Chapter 21.2: Theme Song (8)
Lai Yudong exhaled in relief, like a heavy boulder in his chest had finally rolled away.
Who would’ve thought that just two days ago, he was the one getting laughed at on stage—and now, he was being praised by the dance teacher?
Don’t be fooled just because F-class was the lowest-ranked group. It might not seem like much to be in the top tier within F-Class, but considering it made up nearly half of all the trainees—and factoring in those from other classes who didn’t dance well—his theme song performance was now at a mid-tier level overall.
Suddenly, he remembered what Liang Zhisheng had said to encourage him:
‘Effort will always yield results.’
‘If you work hard today, you’ll see progress tomorrow.’
His nose tingled a little.
It had been a long time since someone’s praise had made him this happy.
…And then, just a few seconds into his joy, Cao Yan followed up with an unexpected jab:
“But your movements are still too stiff.”
Lai Yudong: “……”
Apologies—please allow him to go deaf for three seconds.
…
If Lai Yudong still held a sliver of confidence when it came to dance class, then vocal class filled him with nothing but anxious uncertainty toward the great unknown.
Just as Xu An had guessed, he rarely ever sang with instrumental-only backing tracks. In karaoke, it was always a toss-up between the original vocal version and the guide vocal. Setting aside his jaw-droppingly tragic debut performance, his actual singing ability… was probably just so-so at best.
Listenable, sure—but if it wasn’t necessary, best not to listen.
To make matters worse, the system had mercilessly confiscated his pitch corrector—didn’t even leave him a sliver of hope.
Truly despicable. Strongly condemned.
That said, to be fair, outside of that “pushed-to-the-stage-at-gunpoint” debut situation, using an external aid really was unfair. Other trainees poured in hours of sweat and tears just to get a feel for the notes, while he was shortcutting the process—it was no different from walking into an exam with the answer key in hand.
So at most, Lai Yudong just took the opportunity to grumble about the system he’d long held a grudge against. He never seriously expected a special exemption that neither logic nor ethics would allow.
No wonder he ended up stuck with a system that was absolutely useless at everything.
Its sense of morality was probably too strong. Even if it gave him some flashy new feature that maxed out his style points, it’d likely feel guilty about it afterward.
Back to vocal class—what worried Lai Yudong was that not only might he sing poorly, he might not even be able to improve.
Compared to dancing, singing relied much more on raw talent and was far harder to fake in front of an audience.
Unless the choreography involved floor moves or flips, even someone with zero foundation could memorize the steps if they practiced them a hundred times. And if that wasn’t enough—two hundred times, five hundred times—practice long enough and you’d remember them, guaranteed.
That was exactly why Lai Yudong had improved so quickly. But the second a new routine came along, he’d be knocked right back to square one.
Singing, however, was different. Vocal tone and pitch sensitivity were innate. You could practice a song a hundred times and still not hit the right notes. If anything, you might just end up wrecking your throat.
Lai Yudong’s vocal tone was undoubtedly excellent—a double buff of professional broadcast training and naturally good vocal cords, making him a walking ASMR trap for voice lovers. The problem was that his singing was so bad, not even his great voice could save it. Even the most expensive violin could still screech like a rusty saw in the wrong hands.
This sense of frustration lingered until the 2:00 p.m. vocal class.
The vocal instructor was a woman in her early thirties. She had long, dark brown wavy hair that reached her waist, and her elegant and composed demeanor was accompanied by a gentle smile.
Some of the less-informed F-class trainees, judging by her graceful appearance, assumed she would be the complete opposite of Teacher Cao Yan, and their tense nerves instantly relaxed.
“Hello, everyone. I’m your vocal teacher, Jiang Xiaoting. You can call me ‘Teacher Jiang’ or ‘Teacher Xiaoting.’”
Her voice was just as soft and gentle as they imagined. The fragile hearts that had been shattered into pieces by Cao Yan in the morning were almost healed by this simple introduction—but the next sentence caused a faint crack in that comforting illusion.
Smiling as if it were only natural, Jiang Xiaoting asked, “You’ve all memorized the lyrics by now, right?”
“Teacher Jiang, we haven’t been given the lyrics yet,” Luo Feiran raised his hand to clarify.
Liu Qichu added, “I even went to ask, but the staff said we’d be given the lyrics during vocal class.”
