>>5428907Hide.
The word, spoken with a certain resolved gravitas, echoes clearly through the well worn earphones of Old Deng’s Internet Cafe. Even in your hasty and anxious state, you steel yourself, managing to wholly suppress the tension that has so deeply embedded itself into your twin hands at this very moment. Distant Cloud leaps behind following a series of your well executed keystrokes, leaving only dust of pixelated constitution in his wake. If you were physically there within the game, how deep the ivory white your knuckles would - from tightly clutching your dagger-axe - take on.
What had made Skyfrost retreat so swiftly? In the shadow of the boulder of which you now take concealment in, that’s all you can ponder. Then, you can scarcely believe it. Piercing through from the constant din of battle below, and the divine omnipresent hum of the heavens above, comes the lithe serenade of picked strings, punctuated by occasional spurts of bell-like harmonics. Their tone is light and silvery yet possessed of a bright and warm resonance. They come in varied syncopations, sometimes slow and melancholic in the way they bend and weave through vibrato, and other times in fierce roars of relentless tremolo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4Ye7AisnFM&ab_channel=MusicalMoments-EastThis is, unmistakably, the sound of a pipa (琵琶).
And clearly, it is not the standard, run-of-the-mill pipa that you can get from the auction house. It has clearly been handmade using JSQ’s complex custom crafting system, made possible from the miracles of machine learning, able to even emulate the effect of different types of wood on the tone of instruments and some more - that is - to also infuse the fantastical elements of the game into this process. An entire scene of JSQ-made music has even been birthed from this, not unlike the craze of a certain musical item in a blockgame back in the day.
