29: Chapter 29 Su Wantang: This song was written for me

Jiang Rumu stared at him, the night wind blowing her hair into a mess, with a few strands clinging to her cheek.

"This song," she paused, her voice colder than the sea breeze, "was it also written for your ex-girlfriend?"

This question, like an ice-dipped needle, pierced precisely into the atmosphere that had just begun to soften.

"No." Li Li answered quickly, without the slightest hesitation.

She didn't press further, but her eyes, exceptionally bright in the night, remained on his face as if evaluating the truth of his words.

Li Li didn't explain any further either.

His fingers fell back onto the keys, using action directly in place of words.

The prelude in G major rang out once more. This time, it was no longer the fragmented snippets from teaching, but a complete, emotional torrent. Every note crashed into the night wind of the Persian Gulf, dragged away by the waves, only to be pulled back by the echo.

He played a complete demonstration.

When the piano music stopped, only the sound of the wind remained on the beach.

"The lyrics," Jiang Rumu finally spoke, "don't sound like they were written by you."

"Oh? In what way?"

"They're too good."

Li Li: "..."

This compliment was practically indistinguishable from an insult.

A top star with thirty-four million followers really had a sharp tongue.

"Can you learn it?" He changed the subject.

"Play it once, and I'll know it." Her tone carried an unquestionable confidence.

"Alright."

Li Li reached out and muted the microphones of both livestream rooms.

The video remained, but the audio was cut.

From this second onward, the whole world became the audience of a silent play.

Within the first minute of silence, the bullet comments went completely wild.

[??? Where's my sound? Did my expensive headphones break?]

[They're not broken! Look, the video is still moving! He muted the mic! Holy crap! Is this paid content or what?!]

[A silent Dating Reality Show? Even Charlie Chaplin would applaud you two!]

Yet, no one left the livestream rooms.

On screen, on the beach under the shadow of war, beside a black Steinway grand piano, the two sat facing each other.

He played.

She watched his hands, her lips moving soundlessly as she followed the melody.

Occasionally, Li Li's right hand would lift from the keys, his index finger tapping the air near his Adam's apple to correct her vocal placement.

She would frown slightly, then try again.

In the background, the thirty-eighth interceptor missile soared into the sky, trailing a white wake, exploding into a silent burst of orange-red firework high in the air, its fragments raining down into the pitch-black sea.

A silent vocal practice.

An audible war.

This imagery itself already transcended any background music.

Thirty minutes later, the combined online viewership of the two livestream rooms reached forty-one million.

At forty-five minutes, it was forty-six million.

In the chat, the mudslinging in Arabic and Hebrew had flooded into two distinct waterfalls. A group of internet users from countries currently at war had opened up a second battlefield using text in a muted Chinese Dating Reality Show livestream room.

At fifty-eight minutes.

Jiang Rumu stood up from the piano, brushed the sand off her pants, and walked over to him.

"I'm ready."

Her voice carried a trace of hoarseness, but her eyes were astonishingly bright.

"Are you sure?"

"Ask me one more time, and I won't sing."

Without another word, Li Li stood up and readjusted the angle of the livestream equipment, centering the camera on the piano and her, with the complete Burj Al Arab and the entire Persian Gulf as the backdrop.

He sat back down on the piano bench, took a deep breath, and unmuted the microphone.

The sound of the waves, the wind, and the faint, muffled thuds of distant explosions instantly flooded in.

Total online viewers across both livestream rooms: 49.3 million.

The bullet comments went crazy.

[It's coming, it's coming! The final two minutes of the countdown!]

[She's going to sing!! My god!]

[I'm in New York, and it's 3:00 AM. My eyelids are fighting to stay open, all for this moment!]

Li Li didn't introduce the song, nor did he speak.

His fingers suddenly fell onto the keys.

G major, 4/4 time.

In the fourth bar of the prelude, Jiang Rumu began to sing.

The moment the first note escaped her throat—

The bullet comments stopped.

It wasn't a lag, nor was it a server crash.

It was nearly fifty million fingers frantically typing on their screens, freezing at the exact same second.

"My sky suddenly became so radiant I couldn't breathe..."

"I believe it is just a scenery passing by by chance..."

Her low-to-mid range was transparent and clean.

There was none of the forced saccharine sweetness from her albums; every word felt washed by the sea breeze, landing steadily on the sand—authentic, warm, and textured like grains of sand.

"Until we touched, and my fingertips felt the proof of our connection..."

"At this second, I no longer hesitate to Say I Love You."

The final note was cut clean and sharp.

After a dozen seconds of stillness, the bullet comments erupted back to life.

[Holy shit! This is Jiang Rumu?? Her voice must have been kissed by an angel! What on earth were her previous songs?!]

