Heavy girl? I feel worse than Black Hole Trigger!

……

“Once you understand, you’ll hate rainy days.”

"I will recall the memory hidden somewhere deep inside"

"Yeah. If that's what it is, big bubbles."

"It will be light and quiet, right?"

The rising notes made the only smile in the song disappear in the rain; the girl who was smiling because of memories a second ago was faced with sudden gloom, and her dim eyes were ethereal in the same dim light.

She lowered her eyes, as if she was suffocating under the pressure of the rain.

"Color Walk Looking Down at the Ground"

“Choose to walk in places where there is no standing water”

"And then, to avoid the difficult road"

"You'll definitely choose self-defense—"

Afterwards,

Gao Songdeng suddenly raised his head and took a deep breath.

She gripped the microphone tightly with both hands as if in prayer.

The sudden rise in volume instantly overwhelmed the notes.

“—I am now, an ordinary human!!”

"Today, tomorrow, and the days that follow!"

"That's all you need to agree on!"

"Because everyone lives at their own pace..."

The girl gritted her teeth.

The words dug out from the depths of my heart were accompanied by long pain, and evaporated bloodily under the scorching sun.

…But she still endured the pain and reached out her hand to the other girl.

"Yes! You are also an ordinary human being now!"

"I just hate that look!"

She cried out in tears—

"I can't hate you! Because you are so gentle!"

"Who are you praying for..."

Shoko Toyokawa stared at the scenery in a daze.

The long rainy night clearly separated the two of them completely, and clearly drowned each other's shouts in the sound of the rain.

She chose to turn around and leave, wanting to let the wrong encounter go to zero in the rain.

but.

It turns out that the girl did not give up.

Even if her shouts were snatched away by the howling wind, even if her outstretched hands were blocked by the rain, the girl still walked forward in the rain.

"I want to get rid of this body—"

"If there ever was, for just one moment!"

Seizing this fleeting moment, the girl screamed at her desperately.

"Then cut through the darkness of this world!"

"Let's find the meaning of 'birth' here—"

At the intersection of light and shadow, the once fragile girl twisted her body. To anyone who saw it, it looked like she was in immense pain, giving it her all, as if she would lose all her strength in the next moment, yet she persisted.

"The beginning of the end, once it begins, it's your last life!"

"At the end of a journey that has lost its direction"

"Is there a 'time' that belongs only to the present...?"

When the lights fell like rain, Xiangzi suddenly discovered.

At some point, the girl's face was already wet by the rain.

…It wasn’t drowned in the rain.

"But for some reason, it's so hard to breathe!"

...Living for the death that will come one day.

"In that case. If that's the case—"

The girl gritted her teeth, clenched her fists, and pounded her chest hard.

The sound was barely audible amidst the lingering music, but it felt as if it had created a huge wave in the lake of my heart.

"Already indestructible, indestructible... In the indestructible heart, ring the bell!"

"In this cloudy day, mud is everywhere..."

The falling mud blurred his vision, and Xiangzi could only instinctively follow the melody, using the sound of the piano transmitted by his fingertips to find her figure in the rain that obscured them both.

And the girl also reached out to her in the rain.

"Now, draw a line through this maze that obscures the entire world!"

"The map woven with that thin thread"

"The flowers that bloom just to shine upon you..."

……

……

The cheers like a tsunami brought Toyokawa Shoko back to reality.

She looked up in surprise. There was no rain or mud here, just a simple stage and the lights illuminating it. And the people cheering for them could hardly contain their excitement, offering their most straightforward praise for the performance they had just witnessed.

The girl looked down at her fingertips.

She even forgot what notes she played.

While she was dazed, Nagasaki Suyo quietly leaned over to her and smiled at her. She always felt that there was a hint of ridicule in that smile, but now she no longer had the energy to argue.

Because one girl had turned around, picked up the microphone and looked at the audience.

There was a slight gasp coming from the speaker, and she took a deep breath after a brief pause.

Gao Songdeng looked at the nightmare that always lingered in her mind, and at everything that she could not help but be afraid of, but her heart had never been so violently beating as this moment, as if urging her to muster up the courage to move forward towards the unknown.

"...Today, I really want to thank everyone very much."

She said loudly:

"We 'five' are, CRYCHIC!"

……

After a long night, we welcome the dawn.

To convey the cry in my heart to those who have lost their way.

