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

The moment the recording engineer spoke for the second time, he sat up straight in the chair behind the control panel.

The sound was still extremely low, and the melody was still the same one that had been altered to be unlike the original.

But this time, the weight of each syllable has changed.

They weren't singing.

It's like someone who's weathered a blizzard, prying open their frozen fingers one by one in front of the fireplace.

The song was recorded in three takes before it was approved.

Xu Qing put the guitar back into its case and waved a note in front of Luo Qianyu.

"Go home. Rest up tomorrow, and go on stage the day after."

Luo Qianyu drew a pig's head three times larger than before on the back of the paper he was writing on, and wrote next to it: "You must make me braised pork tomorrow."

Xu Qing flipped the note over, added four short legs and a tail under the pig's head, and pushed it back.

Luo Qianyu looked at the pig that he had drawn completely and the corners of her mouth curved slightly.

She quickly crumpled the note into a ball, stuffed it into her pocket, and walked out of the recording studio with her chin held high.

Xu Qing was following behind when she was suddenly stopped at the corner of the corridor.

When Ma Dongteng called, Xu Qing answered and held the phone between her shoulder and ear, listening as she walked.

"It's finally confirmed. The three seats behind camera number seven are filled in with the names Zhang Wei, Fang Licheng, and Du Haitao—all self-media music critics who have suddenly become popular in the last two years, with a combined following of over 30 million. On the surface, they are independent observers invited by the program team, but in reality, the legal representatives of all three companies point to the same Cayman Islands-related shell company."

"Deep Sea Capital."

Xu Qing calmly replied.

"One hundred percent. I checked their content output over the past six months, and whenever the topic of 'bright moon and gentle breeze' is involved, the layout of the top comments section is exactly the same as the layout of the 47 accounts that were banned before—the same set of scripts and the same team."

Ma Dongteng lowered his voice by half a octave.

"Xu Qing, these three people have access to the live microphone and real-time bullet comments. If they cause trouble in front of everyone during the performance, or start a fight immediately after Luo Qianyu finishes singing—"

"Let them take them."

Xu Qing walked to the parking lot, opened the car door for Luo Qianyu to get in first, and then walked around to the driver's seat before continuing to talk.

"The harder you pull, the harder you fall. You only need to make sure one thing: the live stream signal is uninterrupted the entire time, giving them no room to edit it."

"I can do that. But aren't you worried about her doing it on the spot—"

"She won't."

Xu Qing hung up the phone and started the engine.

Luo Qianyu sat in the passenger seat, tilting her head to look at him.

Although she couldn't hear the conversation, she could read the slight tightening of Xu Qing's lips after she hung up.

She pulled out a piece of paper, spread it on her lap, wrote a line of words, and silently held it up to where he could see it out of the corner of his eye.

"Is someone trying to cause trouble again?"

Xu Qing glanced at it, turned the steering wheel with one hand, and spoke as naturally as if they were discussing what to eat for dinner.

"A minor character."

Luo Qianyu added a line to the end of the note: "I'm not afraid."

Xu Qing didn't respond.

But he took his right hand off the steering wheel, reached over the center armrest, and precisely pinched the back of her neck.

The force was just right.

Luo Qianyu's body went limp for a moment, then she stuck a note on his arm—"Don't touch me while we're driving!"

Recording date for episode 6.

The air in the waiting area was so hot and dry that it was unbearable. Even with the central air conditioning on full blast, it couldn't cool down the body heat generated by the hundreds of staff members and seven groups of singers.

Luo Qianyu sat cross-legged on a folding chair in the corner, her fingers repeatedly stroking a piece of paper that had been folded and unfolded countless times.

That was something Xu Qing had slipped into her hand last night before she went to bed.

The message simply read: "No."

The performances of the first five singers resembled a premeditated hunt.

Lin Bonian presented a terrifyingly difficult original Live House song, with three high notes tearing through the ceiling; Kay Tse covered a classic 90s rock song, pushing the ending note directly to B-flat 5; even the fourth up-and-coming singer presented a complete improvisational key-changing virtuoso section, with brass and bass instruments at their peak, and the entire stage was almost blasted into ruins by the high notes.

Nobody touched the bass section.

Because everyone knows today that Luo Qianyu's voice is ruined; she can no longer reach high notes and only has low notes left to use.

So everyone was hitting high notes.

This is not a coincidence, but a tacit understanding in the hunting grounds—to tell the world in the most glaring way that singers without high notes are not worthy of standing on this stage.

