Chapter 139: One Man’s Renaissance

Chapter 139: One Man’s Renaissance

Chen Feng didn’t know about the private discussion and plans between Ou Junlang and Meng Xiaozhou.

However, Ou Junlang’s personal ambition and Chen Feng’s desire to gather more funds didn’t conflict; instead, they complemented each other.

Chen Feng saw that the lazy Ou Junlang had suddenly become diligent. His round face had nearly stretched into an oval shape like a goose egg; it looked truly pitiful.

Over the next few days, Ou Junlang flew all over the country. Sometimes he even ended up shooting three variety shows in a single day. During his scarce moments of rest on the plane, he either watched acoustic tutorial videos on his tablet or fiercely studied thick, bulky books.

The Fatty originally thought he would quickly want to give up, or even change his interests. But unknowingly, time flew by. Before he even had a chance to feel tired, six days had passed in the blink of an eye.

When Ou Junlang finally received that printed document with the lyrics and full musical score from Chen Feng’s hands, he was so excited that tears almost welled up in his eyes.

Only at this very moment did he gradually understand that his love for music wasn’t just lip service. It wasn’t an excuse to escape boring studies either.

Even though I, Ou Junlang, am lazy, my fitness and health management are a mess, when it comes to something I truly love, I can muster a drive that matches anyone’s!

Chen Feng, too, was shocked by the intense, high-intensity work ethic the Fatty showed these past days. He sighed, “No wonder you’re not cut out for managing an enterprise. Maybe sometimes you yourself don’t realize just how much you love singing. When someone is standing in a position they have neither talent nor passion for, bearing such heavy responsibilities, no matter how hard they try, it might all be for nothing in the end.”

Ou Junlang looked baffled. “Master, what did you say?”

“Nothing. Off you go now. Get some proper rest first. You don’t start practicing the song until tomorrow. Look at the state of you, even your pants are looking baggy. Please, go buy yourself a decent-fitting outfit. Don’t disgrace yourself as a rich second generation. Look at those heirs of billionaires in Europe and America; each one is handsomer than the last. Now look at your own dad – almost dashing enough to be a ladies’ man. How could you, his son, squander the good looks he gave you like this? Don’t you feel any shame?”

Ou Junlang was so verbally assaulted that he covered his face and wept, scurrying away in a fluster.

I’m a rich kid, but what’s wrong with being down-to-earth?

Look at the flesh on my face! How cute! How approachable!

Is there a master out there who tramples on their disciple’s dignity like this?

After seeing the Fatty off, Chen Feng headed to the company’s newly set-up recording studio. There, he put on a pair of studio headphones along with a highly-paid music producer they’d headhunted from outside, and listened to Qin Lu practicing her song.

Qin Lu got her chance partly because she kept joking about wanting to give Chen Feng a child, and partly because she publicly defended him at a critical moment. She earned it through her own effort, persistence, and flattery.

But one couldn’t deny that Qin Lu’s talent was quite good to begin with. Otherwise, Chen Feng wouldn’t have initially agreed to let her sing his draft versions.

Yet, nepotism aside, Chen Feng had extremely strict standards for the quality of the songs. His demands were almost unreasonably picky.

He couldn’t be blamed for being overly strict. Having the original versions etched in his mind, the difference between good and bad was immediately and painfully clear.

Ever since Chen Feng entered the studio, the high-profile music producer found himself unable to divert a small part of his attention away from Chen Feng.

This producer wasn’t famous for his songwriting ability. His expertise lay in grasping the creator’s concept and helping singers repeatedly fine-tune their vocals and pronunciation. His sense of pitch and rhythm ranked near the top in the industry.

Now, this producer was curious: just how capable was Teacher Chen Feng, hailed as a uniquely original creative genius unseen in decades?

“Ah, excuse me, could you go in and have Qin Lu sing all ten songs through? It’s been three days now. As a professional singer, she should roughly be able to manage them, right?”

Chen Feng gestured to the producer. The company had recently hired so many new people that Chen Feng hadn’t had time to get to know everyone individually. So, he couldn’t even remember many people’s names.

The producer felt slightly aggrieved. He was a notable figure, after all, perhaps not as big as Chen Feng, but he still deserved to be called by his name.

Grudges aside, though – the pay was substantial. The producer obediently got up.

But he couldn’t help retorting, “Although she’s practiced each song generally, Teacher Chen, if you intend to guide her through practice, shouldn’t we take it one song at a time? Ten is too many. You probably won’t be able to listen to each one carefully either.”