——There are flowers, blooming in the mud.

Image: "CRYCHIC", Location: "Images/1727411792-100406221-112162495.jpg"

……

……

……

……

PS. Song selection: ウォルピスカーターにに咲く〉 (Blooming in the Mud)

Chapter of Lost Stars, Act 1, Summer Time Record: Finale

...It's so dazzling.

The lights on the stage were too bright, hiding the girls' figures in the dazzling pure white.

And the music is making the originally blurred outline three-dimensional.

Even in the deepest darkness, a little distance away from the crowd, the man couldn't help but feel his heart surging - he had thought that a long time ago, this heart could no longer make his blood boil like it did when he was young.

He raised his hand to rub his eyes, but in the dim light he saw his fingertips, which were so old that they were almost dry.

“——…….”

The man leaned against the wall, staring at his fingertips in a daze.

The next second, out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of a figure struggling to emerge from the crowd as dense as a wall.

It was a blond young man. He had a bitter expression, as if he was being jostled and jostled by the excited crowd. After leaving the crowd, he took a few exaggerated breaths before looking up and grinning at the man.

"Yo."

The man opened his mouth, trying to recall the speech he had prepared before leaving the house, but all he could see were the figures of the women on the stage. Even if he wanted to find his eloquence in the past when they debated in the business world, the rain-like singing and music had already completely washed away the remaining ink in his brain, and only an emotion that could only be described as calm remained quietly in his heart.

He stared silently at the young man's smile, which seemed brighter than the stage lights, even though it was against the light. After a long pause, he uttered a brief, dry greeting:

"...Mr. Bowden."

"Just speak at a normal volume. My ears are pretty good, so don't worry about me not being able to hear you."

The young man named Baodeng Zheli waved his hand, lowered his head to straighten his wrinkled clothes, and with a long sigh, approached the man. He looked up and down at the man who had just entered middle age but looked haggard as if he was on the verge of death. He once again smiled that overly bright smile and said:

"So, Mr. Toyokawa—how about it? LIVE."

"..."

Toyokawa Shoko's father lowered his shoulders somewhat embarrassedly under Baodeng Zheli's unscrupulous gaze.

But it was just a subconscious action - when his brain understood the other party's question, he relaxed his frown and sighed softly. He raised his head, looked over Zhe Li's shoulder, looked at the girl band, and whispered:

"great."

"Is that the only way?" Baodeng Zheli raised his eyebrows and let out a long groan that seemed to have a deeper meaning.

The young man walked to a position side by side with the man, crossed his arms over his chest, and like him, leaned against the wall, looking at the stage in the distance with a smile on his face.

The gray-haired lead singer held the microphone tightly: "Please listen to... CRYCHIC's "Spring Shadow"! "The blue-haired girl then let her slender fingertips dance on the keys, and with a melody as clear as spring water, she opened the last scene of this performance that was destined to be remembered.

Zhe Li squinted his eyes and enjoyed this extremely familiar yet long-lost prelude, then turned his head to look at the man beside him.

The man was gazing intently at the stage. Or to be more precise, at his daughter, Toyokawa Shoko.

"Can't you make pretty good expressions, too?"

"..."

The man paused and retracted the faint smile on his face.

He lowered his eyes, as if thinking for a long, long time, but in the end he still couldn't clear the cloud of doubt that was shrouding his eyes. He was forced to turn his head as well and meet the young man's brilliant smile that was almost smug.

"You are not the teacher of Tsuki no Mori."

"Oh, you finally figured it out? ...No, I guess I figured it out from the very beginning."

Zhe Li shrugged, his pair of blue eyes twinkling like stars in the soft music.

He carefully observed the emotions in the man's eyes, and after a while he spoke: "What do you want to ask?"

"Do you want something from Fengchuan?"

The middle-aged man whispered calmly, and then adjusted his expression bit by bit.

It seemed that during this brief eye contact, he tried to dig out from the depths of his dusty memories the image of a man who was proud of the name "Fengchuan" and was full of vigor and vitality months or even years ago, and re-armed himself with the fragments of the distant past.

"Unfortunately, I am no longer a member of 'Toyokawa'."

"Don't bother with the bluffing. I've been clear about this since our last meeting." The young man spread his hands out in a sneer, and said in a slightly frivolous tone, "If I had to say what I wanted... it was just to get Xiangzi back on stage. And as you can see, I've already achieved my goal."