Chapter 358: She Sang Herself to Tears

Chapter 358: She Sang Herself to Tears

“A hobby. I studied for a while,” Wu Chen said with a smile.

“Then I’ll have to trouble you, Mr. Wu.”

An Menglan stood and gave up the bench.

Until now she had not known he could play.

Song Xuan had never mentioned it either.

And Wu Chen was a science-and-engineering man, a computer science graduate.

Composition could be put down to talent.

You could simply call him a genius.

But piano took more than talent. It took years and years of practice. You had to have studied and trained. Practice was everything.

Without it, skill fell away fast.

There was an old saying: miss one day and you know it, miss two and your peers know it, miss three and the audience knows it. That held for world-class pianists, let alone anyone else.

An Menglan had made mistakes in all four of her runs, a few wrong notes each time.

She simply had not practiced in a while. Add her unfamiliarity with the score and the need to split her attention between playing and singing, and the slips were only natural.

They were hardly serious.

Wu Chen sat down, laced his fingers and flexed them, then gathered the three spread sheets and held them back toward her.

She clearly had not memorized the lyrics, so he was giving them to her to sing from.

“Hm?”

An Menglan blinked, took the manuscript after a beat, and asked, “You don’t need the score, Mr. Wu?”

She had assumed she would stand behind him and share the pages, Wu Chen reading the score while she followed the words.

“I wrote it. Why would I need to look?” He turned and smiled.

“You… remember all of it?” She frowned slightly, plainly finding that hard to swallow.

He had only just written the song.

Supposedly composed it on the spot.

Who could write several hundred characters of lyrics and claim to have every word by heart the instant the pen left the page?

And the score was far more complicated than the lyrics.

Worth noting: by now An Menglan no longer believed Sound the Bell had been prepared in advance. The challenge she set had been too specific. Unless Wu Chen could see the future, he could not have prepared for it.

So he probably had composed it on the spot.

Whether it was good, whether it was really that good, still had to be experienced, tested, judged.

“I wrote it. How could I not remember?” Wu Chen smiled.

“…All right.”

Her expression turned a little strange, but she said nothing more. Even if he missed a few notes it hardly mattered, so long as he was broadly right.

This was not a recording session.

What mattered now was getting herself into the right state and singing the song properly.

She looked down at the manuscript, moved two steps aside without thinking, and rested a hand on the edge of the piano. Standing at an angle to him, she took a deep breath and said, eyes on the pages, “You can start, Mr. Wu.”

Dong—

The clear, cool introduction sounded.

Wu Chen dropped instantly into a state of absolute concentration.

The desolate, killing edge in the piano began to tell of the sorrow of the battlefield. The music surged upward like countless warhorses thundering forward, fierce and heroic, then softened abruptly, flowing long and gentle, full of yearning and grief.

An Menglan tilted her head slightly and stared at him.

She froze.

As a top-tier musician her ear was naturally exceptional. Strike ten notes on a piano at once and she could name every one of them with her eyes closed.

Her ability to hear and analyze music far surpassed Li Ruobing’s.

So she could hear exactly how far his opening stood from what she had just played.

The difference was heaven and earth.

The notes were the same.

What differed was the rhythm.

The feeling.

Even an ordinary listener would have heard it.

It was the difference between an ordinary pianist and one of the very best.

An Menglan was stunned.

She attended concerts every year. She knew precisely how far she stood from true masters.

And right now Wu Chen felt like one of them.

At this level he could absolutely give recitals of his own.

He could stand beside world-class pianists and contend with them.

It sounded outrageous.

It was true.

The piano stopped suddenly.

The room went quiet.

“Miss An? Is something wrong?” Wu Chen turned to her, looking a little puzzled.

She had not sung.

He had finished the introduction. That was her cue.

She had simply stood there.

“Uh… I’m very sorry, Mr. Wu. Sorry, sorry… I got distracted…”

An Menglan came back to herself, still staring at him wide-eyed as she apologized, the shock in her not fading in the least.

“Um… Mr. Wu, may I ask you something?” she began carefully. “When did you learn piano? Who taught you?”

“A long time ago. Self-taught. Why?” he asked with a smile.

“A long time ago… as a hobby?” She could not help asking again.

He had called it a hobby himself.

How the hell could this be a hobby?

A hobby did not produce this.

And holding a state this refined took practice day after day.

“Yeah. A hobby,” Wu Chen said.

“Then… do you practice every day?”

“No. Where would I find the time?” He laughed.

“When did you last play?”

“More than half a month ago, I think.” He thought for a moment before answering.

The last time had been in the top-floor suite at Crown Entertainment, for Li Ruobing.

An Menglan pressed her lips together.

For a moment she had nothing to say.

Again she felt he was lying to her.

Even a world-class master suffered a temporary decline after half a month away from the instrument.

But this time Wu Chen genuinely was not lying.

He had not even told her the more frightening part.

The time before that, the last time he had touched a piano, had been inside the thousand-year loop.

Decades ago.

Wu Chen’s performance ability did not deteriorate with the passage of time.

The reason was his mental stat, more than a thousand times that of an ordinary person.

He no longer needed anything like muscle memory.

His mind was strong enough to exert absolute control over his body.

An Menglan drifted off again.

She believed he was lying, and yet she could not deny one thing: for a twenty-two-year-old to possess technique like this, his talent at the instrument could only be called world-class.

“Miss An?”

He called to her, and when she looked up he smiled again.

“Can we start?”

“Oh… yes, yes!”

She answered at once. She looked down at the manuscript again, pushed all those tangled thoughts aside for the moment, and focused.

Dong—

The piano sounded again.

The introduction passed.

An Menglan began to sing with the music.

A magnificent, tragic war.

A woman waiting for her man to come home.

Her voice began calm, then rose.

An Menglan’s singing ranked among the very finest in the history of Chinese-language pop.

And Wu Chen’s playing was all but flawless.

Together they sounded like a match made in heaven.

A good singer poured genuine emotion into a performance, and she was exactly that kind of singer.

She gave herself to it completely, her own feelings rising and falling violently with her voice.

Two minutes in she reached the fiercest part of the chorus.

That section had left a deep mark on her. She had sung it several times and had it by heart.

So she simply closed her eyes.

Sinking deeper still.

At last.

At around three minutes and forty seconds, her singing ended.

Wu Chen played another ten seconds of outro before the song truly closed.

He lifted his hands from the keys and turned to her with a smile.

He had been about to ask what she thought.

The words never came.

His brows rose slightly.

An Menglan had not yet come out of the song’s emotions. Her face was faintly flushed from the force of what she had felt, and she was raising one hand to touch her cheek with her fingertips.

Then she looked at them.

Wet.

Her eyes were red.

She had cried.

She had sung herself to tears.

Even she could hardly believe it.

Only after the song ended had she sensed something wrong with her face, which was why she had touched it.

When she saw the tears on her fingertips, she went completely still.

“Miss An,” Wu Chen asked with a smile, “are you satisfied?”