Chapter Ninety-Two: The Tragedy on the Court (Please Subscribe)

That morning, after taking Little Treasure Yellow Peach to kindergarten, Huang Guolun returned home and then drove Bai Yao to school.

The smog outside was truly severe.

In the car, Huang Guolun made Bai Yao put on her mask at once, and he kept repeating himself over and over, telling her to stay outdoors as little as possible during the day, to remain in the classroom if she could, to speak as little as she could, to drink plenty of water, and above all not to strain her voice.

Bai Yao was the sort of student who rarely spoke even on ordinary school days, and in weather like this she became even more silent.

She understood the wisdom of saving the finest steel for the sharpest edge.

After driving to Bell Alley, Huang Guolun and Bai Yao walked toward the school, one after the other.

At Xidan Street, they ran into a morning news crew interviewing passersby.

There was a very dedicated male reporter, not wearing a mask, interviewing an elderly woman in a grave expression.

“Auntie, what effects do you think weather like this has on you?”

The old woman removed half her mask, half laughing and half crying, and said, “It has a huge effect! First of all, you ought to see clearly that I’m your uncle!”

Pfft.

Huang Guolun and Bai Yao both burst out laughing.

Neither of them liked being on camera, so they gave the interview crew a wide berth and headed straight for the school.

Whether it was because of the weather or not, that morning Huang Guolun gave music classes to the eleventh-grade students one after another, and almost every class seemed listless. Even the usually liveliest Class Five of Grade Eleven showed little enthusiasm for his lesson in music.

The most obvious example was Zhang Liang.

That boy was usually bright and boisterous even when he was singing nonsense.

But in class that day, when Zhang Liang came up to the podium to perform the required song, he was utterly dispirited, like a defeated rooster, unable to lift his head no matter what.

Later, after class, Huang Guolun ran into Bai Yao on the way to the cafeteria for lunch and asked around, only then learning why Zhang Liang was so downcast today.

It turned out the boy had run into another bit of bad luck.

The Sunday afternoon before last, their school basketball team had played a friendly match against the team from No. 4 Middle School, and lost miserably.

The high school basketball team from No. 4 Middle School was made up almost entirely of sports specialty students and was the strongest high school team in the capital.

Experimental Middle School losing to No. 4 Middle School was by no means something that should have left anyone hanging their head.

But Zhang Liang’s performance in that game had been truly disastrous.

As a basketball specialty student, Zhang Liang was a starting power forward for Experimental Middle School, and sometimes he even filled in at center.

Though a bit slow-witted, he had excellent physical gifts and was one of the team’s strongest players.

He should not have played in that game at all, since he had injured his neck.

But when he heard that the girls’ basketball team, led by Fang Yun, would be there to watch, and that the girls’ team would later play a friendly against No. 4 Middle School’s girls’ team, Zhang Liang was instantly energized. He wanted to make a good impression in front of Fang Yun, so he took off his neck brace and played while injured.

His fighting spirit was admirable, but his luck was simply terrible.

That noon he had eaten too much braised offal, and gas kept rolling in his intestines. He was full to bursting, yet could not go.

Grinding his teeth, Zhang Liang went onto the court with a belly full of filth.

He had barely been playing for long when he and No. 4 Middle School’s mixed-race Black center went up for a rebound. At the worst possible moment, the other giant swung an elbow and caught Zhang Liang right in the stomach.

With a wet pop, Zhang Liang shot diarrhea all over the court in front of everyone.

The game shorts the Experimental Middle School boys’ team wore that day were pure white.

The scene could only be described in four words: too awful to behold.

The players on the court saw a huge yellow stain spread across the back of Zhang Liang’s shorts and nearly threw up.

The students watching from the sidelines were laughing, retching, and making a grand spectacle of it all.

When Zhang Liang saw Fang Yun’s face go white as chalk on the sideline, he nearly cried.

At that moment, he would have given anything to reach into his shorts, scoop something out, taste it, and say it was bean paste...

But sadly, he never found it in himself to go that far. In the end he left in disgrace, a tragic figure beaten by a blow that had quite literally knocked the crap out of him.

After that farce, the Experimental Middle School players were deeply affected. Their minds were clouded with a psychological shadow, and they were ultimately crushed by No. 4 Middle School with a humiliating score of 79 to 38.

Worse still, the matter quickly spread through both No. 4 Middle School and Experimental Middle School.

Everyone at Experimental Middle School knew that No. 4 Middle School had a mixed-race Black center who played like a monster, and that one elbow had knocked the shit out of Zhang Liang.

Now, whenever Zhang Liang walked through the school, he could no longer lift his head. Students passing by him would secretly snicker and call him the center who had been knocked into a shit-out by a single elbow. It was a catastrophe of the highest order.

After hearing about Zhang Liang’s ordeal, Huang Guolun felt rather sorry for the boy.

He often did foolish things, but he was not bad at heart. He was, in truth, a kind-hearted student, just one who always seemed to be at odds with filth.

Some are born to love.

Some are born to wealth.

But Zhang Liang was fated to clash with shit, and clash with it he did.

This time he had finally been defeated by it, and he probably would not climb out of this slump anytime soon. His classmates would be laughing at him for a long time.

