By digging through my old like-favorite-coin records, I finally confirmed the first Weekly Chinese Vocal Synth Chart I had watched and left a mark on.

Maybe it does not count as my actual “first,” strictly speaking. From what I remember of myself a year ago, I was some freeloading gremlin who had only just begun hoarding coins to reach “Sixfold Jealousy”. Watching the “one year ago” retrospective from two weeks back also gave me the vague feeling that I must have started with Issue 625. But does that really matter?

The more important problem is that, one way or another, I seem to have missed the exact one-year anniversary by an entire issue. (

It cannot be helped. There has simply been too much going on lately. Now that I have finally reached somewhere my IP address will stay put, I can at last fulfill the promise I made under Issue 678 to “write something.” I will probably camp out in the comments and post this ramble when Issue 679 goes up. Being one issue late should be fine, right? Most of the mini-essays in the comments are about the previous issue anyway. (Except yours is about the one before that, hello?)

It is rather strange, though. My gateway issue was not the Hall-of-Fame Issue 623, with over a hundred thousand views, but Issue 624 immediately afterward—the one that achieved “sixfold disloyalty,” meaning all six figures, views, comments, danmaku, favorites, coins, and likes, fell from the week before. I even went back to Issue 625 to check. It feels much like how I bought the Muse Dash Just as Planned music pack the moment I learned it had an officially licensed Medium⁵ collaboration, only for those songs to be “recalled”; how I used the 2050 concept trailer to recruit a friend into Medium⁵, only to hear “there will be a new album—the last one”; or how I finished the original Paranoia novel, looked up, and found it pulled from every platform. I do seem to have a gift for arriving just after the glory days.

My entire turbulent journey through Chinese vocal synth music, in one sentence:

I stan Stardust.

Like Wangwang, one of my favorite producers (I think “producer” in this sense came from rhythm-game circles, but never mind), my gateway song was Deities of Cathaysia. I arrived quite a bit later than she did, though. Thinking back, I had definitely heard Chinese vocal synth songs before that, and, now that I think even harder, they really were all by the Master, ilem. I still used Kugou for most of my music then and loved collecting all sorts of playlists. But after I first heard Deities of Cathaysia in what was probably an ancient-style playlist, my Likes became virtual-singer songs and nothing else. Sigh. Chinese vocal synth music: not even once.

Kugou offered several choices for the background image: artist photo, song or album cover, and something else I have forgotten. (I have not used it in ages, haha. The last time I reinstalled it for a look, I discovered that one of my old playlists had apparently become modestly popular. It still has more than 99 likes, a number I have never seen in my Bilibili inbox.) When I switched to Stardust’s artist image, I… felt nothing in particular.

As I keep insisting to everyone around me, I really should not count as a fundamentalist otaku. Sure, I save piles of pictures, buy piles of merch, and watch piles of anime. (That is literally an otaku, hello? Fine, let “fundamentalist” do the disambiguating.) But I truly do not have the same blazing enthusiasm as many fellow fans. And yet this cobalt-haired girl changed the course of the life that followed.

I began deliberately—or absentmindedly—looking for more virtual singers. Since I could not understand the lyrics, I promptly gave up on sampling Japanese Vocaloid. (A moment’s laziness, a lifetime’s loss, kid. Think of all the bangers you missed.) I began encountering names like Luo Tianyi, Yuezheng Ling, Yanhe, Yuezheng Longya, Mo Qingxian, Zhiyu Moke, Haiyi, Chiyu, Shian, Cangqiong, and Minus, in no particular order—not that anyone is policing this list. Still, I could not forget the voice I heard that day, as though it had traveled through a sea of ether from light-years away. Even after the AI voicebank arrived, Stardust V4 remained my eternal moonlight.

I was lucky that I already liked ancient-style music. After the Journey Across the Nine Provinces project apparently stopped releasing virtual-singer versions once it had finished setting Li Daoyuan’s The Three Gorges to music—covers, or dual originals, whatever, I refuse to litigate this—I invested decisively in the Wangchuan project. The result is the Level 6 “Wangchuan Pigeon” fan badge I still wear today, one of only two fan badges I own. Speaking of which, I used to grind the Kugou charts every day for a permanent badge there. I competed for the number-one-fan spot against someone whose yellow profile picture featured a character I can no longer identify. In the end, academic pressure won, and the whole campaign fizzled out. (I paid for several months of membership for this. Aaaaaah.)

While preparing for the high-school entrance exam, I liked doing practice papers with music on. After enough repeats, I naturally memorized the lyrics. If the homework required no brainpower, I could even run three threads at once: write the answers, listen to the song, and recall the lyrics while singing along. Just before middle school ended, I happened to discover a classmate who also seemed to listen to Chinese vocal synth music—his WeChat avatar was even Longya—but we never had the chance to talk properly before I never saw him again.

