123: Chapter 122 Huang Zitao's Live Stream Invitation

Shenzhen.

Tencent Video Building Data Center.

Friday night, seven fifty-five.

The server room fans emitted a deafening roar.

Operations Director Li Hong stood in front of the console, his hands braced against the desktop.

The traffic curve on the main screen surged straight upward, and the red warning lights flashed incessantly.

Five minutes remained until the special episode of "Five Ha" went live.

Forty million unique IPs had already flooded into the backend reservation channel.

"All backup nodes are connected. Cancel the rate-limiting plan."

Li Hong stared at the screen and gave the order.

Chief Planner Fan Wei stood aside, the hand holding his water cup trembling.

Eight o'clock sharp.

The page refreshed.

The main feature's progress bar began to load.

Within zero point one seconds, white bullet comments covered the entire playback screen, dense and layered one on top of another.

[Checking in from the front row! I'm here to watch God Su descend to the mortal world!]

[The server lagged for a second! Tencent Video, are you even competent?!]

[For this man, I just bought a ten-year VIP membership.]

[The Great Devil live recording, brothers, bring out the full grand display!]

[I heard Lao Wang got brutally abused tonight, I'm here with my meal.]

[Everyone stand up, respectfully welcome the KING!]

[...]

Ten minutes into the opening.

Wuha Group hit a wall at the seafood night market, Deng Chao went crazy, and Chen He wailed.

The camera cut to Su Chen.

He sat in front of a traditional handicraft stall, rolled up his sleeves, and picked up a wrench.

His right finger joints tapped against the drum surface.

Listening to the sound, discerning the position.

His left hand clamped onto the bolt, exerting force clockwise to tighten it.

The movement was neat and crisp.

The whole process took three minutes.

The old, worn-out large drum once again emitted a deep and crisp sound.

The stall owner slapped down five hundred yuan on the spot.

The refresh speed of the bullet comments accelerated, directly crashing some low-end mobile phones.

[What a sense of rhythm! Stepping on the beat without missing a single fraction!]

[Aren't these hands used for arranging music? Why are they fixing a large drum here?]

[A max-level boss slaughtering in the beginner village. Wang Zhengyu's face turned green.]

[Five years of life at the bottom really wasn't just talk.]

[Earned five hundred right at the start, Wuha Group has to hug his thighs and call him daddy.]

[...]

The video view count broke one hundred million, taking only fifteen minutes.

The progress bar pushed to the middle section.

The crossroads challenge mission began.

Wang Zhengyu wheeled out a leaky, dilapidated jukebox.

Su Chen stood on the bustling streets of the night market, surrounded by roaring crowds and the constant honking of electric vehicles.

He stepped forward, without holding the metal head of the microphone, and directly pulled out the audio cable plug with one hand.

He turned around and closed his eyes.

No background music, no pitch correction.

The first line of lyrics rushed out from his throat.

The voice was pure.

The pitch accuracy was terrifying.

Without a trace of impurity.

The raw dry vocals without any post-processing were transmitted directly to the ears of online viewers through the production team's sound-reception equipment.

The commotion on the streets of the night market instantly halted in the camera shot.

The tray in the hands of the food stall owner tilted, and soup spilled onto her shoes.

The surrounding diners opened their mouths, forgetting to chew.

After a blank period of up to twenty seconds, the bullet comments erupted instantly.

[Direct raw vocals output! No pitch correction at all!]

[I got goosebumps. The penetrative power of this voice is too terrifying!]

[Who said he was a mute Great Devil? Get out here and take your beating!]

[Without accompaniment, singing acapella in an eighty-decibel noisy environment, the pitch accuracy is stable as a rock.]

[I cried. There are stories in his voice.]

[Lu Han's remark that singing is better than Dancing wasn't a lie.]

[Top-tier VIP Music Critics, come quickly and analyze this vocal placement; this is textbook-level resonance cavity usage!]

[...]

Tencent Video data backend.

Li Hong widened his eyes, pointing at the viewership curve on the big screen.

The moment Su Chen finished his acapella, the curve directly broke through the highest historical peak since the platform's establishment, and it was still climbing upwards.

"It broke the record."

Li Hong swallowed a mouthful of saliva, "It's forty percent higher than the historical number one data."

"Stabilize the servers!"

Fan Wei roared, "It absolutely cannot crash tonight!"

The footage continued to advance.

Gem appeared to provoke him.

The hardcore Trap accompaniment sounded.

Su Chen took the microphone.

An eight-bar American English opening, with articulation and phrasing crisp and direct.

Three seconds later, he seamlessly cut into Korean, with dense plosives and double the speaking speed.

In the middle bridge, the Chinese Rap smashed down.

"Eat a fifteen-yuan bowl of noodles in two meals."

"No one checks in for a hundred-and-twenty-yuan dance class."

Real, gritty, unmasked.

[Old-school English, Korean strafing, heart-touching Chinese!]

