26: Chapter 26 What you've been searching for in vain, you've found it without any effort at all?

At 11:00 PM.

All the lights in the Xiaguan secondhand market were out.

Yan Yu, Brother Cai, and their group searched the last alley.

"We can't find him." A-Li leaned against a utility pole, breathing heavily. "There isn't even a ghost of a shadow in this place."

Yan Yu looked at the pitch-black street, remaining silent.

Brother Cai tightened his jacket. "Yan Yu, everyone's been running around all day; even an iron body can't take it. Let's find a place to stay first and figure something out tomorrow. I've already booked a hotel over in Dali Ancient City."

"I'm not going to Dali Ancient City." Yan Yu refused flatly.

"He hates noise, so he definitely wouldn't stay in the ancient city. If we're looking, we should look for the most remote, least busy inn."

Brother Cai sighed and waved for Xiao Liu to drive.

The Buick drove up the small path at the foot of Cangshan Mountain, moving away from the brightly lit downtown area.

Half an hour later.

The car stopped in front of an inn named Bu Yu halfway up the mountain.

There was no sign light, only two dim yellow lanterns hanging at the entrance.

Pushing open the wooden door, the courtyard was filled with succulents, and a set of tea utensils was placed in the corner.

There was no one at the front desk.

A burst of guitar music came from the backyard. It was intermittent, as if searching for chords.

Yan Yu walked over.

A young man with long hair and cotton-linen clothes sat on the steps, lowering his head to pluck the strings.

"Boss, we'd like a room." Yan Yu called out.

The boss stopped what he was doing and looked up at them.

"How many rooms?"

"Five single rooms." Brother Cai took out his ID cards.

The boss put down the guitar, walked to the front desk to open the computer and register.

Yan Yu's gaze fell on the guitar the boss had just been playing.

The wooden panel was engraved with quite a few scratches; judging by the degree of wear, he was a veteran.

"Boss, you play this guitar pretty well." A-Li chimed in casually.

The boss tapped on the keyboard and let out a self-deprecating laugh.

"Good my ass. In a place like Dali, dropping a brick casually could smash three folk singers to death. I used to think I was pretty awesome too, until I met a real immortal the day before yesterday. Only then did I realize what I played was just cotton batting."

Yan Yu's ears twitched.

The day before yesterday.

An immortal.

That sounds a bit familiar!

"Boss, what did the immortal you mentioned look like?"

The boss handed back the ID cards.

"Tall and thin. Wearing a faded gray short-sleeve shirt. A tuft of curly hair in front of his forehead. He looked quite decadent, but deep down there was an indescribable vibe to him."

Yan Yu's breathing instantly grew hurried.

She directly opened her phone album and shoved the thirteen-second video into the boss's face.

"Is it him?!"

The boss only took one look and nodded.

"Yes, that's him. Is he Dancing in the video? He can dance too?"

Brother Cai and Xiao Liu exchanged glances, instantly energized.

"Did he stay here?" Brother Cai asked eagerly.

"He stayed for one night." The boss pointed to the room at the end of the second-floor hallway. "He checked out and left yesterday morning."

A step too late again.

Yan Yu's shoulders slumped, but they quickly straightened back up.

"You said he played the guitar just now?" Yan Yu stared at the boss. "Does he understand music?"

The boss laughed.

"Understand? Young lady, using that word is a bit insulting."

The boss felt under the counter for a pipe and stuffed some tobacco into it.

"The night before yesterday, at midnight, I was sitting in the courtyard writing a song and got stuck. He was smoking on the second-floor balcony. After listening to me play for a long time, he came downstairs and walked over to borrow my guitar."

The boss lit the pipe and took a puff.

"He sat there without tuning or looking at the sheet music. He just casually strummed two chords."

"I've played folk music for ten years, and I've never heard a chord progression like that. It was too weird, but also too catchy. He hummed a melody along the chords, with no lyrics, just pure humming."

The boss pointed to his own head.

"That melody has played through my mind hundreds of times over the past two days. I tried to transcribe the score, but couldn't for the life of me. His arrangement logic completely breaks the rules. Dimensional reduction strike, understand?"

Yan Yu swallowed hard.

"Did you record it?"

The boss nodded.

"I had my voice recorder turned on at the time. I was originally recording my own creative inspiration, and it just happened to record that part of his."

"Let me listen." Yan Yu's voice was trembling.

The boss didn't refuse. He took a black voice recorder from the drawer and connected it to the front desk's Bluetooth speaker.

