Chapter Sixty-Nine: In the Name of the Father

The family stayed in the capital until the second day of the New Year before returning to Shanghai, even though their tickets were originally booked for the fifth. Although Su Changhe didn’t say anything, it was obvious that he hadn’t enjoyed himself in the capital either.

Cheng Xiaoyu didn’t need to ask to know it was probably because of him. Before leaving, he met with Wang Dongliang one more time. Because of the New Year holidays, Wang Dongliang hadn’t managed to find much valuable information about the Alumni Network. He had, however, subtly probed a senior executive at Thin Fox Net about their plans for the site. Lately, the Alumni Network had frequent login issues, and there were rumors that Thin Fox Net would shut it down completely.

That executive didn’t shy away from discussing the Alumni Network’s situation—everyone in the circle was aware of it—but didn’t say much to Wang Dongliang, only that discussions were underway. The project might be cut, but the situation was complicated, and the final outcome was hard to predict.

When Cheng Xiaoyu and Wang Dongliang parted, he handed over a black bag containing two hundred thousand yuan in cash, pressing it into Wang Dongliang’s hands. Wang Dongliang nervously tried to refuse for a long time, but Cheng Xiaoyu simply left it and walked away, so Wang Dongliang had no choice but to accept it.

As for why Cheng Xiaoyu didn’t transfer the money electronically and instead withdrew it as cash, it was because he knew well that two hundred thousand in an account was just a number, but stacks of banknotes made a far stronger impression.

At the time, Wang Dongliang didn’t know how much was in the bag. When he opened it in the car and counted, it was indeed two hundred thousand, which astonished him. Although the company’s Audi hadn’t been repaired yet, he wouldn’t have to pay for the repairs himself. In other words, although Wang Dongliang had been somewhat startled, he had gained two hundred thousand.

After thinking it over, Wang Dongliang still felt uneasy. Moreover, he considered knowing someone like Cheng Xiaoyu an honor and didn’t want to make their relationship too transactional. He suspected that money from someone like Cheng Xiaoyu would not be so easy to accept. So he called Cheng Xiaoyu, hoping to return the money.

Cheng Xiaoyu, however, spoke to him with heart and sincerity, which moved Wang Dongliang. Chinese scholars have always had the idea of “mastering the arts to serve the emperor,” and for the first time, Cheng Xiaoyu’s inherited air of aristocratic recklessness won him greater loyalty and trust from Wang Dongliang.

Once again, Wang Dongliang tried to persuade Cheng Xiaoyu not to waste money buying the Alumni Network. Cheng Xiaoyu had already decided how to answer and naturally couldn’t tell the truth now. He explained that he was working on a project, a website jointly sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and the National Publicity Department. Cheng Xiaoyu wanted to acquire the campus network, repackage it, and then “hand it over to the state” under certain conditions.

Now Wang Dongliang understood; only someone with connections like Cheng Xiaoyu could pull off such a thing—ordinary people wouldn’t even dare dream of it. Wang Dongliang immediately promised to try his best to negotiate for the Alumni Network on Cheng Xiaoyu’s behalf.

Cheng Xiaoyu, in turn, promised that if the matter succeeded, he would reward Wang Dongliang handsomely, and asked him to stay in close contact.

Back in Shanghai, Aunt Zhou cashed the three-million-yuan check Zheng Jun had given Su Weilan as compensation and transferred the money to Cheng Xiaoyu’s account, telling him that if he didn’t do well on the college entrance exam, he’d have to buy his own car.

Aunt Zhou had always had a detached attitude toward money. Though she lived a material life, she believed that if you have money, you live one way, and if you don’t, you live another. She didn’t envy others’ luxury, nor did she refuse what she could afford.

She was also fairly at ease with Cheng Xiaoyu. Although he’d gotten into serious trouble twice, he was otherwise well-behaved apart from his mediocre grades. He never caused minor issues or wasted money—he’d barely used his fifty-thousand-yuan credit card limit. Moreover, his grades had improved rapidly after the last term. So Aunt Zhou handed the money over without worry, always believing that a boy should control money, not be seduced or enslaved by it.

These days, apart from practicing the piano, Cheng Xiaoyu was holed up in his music studio.

He had painstakingly recorded a song, “Sunny Day.” Since he was working alone, he had to set up the mixer outside, then record each instrument track one by one, followed by the vocal track. Recording each instrument track alone took a lot of time, but he believed that as he became more adept at the process, he would speed up.

After recording all the tracks, he entered the complex post-production stage—adjusting the sound (pitch, rhythm, etc.), applying effects, and mixing the tracks. For instruments he couldn’t play but the music required, he used a synthesizer.

For this rendition of “Sunny Day,” Cheng Xiaoyu did not use the original rock arrangement by Jay Chieh-lun but instead drew inspiration from Guan Shimin and Liu Ruiqi’s versions, using the piano as the main melody. This gave the song a profoundly moving power.

“Sunny Day” had accompanied Cheng Xiaoyu through the golden years of his student life. He imagined that most of his peers, upon hearing this song, would think of their own school days, their secret crushes, youthful innocence, pure eternity, and the bittersweet pangs of first love.

The opening of “Sunny Day” was stunning: three chords repeated and woven into a melody of genius, and when the singing began, it was even more dazzling.

