Another year, another frost.
"Xiao Chu, got time to swing by and do a cameo?" The call was from Wang Anyi.
A cameo means lending your popularity to help a film's box office. Depending on the lines, there's a paycheck. One of the more famous rumors on Earth was a certain five-minute cameo in Avengers 3 where Scarlett supposedly pocketed a ridiculous fee. Who knows if that's true. There's also the "friendship cameo," no pay, you just help a friend. Coming from Director Wang Anyi, Chu Zhi automatically treated it as a friendship cameo.
"When exactly?" Chu Zhi asked.
He had to fly to Qatar on the 19th next month, and there were gigs at the end of the month too. Even if he wanted to agree on the spot, he had to consider Niu Jiangxue and the team. They'd already reshuffled everything once to block out time for Retracing the Long March. Asking for another overhaul would crush the schedule.
"I've got a few commitments I really can't move," he added.
"I get it," Wang Anyi said. "We'll be shooting near the end of October. Anytime on or after the twenty-fifth is fine. Come to the set in Jinling, we'll finish in a day. It's only a few scenes."
"No problem. I'll call ahead before I come," Chu Zhi said.
If the timing's flexible, it's just stealing an hour out of a packed day, like when he records voice work at home.
A little later, Wang Anyi sent the script. The role was "schizophrenia," basically a living backdrop. About three minutes of screen time, not many lines, nothing crucial. The protagonist feels the world's driven him mad, then runs into this person. They don't speak, and even "his" appearance doesn't stir the lead's emotions.
It sounded kind of useless on paper, but Wang Anyi wanted to show the flow of people. A big-name director has her own sense of composition and story rhythm. Chu Zhi read it, and that was that. He wasn't about to give notes.
"This is great. Playing schizophrenia's right up my alley. I've got [Sick-Note] anyway," he said. He'd test it in advance, get the feel.
He silently invoked the [Sick-Note] epic title, set it to schizophrenia, moderate. Last time he tried severe depression, he nearly couldn't take it, so he wasn't looking to die today.
Instantly, a sound grew in his ears, like tiny bells and a low-flying plane, the two braided together. It was faint, tiny, but dead on. No, more accurate to say the sound was growing inside his ears.
"…?"
He looked around by reflex, but there wasn't a source. The room was quiet. He realized it must be auditory hallucinations, a classic symptom.
Annoying, sure, but still within tolerance. He exhaled and tried to shift his focus. He logged into his Bilibili alt. He followed tons of craft makers. Besides watching people praise him, he loved the food and DIY sections.
The uploader was restoring a mid-Tang dragon-scale binding. It needed machine-level precision. The uploader's hands didn't shake at all. Absolute unit.
Chu Zhi typed in the chat: [My hands were born to make up the numbers.]
The moment he hit send, he froze. Why'd he type that?
Normally he'd just spam 6666. Since when did he roast his own hands as useless?
"Something was off." That brief thought stream had felt wrong.
Like something had hijacked his brain. The buzzing kept scraping his thoughts out of line.
"Don't try to fool me with fake signals," he told himself.
Was the system nudging his mind? He wondered. Then his brain leaped even further…
[Simulated illness is damaging host cognition. System shutting down automatically.] The system popped up.
The next second, his head spun like he'd turned in place three hundred times. He pressed his fingers to his brow and breathed through it.
He remembered every thought he'd just had, yet it didn't feel like him. Why had he jumped to baseless suspicion? Now that he was clear again, he couldn't even understand himself from two minutes ago.
He'd never understood schizophrenia before. Now he did. There are degrees to it, and the line's how much it breaks your ability to function.
You can't "don't overthink it" your way out. It's not the cool genius disease. It's not cool at all.
You don't walk out of it with willpower. Think about John Nash, Nobel in Economics, smart enough? When he was sick, he believed he got messages from aliens, or coded letters from foreign governments.
When he was better later on, a reporter asked, "You're so smart. Why would you believe aliens were sending you messages? Doesn't that sound absurd?" Nash answered, "Perceptions of the supernatural are like mathematical insight. They arrive without reason or warning."
That hit the nail on the head. It was exactly like the suspicion that had just bloomed in his mind. First reaction, schizophrenia's terrifying.
Second, how desperate must patients feel, and how impossible is it for outsiders to understand.
"System, would using [Sick-Note] any longer have hurt me?" he asked.
[Severe schizophrenia can lead to psychiatric disability and has some heritability. The epic title [Sick-Note] can withdraw a condition at any time and won't physically harm the host.] The system answered.
He got it. The real danger wasn't physical. It was not realizing the thoughts came from schizophrenia. If the system bro hadn't yanked the plug just now…
"I didn't show enough respect," he said. "Thanks, bro. You saved my life again."
The system stayed humble and silent.
Still rattled and sweating, he took a cold shower. Lying in bed, he couldn't get comfortable. He asked the system if that had really only been moderate. The system confirmed it.
A thought rose in his head anyway. He wanted to know what someone with severe schizophrenia actually saw. He wasn't going to play chicken with his life though. He asked his unrelated-by-blood twin, the system, to watch him. If anything went wrong, yank it.
