140: Chapter 139 Brother Cai and his brothers have arrived.

Five o'clock in the morning.

The temperature in Chengdu was not high, and a thin layer of condensation covered the window glass of the Morning Star No. 1 Training Room.

The air conditioning was set to fifteen degrees.

Fifty people were already standing on the wooden floor, and no one was speaking.

Everyone wore protective gear on their feet, and their short-sleeved practice shirts had all been replaced with thick, dirt-resistant, and non-slip cotton clothes.

Footsteps came from the other end of the corridor.

Su Chen walked in, closed the door with his backhand, walked to the floor right in front of the formation, and threw his black backpack into the corner.

The metronome was held in his right hand.

Su Chen pushed the tempo slider all the way to the end.

BPM one hundred thirty-five.

"Start."

Two words came from Su Chen's mouth.

No one asked any questions.

The front row, consisting of Guan Heng and four others, immediately lowered their center of gravity along with the first high-frequency beat, followed by the fourteen veterans of the Buqi Dance Troupe led by Brother Cai, and further back were the professionally-trained Chen Yu and Yan Yu, who had a girl group background.

Continuous rapid turning-back floor syncopation, accompanied by high-frequency chest tremors.

Every squat required the knees to bend below ninety degrees, with the collarbone and chest locked right in the center of the fast beat.

Fifteen minutes passed, and the floor was stomped to a thumping sound.

"Lock it steady."

Su Chen himself was directly in front of the first row, his hands not supporting his knees, his upper body as steady as the most accurate pendulum, "Step back if the depth of the dive is not enough."

Yan Yu's thigh muscles began to twitch.

She gritted her teeth to keep her upper body from shaking, grabbed the seam of her trousers with one hand, and slammed her heels onto the ground following the ninth eight-count.

Brother Cai's temples were covered in sweat, and he shouted loudly, "Keep up with the third beat! Chen Yu, make your leg-retraction speed half a second faster!"

Chen Yu's face flushed red, and he had no strength left to open his mouth and argue.

In the past few days, he had always felt that the zero-foundation Guan Heng appeared clumsy in the formation. At this moment, after the high-pressure beat continuously reached twelve thousand steps, the arrogant posture of the professionally-trained student completely collapsed.

Only muscle energy storage could support this kind of continuous exertion twice a second.

Eleven-thirty in the morning.

There was no rest whatsoever during the six hours of basic stretching and training in the morning.

Su Chen turned off the metronome and stepped back two paces.

Guan Heng in the front row gave a heavy stomp on the floor and collapsed directly onto the ground.

Brother Cai pressed his hands on his knees and exhaled continuously, his lips chapped and peeling.

"Go to the cafeteria next door, and come back after eating."

Su Chen went to the front desk to pick up a towel and wiped away two beads of sweat from his jaw.

Fifty people lined up and walked toward the door.

There were no loud voices, and everyone's footsteps dragged heavily and dully.

At one o'clock in the afternoon, a one-hour live broadcast of the on-site special training was opened for display.

Lin Hao set up the camera position and steadily locked the lens onto the group dance choreography and training area.

Inside the lens, Su Chen stood at the very front of the formation with his back to the large mirror, executing a series of coherent, delicate hand transitions. His footwork combined with a single-palm beat-cut locked him directly in place, while Guan Heng and Brother Cai flanked him on both sides, likewise locked dead in place.

The number of online viewers rapidly broke twenty million, and the bullet comments began to explode across the screen.

[Holy crap, look at how much they are sweating, even the floor has been stepped on to a dark color.]

[Brother Cai's skills are really fierce now. A while ago, he still leaned towards technical choreography, but now even his core downward cuts are as rock-solid as Guan Heng's!]

[I see Chen Yu and the others aren't even shouting about being tired anymore. Have they really all been trained into emotionless iron men?]

[You have to hand it to him. Su Chen's movements in the front row from early morning until now haven't dropped in standard even a tiny bit.]

[I really can't figure out how they managed to push through. The training load of each single day is already enough for an ordinary team to rest for a week.]