[Her voice...I don't even speak Chinese but I'm crying.]

[She sounds like a completely different person compared to her albums! It's a world of difference! Her agency is truly inhuman!]

Li Li's left hand stabilized the rhythm, like a net precisely supporting her voice, allowing her to walk and leap upon it.

An interlude, a piano solo.

Right after, the chorus began.

"Meeting you, yet rewriting all definitions..."

"My hesitation, all my worries, become clear because of you..."

"Walking on and on, I really ended up in your arms..."

The pitch climbed steadily, her voice shifting from transparent to bright, taking on a thin, textured rasp. It wasn't a flaw; it was depth. It was like a fine blade, long sealed away, finally slashing through the cotton candy wrapping it to reveal its true, sharp edge.

"Until we touched, and my fingertips felt the proof of our connection..."

"At this second, I no longer hesitate to Say I Love You!"

She pushed the final long note high, beautiful like the wake of the interceptor missile tearing through the night sky.

The piano music faded.

The wind died down.

The tide receded.

The entire world seemed to have been waiting for her to finish singing.

After five seconds of dead silence, the floodgates of the bullet comments burst wide open.

The total online viewers instantly broke through the sixty-million mark, and the server let out a strained, lagging wail under the heavy load.

[Can't find it anywhere on the web! Where on earth did this song come from?! An original?]

[How many years did her agency waste Jiang Rumu's voice! This is her fucking true strength!]

[This song doesn't exist anywhere on the internet. WHO IS THIS MAN?!]

On the screen, rocket and carnival special effects rained down as if they cost nothing, completely plastering the entire feed.

Li Li stood up from the piano bench and habitually rotated his left wrist.

Blue text emerged.

[System: Host has been detected to have completed the task [Give Her an Unforgettable Night].]

[Livestream peak online popularity reached 62.1 million, covering 127 countries and regions.]

[Reward: Firearms Mastery.]

[System Evaluation: The system has given up on evaluating. But a word of advice to the Host: some lies are harder to cover up than defusing a bomb.]

Li Li completely ignored that last piece of nonsense.

However, the phone in his pocket began to vibrate frantically.

It wasn't the system; it was WeChat.

He swiped it open to find a fifty-seven-second voice message from Su Wantang.

He didn't play it.

An ominous feeling made him switch directly to Weibo.

In seventh place on the hot search list, a glaring hashtag hung there:

#Su Wantang Posts Long Text Late at Night#

He clicked in.

Eight minutes ago, her verified account had posted a paragraph of text.

"Some songs are hummed to you by someone late at night with a broken guitar missing a string. You thought that was a unique secret between the two of you. It turns out he remembered it even more clearly—clear enough to turn it into a complete song and sing it to someone else."

"He said that once this song, 'Say I Love You,' was finished, he would be the first to sing it to me."

"Tonight, the whole world heard it."

Below the text, a selfie was attached.

The lighting was intimate, the corners of her eyes were red, and the camera was slightly out of focus—every single tear was positioned perfectly.

The comment section had already exploded.

"So this song was written by Li Li for Su Wantang? And he sang it to Jiang Rumu on a Dating Reality Show? What a scumbag!"

"Sister Tangtang, don't cry! A man like this isn't worth it!"

Li Li's mind buzzed.

Something was wrong.

The original arrangement of "Say I Love You" was on the piano, not the guitar.

More importantly, this song, just like "Season of Fireworks," came from another world.

How on earth did Su Wantang "hear" it?

Before he could untangle this mess, a figure had already walked up to him.

Jiang Rumu was barefoot, carrying her canvas shoes, her hair completely let down with a few strands blown against her collarbone by the sea breeze.

She didn't look at his phone, but simply stated a fact calmly.

"Your ex-girlfriend posted on Weibo."

"I saw it." Li Li put away his phone.

"She said the song was written for her."

"It wasn't."

"But now, the entire internet believes it." She looked at him, her tone unreadable.

Li Li met her gaze. "The truth is that it wasn't."

"I don't care about the truth." Jiang Rumu took a step toward the hotel, then stopped and turned back. The night obscured half of her face, leaving only her terrifyingly bright eyes visible.

"That song, you said it wasn't written for her."

"Yeah."

"Then who was it written for?"

On the horizon, the forty-fourth interceptor missile soared into the sky.

Li Li looked at her and fell silent for a few seconds.

"I haven't decided yet."

Jiang Rumu also looked at him, her face betraying no emotion.

She suddenly dropped the canvas shoes in her hand onto the sand and took a step closer to him, close enough for Li Li to smell the salty sea breeze on her hair.

"Fine."

She held out her right pinky finger.

"When you've decided, tell me first."