Chen Feng shook his head. “Just do as I say. Oh, and don’t tell her I’m listening in either. I don’t want her getting nervous.”

“Alright then, Teacher Chen,” the producer replied, deliberately stressing the word “Teacher.”

Chen Feng could empathize with his resentment. To a normal person, his demands might indeed seem unreasonable. Even the strongest producer couldn’t meticulously fine-tune ten songs in one go for someone.

But Chen Feng wouldn’t explain. It’d be a waste of breath. Time was far too precious.

An hour later, Qin Lu walked out. Surprised to see Chen Feng, she gasped, “Ah! Teacher, when did you get here?”

She had started calling Chen Feng “Teacher” directly. It felt closer than others while still keeping it respectful.

Chen Feng sat on his chair, face stern, fingers interlocked. “Your progress is far too slow. I’m very dissatisfied.”

When he decided to accept Qin Lu, aside from their personal connection, Chen Feng valued her talent.

Her mezzo-soprano voice was distinctive, yet her vocals could also handle higher pitches and moments requiring power when needed. Moreover, her fidelity to the song was excellent, making her a perfect vessel to transform Chen Feng’s transplanted songs into finished products.

Chen Feng intended to grant her a lifetime of prosperity. Naturally, he demanded the highest standards from her.

Qin Lu nervously flinched. Beside her, the other producer remained expressionless.

Chen Feng asked, “Do you have a recording device?”

The producer answered, “Yes.”

“Good. Record every single word I say from now on. Qin Lu, you can chew on it slowly later. I am only going to personally guide you through this once. Whether you soar like a dragon or return empty-handed depends entirely on how hard you work next.”

Having said that, Chen Feng took a deep breath and began explaining, at a breathtaking pace, word for word, sentence by sentence.

“For the first line, you started your pitch too high. The emotion at the start is very calm, like a creek gently winding through a forest, giving a feeling of serenity in an orchid-filled valley. So, you need to hold your breath a bit longer here. You can’t cut off your trailing notes so abruptly; hold in the sound of that guzheng (Chinese zither) underneath…”

“Here, your articulation was slightly unclear. While singing, you need to withdraw the breath slightly…”

“For this line, the usual way to handle the trailing note is with a fast release, a quick pulling back of the sound, and lowering the key. But you shouldn’t handle it like that here…”

About an hour later, Chen Feng finally released a small sigh and stood up. “Alright, I’ll stop here. Next time, I want to hear the final master recording directly.”

He didn’t say anything more and left swiftly.

Inside the recording studio, Qin Lu and the producer exchanged a silent look.

Qin Lu was fine; she was deep in self-reflection. But the producer felt like his entire career’s worth of learning had been reduced to zero.

On the path of art, they say there’s never a highest peak. After climbing one mountain, a taller one always comes into view. Yet, he felt that Chen Feng’s height had already reached a point he couldn’t comprehend.

No wonder Chen Feng, after bursting onto the scene, hadn’t shown any signs of fading. His personal influence within the music industry kept skyrocketing like a rocket.

What terrifyingly sharp instincts! What unbelievable memory! And that frightening musical intuition and professional skill! So powerful!

Having dealt with that matter, Chen Feng immediately rushed back to his own office. He started organizing the plot outlines for those big-selling sci-fi films from the early 21st Century that he’d seen in the millennium future on his last trip.

His memory was exceptionally strong. Sadly, the database didn’t hold complete scripts. He had to manually piece the plots back together himself.

He could recall every scene, every visual sequence. But translating those plots and visuals back onto paper belonged to another specialized field: screenwriting.

In the previous future timeline, he had witnessed how his old self had stubbornly charged ahead only to meet a disastrous Waterloo. This time, Chen Feng didn’t plan to personally attend to every little detail.

He would hand over the plot outlines and have Meng Xiaozhou hire professionals to continuously polish the scripts. Finally, he himself would revise the final drafts once or twice.

Later, when filming actually started, he planned to show up on set periodically to personally oversee things, strictly enforcing his vision, striving to restore those future blockbusters as faithfully as possible.

Sadly, all these tasks couldn’t possibly be completed within a month. Chen Feng only planned to get the preliminary work done, note it down, write it into a strategy plan that must be implemented, and leave it for this timeline’s future self to open and execute later.

The next time he traveled a thousand years into the future, he would naturally see whether the results were good or bad.

