Trapped in the Same Day for a Thousand Years

Chapter 423: Rap Beyond the Limits of Humanity! The New Song Is Released!

by cnwebnovels

After coming back in, An Menglan didn’t say a word. She was feeling rather frustrated herself. Out in the corridor, Yu Xiaohu had been genuinely upset.

She knew he was only thinking of getting her album out smoothly and meant well. She could hardly fall out with him over it, so she’d had no choice but to tell him the truth.

For the next few minutes, no one spoke but Wu Chen.

He was correcting the musicians’ mistakes, going through all eight of them one by one. He could play every instrument there.

He only ever demonstrated a short passage on each, so there was no telling exactly how high his level went. But it was unquestionably very high.

An Menglan barely reacted. She already regarded him as a man who could become a god of the music world, a musical genius. Was it strange that he knew so much?

Yu Xiaohu, though… His expression changed again and again as he watched.

Only twenty-two, and proficient in this many instruments. No ordinary person could do that. Yet it didn’t change his view of Wu Chen.

Knowing a lot of instruments didn’t make a song good. Nor did it entitle him to eat up the album’s production time at the most critical moment.

Least of all for a “trashy song” like that.

Yu Xiaohu’s opinion of Wu Chen was about to drop below zero.

Clap. Clap.

“That’s about it. Again,” Wu Chen said, having gone through everyone once, and clapped as he returned to the front of the band.

They began again.

Four minutes later, the song ended.

“Very good. That’s more or less the feel I want.” Wu Chen nodded and glanced at his watch, then looked up. “I’ll give you half an hour. Run it a few more times. In thirty minutes, we record.”

At that, every face changed.

Record in half an hour?

That was far too rushed.

Were they going to record together, then, rather than track by track?

Wu Chen didn’t explain. For him, this song’s accompaniment really only had to be good enough. They were all highly skilled, and he had no intention of being too exacting.

As long as the melody, rhythm, and feel didn’t go wrong, that was fine.

It wasn’t as if they were putting on a concert.

For a song, everything else was extra. What ultimately decided whether it was good or bad was the singer’s performance.

And in “Genius Superstar,” what mattered above all was the delivery. Everything else only had to pass.

He turned and walked toward the rehearsal room’s side door, lifting a hand toward An Menglan as he went. “Keep an eye on them for me. I’m borrowing your recording studio.”

The studio was right next door. A side door connected it directly to the rehearsal room.

Slightly dazed, An Menglan nodded. For a fleeting moment she had the odd feeling that he seemed to know the layout here very well…

She didn’t dwell on it. He had given her a “task.”

Once he’d left, she picked up the score and looked it over, then turned to the band and gestured. “All right. Rehearse.”

With the boss watching personally, the band naturally grew serious and focused.

Zhuang Xiaodie followed Wu Chen into the studio.

Yu Xiaohu stayed put. Something felt strange to him. Very strange. The way Morning Mist had just spoken to An Menglan… assigning her work?

If Morning Mist hadn’t brought a female companion, Yu Xiaohu might even have suspected that he and An Menglan were involved, boyfriend and girlfriend.

After watching a while, Yu Xiaohu moved too, heading for the studio.

He wanted to see what this troublemaker Morning Mist was up to.

Inside the recording studio, a huge glass window divided the booth from the control room.

When Yu Xiaohu came in, Zhuang Xiaodie had found a sofa in the control room and sat down. Wu Chen was alone in the booth, facing the microphone… apparently practicing the song.

Cramming at the last minute?

The odds of this becoming a joke had just gone up.

Yu Xiaohu picked up a pair of monitor headphones from the control-room console, wanting to hear how the practice was going. He heard nothing. Wu Chen hadn’t switched on the mic.

All he wanted was somewhere perfectly silent to practice for a while.

What Yu Xiaohu didn’t know was that for an ordinary song, Wu Chen needed no practice at all.

His mental stat, more than a thousand times an ordinary person’s, let him stay permanently at his peak. His singing technique would never deteriorate.

He needed to practice this time mainly because the chorus of “Genius Superstar” was harder than the limits of human ability.

