Theme Song (continued)

The two froze at the same time, staring wide-eyed at each other. For a moment, neither could tell who had made the mistake.

Faint laughter rose from the crowd. Even Cao Yan pressed a hand to his forehead, unable to watch.

Lai Yudong thought pessimistically that Dorm 707 might be finished.

The first three classes took turns dancing to the Theme Song. As expected, Class A had the biggest gap between its best and worst performers, and barring any surprises, the class with the most even skill level would be Class F, which was about to take the stage.

There was no other reason: they were all bad.

But that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Compared with his critique of Class A, Cao Yan had been less strict with Class C, so he should be even more forgiving of Class F, whose members were all equally bad.

"Um, Miura..."

The Trainee who was clutching at straws was back. Amid the chaos of Class C leaving the stage and Class F going on, he furtively pulled Lai Yudong aside and made a quiet suggestion:

"Could you stand farther back? I want to stand in the last row, so how about you stand in the second-to-last row?"

Lai Yudong gave him a strange look, not expecting to hear such an absurd request.

It wasn't that he couldn't stand farther back. The other Trainee could easily have found a cleverer way to put it, such as saying that dancing too badly up front would hurt his appeal with viewers. At least that would have been an option worth considering from the listener's perspective.

But whatever the reason, asking a competitor to stand farther back, away from the cameras, was unreasonable.

To put it kindly, it was selfish and showed low emotional intelligence. To put it bluntly, it was ill-intentioned and underhanded competition.

Facing that eager, anxious gaze, Lai Yudong took his time lowering his eyes to read the name on the badge—Luo Feiran—and added another person to his blacklist. "I want to stand in the front row."

Though his voice was quiet, he made his refusal clear.

Luo Feiran was taken aback. "The front row?"

Lai Yudong gave him a polite smile and said no more. He turned and followed the main group toward the Evaluation Area.

As it turned out, Lai Yudong wasn't the only one with that idea.

Class F's forty-two members lined up in a seven-by-six formation. The most sought-after spots weren't, as one might imagine, the center position in the front row, but the five positions surrounding it: the two flanking spots in the front row and the three middle spots in the second.

If he hadn't set his sights from the start on the far-left position in the front row—an unpopular edge spot that was both low-key and conspicuous—he probably would have been squeezed into some corner.

[There are so many people in Class F]

[Little brother Qichu is blocked from view QAQ]

[Found Pei Lan by his height...]

[Class C only had thirty-something people, but Class F has over forty, right? That's almost half of everyone]

[Reporting in! You Shu is at the very end of the front row!]

[Yuzu was the first one I saw hahahaha]

Lai Yudong looked to his right. Beside him stood Wang Yiwen, a boy he didn't know, Zeng Kai, and two boys who had attended the Su Junzhe-Style Tutoring Class with him, in that order. That meant Zeng Kai was at the center of the whole class.

As for Pei Lan, whom the bullet comments mentioned, he came from a well-known modeling agency. At around 1.9 meters tall, he towered over everyone in the back row, while Liu Qichu, standing beside him, was visibly a good deal shorter.

"Can I change positions?" Liu Qichu wailed, craning his head up. "Can I say something? I feel like a dwarf."

Liu Qichu was probably the only one in this situation who was still in the mood to joke.

After quickly arranging the formation, everyone settled into position.

Lai Yudong struck an impeccable opening pose, head slightly lowered and one hand resting on his pocket. At first glance, he looked the part.

He knew perfectly well that this was only an in-class spot test that wouldn't affect his grade, yet the moment the intro began, his heart started racing out of control. His body stiffened as though it had been injected with tons of cement, leaving him barely able to move.

The very first movement, lifting his head, ruthlessly shattered the excellent form he had created while standing still.

Forget it, it's no big deal. Going from a jpg to a gif is progress.

That was how he comforted himself.

"One, two, three, four..."

Lai Yudong counted the beat under his breath. He had originally planned to count silently in his head so he wouldn't look so much like a clumsy beginner, but the music he hadn't yet grown accustomed to kept disrupting his thoughts. In particular, when the vocals burst into the lyrics, they nearly dragged him out of his own rhythm.

Fortunately, he steadied himself in time, narrowly avoiding the disaster of crashing right at the start.

But he could save himself for a moment, not forever. As soon as he put it into practice, all sorts of problems he'd never noticed before cropped up.

For instance, he apparently couldn't count beats.

"...Five, six and seven and eight..."

"One and two and three... uh... eight?"

"One, two...? One, two, three, four..."

The straightforward full beats were manageable, but the half beats, which could pop up at any moment, were hard for Lai Yudong to handle. As he counted, he would either miss a half beat or add an extra one, alternating between falling behind and rushing ahead.

His dancing was even more outrageous. At some point, his dancing, the beat, and the music had all come apart, like three railway tracks riddled with safety hazards: now parallel, now overlapping, now crossing. A speeding train charged wildly along the tracks, and he was the poor sap tied to them.

Could someone save him?

[Did You Shu get it wrong? Why did he do it twice?]

[It'd be strange if he got everything right, 233]

[The little brother behind Yuzu is dancing pretty well]

[That's Wang Yiwen, but I think he made a mistake too]

[Miura's beat is completely off]

[Honestly, I can't tell who has the right answer...]

A dense stream of bullet comments pointing out mistakes swept past in front of him. Lai Yudong completely lost his bearings, his thunderous heartbeat nearly drowning out the music. In his panic, he accidentally tripped his left foot over his right and stumbled, nearly falling to the floor.

He hurriedly regained his footing, but the two tracks of "dance" and "beat" came to a complete halt. Once his muddled brain had broken away from the rhythm, which had been as precarious as an illegal structure, he didn't know what move came next.

At this point, he could only "copy" the other Trainees' homework to salvage his dance, which had fallen to pieces.