Writing was really torturous. Just moving the summaries of a few sci-fi films took him nearly half a month, deleting and revising, striving for precision. The finished moved works had to be faithful, expressive, and elegant, to avoid being too far from the level he wanted when later generations perfected the full scripts.

After that, Chen Feng began his second round of high-speed, shamelessly crazy creation.

In four days, he wrote nearly thirty songs.

A gush was not enough to describe his state; it was a volcanic eruption.

The classic songs he brought out this time not only included many popular Chinese and English hits from 2000 to 2050, but he also tentatively took out several new-style masterpieces from 2050 to 2100.

Adding the four late-21st-century famous songs he previously slipped into Ou Junlang’s second album, he allowed a total of ten songs that should have appeared before the world fifty years later to be born early today.

He acted more and more recklessly.

Chen Feng already knew his actions were brewing a Renaissance, so he might as well brew a big one, even fiercer.

He wanted this Renaissance to erupt more violently.

The influence of the Renaissance was not limited to the arts circle; it was just named so because it began there.

The essence of the Renaissance was actually a surge of thought, ultimately triggering a domino effect of ideological and cultural movement.

What it shook was thought, the change in thinking of everyone bathed in the tide of revival.

It was the rapid explosion of creativity in the art world in a short time, eventually driving all industries and disciplines forward comprehensively.

Art was infectious.

This infection touched all aspects, making people’s spiritual attributes stronger.

As the revival trend gradually emerged, people were easily influenced by higher-quality artworks, developing an involuntary desire to refine their own lives and this era to perfection.

What the Renaissance aimed to awaken was people’s spirit of enterprise, creativity, and a quest for knowledge that respected science and reality more.

From a historical perspective, the Renaissance was the Universe’s gift to Human Civilization.

Viewing the entire Civilization as an individual cultivator, the Renaissance was the rare moment of enlightenment in that cultivator’s life.

In this era, with the increasing prevalence of the information society, too much redundant information filled people’s lives, occupying their precious time.

Soap operas, low-quality variety shows, poorly made bad films that only satisfied sensory stimulation, deliberately packaged idol personas…

Under the guise of entertainment, these things were constantly harming people’s lives.

A celebrity forgetting toilet paper in the restroom could be bought onto trending searches, make headlines, and appear on many ordinary people’s Weibo.

Every second someone spent looking at such useless information added more poison to human progress.

It was like a slow-acting poison; when the toxicity deepened, it held back the pace of Civilization.

Humanity had been moving forward under a heavy burden. This weight came not only from confrontation with nature, nor only from war and disease, but also from these toxic pieces of information created by some people for profit, disregarding conscience.

Because of the flood of this junk information, in the 21st Century today, humanity no longer had the soil for another Renaissance.

Bad money drives out good. Too many originally talented artists died before fully budding due to the creators’ own poverty.

People always had to make a living.

Painters became house painters.

Writers became joke-tellers and self-media array members.

Musicians became scissorshands focused on plagiarism.

Everything had accumulated beyond remedy, hopeless.

If there were no other interfering factors, perhaps it would take several hundred years for humanity to wake from this delusional, toxic beautiful dream, and feel heartache, regret, gritted teeth, and extreme disdain for the “ancients” who wasted their time centuries ago.

Fortunately, this era had Chen Feng.

He hadn’t thought this much before, but now he had to.

So he did it himself.

He would use his shameless plagiarism that went against conscience and morals to expose all the pseudo-celebrities and pseudo-artists who wasted time, hiding behind false personas.

He would force everyone to keep up with his pace and rhythm.

From now on, your good days of not working hard to create and improve, thinking you could buy trending searches with any random song, or stay popular by doing anything trivial, were over!

He, single-handedly, would forcefully create a non-existent, free Renaissance for humanity, starting from music.

A thousand years later, when people recalled the ancients, they might still laugh at the backward technology of the early 21st Century, but only classic artworks would be eternal.

They would deeply realize how pinnacle the artistic achievements of the ancients a thousand years ago were, and how they left precious spiritual wealth for posterity.

After copying his own songs, Chen Feng selected one and sent it to Lu Wei.

Lu Wei replied, “What a coincidence, Zhong Lei is here teaching me to sing a new song she just finished, and you sent one too. Today is doubly lucky for me. Do you want to come over?”

Chen Feng replied, “You two go ahead first. You can look at mine later.”

He wiped sweat from his forehead.

I’m a bit tired.

I’ll rest a moment.