Of course I also performed that time-honored ritual of copying lyrics by hand, though that would have to wait until high school. Before then, in the summer after graduation, I bought the first physical album of my life: Quadimension X-1—hereafter X-1, and the same convention applies to the sequels. It was… not the deluxe edition. Missing out on the five girls’ charms became an eternal wound. (The official X-1 outfits really were gorgeous, to be fair.) That day, hands trembling with excitement, I posted a WeChat Moment visible only to myself.

Virtual singers were hardly common knowledge, of course. I do not know exactly what I was thinking, but I simply did not want too many people to know about this part of me. My parents had always known, though. Before that, I had even asked Dad to buy the five official-outfit charms in installments, only to realize later that ordering them together would probably have been cheaper. During high school, I gradually bought secondhand copies of three older albums—Queendom, Storybook, and Star Wish—plus a handful of Stardust goods from Moeyu. (Good grief, was I rich back then?) And at last, X-2 was announced.

That was precisely when my parents and I came into conflict.

Their intentions were good. Anime culture inevitably contains a certain amount of softcore sexual material, and a teenage boy does, admittedly, have impulses. They saw my preorder on Taobao, talked it over with me, and canceled X-2. That alone would not have been a tragedy; I could always buy it when I grew up. But I made the wrong choice. I transferred some money out of Mom’s account, then bought the album again through Grandma’s account.

I was delighted on the day it arrived, yet something inside me felt wrong.

That evening, while I was cleaning the bathroom, Mom saw how unusually industrious I was and, in her imperial pleasure, offered me a small reward. My brain short-circuited. “Can I buy an album?”

After thinking for a while, she said yes. My brain short-circuited again. “Great! Grandma has already bought it for me, so we can just count it as your present.”

Yes. You can imagine what happened next.

That night, parents and son, relations thoroughly ruptured over the matter, sat down for a serious talk. I still remember Dad taking out the lyric booklets and opening, in succession, to Summer Cold from X-1, The Elegant Origin of Sin from Glimmers, Honeyed Poison from All Rivers Run into the Sea—wait, that may only have been the cover page—and The Futile Love of a Beautiful Girl from Star Wish. (She was only showing her back, hello?)

Father and son talked for a long time. We analyzed Whispering Snowflakes, my favorite song on X-2, and criticized its idea of romance. When we reached my gateway song, Deities of Cathaysia, Dad said he had already listened to it at my recommendation, though he remained skeptical of its excessive self-confidence.

The purchases had been made, however, and my parents were at a loss as they stared at a table covered in colorful little objects. The final decision was that I would organize the albums and assorted goods, then lock them in the safe at home. That night, after writing my self-criticism, I reluctantly placed each album and trinket into the safe one by one, with all the solemnity of a warrior crossing the River Yi.

Of course, I seem to have forgotten a few paper items, hehe. (Did you really forget, though?)

The spending stopped, but the listening did not. Not long after starting high school, I maneuvered my way into owning an MP4 player with Bluetooth, synchronized lyrics, video playback, and an ebook reader. For the exact procedure, please consult the replay:

Me: Dad, I want an MP4 player for music.

Dad: No.

Me: Mom, I want a device for listening to music.

Mom: No.

After a protracted campaign of grinding down Mom’s resistance…

Me: Moooom, I just want to listen to music during the day too.

Mom: Fine, fine, go buy it.

Me: (Places the order before Her Majesty can reconsider.)

And so my roommate and I acquired a device on which we could even watch Ultraman Tiga together after lights-out. The screen was tiny, and we only made it through two episodes. Joking aside, I naturally used it mostly for music. On HiFiNi—do not bother searching; the site is dead now—I found a kind stranger’s download containing all six Medium⁵ albums. Together with the songs from my own copies of X-1 and Star Wish, they formed my offline playlist. That “tradition” continues to this day.

I do not know whether other people experience memory this way, but, for me, what I see and what I hear become connected. Whenever I hear one of the songs I liked less from those first six albums—the ones that failed to survive as my playlist kept evolving—I return to the days when I fell asleep to music in the top bunk of the dorm. I did not even know how to set a sleep timer then, so every morning the MP4 player was dead.

Stranded Siren, the song at Number 2 on the first chart I watched—yes, we have finally returned to the subject—was certainly not among those eliminated tracks. By coincidence, I was reading The Odyssey at the time. I rewrote a set of lyrics around the story and fantasized about producing the entire song myself, only for the idea to die in the womb. Odysseus and that song thus became a single anchor in my memory. When the song, released for Haiyi’s 2024 birthday, appeared at Number 2 on the chart, it shocked me back into that period even though I had already heard it before.

