Chapter 157: Let Her Understand Exactly What She Missed!

Chapter 157: Let Her Understand Exactly What She Missed!

Wu Chen’s asking price could only be called outrageous. Unbelievable.

Coming from an established songwriter with a smash hit already behind him, the figure might have made sense. Even inflated on the reasoning that Song Xuan came from money, was only playing at music, and would not miss the expense—that too would have been understandable.

But Wu Chen had only just graduated from Donghai University.

And he had majored in computer science.

He had dashed off a song like that and dared to ask a hundred thousand yuan—one hundred times her original offer. To Song Xuan it meant one of two things: either Wu Chen was mad, or he had come here specifically to have fun with her.

“One hundred thousand,” Wu Chen repeated, smiling. “Student Song, all you have to tell me is whether you accept. That’s all. There’s nothing to negotiate on the price. I have several other songs, and they’re all the same.”

“Of course I don’t accept,” Song Xuan said.

She really did have a good temper. Convinced though she was that he was toying with her, she felt no anger. Only her smile had thinned a little.

“Then there’s nothing more to discuss.” Wu Chen gestured toward her. “The notebook.”

Song Xuan was startled.

That was it?

He was finished?

Was this some game of playing hard to get?

In Song Xuan’s memory, every person who had ever come to have fun with her had wanted the same thing in the end: to get near her, to become someone she knew.

So however the conversation went, not one of them had ever ended it of his own accord. Unless she said there was nothing left to discuss, they all looked prepared to keep talking with her until the end of the world. Writing a song and trying to sell it to her was only a way of approaching her, a pretext for getting a chance to speak.

Still surprised, Song Xuan handed the notebook back.

Wu Chen took it and began to tear out the pages with the song on them—then stopped.

“I don’t think Student Song is the sort of person who would plagiarize someone else’s work. We’ve only just properly met, but I can trust you that far.” Smiling, he closed the notebook and passed it back to her. “I won’t tear them out. It’s a nice notebook. Two pages missing and it wouldn’t be perfect anymore.”

He stood. “That’ll be all.”

He smiled, turned, and walked away.

He actually left.

Without one unnecessary word.

Song Xuan stared blankly after him as he pushed open the café door and stepped outside. At last she pulled the mask at her chin back up over her face and murmured, “Weirdo.”

She looked down at the notebook in her hands.

She opened it and read the song again.

It really was very good. Like the other good songs she had been given before, it had all sorts of strengths.

But that was all it was.

Nobody could control public taste with any precision. Whether a song succeeded depended above all on whether the public liked it. Whether the song itself was good came second—or rather, being good was only the foundation on which success became possible.

So although Song Xuan thought Wu Chen’s song was good, she did not think it would become popular. More precisely, she thought the odds were extremely low.

She had been disappointed too many times. She no longer dared hope for much.

Whatever else happened, she would never pay a hundred thousand. And she would certainly never plagiarize it either. She would simply leave it in the notebook and look at it now and then.

What Song Xuan did not know was this:

The song Wu Chen had written, “Antidote for the Soul,” was guaranteed to become a hit.

And not merely a hit. It would explode overnight.

There was no uncertainty in it at all.

It would be a hit.

Because Wu Chen had tested it.

Wu Chen had been trapped on July 7 for a thousand years—three hundred and sixty-five thousand days and nights. He had done nearly everything imaginable, and naturally he had once thought of becoming a celebrity, if only for a day. Everything reset in the end. A day was the most he could ever have.

To that end Wu Chen had studied music and learned pop singing.

Then he had begun posting songs online like a madman.

At first he posted famous songs from his previous life—the classics that had already become the collective memory of a generation. He simply took them and used them.

The results surprised him.

Some drew attention that very day. Others did not.

The era, the time word of mouth needed to build, and a great many other factors all bore on whether a song could catch fire quickly.

Later Wu Chen began writing and releasing songs of his own.

He had studied music during the loop. He could write, and he could sing.

Being trapped in a single day was simply too boring. To pass the time he began to experiment, and one experiment was particularly interesting: every morning after the reset he would quickly write down every song he had conceived the day before, find a professional recording studio, record them at once, and release them at noon across all the major online music platforms.

Then he waited for the results and watched the data on each platform.

A day was too short for a song to spread on its own, so Wu Chen accelerated the process himself. The method was simple: he found major online music influencers, music critics, and related accounts and paid them to repost and recommend the songs.

It was an ordinary promotional method. Even superstars promoted their albums.

In that stretch of the loop Wu Chen released an enormous quantity of songs. Songwriting was excellent for killing time, so he wrote a great deal of it. When inspiration ran high he could produce more than a dozen in a day; when his thinking went nowhere he might not finish a single set of lyrics.

Counting the simple, catchy throwaways with plain lyrics and plainer melodies, Wu Chen created more than three thousand songs during that period of the loop.

The overwhelming majority of those three thousand-odd songs raised barely a ripple after release.

Mainly because of time.

Once recording time was deducted, the songs had less than a day to spread. Some might have become popular given longer, but the Wu Chen inside the loop had no “future.” He could not see it.

So most of them never caught on.

But some did.

Sixty-seven in all.

That was the result of the experiment. Of more than three thousand songs Wu Chen had written, sixty-seven had exploded across the internet in under a day.

That ratio was extraordinarily high, because the standard was not “becoming popular.” It was “becoming popular in one day.” Two entirely different concepts.

However brilliant a musician was—even a top figure of the era with a thousand songs behind him—he would not dare claim that several of his songs had exploded overnight. A celebrity releasing a song and going viral did not count. A celebrity carried terrifying traffic with them already.

Whether anyone could create a song that became a hit within a single day was very nearly a matter of fate. The odds were lower than a lottery jackpot.

So Wu Chen’s one-day-hit ratio was not merely high. It was frighteningly high.

Not because his songwriting ability had somehow surpassed everyone else on earth.

Because he had been looping through the same day. As the experiments went on he understood more and more deeply what the public wanted to hear on July 7, 2020.

He had mastered the musical taste of the public in this era.

Other musicians simply could not guarantee—could barely even judge—what styles, lyrics, melodies, or kinds of music the public would certainly like right now.

Wu Chen knew.

Of course, “a hit in one day” remained an absurdly harsh standard. Even late in the experiment, with his success rate improved, he could never hit every time. Too many factors were in play.

Sixty-seven songs had become one-day hits.

“Antidote for the Soul” was one of them.

Song Xuan had no idea what she had just let slip through her fingers.

After leaving the café, Wu Chen went straight down to the underground garage beneath CBD Tower Seven and drove off in the Lamborghini.

Out of the garage, he steered with one hand and placed a call.

It was answered quickly.

“Hello, Microflash Music.”

A polite male voice. An employee of a recording studio called Microflash Music Studio. The studio did nothing but recording, with a full complement of imported equipment and an extremely professional operation.

Naturally, it was expensive.

The studio was here in Donghai. It was the studio Wu Chen had rented most often during the loop.

Wu Chen was going to record a song.

He was going to release it anonymously.

Today. Immediately.

He was going to make Song Xuan understand exactly what she had missed.

He would make her come looking for him—make her shamelessly pester him, throw a fit, roll around, act cute, play pitiful, and beg.

“I want to record a song. Three hours in the studio,” Wu Chen said into the phone.

“Ah—I’m sorry, sir. There’s a band in—”

“I’ll pay ten times the rate,” Wu Chen cut in.

“Uh—yes, sir! When will you be arriving? We’ll arrange it immediately!”