A low murmur spread through the classroom—
“No wonder I saw Qu Xincheng from the dorm next door memorizing lyrics. I thought he brought a printer with him or something.”
“That’s totally unfair, isn’t it? A and B class had their vocal lessons in the morning, so they got the lyrics before us.”
“Why do they get the lyrics earlier than us? Just because they’re in higher-level classes?”
“C class has it even worse. Their vocal class is the last one—later than even ours.”
[We’re screwed. Something’s about to go down.]
[Fooled by Teacher Jiang’s appearance, huh.]
[Seriously? She was giving vocal lessons and it’s not like you weren’t in that class too.]
[Why not say you were the ones nitpicking the choreography first?]
[If you didn’t memorize the lyrics, don’t drag the rest of your teammates down with you…]
Standing on the far end, Lai Yudong quietly glanced at them, sensing danger in the air.
He had planned to observe if someone who had already memorized the lyrics would step up first so he could tag along and ride the wave. But thanks to Luo Feiran and Liu Qichu’s back-and-forth complaining, things took a turn for the worse.
Great.
Agreeing with them would be bad. Admitting he had memorized everything would also be bad.
So he decided to pretend he was a mute little sapling.
From the moment he entered the classroom, Lai Yudong had already been “spoiled” by a barrage of bullet comments—this vocal instructor wasn’t nearly as gentle as she looked. Apparently, during the morning session, she had scolded a bunch of trainees. Her strictness was said to be on par with Cao Yan’s.
But even if he hadn’t seen the spoilers, there was no way he would boldly and fearlessly claim, “I didn’t get the lyrics sheet,” in a situation like this.
Even though it was true, to a teacher, that kind of answer would only sound like an excuse—shifting the blame. It would’ve been better to just admit he didn’t memorize it.
And sure enough, faced with the growing number of complaints, Jiang Xiaoting calmly asked:
“So, what you’re saying is… you didn’t memorize it?”
“……”
No one dared respond.
At this point, even the slowest person should have realized—this was bad.
“Before the official class started, I asked the same question to both Class A and Class B,” Jiang Xiaoting said as she put away her smile. Her gentle voice was like snowflakes lightly brushing against the face. “Not only did no one tell me they didn’t receive the lyrics, but several of them even memorized the entire thing. So how did they manage that? Did the lyrics just magically appear in their heads?”
She went on, “You all had an extra morning compared to them, and you could even borrow the printed lyrics from them. There are more of you here than in both A and B classes combined. Logically, shouldn’t more of you have memorized the lyrics? Is memorizing really that hard? Does it require being great at dancing or singing?”
Lai Yudong stared down at the floor, pretending to count imaginary ants.
Though the atmosphere was tense, unlike in dance class, he wasn’t one of the ones getting scolded this time. He could let it go in one ear and out the other with a clear conscience.
Thank you, me from yesterday, for using even mealtime to memorize lyrics.
Jiang Xiaoting sighed. “Has anyone memorized them?”
A few seconds later, a few hands hesitantly rose from the crowd.
[Who raised their hands? I only recognized Yuzu.]
[There was also Wang Yiwen.]
[My face-blindness is kicking in.]
[That’s so few—only six people, even fewer than Class B.]
[Well, they focused their time on practicing the dance instead.]
[They practiced so many times, they probably learned it just by listening.]
[Has it occurred to anyone that maybe they just can’t keep up with the music, lol.]
Six people—that was only one-seventh of the group.
It really was quite few.
“Put your hands down,” Jiang Xiaoting said with a helpless shake of her head. “Keep it up. For those who haven’t memorized it yet, you’ll need to work harder.”
After that poor opening, the lesson officially began.
Since the class had a large number of students and limited time, it was impossible for the teacher to listen to each person sing the entire song individually, so a relay-style method was used instead.
“I’ll play the backing track in a moment. Starting from the left and going by your positions, you’ll each sing two lines in turn. Once it plays through, I’ll play it again, until everyone has had their turn,” Jiang Xiaoting explained while handing out printed lyrics. “I won’t interrupt you the first time—we’ll start by seeing how well you grasp the song as a whole.”
Singing just two lines each didn’t sound difficult, but the actual outcome could only be described with one word: disaster.
The very first person came in too early, which led the next few to also jump the cue. And that wasn’t even the worst part—the pitch fluctuated wildly, they went off-key or cracked, and some even skipped half a line, leaving a few seconds of just the instrumental with no vocals at all.
