Chapter 337: Appearance! The Whole Internet is Boiling!

A commotion began in the audience.

Some people were whispering to each other, some were looking down at their phones, and some had already unconsciously straightened their backs.

The corners of the host's mouth slowly curled upward.

"Some people's talent is used to entertain the masses. Some people's talent is used to challenge boundaries. And the talent of today's guest lies somewhere in between—he lets us see the moment when the impossible becomes possible."

He took a step back, extended his right hand forward, palm up, and made a "please look" gesture.

"Ladies and gentlemen, let us welcome with the warmest applause—"

He paused. This pause lasted only one second, but in that one second, the breathing of all two thousand eight hundred people in the theater stopped.

"Chu Chen!"

The lights went out.

It wasn't just the stage lights that went out; it was every light in the entire theater—the front lights, side lights, top lights, the audience seating lights, the corridor safety indicator lights, and even the row of emergency lights behind the stage that were always on—all extinguished in the same millisecond!

The theater plunged into absolute darkness, so black that one could not see the outline of their fingers even when holding their hand in front of their eyes.

The darkness lasted for about two seconds, and then a beam of light shone down vertically from the very center of the theater's dome, like a sword of light stabbing down from the heavens.

The beam of light landed in the center of the audience seating.

In the center of that white beam of light, a figure slowly stood up.

He was wearing a deep black suit, no tie, with the top button of his shirt collar undone.

The suit was well-tailored, the shoulder line falling exactly at the edge of his shoulders, and the length of the cuffs revealing just a small sliver of the shirt's white edge.

His hair was a bit longer than it had been in London, his bangs hanging down slightly to cover a small part of his forehead, his face carrying that faint, inscrutable curve of a smile that everyone was familiar with, like the Mona Lisa's.

In the middle of the sixth row of the audience.

To his left was a lady in a red evening gown, and to his right was an elderly gentleman with graying hair.

The first person to scream was that lady in the red evening gown to his left!

Her scream was like a knife, cutting through the solidified air in the theater!

Then came the second, the third, the tenth, the two-hundredth.

Screams erupted from different corners of the audience simultaneously, like a sudden rainstorm, pattering against the theater's walls and ceiling!

The host on stage had his mouth open, the microphone still held in his hand, but he had forgotten what he was going to say!

The sound system faithfully captured his breathing, that rapid, uneven sound of breathing, which was transmitted throughout the entire theater via the fifty-thousand-watt sound system, mixing with the screams of the audience to form a strange, electronic-music-like roar!

Out of two thousand eight hundred people, at least five hundred pulled out their phones in the same second!

At the same time, the Chu Chen Exclusive Live Broadcast Room for Simulated Crime was also lit up!

The live broadcast popularity broke through one billion in just a few seconds!

This moment.

The bullet comments were no longer just bullet comments.

The text on the screen wasn't scrolling line by line, but gushing out in waves!

Too much, too fast, too dense; individual characters could no longer be distinguished, and one could only see whole screens of white, green, and yellow color blocks refreshing upward at an incredible speed!

【God Chu?】

【Finally here!】

【Where is this?】

【This is New York!】

【Is he in New York? Is he at the Metropolitan Opera House? Is he at the insurance company's annual meeting?】

On Twitter, when the first tweet about Chu Chen appearing at the Metropolitan Opera House was sent, the person who sent it hadn't even finished typing the last letter.

They typed "ChuChenisattheMetropol"—they didn't have time to type the last letter before pressing the send button because their hands were shaking. This tweet was retweeted fifty thousand times within eleven seconds.

The hashtag #ChuChenAtTheMet climbed to number one on the US trending list within three minutes, and topped the global trending list five minutes later!

No warm-up, no foreshadowing, no warning of any kind. It was like a bomb suddenly exploding without any alarm; everyone heard that loud noise at the same instant, and then scrambled to rush toward the direction the sound came from!

On Weibo, the algorithm engineer for the trending search list had just experienced the strangest scene of their professional career!

The second to tenth places on the trending list had almost no changes in those few minutes—a new song by some popular celebrity, the finale of some TV series, the opening of a new subway line in some city—but the discussion volume for these topics all dropped to zero in an instant!

All the discussion volume was sucked up by one word: Chu Chen!

The number behind the first place on the trending list jumped from "1 million" to "5 million," and then skipped all the numbers in between to become "10 million"!

This was not a normal data growth curve; this was a tsunami!

The data came crashing down like a wall of water dozens of meters high, swallowing everything in its path!

Back to the Metropolitan Opera House.

Chu Chen stood between the seats in the sixth row of the audience, enveloped by that beam of white light.

After the audience became completely quiet, he smiled and looked around.

His gaze swept from the left side of the audience to the right:

"Good evening, everyone. I am Chu Chen."

His voice was not loud, but the sound system in the theater processed every syllable to be clean and full, landing clearly in every corner of the audience.

"I know what you are thinking," he said. "You must be very surprised by my appearance, and perhaps you weren't even prepared for how to welcome me."

A low ripple of laughter broke out from the audience.

Then they began to applaud.

The applause surged up from every corner of the audience like a tide, gathered under the dome, and then bounced back, forming an airtight, thunderous roar.

"Thank you," Chu Chen said after the applause died down. "But you don't need to be so polite. I am just a magician who was invited here, and there is no essential difference between me and the other performers tonight. The only difference is—this time, I didn't charge an appearance fee."

The laughter grew louder.

This time it was mixed with a few whistles and a clear "Yeah" coming from the second floor of the audience.

Chu Chen took a step forward, walked out from between the rows of seats, and slowly walked toward the stage along the aisle in the middle of the auditorium.

That beam of white light followed his movement.

Before long, he walked up the steps on the side of the stage and stepped onto the wooden floor of the stage.

The lighting switched from a single beam of white light to full-stage front and side lighting, and the entire stage was illuminated as if it were broad daylight.

He stood in the center of the stage.

He faced two thousand eight hundred people, with that massive LED screen behind him; the screen switched from a starry sky background to a close-up of his silhouette—filmed in real-time by a hidden camera on the side of the stage, the image was projected onto the screen synchronously.

The outline of the silhouette was traced by the white background light with a clean edge, like a coin that had just been minted.

"Before this performance officially begins, I would like to tell a story first. A story about magic."