It was rap.

That was why the song had twice the lyrics of an ordinary song yet a perfectly normal running time. The chorus was rap.

He had to get through a passage of explosive difficulty while keeping the rhythm and every syllable crystal clear.

People all spoke at roughly the same speed.

An ordinary person talking normally managed about 160 to 180 Chinese characters a minute, around three a second.

A professional broadcaster, articulating clearly, managed about 240 a minute, or four a second.

As for rap… looking across the whole world today, and counting Chinese-language rap alone, top rappers could hit ten characters a second. Twelve or thirteen wasn’t rare either.

And at the very peak, among the Chinese-language rappers who had already reached legendary status, the fastest could manage fifteen characters a second with every syllable clear and the rhythm sharp.

That was the king on the throne.

Fifteen characters a second was the current human limit.

The chorus of Wu Chen’s “Genius Superstar” held a twenty-seven-second rap passage that had to be delivered in a single breath, at an average of—

Sixteen characters a second.

With rhythm.

With every word clear.

That was the real hook of “Genius Superstar.” At that extreme speed, any unknown singer who could perform this song would go viral online within a day. It could be called surpassing the limits of humanity. Or it could be called… setting a new one.

During the thousand-year loop, Wu Chen had learned to sing first. He covered all kinds of songs for fun, to challenge himself, to pass the time. Only once he grew tired of singing other people’s songs did he start writing his own.

In other words, before he ever attempted his first composition in the loop, his singing technique was already extraordinarily advanced.

Yet the first time he tried to sing “Genius Superstar,” he ran into a problem.

His body reset.

His vocal cords could never undergo any lasting development.

Ever more refined technique, and better use of breath and resonance, could make up for the limits of his vocal cords, but… challenging the limits of humanity was still extremely hard.

He found a solution.

A very simple one. Warm up before the real performance. Rap depended far more on technique; its demands on the natural voice and vocal cords really weren’t that high.

So all he had to do was practice a little beforehand and “open up” his voice. That was enough.

Half an hour later.

The studio’s side door opened, and An Menglan came in.

It was time.

Wu Chen had practiced enough too.

All eight musicians were called in. Recording began.

The violin, guitar, bass, and the like the musicians carried in themselves. The piano and drum kit stayed where they were. Too big to move easily, but that made no difference to the recording, because the booth had its own.

Every large instrument too unwieldy to move could be found in An Menglan’s studio, and every one was extremely expensive, even better than those used in rehearsal.

The session went smoothly.

Every instrument had a pickup mic in front of it, and every musician wore in-ear monitors. Nine people in the booth. In the control room, An Menglan and Yu Xiaohu ran the equipment themselves… Yu Xiaohu’s opinion of Wu Chen might already be in negative territory, but things had come this far, and he wasn’t going to refuse to lend a hand.

A few minutes later.

Recording finished.

One take.

When Wu Chen came out of the booth, An Menglan and Yu Xiaohu still wore very strange expressions. They looked stunned.

Through their monitor headphones, they had both just heard him sing the song for the first time. And for the first time, they had heard that rap delivered at an extreme speed with every word perfectly clear.

It was breathtaking.

He had made insulting people breathtaking.

Wu Chen ignored their faces. He sat down at the console, pulled up the recording on the computer, and started typing rapidly.

A little post-production.

Cleaning up a few small flaws in the accompaniment.

Ten-odd minutes later, he logged into the back ends of several music platforms through the browser, using the same “Morning Mist” account.

Publish.

Simple and direct. Morning Mist’s new work, “Genius Superstar,” was officially released across the internet.

“Done.” Wu Chen tapped a few more keys, cleared the computer’s login history, and stood with a smile.

An Menglan opened her mouth to say something to him, but it didn’t come out. Instead she stepped quickly to one side, took out her phone, and dialed.

It connected quickly.

“Hello, Sister Jing… Mr. Wu just released a new song. Have the tech department monitor public opinion online. If anything major happens, tell me right away…”

She still couldn’t judge what kind of effect or impact this song would have.

She was deeply uneasy.