He pressed the play button.

The inn's lobby was extremely quiet.

At the very beginning of the recording, there was the rustling sound of the night wind blowing through the leaves.

Then came an extremely casual throat-clearing.

And then.

"Clang——"

The sound of guitar Strumming rang out.

It wasn't the common C chord opening, but an extremely complex ninth chord.

Immediately after, the fingerstyle arpeggios poured out like flowing water.

Brother Cai didn't understand music theory, but he understood rhythm.

He widened his eyes.

The rhythm of this guitar was too steady. It was as steady as a precision metronome, yet it had an indescribable sense of relaxation that a metronome lacked.

Just after the guitar accompaniment laid the foundation for over ten seconds.

A man's voice cut in.

"Hmm~"

No lyrics.

Just the simplest humming.

But as soon as the voice came out, goosebumps instantly erupted all over Yan Yu's body.

The voice was slightly hoarse, carrying an extremely lazy graininess.

But the pitch accuracy was terrifyingly high.

He switched back and forth between the high and low registers, with not the slightest gap in the transition between chest and head voice.

The melody carried an intensely thick sense of sorrow, yet within that sorrow radiated a tension that could tear everything apart.

It was as if someone was standing on the ruins, looking at the debris all over the ground, sneering while taking a puff of a cigarette.

The entire recording was only a short minute and a half.

Finally, it ended with a crisp and neat harmonic.

The recording ended.

There was a deathly silence in the inn.

A-Li's mouth hung open, failing to close for a long time.

Brother Cai thrust his hands into his hair and grabbed it hard a couple of times.

"What the f—" Brother Cai couldn't find words to describe it.

Yan Yu's eyes turned red.

Over the past three days, the entire internet had been celebrating, discussing how awesome Su Chen's Dancing was.

But the emotion in this recording was the real him.

That kind of loneliness after being abandoned by the world, where all talent and reluctance were crushed and swallowed into one's stomach.

"Boss." Yan Yu looked at the inn owner. "Can you send me this audio?"

The boss hesitated for a moment.

"I can send it to you, but don't use it commercially. That's a blasphemy against music."

"I won't use it commercially." Yan Yu's tone was firm. "I just want those clowns riding on traffic across the whole internet to see what true talent is."

1:00 AM.

Yan Yu returned to her room on the second floor.

She didn't turn on the lights.

Sitting by the bed, she imported the audio from the voice recorder into her phone.

Without any editing.

She directly paired it with a pitch-black night view picture at the foot of Cangshan Mountain in Dali.

Clicked upload.

The title had only one sentence:

[At the foot of Cangshan Mountain in Dali, a recording from the inn owner. No lyrics, only him.]

The video was posted.

Yan Yu leaned against the head of the bed and closed her eyes.

She knew that tonight, the internet wouldn't be sleeping.

In just ten minutes.

The number of likes on this video directly broke fifty thousand.

The comment section was frantically refreshing at a speed of several hundred entries per second.

[Holy shit! Is this Su Chen's voice?!]

[This guitar skill... As someone who has studied the guitar for eight years, I'm kneeling. What the hell is this chord progression? It's completely anti-human yet sounds explosively good!]

[This humming is peerless. Not a single lyric, but it made me cry.]

[So high-class. This is definitely not something an unorthodox background could pull off. This arrangement logic, this harmony, this vocal skill. How many top idols in the Chinese Entertainment Industry can manage this kind of improvisation nowadays?]

[Maxed-out Dancing, maxed-out music. Which alien planet did this brother come from?]

[I previously thought he was just an internet celebrity who was good at Dancing, but now I take those words back. This is an artist.]

As the popularity fermented, more and more professionals stepped into the fray.

A certain well-known music producer directly reposted this video.

The accompanying text was extremely exaggerated:

[I just put this audio into software for analysis. His pitch didn't have a single deviation. What's most terrifying is his guitar arrangement; he used an ordinary acoustic guitar to play out the layering of an entire band. If someone like this is in the Chinese Entertainment Industry, I'd be willing to be his producer for free.]

The topic #Su Chen Inn Recording# surged to second place on the trending searches without a suspense.

Tightly biting at the heels of the first place #Thirteen Seconds to Achieve Divinity#.

Just as the entire internet was marveling at the god-tier arrangement of this melody.

Yan Yu refreshed the comment section.

A newly posted comment saw its like count soar to thirty thousand in just two minutes, instantly being pushed to the top of the hot comments.