Chapter 419: A Second Miracle?

Chapter 419: A Second Miracle?

“Right. A remedy.” Wu Chen nodded with a smile. “For now, the best way to deal with the leak is for you to officially release the album as soon as possible. But the leak’s buzz has already peaked. Today was the peak. And even at the fastest possible pace, your album is still days away.”

“In other words, releasing early can only recover the losses still to come. Whatever the leak cost you in these first few days, including the hit to the album’s momentum, is already gone.”

An Menglan thought it over. Naturally she understood the logic.

Releasing early was about cutting future losses. The earlier losses had already happened.

Some people listened to a new song for only a few days, looping it until they were sick of it, then never played it again, or not for a long time.

Those fans had been “lost” the instant the audio leaked. Even if they later paid for the official album, they wouldn’t do much to push the songs up the charts.

Releasing early meant saving what hadn’t been lost yet.

The more she thought about it, the more it seemed he’d only been stating the obvious. He still hadn’t said how releasing a song of his own would help.

“So?” she asked.

“So I can use my buzz to lift yours,” Wu Chen said with a smile.

She stared at him.

That was… staggeringly arrogant. Wildly, boundlessly arrogant.

An Menglan was all but known as the Demon King of the music world. She was a superstar at the height of her fame, with international reach. She had a superstar’s ability and the traffic of a young idol.

In the entire Chinese-language music scene today, there was practically no other female singer as hot as she was.

And she was in semi-retirement, one that hadn’t lasted long.

The timing was perfect. Her fans hadn’t drifted away for lack of new songs, and their anticipation for her album was at its height.

All that pent-up energy was waiting to erupt and carry her to new heights.

The leak had sapped a good deal of it.

But not to the point where a non-celebrity singer could compare.

It was like a farmer jumping up to offer to boost a king’s prestige. The king already had all the prestige there was. However nicely the farmer spoke of him, how much could he add? Not even one ten-thousandth, surely.

In truth, An Menglan didn’t think Wu Chen was all that arrogant. She had enormous faith in his musical talent. She even felt that if he wanted to be arrogant, he had every right.

His talent really was that formidable.

But.

This wasn’t purely a question of music. It was business. What he described might help a tiny bit, but however she looked at it, it didn’t sound very reliable.

Even when two superstars teamed up on a new song, the buzz wasn’t much greater than one superstar releasing a song alone. Their popularity didn’t simply add up.

That held even for superstars. And Wu Chen was a newcomer with a single hit.

“Something wrong?” he asked, seeing her puzzled, thoughtful frown.

“N-no. Nothing’s wrong.” She shook her head at once.

She thought the whole thing was a long shot, but she wasn’t going to object. She already felt she owed him, and he had just found her traitor. So… whatever he wanted to do, they would do.

“Let me borrow your computer.” Wu Chen smiled, gestured, and headed for the desk.

She nodded and followed.

He reached the desk first and sat behind it. The computer was asleep on the lock screen. She arrived a moment later, bent to tap the keyboard, and typed in her password.

After that she left it to him.

Several documents, programs, and web pages were still open on her desktop. He minimized them all, then opened the songwriting program sitting in a prominent spot on her desktop.

He was going to write another song on the spot.

She had guessed as much while entering the password, but it still made the whole thing feel even less reliable.

Not because of his talent.

It came down to the same thing as before: business.

She believed he would certainly produce something good again. But it would be good the way the eight songs he’d written for her were good. She thought every one of them was excellent, yet none had faced the market yet.

She was sure, too, that her album would be a hit once it came out.

Never mind the release. The leak alone had already “gone viral.”

But that was because she was An Menglan. She brought colossal traffic with her. Even if she sang a throwaway pop song, it would catch on. It just wouldn’t become a classic people sang for years.

Wu Chen didn’t have what she had.

“Antidote for the Soul” had exploded overnight. He had already worked one miracle.

A miracle was a miracle precisely because it shouldn’t have been possible.

He had already pulled off the impossible once. Was he going to do it again?!

Time was short. If he wanted to lift her popularity, his song had to hit immediately. Only then could it have any real effect. That much she understood perfectly well.

So the question remained.

Was he going to work a second miracle?

He had a name online now, and this wasn’t his first release. But precisely because his first song had blown up overnight, and he’d released nothing since, could a second song, only half a month later, really hit that big?

He had never missed.

That made it harder still.

How many online singers had put out a song, watched it simmer for a month or two, then explode across the internet and get the whole country talking, only to… sink back into obscurity afterward?

They never produced anything worth mentioning again. Not because they stopped releasing songs, but because nobody listened.

The internet was full of examples. Since its rise, millions of online singers had released songs at the very least. Only a tiny fraction had ever gone viral. And of those, the ones still active online today, or who had formally debuted and were still popular, were rare as phoenix feathers and qilin horns.

What Wu Chen was attempting was hundreds, even thousands of times harder than an online singer simply hitting it big a second time.

An Menglan only thought all this. From start to finish, she didn’t say a word…

He was already hammering away at the keyboard.

She leaned in a little and looked at what he had typed. At the very top was the title.

Genius Superstar.

An interesting title.

She still couldn’t tell what kind of song he meant to write.

Knock, knock!

A sudden knock, and the door was pushed open.

“Miss An, I heard…” A middle-aged man with a receding hairline and thick glasses walked in talking, sounding anxious. He had barely begun when he stopped short.

“Morning Mist” was sitting behind the president’s desk, typing, while An Menglan stood beside him, bent slightly forward, looking at something.

Had he not known who was who, he might have taken it for a male president at work with his female secretary standing by to report.

The whole scene struck him as deeply out of place.

“Teacher Xiaohu.” An Menglan looked up and smiled when she saw who it was. “Did you need something?”

It was Menghua Music’s gold-medal producer, Yu Xiaohu. He was also the company’s music director and a vice president.

He and An Menglan went back a long way. A renowned mainland musician, he had originally been with Huaxing Entertainment, and they had known each other since she was in her teens, before her debut. Her debut album had been created by Yu Xiaohu together with several other well-known musicians.

From the first day they met, he had called her “Miss An.” It had become a habit, so he never called her Boss. And she was just as used to calling him “Teacher Xiaohu.”

Yu Xiaohu collected himself. He had no idea why An Menglan thought so highly of this “Morning Mist” that she’d even let him use her computer. Did the man have some kind of background?

He didn’t dwell on it for now. He had come over for something far more important.

“Miss An, I heard the one who leaked the audio was Su Lei? That… that can’t be him, can it? Could there be some misunderstanding?” Then he added, “That kid always seemed honest to me. He’s been with the company a few years now…”