After listening for a while, Li Wei understood why the tune had felt so familiar.
Wasn't this one of the songs from The Hobbit, cobbled together by Vina from the outline and shadow-play drama he had provided back then?
He had long foreseen that this would exert a subtle, imperceptible influence on entertainment across the Coriel Continent. He just hadn't expected that in barely forty-odd years, even bards in the south had already been touched by their "cultural invasion."
That pace was hardly slow.
In Li Wei's original estimation, even if these forms of cultural and spiritual enjoyment spread to other kingdoms and city-states, social development and the extreme divide in wealth would mean that the nobility would monopolize them for a long time first.
Just like Netheril back then. Their Great Arcanists had ridden "spaceships" into the heavens, yet the overwhelming majority at the bottom still lived feudal medieval lives.
Judging from the reactions of the customers around them, they were quite happy to accept this inexpensive form of entertainment. And if they encountered particularly generous patrons, they would warmly buy the bard a tankard of ale or toss him a few copper thumbs.
And as far as Li Wei knew, that was practically the entirety of their income. Unless a bard was truly famous, taverns generally wouldn't pay them anything extra.
What a joke. Singing for money on our turf, and we don't even take a cut from you—that's already conscientious enough. Didn't those tavern girls have to hand over a share even when they took on private work?
Yet as the halfling bard continued to sing, Li Wei gradually began to sense that something was off.
What he played on his six-string lute was indeed a song from The Hobbit, but the story he told sounded like