Come to think of it, Huang Guolun now possessed exceptional musical talent, and Zhang Liang owed a definite share of credit to eating shit.

Now that he saw Zhang Liang so listless, Huang Guolun thought he ought to find some way to help the boy.

To enrich the students’ cultural life, Experimental Middle School held a grand New Year’s concert every year, starring the school’s students and teachers. Every class had to put on a performance, and many teachers were required to lend their voices to the event.

This year Experimental Middle School had held an even grander fiftieth-anniversary celebration, but the New Year’s concert at the end of next month would still be held as usual.

Huang Guolun had heard that this year’s concert would be larger than ever, as a follow-up to the anniversary celebration.

The choir competition that the first-year students were about to hold was one of the preliminary events for the New Year’s concert. The class that won the choir competition would not only represent Experimental Middle School in next year’s citywide choir contest, but would also perform as the closing act at the New Year’s concert.

Huang Guolun did not have any other way to help Zhang Liang, so he figured he might as well write him a song and try to help him regain his confidence at the New Year’s concert.

Didn’t Zhang Liang always have trouble with shit? Didn’t the students at school always call him a “flying shit man”? Then perhaps he could simply write him a fiercely grand song called The Song of Shit, to sweep away the gloom and help him stride cleanly past this hurdle once and for all.

Of course, this was only a passing notion for the moment. Whether Zhang Liang would truly be made to sing that song or not would have to depend on the circumstances.

As a newly cultivated homeroom teacher whom the school regarded as a key talent, Sun Yanzhen had to attend professional training at the municipal education commission for the first three days of that week. At first she had wanted Huang Guolun to coach her class choir on his own.

But after thinking it over, she felt that the group of students in her class, led by Dongfang Liang, were far too mischievous, and Huang Guolun had never taught them before and was not familiar with them. She worried those kids might give him trouble, so in the end Sun Yanzhen did not let Huang Guolun have any private contact with the students in her class.

She would wait until she returned from training and then personally bring the class choir to receive his guidance.

That happened to give Huang Guolun three leisurely days.

He had never liked the feeling of a life stuffed full of all sorts of random clutter.

He preferred to do just one thing wholeheartedly, taking his time and savoring a gentler rhythm of life.

These few days, he devoted most of his energy to rehearsing a solo musical set with Bai Yao.

For three consecutive days, master and disciple rehearsed until late into the night, working with great diligence.

Bai Yao could stay up late and endure hardship very well. Every time, it was Huang Guolun who first reached his limit, his eyes barely able to remain open, and only then did he take the initiative to end rehearsal and let them rest.

And after Huang Guolun fell asleep, Bai Yao would lie in bed with her headphones on, continuing to listen to music; even in her dreams she would still practice singing for a while.

Her diligence advanced her practice far beyond Huang Guolun’s expectations. By midweek, Bai Yao was already able to bring out, quite well, the kind of singing effect Huang Guolun wanted.

While they rehearsed, Huang Guolun and Bai Yao also kept a constant eye on the box office performance of The Bride Who Was Already a Corpse.

What was disappointing and rather helpless was that the film had shown only a slight upward turn in ticket sales on last Sunday alone: the day Sun Yanzhen took her class on a field trip in their class uniforms to collectively advertise The Bride Who Was Already a Corpse, and also the day Huang Guolun held his solo event at the duck restaurant, where Zhao Jing enthusiastically promoted the film and gave it another wave of publicity.

Once the week turned, the small spark The Bride Who Was Already a Corpse had kindled was immediately extinguished.

In the first three days of this week, its daily box office never once exceeded one hundred thousand, and on Tuesday it even set a new post-release low of sixty thousand.

Compared with the popular new releases opening at the same time, its performance had been left in the dust, not by one block but by a hundred.

On the major video platforms, The Bride Who Was Already a Corpse could not even place in the top fifty for daily box office performance.

Such a chilly reception was like having a bucket of icy water poured over everyone who cared about the film.

The one most badly hit was none other than Huang Guokun himself, the investor and producer of the movie.

These past few days had so worried Huang Guokun that dozens of his hairs had gone white outright, and he had smoked so much his lungs were nearly ready to burst.

Every day he slept no more than three hours, racking his brains for a way to reverse the film’s decline.

Yet his heaviest punch of all — the plan to ask top traffic celebrities like Yang Mi to help promote it via social-media posts — had fallen into a dead end.

The day he received Huang Guolun’s million-yuan support, Huang Guokun immediately contacted the management teams of Yang Mi and Wu Yifan, and even asked friends in the industry to pass along the message, hoping one of their teams would take the job.

But for this kind of promotional endorsement, those celebrity teams simply looked down their noses at it.

Wu Yifan’s team shot Huang Guokun down that very day, refusing in no uncertain terms and stating that they would not take this kind of advertisement.

After weighing personal connections against the pros and cons, Yang Mi’s team also politely declined the promotional cooperation.

After that, Huang Guokun contacted the teams of several other top traffic stars, including Lu Han, hoping that someone would accept the job. He even raised the offer to the outrageous sum of one million yuan per promotional post.

But promoting an online movie carried too great a risk of losing fans, and those superstar celebrities were not short of that million yuan. In the end, without exception, they all turned Huang Guokun down.