[My ears are bleeding / smiling emoji]
[I expected it to sound bad, but not this bad…]
[Is this show really worth selecting trainees for?]
[Pei Lan salvaged it, thankfully.]
[The model guy didn’t sound too bad either.]
When it was Lai Yudong’s turn, he was struck by a strange silence.
A literal silence.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to sing—it’s just that the line he was supposed to sing had absolutely nothing to do with the part of the instrumental that was playing.
Based on the rotation, his assigned lyrics should’ve been “The tiny me, chosen by you.” But someone earlier on—whether they misread the section or misjudged the timing—sang his line too early. The next person just rolled with it and sang the following line, and the next did the same.
By the time it reached him, the entire order had fallen apart.
Lai Yudong was mentally breaking down.
These people…
Had absolutely no familiarity with the song!?
[Poor Yuzu-baby, got totally screwed over.]
[What line are they on now? I can’t even tell.]
[I think they jumped a line or something.]
The despairing Lai Yudong had originally planned to just ignore the instrumental and stubbornly sing the line he was assigned. But out of the corner of his eye, he happened to catch a hint from the barrage of on-screen comments. He calmed himself and listened closely to the backing track—and to his surprise, his familiarity with the original song allowed him to pick up on the cue.
Yes, it had shifted one line forward. The current line was “Dreams are no longer fragile bubbles that burst at a touch.”
He actually figured it out!
At the same time, Jiang Xiaoting’s fingers trembled slightly as she held the lyrics sheet. The theme song, oscillating wildly between “normally bad” and “exceptionally bad,” had sent her blood pressure soaring—and just when she thought it couldn’t get worse, someone still managed to sing the wrong line even while reading the lyrics.
Worse yet, the two people after that just went with the flow, not even trying to fix the mess.
Just as she was about to break her promise and interrupt them, a soft humming aligned perfectly with the beat of “fragile bubbles.”
Jiang Xiaoting looked up at the sound. At the far end stood a light-blond-haired boy, holding an A4-sized lyric sheet with both hands, chest out, stomach tucked in, shoulders back—his long lashes hung low in concentration, and his posture was so proper he looked like he was reciting from a poetry competition script.
He took a breath and clearly sang: “Please look at me, don’t give up on me.”
His naturally cool-toned low voice gave him an edge—distinctive and magnetic. After a long string of performances, he was the first trainee whose vocal tone truly caught the ear. He embodied the lyric perfectly: Please look at him, don’t give up on him.
The rhythm was right. The lyrics were correct.
Of course, the flaws were clear too—his singing technique still needed improvement.
[Whoa—he saved it!]
[Since when did Yuzu sing so well??]
[Honestly, it was just average—like karaoke level—but that voice is something else.]
[I don’t know about his singing skills, but I do know he sings really pretty /doge]
[In a way, this was an audiovisual feast, LOL.]
Lai Yudong was so nervous it felt like his heart was about to leap out of his throat. The barrage of comments—whether amazed, praising, or dismissive—couldn’t sway his emotions. Only one thing mattered to him at that moment.
He suppressed his trembling and slowly lowered the lyric sheet, then cautiously glanced at the vocal instructor.
Jiang Xiaoting gave no extra reaction. She calmly shifted her gaze to the other end of the room—to the first person in the back row, whose turn it was next.
No reaction meant the best possible outcome.
Lai Yudong exhaled in relief, as if a weight had been lifted off his chest. That was close—he’d almost thought he wouldn’t get the chance to sing.
If the teacher had interrupted during his part—even if he’d simply been the unlucky one caught in the mess—the end result would’ve made it seem like he was the cause of the chaos. To the viewers, it would have looked like he was the one who triggered the disaster.
So in a way, it was both saving the performance and saving himself.
——————
Author’s Note:
Here’s a snippet of the current lyrics from the theme song “To The Stars” that have appeared so far. I don’t know music theory and wrote them purely by feel—hope there aren’t any mistakes!
(Verse)
The tiny me, chosen by you.
Dreams are no longer fragile bubbles that burst at a touch.
Please look at me, don’t give up on me.
Tonight, I’ll shine for you.
(Chorus)
To the stars. To the stars.
Never back down, charge toward the peak with all I’ve got.
To the stars. To the stars.
Never give up, dreams shine bright like the stars.
To the stars. To the stras.
I’m your only star.