analogy is stupid."

Xu Qing: "Your pig head drawing is even sillier."

Luo Qianyu drew a row of exclamation marks.

Xu Qing drew an arrow pointing to the words "Keep practicing".

At 11:40 p.m., Luo Qianyu finally finished silently reading the melody of the entire song.

She leaned back in her chair, staring at the ceiling, her lips moving slightly as she silently went over the chorus in her mind.

That deep, almost whispering melody would never have seemed to her to be dangerous before.

But now, with her high notes completely blocked out, and the whole world waiting for her to make a fool of herself, the knife Xu Qing handed her felt more dangerous than any sharp high note.

She tore off the last piece of paper, hesitated for a long time, wrote a sentence, and gently placed it beside Xu Qing's hand.

"What if I mess up my low notes too?"

Xu Qing looked down at the line of text.

He didn't reply to the note.

He picked up a pencil and wrote just two words directly below her line.

"Won't."

Luo Qianyu stared at those two words for a long time, then folded the note and pressed it together with the previous notes that were full of pig heads and exclamation marks.

The desk lamp in the study stayed on all night.

At two o'clock in the morning, Luo Qianyu fell asleep on the table.

Xu Qing took off his coat and draped it over her shoulders, then walked to the living room and dialed Ma Dongteng's number.

"The music is finished, we'll be in the studio tomorrow. How's it going on your end?"

Ma Dongteng's voice had an icy tone: "We intercepted an encrypted email half an hour ago, sent from New York to Marcus's private terminal."

"content?"

"Just one line of text—'Sixth episode recording. The three audience music critics behind camera number seven are already in position, waiting to see the joke.'"

Xu Qing remained silent for three seconds.

"Behind camera number seven... that's the open area on the flank of the judges' panel, where independent music critics have their assigned seats."

"Yes. The meaning is very clear - they not only want to mess with you online, but also stab her in the face in public."

Xu Qing leaned back on the sofa armrest, slowly stroking the edge of her phone with her thumb.

"Let them do it."

His voice was so calm it sounded like he was giving tomorrow's weather forecast.

Ma Dongteng was silent for a moment on the other end of the phone, then uttered a single word.

"OK."

......

There are 48 hours left until the recording of the sixth episode.

The online frenzy has reached its peak.

The candid photos of Luo Qianyu wearing a mask entering and leaving the hospital were repeatedly retaliated against by marketing accounts, with each caption more disgusting than the last.

"Her voice is ruined and she's barely hanging on," "Xu Qing's personal karaoke machine is completely broken," and some people even edited together clips of her high notes from all her previous performances, with the title "You'll never hear these high notes again."

The top comments section of the comment section was completely dominated by paid trolls.

"To be honest, losing her voice is a good thing for her, it saves her from embarrassing herself on stage."

"Why not just forfeit the match? Don't torture the audience's ears."

"God shut her throat for us, thank you."

Luo Qianyu didn't see any of this because her phone was locked in a drawer with a small brass lock.

But Xu Qing saw it.

At four in the morning, the cold light from his phone screen shone on his face in the kitchen.

He scrolled through the comments from beginning to end, his expression as cold as a piece of ice that had been shattered and then re-frozen, with the cracks all inside.

He locked his phone on the table and took a swig of iced cola.

He turned and went back to his study to continue composing the music.

He adjusted the bass line of the cello by two measures, adding a set of extremely subtle overtones in the transition section of the chorus, as faint as a heartbeat.

He wanted to ensure that Luo Qianyu could make everyone's hearts beat in sync with this frequency without having to exert any effort.

The day before recording.

Penguin Music's Class A recording studio.

Luo Qianyu stood in front of the microphone, holding a list of notes she had accumulated over two days—all of them were her questions about the sheet music and Xu Qing's annotations and replies, densely filling four A4 pages.

There were no electronic devices inside the shed.

There was only a cello lying in the corner, and Xu Qing sat opposite it, tuning an acoustic guitar.

"Try the verse once."

Luo Qianyu closed her eyes and placed her palms on both sides of her ribs—the exact same spot Xu Qing had taught her the day before yesterday.

She spoke.

"We traveled this route, stopping and starting along the way—"

The sound was extremely low, like a thin layer of mist spreading across the ground, with a rough feel as if it had been sanded by sandpaper, but it was not harsh at all. Instead, it had the damp temperature of soil after a rainstorm.

Xu Qing's guitar followed, with the strumming force kept to a minimum, providing only a faint layer of harmonic undertones.

After finishing the first verse, Luo Qianyu's breathing was much more stable than expected—the two days of silence, coupled with Xu Qing's almost obsessive bass resonance training method, had indeed been effective. Her mid-to-low range vocals had become more focused and mellow due to the temporary closure of the high range.

"refrain."

Xu Qing raised her chin slightly.

This is the most crucial paragraph.

The soaring high notes of the original version have now been completely replaced with falsetto treatment and vocal embellishments an octave lower. The melody line does not rise, but falls—like a fallen leaf slowly spinning and sinking to the ground in the autumn wind.

"I was once overwhelmed by the vastness of the world—"

Luo Qianyu's voice reached a low point never before explored in her professional career, with chest resonance supporting the bottom structure of the entire vocal range, and breath flowing slowly between her teeth.

But when she got to the line “also indulging in it and talking in her sleep,” her breath became unstable and shaky.

It's not a technical issue—it's instinct.

Her body's memory was screaming at her to push the pitch higher; the inertial circuits in her brain were like a struggling snake, desperately trying to pull her voice up.

Xu Qing's guitar playing suddenly stopped.

You're fighting with yourself.

He cut to the chase, "Don't think, 'This was supposed to be a high note.' This song didn't have an original version. From the very first second it was written, it was tailor-made for you right now."

Luo Qianyu opened her eyes and looked at him, her lips moved but she didn't make a sound—she wanted to speak, but the silence rule was stuck there.

She scribbled furiously on the note, head down: "I know! I just can't control it! My body moves faster than my brain!"

Xu Qing stood up, put the guitar aside, and walked over to her.

"Don't sing with your brain."

He reached out and pressed down on her shoulders, gently lowering her by three centimeters, as if telling her body—down, down further.

"Think about what you've been through these past two years. You've been sidelined, ridiculed, cyberbullied, and called a lackey."

His voice was so low that only she could hear it, "Where does the weight of all this go?"

Luo Qianyu's eyelashes trembled.

"They won't fly into the sky. They'll fall, press down on your chest, sink into your belly, and fall into the soil beneath your feet."

Xu Qing released her shoulder and took a step back.

"Go sing that weight."

The recording studio was silent for about ten seconds.

Luo Qianyu closed her eyes again; this time, she would no longer fight against anything.

"I was once overwhelmed by the vastness of the world—"