Time flies; life is short. Cheng Xiaoyu always felt that every stage of life was strung together by symbolic things, and “Sunny Day” was one of the most important symbols of his adolescence.

In his previous life, Cheng Xiaoyu had sung “Sunny Day” in full to express his first love and had an almost obsessive fondness for the song. So he recorded another version, using Jay Chieh-lun’s original arrangement, taking it as practice to hone his recording and post-production skills.

After the New Year, back in Shanghai, Cheng Xiaoyu recorded “In the Name of the Father.” The song’s prelude, including the violin and Italian soprano coloratura, could only be accomplished through a synthesizer. (There’s no need for a lesson on vocal synthesizers here; everyone knows Hatsune Miku, for example. Their advantage is that years of vocal training by real singers become meaningless—there are no limitations in range or breath, no issues with pitch or rhythm. The disadvantage is that, due to technical limits, the virtual singers’ voices can sound stiff and lack subtle emotional variation, leading many people to reject this kind of music and prejudge it as a flaw in the music itself.)

Although the effect of the vocal synthesizer wasn’t as good as a real studio-recorded voice, after Cheng Xiaoyu’s painstaking refinement, the final mixed song had a distinctive, dreamlike mechanical feel that gave it a unique charm.

“In the Name of the Father” had always been, for Cheng Xiaoyu, a masterpiece in the Western classical style, and he even considered it Jay Chieh-lun’s musical pinnacle—a height he might never surpass in his life.

When working on this song, since the arrangement was already perfect, Cheng Xiaoyu used the original orchestration without hesitation.

To achieve a faithful reproduction, he racked his brains. The prelude’s background sounds—prayers, gunshots—were meant to set the atmosphere. The overture opened with an exaggerated Italian opera feel.

To get the Italian prayer and operatic opening, Cheng Xiaoyu scoured Shanghai for Italian priests and opera singers. Unfortunately, while he could find teachers, coloratura sopranos who could sing Italian opera were extremely rare. He had no choice but to use a vocal synthesizer. As for the Italian Bible monologue, Cheng Xiaoyu visited every church in Shanghai and finally found an Italian priest, whom he persuaded to record the original Italian prayer in exchange for attending a service.

The verses used straightforward rap; the chorus was also simple and concise, intentionally discarding the sweeping melodic rises and falls of pop songs, setting a gloomy, mocking, dark tone for the piece.

Fortunately, the song wasn’t vocally difficult—its challenge lay in the arrangement and recording.

Cheng Xiaoyu put his all into the rap, spending a lot of time practicing and making countless detailed adjustments in post-production.

When the recording and mixing were finished, Cheng Xiaoyu was quite satisfied.

“In the Name of the Father” was less a song than a movie composed entirely in sound. The composition had no obvious chorus; the looping, somber melody underpinned the rap. Whether it was the piano solo, the bel canto, the prayers in the prelude, or the gunshots, it all felt like scenes and scores from a film.

The section where the piano solo was combined with female bel canto vocals used a style reminiscent of “John Woo and flying doves”—juxtaposing stillness and motion to create a cinematic sense of imagery. What one could only experience in movies was now palpable in a song.

Back in the day, some said that Jay Chieh-lun’s “In the Name of the Father” was a whole era ahead of its time in terms of composition and arrangement. Today, Cheng Xiaoyu wanted to use this legendary song to open a brand-new door for the era’s pop music.

After recording “In the Name of the Father,” Cheng Xiaoyu felt his post-production and studio recording skills had reached a new level. The next song, “Class 2, Grade 3,” took him hardly any effort.

After completing the three songs, Cheng Xiaoyu logged onto MusicNet, opened his a’sposon account, and uploaded four tracks he had finished recording—including two versions of “Sunny Day.”

After uploading, he scrolled through page after page of copyright agreements and dispute resolutions, dizzy from the fine print but knowing he had to read carefully. The copyright belonged to the creator, but MusicNet had exclusive streaming rights. The creator set the download and streaming fees.

MusicNet split the revenue seventy-thirty with creators, or fifty-fifty for signed artists.

Once the music was set up, a cloud server would scan the melody against the music library for copyright issues, flagging suspicious tracks for manual review.

If there were no copyright problems, the song would appear on the MusicNet artist charts within one business day.

There were also detailed explanations of the chart rules, but Cheng Xiaoyu didn’t study them closely.

When he set the download and streaming prices, he was already feeling mentally exhausted and didn’t bother to check the rules for new artists on the charts or devise any elaborate promotion strategy. He disabled downloads and set the streaming price at 0.5 yuan.

He knew that free streaming was the best way for a newcomer to attract listeners, but he felt that his idol Jay Chieh-lun’s music was good enough, and he didn’t want his own hard work to be cheapened. Believing that “good wine needs no bush,” he chose to charge, thinking that paid streaming might even draw more attention.

However, in his dizziness, he accidentally typed a comma instead of a decimal point in “0.5,” and didn’t notice before submitting the settings and closing the browser.

Unbeknownst to him, the system interpreted “0,5” as 5. Thus, the four tracks Cheng Xiaoyu had uploaded were set to stream at 5 yuan each, with downloads disabled.