426: Chapter 426 Her music held the lives of others.

The moment the first note fell, the entire Central Concert Hall went silent.

The opening of the first movement of Rachmaninoff's "Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Minor" was as light as a layer of mist breathed onto glass.

You would think it might dissipate, but something underneath was slowly, heavily awakening.

Ye Xi's right hand outlined that famous main melody in the treble register.

The tone was clean, the touch was extremely light, and every note carried a restrained weight.

The sound of breathing from the two thousand four hundred seats in the hall was pressed into silence by this melody.

In the judges' seats, Yan Zhenming took off his reading glasses, wiped them, and put them back on.

His gaze was fixed firmly on Ye Xi's fingers, his lips slightly pursed.

Beside him, Liang Qiu had already opened the scoring interface on his tablet.

His pen tip hovered over his notebook, and after listening for about thirty seconds, he wrote down two lines.

"Steady start, precise control of key touch. Emotional layer is flat."

He leaned to the side and spoke to Yan Zhenming in a low voice:

"This opening section, the child has held it steady. But the opening of Rach 3 is a trap in itself. It's comfortable, pleasant, and easy to let one's guard down. The real killer is the slope of emotional progression afterward. Her current playing style leaves too little margin; if the emotion doesn't build up later, the entire movement might collapse."

Yan Zhenming didn't answer immediately. He was listening.

The main melody unfolded under Ye Xi's fingers for about forty-five seconds.

Proper, beautiful, impeccable. But as Liang Qiu said, it was missing a certain breath.

The judges present all knew what this breath was.

When Rachmaninoff wrote this piece, he had just crawled out of three years of creative paralysis.

During those three years, he couldn't write anything and developed a fundamental doubt about his own talent.

The underlying color of the entire piece is the process of a creator being forced to a dead end and then climbing up from the abyss inch by inch.

How could a teenager possibly play something like that?

Liang Qiu was about to write the third line of comments in his notebook. Then his pen tip stopped.

At the one-minute-seven-second mark. The music had just crossed the junction of the first phrase and entered the starting point of emotional progression.

Ye Xi's way of touching the keys changed.

Within a single bar, she seemed to have changed her hands entirely.

Her touch became coarse, and the tail of every note dragged with fine, jagged edges, as if her fingertips were wrapped in sandpaper grinding across the keys.

The bass register in her left hand suddenly sank, and she struck the chords heavily and dully, creating a kind of numb, dull pain.

The melodic line of her right hand was no longer smooth; the tail of every note dragged with subtle, jagged edges.

Liang Qiu's back pressed against the chair. Not right.

He turned his head to look at Yan Zhenming. The director's glasses had been readjusted, his eyes were fixed on the stage, and his whole body was leaning forward by at least fifteen degrees.

"What is she playing?" Liang Qiu's voice was extremely low, as if afraid of disturbing something.

Yan Zhenming didn't answer his question, but his hand resting on his knee tightened unconsciously.

On stage, Ye Xi's body swayed slightly as the music progressed.

It wasn't the kind of elegant rhythm found in textbooks, but an uncontrolled swaying, as if she were being pulled from inside her body by the piano music.

Her right hand ran a series of rapid sixteenth notes in the treble register.

She played the passing phrases breathlessly, every note carrying the strength to crawl forward, yet being pulled back by something.

The trajectory of her fingertips jumping between the black and white keys was like a person repeatedly falling, getting up, and falling again in the mud.

Lin Que leaned back in his chair, his arms crossed over his chest, his gaze falling on the slender figure in the center of the stage.

He understood. He was too familiar with what was buried in that melody—the youth chewing on cold steamed buns on the Loess Plateau, the person gritting their teeth to stand straight at the edge of the abyss.

Ye Xi poured out all those words she had read into her bones from her fingertips.

Lin Que knew how she had felt it. She had read every chapter of "ordinary world".

She said, "When I read it, my fingers were stiff, as if I were moving bricks myself."

He hadn't paid attention at the time. Now he understood; that wasn't just polite talk.

This girl had stored every word she read into her own body. Stored it in her fingers, in the crevices of her bones.

The music progressed to the third minute. In the piano section that should have been a brief respite, Ye Xi didn't slacken.