He flipped the switch.
To be polite, it was like opening the door to a new world. To be honest, it was like stepping into hell.
A chair sprouted a lump of shadow, like a cup overflowing with some unknown liquid, and inside the blackness, there seemed to be a set of razor-sharp features.
Calling facial features "sharp" felt weird, but it fit. The faint noise in his ears turned into a crowd of whispers.
"Your mom's still in the nursing home while you feast," "Oh? You've thought she was a burden for a long time…" The voices hissed in a dozen throats. He couldn't make out every word, only the mockery and spite.
People think schizophrenia looks "crazy" because patients see things others can't. Hallucinations and voices don't just scare you, they drag you into another world.
He endured twenty minutes, then needed two hours to come back. It was late, and the mental fatigue stacked. He owed today's practice. Even a machine like him, rain or shine, had to rest. It said enough about what patients shoulder.
He did gain something. When he showed up for that cameo in two weeks, he'd turn in a performance people would remember after just a few minutes. And now that he knew what this illness felt like, he wanted to donate. He looked it up and found the country had already gotten there first. Long-acting injectables were covered by national insurance.
"Whew… good," he said, and went to sleep.
There's no sunlight at night.
There's no moonlight at dawn.
So don't sunbathe at midnight or moon-gaze at noon. Don't waste your effort.
He and Niu Jiangxue just missed each other. She flew to Qiantang City. He pinged her on WeChat about taking a one-day cameo in Wang Anyi's new film, gave the who, what, when in a few lines.
[The 29th works. I checked the calendar. You've got an event in Jinling on the 28th, so you can shoot the next day.]
[One small thing, you might wrap late on the 28th.]
About ten minutes later, Niu Jiangxue sent two replies.
It was a special moment on the calendar, so he did a quick rundown.
In this parallel world's delayed schedule, the World Cup kicks off November 21, 2023.
Qatar's promo machine had been grinding for years, ever since they won the bid. Everything from big to small was moving. People ask how they spent over a hundred billion dollars on the Olympics, it's the same logic. Seven new mega-stadiums, including the seven-hundred-million-dollar Lusail Stadium, airport expansion, and a blizzard of supporting projects.
On October 25, the World Cup promo video went up on YouTube and across the web.
Chu Zhi's single from two years ago rode the World Cup wave straight back into the stratosphere. "We Will Rock You" hit the top ten on multiple SPO national charts.
At Fuji Outdoor Rock Festival, director Hojo Koshi stared at the dashboard this morning as live sales of "We Will Rock You" spiked like crazy, even surpassing this year's live bundle. Weird phenomenon.
"This song should've been the final apostle already, it should've wiped every other 'apostle' off the map." Hojo Koshi wasn't even surprised. He felt the track that won the festival's first ever "full-arena participation" achievement should've gone global long ago.
It only didn't blow up because there wasn't a single release. Now the live version's out and traffic's feeding it back, that's way too normal.
Today felt special for another reason too. The national delegation for the Saint Petersburg International Cultural Forum was heading to Russia.
When Ma Qi received the invitation letter from the forum's culture group, he stood there half-dazed and half-delighted. He thought, my sparkle finally got noticed, and fired off a reply to accept.
He reached Saint Petersburg and soon linked up with the national team. It's better to move with the main group overseas anyway. He chatted with the country's human subwoofers, the bel canto singers.
"It's pretty easy to analyze. The Saint Petersburg International Cultural Forum is the biggest window for Aurora's culture. It outranks the Moscow Film Festival by a full tier. So people who can even submit nominations are few."
"Directors and writers aren't part of this, and cross field nominations aren't on the table. On our side, music only has three members in the Nominators Culture Group, Li Weiwen, Dang Kai, and Chu Zhi."
"Li Weiwen and Dang Kai put forward two young vocalists. So, little Ma, you were probably nominated by Teacher Chu."
Through the chat, lyric baritone Lin Anqian, the human analyzer, pieced the situation together.
"If you ask me, Teacher Chu's absolutely a young prodigy. Li Weiwen and Dang Kai, the former's the soul of domestic bel canto, the latter served as principal at the Moscow Choir. Only Teacher Chu…" Lin Anqian held back for a long beat, then found the phrasing, "he's powerful in a way that's inventive."
Everyone nodded. The other singers chimed in one by one.
"Teacher Chu's first turn with 'Opera 2' shocked everyone. Aurora's own news agency and a bunch of major papers abroad reported on it."
Tenor Shan Ting said, "He was riding the wind. The audience was in his pocket."
The vocal group leader that year was Li Weiwen, the same "uncle Li" who gets lost, the one Chu Zhi teased with, "Uncle Li, you don't want your fans to know you can't navigate, right." Shan Ting's his old friend, and he painted the stage picture for him.
"The second time he came, he sang 'Katyusha'." Shan Ting spread his hands. In that country, that song's status says everything.
"If I remember right, Teacher Chu's the youngest person in the cultural group for the entire Saint Petersburg forum."
