A Sad Song

She looked down at the audience, carefully scanning every face beneath the pale-blue wash of the lights. It was still a dense crowd, and she could make out a few familiar faces.

Everything seemed just as it had before.

“Very familiar, very calm.” Her smile was serene. “I’m here only to enjoy the music, and to invite everyone to take a little walk with me through it.”

“Well said!” The host applauded, fanning the atmosphere with exaggerated enthusiasm. “Nan Changgeng is still Nan Changgeng. No matter what you’ve been through, your love of music never changes!”

“Then the stage is yours.”

The host left, and Nan Changgeng stood alone at center stage. The lights shifted; the prelude began. From below, the cheers rose even more fiercely.

She put in her in-ear monitor. With nothing in her ears but the music, she lowered her gaze slightly and felt completely at peace.

Singing on stage had never felt as pure as it did now.

In the past, every performance had come with baggage: she had to care about the audience’s reaction, worry about making mistakes, and watch whether the countless eyes on her were warm and focused, full of affection.

Now all that cluttered, unnecessary emotion was gone. She was simply singing, taking a stroll through a piece of music. It was fine if someone could immerse themselves in this river and walk with her for a little while. If not, that was fine too.

She no longer deliberately looked at the faces below, letting her gaze drift vaguely into the distance as the music moved through her throat.

It was a song about the universe, called “Death and the Universe.” Silent and grand, empty and vast; the arrangement was like the pale light of a winter moon, and her voice carried a coldness like ore, as if one were hearing the long sigh of the river of fate while looking up at the stars.

Yu Mao looked at her but couldn’t make out her expression. The cold light seemed to soak into her, yet also to burst from within her body. The song spread far and wide through the entire venue; the emotions it held were wrapped in that deep, low voice, like fire trapped in ice, like a benevolent yet indifferent deity.

She lifted a hand and removed the earphone from her left ear.

A clearer version of the singing poured into her ears, like ripples washing over her soul, stirring heat at the corners of her eyes.

All the strength in her body seemed to drain away at once. Her consciousness slipped free of her awareness of her shell, as if it had shattered into fragments and ground itself into flecks of light, merging into that vast radiance and circling around her.

Yu Mao could not help wanting to vanish in that very moment, longing to melt into the point where time converged right now and become permanently part of the woman’s song.

That desire, once the final note ended, turned instantly into a vast emptiness.

The audience seats erupted into fierce shouts and cheers. Hearing it, she only felt as though the sound had fallen into a black hole; before it could even stir an echo, it had already been swallowed.

The lighting returned to normal, and the host came back onstage. As soon as she spoke, the lingering fragments of song were shaken loose and scattered away.

“So strong; truly too strong. As expected of Nan Changgeng.” The host kept shaking her head in admiration, looking so stunned that she seemed almost speechless. She let out a forceful sigh to settle the rush in her chest, then asked the audience, “Is everyone excited?”

A shout rose from below: “Yesss!!”

“There are too many people down there for me to tell just how excited you all are, but the most excited person onstage, I can tell at a glance.”

The host turned, taking in Nan Changgeng beside her and the contestant seats farther away, and smiled. “Changgeng, you know it too, don’t you?”

Nan Changgeng followed her gaze and saw a face streaked with tears; she froze.

The host caught her reaction and smiled. “Looks like you do. Come on, let’s interview Yu Mao and hear what she’s feeling right now. From her face, I can almost see what many of your fans below look like at this very moment. What does it feel like to see your idol standing on a big stage again and singing?”

In the contestant seats, a staff member handed over the microphone, waving it in front of Yu Mao’s face several times before she finally seemed to recognize it like a robot identifying an object. She raised her arm and took it.

She cried silently, as quietly as a few drops of rain falling from the sky. No one could mistake rainfall for the sky crying, and no one could read her emotions from those hollow eyes.

Expressionless, cold; they were tears, but they looked like a few wet streaks sliding over metal.

Yu Mao had cut off most of the connection between her emotions and her body; otherwise, she would already have lost control. Whether it was joy or grief, once it became intense enough, it would inevitably rush toward destruction.

She heard the host’s question and tried to gather a thread of reason to think it through.

What kind of feeling?

The emotion was undoubtedly intense, but it was not happiness, and not quite what one would call joy; perhaps exhilaration could describe part of it.

Like a believer witnessing the manifestation of a miracle, that instant when fervent feeling surged up and burst—it coiled into a lump of flesh wrapped inside a horn, pressed toward the horn’s tip by an immense and terrifying force, concentrated to the extreme.

There wasn’t much she could put into words. It was simply burning, burning like fire.

Compressed inside a motionless, frail shell, it forged her soul until it twisted out of shape.

Yu Mao stood there blankly with the microphone for a long moment before she finally managed to make her lungs produce a whisper: “The feeling… is like seeing a god descend, I suppose.”

She hesitated too long, making it sound difficult, and that actually weakened what she meant to convey.

Especially since everyone had already heard plenty of overly flattering official lines on the show; Yu Mao’s words were not especially surprising, and most people simply ignored how sincere they really were.

Only Nan Changgeng looked at her for a long time, and suddenly caught a trace of something warped by heat, like devotion twisted under extreme temperatures. A wave of alarm spread abruptly through her heart.