Behind camera position number seven, three well-dressed middle-aged men sat in the independent observation deck.

Wearing a name tag that reads "Invited Music Critic" on his chest, he had a live broadcast terminal and a wireless microphone provided by the program team next to him.

The guy on the left, Zhang Wei, picked up the microphone after the fourth group of singers finished singing, smiled and said to the camera, "The level of the performance today was too high. The next singers will be under a lot of pressure."

The tone was relaxed and the wording was appropriate.

But when he smiled, his eyes glanced towards the waiting area for half a second.

Live comments scrolled across the large screen in the studio, with several particularly eye-catching comments being repeatedly pinned and refreshed.

"Is the next one going to hurt your voice? I'll have earplugs ready, hahaha."

"Is a broken bellows going to come up and sing?"

"Why not just forfeit the match and save face..."

Adam sat on the furthest chair in the waiting area, wearing headphones and remaining silent.

The monitor in front of him could display comments. He didn't recognize many of the malicious Chinese characters, but he had specifically looked up the words "broken" and "waste" last week. At this moment, he unscrewed and screwed the cap off the mineral water bottle five times, each time with more force.

Xu Qing stood in the shadows at the deepest part of the passage, her expression not clearly visible.

A staff member came over: "Next group, Luo Qianyu."

The moment Luo Qianyu stood up, her leg trembled very slightly.

She herself didn't realize it, but Xu Qing did.

He walked over and stood beside her.

The angle was perfectly blocked by the shadow of the light fixture, so the live stream wouldn't capture their interaction.

Luo Qianyu lowered her head and took a deep breath, her fingers unconsciously clenching the hem of her skirt.

Xu Qing didn't say anything, but simply reached out and, just like last time, pried open her clenched fingers one by one.

Then he took her hand in his own.

The palms are dry and warm.

Just then, a voice came from behind camera position seven, precisely positioned within the microphone's range.

The volume wasn't loud, but during the intervals between quiet moments in the venue, it was as clear as a blade slicing through glass.

"Are we going to have to listen to a broken bellows singing today?"

It's the one in the middle named Fang Licheng who's laughing.

"Or should we just lip-sync? My voice's already ruined anyway..."

Zhang Wei, who was standing next to him, chimed in, "That's true. If you can't sing, don't force yourself. It's more important to leave a good impression on the audience."

The laughter wasn't loud, but it traveled precisely into the passageway.

Luo Qianyu's fingernails instantly dug into the back of Xu Qing's hand.

Xu Qing glanced down at her sunken fingernails, then looked up and across the passage toward camera position seven.

He neither laughed nor got angry.

He only glanced at it.

Like a hunter marking the location of his prey.

Then he lowered his head, leaned close to Luo Qianyu's ear, and said only one word.

"stable."

Luo Qianyu loosened her grip on the back of his hand.

She tucked the note that said "No" into her collar, close to her collarbone, and looked up at Xu Qing.

Her eyes were red, but not a single tear fell.

She reached out and patted his chest—forcefully, like striking a drum.

Then she turned and walked into the spotlight.

There was only a cello and a wooden guitar on the stage.

There was no symphony orchestra, no synthesizers, and no visual effects.

It was as clean as an empty classroom.

Xu Qing was already sitting in a dark corner to the right rear of the stage, with a wooden guitar on his lap, his hat brim pulled low, and a mask covering most of his face.

He's not the main character here, he's just there for the accompaniment.

The large screen lights up.

"got windy"

Lyrics and music arrangement: Mingyue Qingfeng

The three music critics exchanged a glance in their seats.

The smile on her lips was already on, and the words for her critique were already lined up in her mind—"pitch collapse," "insufficient breath control," "forced low notes with a misplaced aesthetic"... She had written three versions of the press release, just waiting for the moment she would speak.

The cello bowstring fell.

It wasn't a fierce playing, but an extremely slow and deep long note, like a sigh from the earth, vibrating and spreading through the air of the entire studio from a low frequency.

Xu Qing's guitar followed, and the muffled sound of him strumming the strings with the heel of his right hand was like a heartbeat, one beat after another.

The venue, which can hold 3,000 people, was so quiet that you could hear the hum of the air conditioning vents.

Luo Qianyu stood in the very center of that pure white beam of light, and somehow she looked very small.

She spoke.

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

The moment the first note came out, Zhang Wei's hand, which was about to touch the microphone, froze in mid-air.

The voice was too low; it didn't sound like it came from a girl in her twenties.