103: Chapter 103 is here! Everything that belongs to him will be back!

Four giant subwoofers at both ends of the venue heavily smashed out a wave of sound.

It was not music, but an extremely heavy and steady recorded sound of a human heartbeat.

The entire ceiling screen turned completely black.

[The White Sea! A pure white sea has appeared! A White Sea of fifty thousand people!]

[Good heavens, my screen is drenched in tears, I can't even see the picture!]

[This is the grand spectacle that Chinese netizens promised him!]

[Did that bunch of Korean fellows see this! Open your eyes and look closely, who still dares to say a single word of doubt here today!]

[The heartbeat, that heartbeat just now was simply too intense!]

[It's coming! The show is really about to start!]

[Who is it? Who is the first person to come out and open the show?]

[Big Senior Brother, come out!]

[...]

Right in the dead center of the pitch-black stage.

Accompanied by the grinding sound of mechanical rotating shafts and gears, a large hydraulic lift slowly rose from a mechanical compartment three meters deep beneath the floor tiles.

At the exact instant when the surface of the lift became completely flush with the main floor of the venue,

the remaining sixteen-kilowatt high color rendering index followspot at the top of the venue shone down from above, landing on a figure standing in the center of the lift.

In that single second, over fifty thousand throats in the venue gasped a breath of cold air, preparing to burst out with a name.

But with the words on the tip of their tongues, all sounds suddenly stopped.

The man standing beneath that cold white followspot right in the center of the stage was not wearing the old black windbreaker from the promotional poster.

He wore a custom-made bright silver performance jacket, with a carefully styled parted hairstyle and a sparkling silver earring on his right ear.

It was Zhang Yixing.

Zhang Yixing stood in place.

He didn't bring any backup dancers with him; in the center of the huge venue, he was the only one standing lonely within that expanse of pure white circular light.

He did not look at the left and right stands, nor did he wave at the four-kilowatt panoramic camera facing his face. His facial expression was extremely restrained, and his usual signature dimples and silly smile were nowhere to be seen.

The low accompaniment had not yet sounded.

The breathing sounds of the fifty thousand people in the audience merged into one.

Zhang Yixing stepped forward by half a step.

His left leg bent and sank, while his right toe firmly pinned itself to the plastic flooring.

Then, his shoulders dropped downward.

This was not the conventional opening rhythm common in modern popular Street Dance.

His sternum was forcefully lifted upward into an extremely meticulous physiological limit arc, his two shoulder blades in the back locked toward the center simultaneously, and his arms slowly traced half a semicircle from both sides of his body, finally straightening diagonally above his head.

The five fingers of his right hand were not stretched out.

That was a peculiar posture locked inward, with only the index finger and thumb pointing straight at a certain angle in the sky.

There was no movement in the stands.

Within these one or two seconds, even the scrolling bullet comments in the livestream room dropped by more than half.

For the vast majority of new fans who followed the trends of the past two years, this opening posture was strange and stiff, completely inconsistent with the smooth electronic music dance style consistently emphasized in Zhang Yixing's new album.

But for those hardcore fans who had endured from five years ago until now and followed every fragmented behind-the-scenes tidbit of that basement in Seoul,

upon seeing that angled instant when the fingertips pointed toward the sky,

everyone went crazy.

Guan Heng clenched both hands into iron fists, his nails digging directly into the flesh of his palms, and let out a muffled roar from his mouth that didn't sound like it could come from a human being.

Yan Yu held up her phone stabilizer and wept bitterly, lacking even the energy to grab her falling wrist.

Shen Yun stood up from her chair, and the exquisite formal suit on her body was pulled into several distinct twisted wrinkles by her vigorous standing motion.

She understood this exertion framework, saw the cruel center of gravity that pressed the whole body's weight onto a single toe, and recognized this opening move exclusively belonging to one person.

This was not the system that Zhang Yixing had learned from Japanese and Korean choreographers over the past few years.

This posture, this tension framework that even violated normal pop aesthetics and carried a sense of twisting the whole body's muscles into steel wire—

belonged to five years ago.

It belonged to that basement rehearsal room where the surveillance footage had been completely deleted and the lighting was dim yellow.

It belonged to the opening when the group still had a total of thirteen people.

Back then, standing right at the front of the entire team as the core ACE who solely occupied the absolute center, facing all the Korean entertainment examiners off the stage, and facing the twelve younger brothers behind him who were still looking up at him,

that person's only ultimate freeze-frame to make every time before stepping onto the first low-frequency drumbeat.

Zhang Yixing stood on today's venue for fifty thousand people, capable of generating fifty million in revenue, watched intently by six million people across the entire internet.

Taking the enormous public opinion risk of potentially being directly called to a stop with a wave of the hand by that big senior brother on stage,

and braving the scrutiny of the suited executives in the private boxes holding audio capture algorithms and transnational lawsuits, ready to cut the power at any moment,

braving the pressure of breach of contract,

with his solo entrance, he restored this marker—which had been completely deleted from this world for five years—completely and without changing a single muscle, right in the dead center of this grand stage.

The red soundwave of the backstage interfacing monitoring port did not emit a trace of red light.

Because this action did not need music.

It was a salute.

It was an absolute obedience to the man standing in a certain dark position at the back, waiting for five years.

At this moment, the followspot suddenly blazed with bright light.

The knuckle of Zhang Yixing's right hand locked toward the sky pressed downward along with the rhythm of the heartbeat.

With a boom!

The first sound timbre smashed toward the stage along the large line array speakers.