She compressed the sound to the minimum, but the density didn't drop. Every soft note was bitten tightly, like someone gritting their teeth in the dark without making a sound.

Liang Qiu flipped his notebook to the next page. He wrote three words on the first line, then crossed them out. He had originally wanted to write "Too risky".

But now he couldn't write it. Because the "mistake" he had been waiting for for three minutes simply didn't come.

Not only were there no mistakes, but not even a single note was hollow.

He looked at Ye Xi's hands again. The speed at which those hands moved on the keys was getting faster and faster, the opening and closing amplitude of her fingers was getting larger, but every key strike was as precise as if it had been measured.

"Stamina is not a problem." Yan Zhenming finally spoke, his voice carrying suppressed surprise.

"Her finger mechanics are at least two levels higher than I estimated."

He crossed out the score he had previously entered on the tablet and entered a new one. Liang Qiu noticed that the number was a full four points higher than before.

"But what really surprises me isn't the technique." Yan Zhenming stared at the stage, speaking very slowly, enunciating every word.

"It's the depth."

"At this age, with this family background. A child who grew up in luxury, how could she play something with this much weight?"

Liang Qiu placed his pen on his knee and shook his head. "I'm thinking about that too. The bass chords she plays carry a kind of gloom I rarely hear even in the adult professional group. That feeling isn't something you can just get by increasing the force."

He paused for a moment, lowered his voice, and added, "It's as if her music holds the lives of others."

Lin Que heard this sentence. His gaze didn't move. The corners of his mouth twitched, very shallowly, very quickly.

Yes. Her music held the lives of the two Sun brothers from the Loess Plateau, held those people who gritting their teeth to stand straight at the edge of the abyss, and held her own obsession that she had shattered and pieced back together countless times during her rigorous training.

All the words she had read into her bones were pouring out from her fingertips at this moment.

Lin Que's gaze didn't move. The corners of his mouth twitched, very shallowly, very quickly. He leaned back into his chair, arms crossed over his chest, saying nothing.

Those few words before the opening—she had played the best evidence for him.

The music rushed irresistibly toward the most terrifying pass of the first movement. The Great Cadenza.

The cadenza section of the first movement of Rach 3 is called the "Death Zone" by countless piano educators.

The density of notes increased geometrically within a mere few dozen bars, with the left hand's continuous octave jumps combined with the right hand's high-speed running, parallel lines, squeezing the physical and mental limits to the peak of the entire concerto.

In the judges' seats, several professors leaned forward involuntarily.

Yan Zhenming's hands supported the armrests, his whole body almost rising from his chair.

Liang Qiu's pen tip pressed against the paper, but he didn't write a single word.

Ye Xi's hands turned into a blur on the keys. The octave jumps of her left hand were struck with a force that was almost insane.

That force was striking at herself. Inward, squeezing, like someone pounding their own sternum with their fist. Every strike drew blood.

But she wasn't chaotic. All the madness was running along an invisible line, like a spinning top in a storm, the outer trajectory already blurred into a phantom, while the axis remained motionless.

In the two thousand four hundred seats, all whispering evaporated completely within three seconds.

The audience in the back rows who were whispering just a moment ago were now sitting stiffly in their seats, not even daring to make a sound while swallowing saliva.

The girls in the third-floor fan area holding glowing support signs had lowered their arms.

In the very center of the first row. That silver-haired, straight-backed old man had released his hands from his knees.

His brows were tightly knitted at the moment the cadenza began, his ten fingers locked together, his knuckles white.

But as Ye Xi's left hand steadily struck down the seventh set of octave jumps and precisely connected to the rapid running in the right hand's treble register, the old man's brows smoothed out bit by bit.

First the corners of his mouth. An extremely subtle arc slowly emerged on that wrinkled face.

Then the eyes. In those eyes that had watched pianos for a lifetime, the worry receded like the ebbing tide, revealing the beach illuminated by sunlight beneath.

He nodded once. Then again. By the third time, his upper body was gently swaying with the rhythm of the music.

The sound waves of the Great Cadenza surged to the highest point like a mountain torrent.

Ye Xi's body leaned back half an inch, all her weight pressing on her lumbar spine, the strength of her arms pouring down from her shoulder joints into her ten fingers.

The final chord was struck with a thunderous crash.