“It seems Yu Mao still hasn’t fully come back from the performance just now.” The host smoothly filled the gap, then changed the subject and turned to Nan Changgeng. “I’d never heard this song before. Even on the first listen, I felt completely stunned. Can you tell us what scene inspired you to write it?”

Nan Changgeng swallowed, looked back, and composed herself as if nothing had happened. Taking the microphone, she smiled and said,

“When I used to have insomnia and couldn’t sleep, I liked going up to the rooftop and looking at the stars. The night wind was chilly, and it made me feel like the sky above was just as cold. As I looked, inspiration came.”

The words were brief, but beneath them there had in fact been many unspoken shifts of feeling. Every time she went up to the rooftop, it was never to look at the stars; she wanted to jump.

But nights were truly quiet, free of distractions, and even her urgent thoughts of death would slow down. So she would lie down wherever she stood, rest her head on the concrete floor, and plan to savor a little longer the silence that belonged to the night and the stars.

The colder it was, the slower she became; even the clutter in her mind was gradually emptied out. She stopped thinking about dying, and with the rare sleepiness that rose in her, she would fall asleep at once. Then she would catch a fever from the cold, be sick and dazed, and still manage to get a few more days of good sleep.

The host naturally knew none of this. She praised Nan Changgeng as a musical genius with utter admiration and was just about to move the process along to the voting-push segment when she glanced sideways and saw Yu Mao’s face already covered in tears again, tears seeping from her eyes like oil leaking from a machine.

“Oh my, did Changgeng’s song hit that hard? You still haven’t calmed down?” Her tone was teasing, with a hint of concern.

Yu Mao blinked slowly, met Nan Changgeng’s gaze, and softly explained, “It reminded me of something sad.”

Nan Changgeng’s expression tightened slightly. She frowned, a flicker of uncertain confusion surfacing in her mind. She seemed to sense something off, but couldn’t make it out clearly.

However, there was no time to think it through. It was soon time for the mentor commentary segment; after a long stretch of praise came the vote solicitation, and then waiting for the final vote count.

To avoid affecting the fairness of the vote, the mentors’ presence was minimized, leaving them very little time to speak.

After the inevitable process—an anxious countdown—the highest score so far appeared on the screen.

Even Nan Changgeng, who had not been especially concerned about it, was surprised. The kind of song she had chosen wasn’t suited to competition, and several contestants before her had performed very well. This score had been beyond her expectations.

In her surprise, she heard an audience member below, waving a red glow stick, shout at her:

“I voted for you; tell her to stop crying!!”

Nan Changgeng was momentarily dazed, then felt both amused and moved.

After years in this circle, she could roughly imagine the mindset of some of Yu Mao’s fans… probably pretty shattered, too.

She smiled faintly and gave a slight nod toward the audience, responding briefly to the host’s and mentors’ congratulations and teasing. When that was over, she turned and walked back toward the contestant seats.

Yu Mao’s condition was abnormal, but on her, that abnormality had become normal.

Nan Changgeng returned to her seat, stared for two seconds at the round top of the head in front of her, then bent down and pulled away the pale-blue handkerchief Yu Mao had tied onto the ribbon at her waist.

Honestly, the color didn’t match her little gothic-style dress at all.

But because she had no pockets, the stylist had firmly attached it to her waist after much resistance, and she couldn’t bear to be apart from it for even a moment, afraid of losing it.

A handkerchief meant for wiping away dirt had been treated like a treasure by her; Nan Changgeng found the whole thing somewhat awkward.

So she untied it and took it away, letting it fulfill its original purpose. When Yu Mao noticed the movement and turned back, Nan Changgeng casually wiped the tears from her face.

“Why are you crying?” she asked quietly.

Yu Mao opened her lips, wanting to answer, but before a single clear phrase could form in her throat, she frowned in distress. “I don’t know how to say it. Language is limiting me.”

“Technology’s still a little slow. Maybe someday they’ll develop direct brainwave transmission, so people won’t need to speak at all; they’ll just share consciousness directly and even get past language barriers.”

Nan Changgeng was smiling, her tone gentle, as if she were trying to ease the girl’s emotions through casual conversation. She placed the handkerchief back into Yu Mao’s hands after wiping her tears.

Yu Mao tilted her head, imagining it, and a trace of unease rose in her heart. “Is that something you want?”

If it was, she would go study it, but her life might not last that long.

“Hm? What do you mean?” Nan Changgeng froze, then understood at once and laughed helplessly. “You’re not thinking I need you to do that, are you? Of course not. I just mentioned it offhand, as a fantasy.”

Yu Mao knew the odds were low; after relaxing, she felt a little disappointed again.

“You seem distracted. Aren’t you happy listening to me sing?”

Although the girl’s expression, as always, showed little change, Nan Changgeng could clearly sense that the emotional particles around her had settled down, no longer as active as usual.

She had thought that if she asked that, Yu Mao would definitely deny it in flustered detail and then brighten up. Instead, the other girl looked steadily back, the gloom still lingering between her brows.

“It’s a sad song.”

Originally Yu Mao could have avoided remembering, but the host had brought up the circumstances of its creation.

She knew a great deal about Nan Changgeng’s past. All of it stolen.

Every stolen fragment was like a medicine that happened to neutralize the poison she had been given; if she didn’t take it, she would die. If she did take it, it hurt, hurt until her mind collapsed, and she would still die.