[Seamless switching in three seconds? Doesn't this require translation in the brain?!]

[That line 'Let all those who don't know the rules step down' is too arrogant!]

[Those guys in the underground Rap circle must be dumbfounded, this is true improvisation!]

[Gem's expression is hilarious, clapping with both hands, utterly convinced.]

[What is called a full score in all subjects! Vocals, arrangement, Dancing, Rap, all S-tier!]

[...]

The show entered the second half.

At the dock in the early morning, Su Chen's fluent Wenzhou dialect stunned the boat captain.

Scattering salt to catch razor clam kings, putting mudskippers into his windbreaker pockets.

In the early morning market, a boning knife blade flashed, and within ten seconds, the grouper's internal organs were hollowed out, the fish meat separated, and scales flew everywhere.

Finally, the lobby of Junlan Hotel.

Facing the irregular noise audio, Su Chen's ten fingers flew across the grand piano, perfectly replicating the chords one hundred percent, and adding variations in the second half, directly rewriting the noise into a smooth piece of jazz.

Turning the tables, he demanded nine hundred yuan in shipping fees from Wang Zhengyu.

The two-hour main feature ended.

The network paralyzed.

Ten fifteen at night.

The Weibo hot search list refreshed.

The top five entries all carried deep red "Explode" tags.

First place: #SuChenFullScoresInAllSubjects#

Second place: #SuChenCrossroadsAcapella#

Third place: #WuhaProductionTeamReverseBankrupt#

Fourth place: #TheGoldContentOfTenSecondFishKilling#

Fifth place: #TrilingualRapCrushing#

On short video platforms, Su Chen's performance tonight was clipped into individual pieces by major bloggers and crazily reposted.

A thirty-second acapella video broke five million likes within half an hour.

That segment using the piano to turn decay into magic was reposted by professors from major music conservatories.

Huaxia's famous Music Critic Er Di published a long article at ten-thirty.

"After watching tonight's show, I overturned all my previous conclusions. Su Chen is not just a top dancer and composer. In terms of vocal control, language talent, and pitch memory, he has likewise reached a terrifying height. The Chinese Entertainment Industry cannot find a second all-rounded monster like this. Five years of sedimentation did not destroy him, but instead gave him the most authentic confidence."

Ten-forty.

Lu Han's official Weibo updated.

He didn't post heavily-retouched stills, nor did he post a lengthy commercial copywriting text.

He directly pasted the official playback link of the "Five Ha" special episode.

The accompanying text had only three words.

Plus an exclamation mark.

"My brother is awesome!"

This Weibo post went out.

Within five minutes, the number of comments exceeded one hundred thousand.

Lu Han's fans and Su Chen's fans victoriously rendezvoused in the comment section.

[Little Lu's fanboy attribute can no longer be hidden at all.]

[This is the first time I've seen a top-tier traffic star personally step down to blow rainbow farts.]

[Who wouldn't love such an all-rounded big brother!]

[Case solved, the current top stars in the Chinese Entertainment Industry were all brought up by God Su.]

[Zhang Yixing crying and begging for hugs at the Workers Stadium, Lu Han wildly showing off in the variety show, this Shura field is amazing.]

[...]

Shanghai.

By the Huangpu River, a large apartment.

Huang Zitao, wearing loose pajamas, sat cross-legged on an e-sports chair.

The three curved-screen monitors in front of him respectively played the "Five Ha" variety show playback, Weibo's hot search list, and the dynamic post Lu Han had just published.

Huang Zitao stared at that "My brother is awesome" on the screen, the muscles at the corner of his eye twitching.

He grabbed half a can of cola from the table and gulped down a mouthful fiercely.

Carbonated bubbles exploded in his throat.

"What is this supposed to be?"

Huang Zitao crushed the cola can, making a crisp sound, and threw it into the trash can.

He leaned against the back of the chair, turning his head to look at the broken wooden guitar hanging on the wall.

"Zhang Yixing got the out-of-print shared stage at the Workers Stadium. Lu Han managed to get a shared frame in a phenomenal variety show."

Huang Zitao gritted his teeth, his fingers violently pounding on the keyboard, "All this traffic was completely taken up by you two families. Why?"

He stood up, walked to the floor-to-ceiling window, and looked at the brilliant night view outside.

Five years ago, in that pitch-dark basement in Seoul, Su Chen taught him Rap and helped him find the rhythm.

He had always been holding back a breath, wanting to prove himself to Su Chen in the field he excelled at most.

Now, the opportunity had come.

Huang Zitao walked back to the computer and flipped a draft paper filled with lyrics and chords out of the drawer.

"Trilingual Freestyle, huh."

The corners of Huang Zitao's mouth curled up, a gleam of excitement flashing in his eyes, "I happen to have practiced a real piece of stuff too."

He picked up his phone.

Opened the Weibo client backend.

The editing box popped up.

His fingers tapped rapidly on the screen.

"Zhang Yixing and Lu Han only know how to shout brother. I'm different."