Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Alive?

Dead?

What was that supposed to mean?

I had another gig to get to that night, so I didn’t have time to think it over. I quickly tucked the note into my pocket and headed out.

The performance was for some company’s anniversary celebration. After it ended, I watched with my own eyes as girl after girl streamed over to add my childhood friend on WeChat. And him? The more the merrier. He accepted every single one.

When he caught me giving him the side-eye, he didn’t care in the slightest. “It’s just for fun.”

My childhood friend’s full name was Yu Chang. He had a very Eddie Peng sort of face, which was why his luck with women was outrageously good. Seeing the greasy look of disgust on my face, he gave me a wicked grin. “How about you date me instead? Then I’ll delete all of them. What do you say?”

I remained unmoved. “Please, carry on.”

“Tch.”

He went back to chatting with the girls. Bored out of my mind, I took the note out of my pocket and started studying it.

To be fair, the line was pretty beautiful. Very literary.

It was just hard as hell to figure out what it meant.

While I was still completely baffled, Yu Chang leaned in from behind me and suddenly said, “Isn’t that a lyric?”

“A lyric?”

“Yeah. I sang it at a bar a few days ago. Girls these days all love this song.”

“Oh?”

As if sensing my interest, he immediately launched into an explanation. “The song didn’t make the original singer famous. Instead, it made the bel canto vocalist blow up. Too bad he passed away not long after.”

“But the song really is good. Want to hear it?”

Without waiting for my answer, he swiped his finger across the screen and sent a link to my phone. “Lossless original audio, cracked version. See? Your bro treats you well, right?”

“…Thanks, bro.”

In truth, although I counted as half a musician, my knowledge of pop music was genuinely superficial. It wasn’t until I heard the whole thing that I realized the song was a duet.

But the moment the tenor’s voice came in, all the buildup in the first half instantly seemed pale and powerless. I had never heard bel canto singing before. It was as if my soul had been plucked right out of my body, drifting along with that thread-thin voice into the mist, swaying among the clouds, unable to come back down for the longest time.

By the time the song ended, both my arms were covered in goosebumps.

No wonder it had gone viral.

I couldn’t help tapping into the link and carefully checking the bel canto singer’s name-

Tenor: Jiang Boguang.

Hiss…

Why did that name look kind of familiar?

After I got home, I couldn’t resist searching for more information on the tenor Jiang Boguang, trying to unravel the mystery.

Baidu Baike had a photo of him. The man in it was very young, definitely no older than thirty. His brows were long and slightly arched, and his phoenix eyes tilted faintly upward at the corners, making him look somewhat cold and indifferent no matter whom he was looking at.

Because the photo was in black and white, it gave him an even more detached, melancholy air.

Then I looked at his biography…

He had actually been dead for more than two years.

His death was bizarre. At the peak of his career, he developed depression, then died in the hospital after taking an overdose of sleeping pills.

He had been so young. Why would he commit suicide?

And when I compared that to the smiling portrait in the photo-could there really be such a coincidence in this world?

At that moment, the song was still playing on loop through my speakers. The small room was filled with that gorgeous, clear voice, as though it had come from another dimension, brimming with an irrepressible vitality and passion.

It was hard to believe that this beautiful singing still remained, while the person who had sung it was already gone.