[Stop talking nonsense, look at Guan Heng's positioning in this group dance, those five people are truly outrageous!]

Lin Hao glanced at the screen and did not read these comments out to anyone in the room.

The music began to play; it was "Hundred Family Surnames" accompanied by heavy-hitting drums and bass brought out by Su Chen.

Zhao, Qian, Sun, Li, Li, Zhao, Sun, Qian—amidst the pure percussion rhythm without complex harmonies, everyone stood ready according to the formation.

"The third group stuttered during the direction change."

Su Chen raised a hand, and the audio source stopped.

Brother Cai stopped in his tracks, turning back to look at Chen Yu and Guan Heng.

When spinning rapidly, Guan Heng's shoulders turned past the correct angle, and Chen Yu, worried that the other party would crash into him, shrank his steps and yielded by two inches.

A two-inch gap made the entire team look discontinuous from a side-row perspective.

Su Chen didn't scold them; he walked between the two.

"You skimped a bit on waist strength for your left shoulder; point your right toes outward."

Su Chen looked at Guan Heng.

Guan Heng supported himself on the ground with one palm and immediately deflected his legs at an angle according to the request.

"You don't need to step back."

Su Chen turned to Chen Yu, "Snatch half a beat forward on the step lock, and use your thighs to block him and absorb the force. Continuous team competitions aren't about individual prettiness; they are about coordination."

Chen Yu looked at Su Chen's position, "This might cause abrasions."

"The floor at the World Championships is harder than this."

Su Chen stood two paces away and personally walked through a repositioning demonstration, "You two try it ten times again. If you can't keep it smooth, the whole team will do two hundred core combo kicks."

The beat sounded again.

Brother Cai shouted one, two, three, four, and Chen Yu directly exerted force to push forward and lean in, while Guan Heng simultaneously rotated his shoulders and cut in according to the rules.

Their bodies brushed past each other halfway, followed by a simultaneous burst of chest vibration, and they stood firmly in unison on the red dividing line.

Once, twice, ten times.

No one stepped back, no one pulled back their hands.

Ten o'clock in the evening.

Lin Hao had already closed the network access channel.

Everyone's movements were driven by instinct.

Due to repeated high-load stretching, the area above Yan Yu's ankle swelled up by a circle, and she kept pressing a cold water bottle against her skin to reduce the swelling.

Brother Cai had long since taken off his shirt, and the firm lines on his waist and abdomen tightened as he held his breath and exerted force.

This top domestic manager looked at Su Chen ahead, and then at the tireless grassroots and newcomers around him, leaving only the intuition of lowering his head and rushing straight forward.

Eleven-thirty, the night class arrived right on time.

Su Chen slapped his hand against the metal ballet barre, stopping the rolling music track in the speakers.

All fifty practicing team members inside the room sat on the wooden floor breathing heavily.

Guan Heng wiped away the salt frost from the corners of his mouth with the back of his hand, and Chen Yu picked up a sports drink and gulped down half of it.

Lin Hao walked over and handed over the accompaniment USB flash drive for the next phase, "Tomorrow enters the latter stage of group formation evaluations; do you want to rest for half a day?"

Su Chen did not reach out to take the electronic music tape commonly prepared by European and American producers.

He walked toward the console, plugged his phone into the data cable, and opened an unnamed audio track that had been stored for a long time.

A flute sound with a lingering aftertaste rushed out, followed instantly by the shock and cover of hardcore, heavy war drums. The drumhead vibration lasted for four beats, directly pushing up the spatial loudness of the training room.

Brother Cai and Chen Yu, who had originally been sitting on the ground, both straightened their backs.

Su Chen walked to the center of the full-wall floor-to-ceiling mirror.

He crumpled those usual European and American quick-step blueprints into a ball and threw them into the corner of the wall, then took out a positioning map card covered with a nine-palace eight-trigram grid and spread it flat in the middle of the floor.

"Starting tomorrow, we change the footwork paths."