"'Katyusha' is a dimensionality reduction strike on that stage," Ma Qi said. "Teacher Chu's technique is strong."
He didn't say the back half out loud. I'm not weak either.
He wasn't trying to butt heads with "Katyusha." There are lines you shouldn't cross. Still, he had confidence. A human bass cannon firing at the Saint Petersburg Philharmonia, a full power show like "Opera 2," he believed he could stun the hall.
They drifted to other topics, like pop. The bel canto crew was unusually unified, probably because most of them were forty five and up.
"Not many good songs these past two years."
"Not a lot. I overheard my granddaughter's playlist a month ago. Hard to love."
"I know Lin Xia. His huge with the young crowd. Some lyrics of his curry a bit too much favor."
"If we look at the market, is it because physical albums don't sell, so no sales means no money, so making music becomes paying out of pocket, so everyone aims to finish albums fast and cheap."
"Hahaha, Lao Xiao, you don't know how much they earn. I feel a lot of indie kids make decent stuff."
…
Even though Ma Qi's low register sounded premium, he was still a pop singer, and the age gap meant there was a wall. He couldn't jump into the elders' group chat.
Listening in, he realized something else. None of the elders placed Chu Zhi under pop singer. They called him a vocalist. That stunned him. In society, changing how people label you is brutal.
It's like an actor stacking acclaimed films, yet people still reflexively call him an idol kid. Chu Zhi debuted only a few years ago. How'd he flip the label so fast?
After lunch at the hotel, he walked the nearby sights to digest and calm his nerves. He was performing tomorrow. He'd sung a thousand gigs, but the first time on an international stage, your heart's allowed to wobble.
On the day, he arrived at the Saint Petersburg Philharmonia with his fighting spirit up. The lineup was as heavyweight as ever. Reporters from major wire services sat in the press pen. A German soprano, an Italian dramatic baritone, a famous Aurora folk diva. When the "Lakmé" coloratura unleashed a torrent of fireworks, Ma Qi's scalp tingled. The pressure rolled in.
You don't get the forum's gold content from news clippings. You only feel it when you're here.
Honestly, it's obvious. If you're invited, you're a national team pick. Young singers come to learn.
He tried to comfort himself. He had a unique bass. Then the slot right before him turned out to be Aurora's own basso, singing the folk classic "Song of the Volga Boatmen." That song sits at the peak of Russian folk music. Not a single accusatory word, yet its plain lyrics and melody sketch a time that squeezed laborers dry. The singer's tone was rich and heavy, like a skiff drifting on the river while stones slid into its hold, slow and steady, until the boat slipped under without a sound.
Mom, that bass was more bass than the human bass cannon. His cannonballs were in danger of sinking.
He took a long breath and pulled up the courage to burn the boats. East wind blows, war drums thunder, who would he fear besides his cousin.
Courage's great, it's just not a cheat. His performance didn't go super saiyan. He knew it. He wasn't as good as many nights back home.
Applause still came from the floor. Dreams are plush, reality's bony. The gap was too wide. He walked off in a daze.
"You did well. The first phrase shook a little, but you corrected right away. Solid show." Shan Ting saw the slump on him and came to steady him.
"Teacher Shan," Ma Qi looked up, "were the lineups this stacked in Teacher Chu's two years too?"
"In terms of vocal rosters, yeah, about the same," Shan Ting said. "They invite principals from the top national choirs."
"Then how did Teacher Chu stun the room like that?" Only after stepping out there did he understand how impossible the task felt.
"Flash the technique," Shan Ting said. "In front of that many pros, you've got to dazzle so hard they can't help being shocked."
…
Late October, the day before Chu Zhi would head to the Abnormal Is Normal set.
"I didn't expect you to ask Xiao Chu over. Didn't you look down on his acting?" Zhao Yusheng asked.
Wang Anyi said, "I don't look down on him. I'm just being honest. His script sense isn't nimble yet. Acting takes grind and gift. If you compare to Xiao Li and Xiao He, he's far behind. Xiao Chu doesn't have much aura."
Zhao Yusheng rolled his eyes again. The "Xiao He" and "Xiao Li" in that mouth are what, exactly? The first is from a Peking Opera family, got a Hundred Flowers Best Actor nomination at thirteen, youngest Best Actor nominee ever. The second clawed his way from extra to Best Actor, the kind of life you could write a novel about. Holding those two up as benchmarks, isn't that bullying.
Then Wang Anyi turned the corner. "But as a person, Xiao Chu's first class."
"That's true. He messaged me before he even arrived, said long time no see, let's have dinner after his scenes tomorrow," Zhao Yusheng nodded.
Big directors tend to work with the same crew, so the cast and team of Abnormal Is Normal was basically the same group Chu Zhi worked with on Shiyi Lang. He'd sent pings to everyone he knew, Director Wang included.
Fair's fair, if he hadn't invited Director Wang to dinner, Zhao Yusheng's line would've been a little awkward.
===
"Song of the Volga Boatmen" — how to read: Vol-ga Boat-men. Russian folk song, often arranged by composers like Glazunov or Balakirev for concert use.