It was a time when everything seemed to thrive. The official team interacted with fans. The five Medium⁵ sisters’ roleplay accounts bantered on Weibo. Birthdays and holidays were both likely to bring new songs, and a new album came year after year. No one else in my class listened to virtual singers, but I happily wandered through my little world alone. Occasionally opening my mouth to sing and getting roasted for it was part of the fun.

Then we were forced to scatter, and the uncertainty of the future had never stood so plainly before me. If you asked the me of that time, perhaps I was not thinking very deeply. I simply followed the beat. Music became a seasoning I always carried with me: secretly playing rhythm games on a tablet that did not yet belong to me during a school trip to Moganshan; racing a deadline and finishing an essay on a bench beside Xianghu Lake; opening Bilibili on the family computer at my desk whenever my parents went out; and at Tianyuan Mountain… well, I did rather a lot there, haha.

I aggressively recommended Medium⁵ and Wangchuan to my classmates, finally recruiting one with the promise of 2050—only for the project to die unborn. That friend still cannot let it go and has always wanted to write a story to complete what was left behind, though so far it remains an outline. Once, I grew so excited by a new song during a livestream that I opened Phigros on the spot, only for the teacher to catch me and leave behind the immortal verdict: “triangular composition.” For Stardust’s sixth birthday I looped The Stars and the Princess of Night in ecstasy and ignored the comments entirely. I miss the version of me who listened without joining the fandom.

By then, I had already begun making my own LRC files for singles that lacked lyrics outside the album releases. That tradition, too, continues to this day.

Wait, how did I jump all the way to 2022? Stardust’s fifth birthday in 2021 was the first of hers I experienced. Light and Star Light have stayed fresh no matter how often I replay them, and I copied both sets of lyrics into my notebook. That year, back in my hometown, I also waited for the exact second to grab her Bilibili profile theme. Mine was Number 2769. The number has no hidden significance; I simply remember it. I did not pay for the later Lunar New Year theme, since I thought one set was enough. (Glances at my Bilibili collection today… right, I failed to resist.)

If I had to summarize those years of Chinese vocal synth fandom, the answer would be: I understood absolutely nothing. My internet-introvert nature kept me from joining a single fan group or meeting a single creator. Missing the chance to join the “Official Medium⁵ Wild Speculation Group” later became one of my enduring regrets. But who cared? The songs sounded good, and that was enough. Real life already had plenty of trouble beyond the music.

On Advent Day in 2022, Stardust Infinity was released. I had replayed the demo tracks countless times beforehand. Her voice did resemble her voice provider, but I did not consider that a bad thing. As I have said, I still love V4 best, yet the AI voicebank dramatically lowered the barrier to tuning while raising the upper limit of what the voice could do. For creators and listeners alike, that was undoubtedly good news. Occasionally a danmaku would glide by calling her “Tea Tree AI,” or I would glimpse a skeptical comment. I paid them no mind.

Later, X-3 came out. I did not buy it immediately, but eventually made up for that with the most basic album-and-postcards set. At last I filled the little booklet I had bought to hold postcards—the very thing I had secretly kept out of the safe. All I remember is how excited and content I felt.

Official songs, Wangchuan, and the Bilibili New Year Gala were enough for me then. Until March 2023.

“Medium⁵ is dead.”

I stared at Li’s post—or rather, a screenshot in a video’s comments, since the original apparently survived for less than a day and I never made the pilgrimage to see it myself—and could scarcely believe it. Yes, the roleplay accounts had been silent for a long time. Yes, the rate of new songs and reuploads had visibly slowed; the V4 version of The Art Museum, for example, had still not appeared. Yes, the doubts in the comments were multiplying. Yes… and still, it arrived without warning.

It dawned on me that I knew very little about Medium⁵. So I began looking for an organization to join. (Ah, joining the Nationalists in 1949.) I read a brief history of Quadimension and an essay called Phoenix Reborn, Long Road Ahead on Zhihu. In some QQ group, I successfully located The Collected Works of Ddickky. At last I gained a rough understanding of the Quadimension-to-Medium⁵ timeline. And then I stepped onto the one-way road of joining the fandom, although most of the time I still only watched from the sidelines, haha.

The high-energy Chinese vocal synth number was absent from that year’s New Year Gala, though Deeper into Deep Space filled the gap. Around then, I learned how to rip music from Bilibili. The first song I downloaded and hand-timed into an LRC file was probably KB’s Strange Tales by the Banana Window. It was not efficient, but I had finally found a way to listen to new releases. I was preparing to study abroad and had also entered a crucial stage of high school. Sometimes I wondered whether this was all arranged so that I would concentrate on my studies.

Oh, right. Before we moved overseas, I successfully recovered the long-sealed albums and merch from the safe and sent them back to my hometown. Amid the chaos I also spirited away the tablet I used for rhythm games. What a sacred relic.

At an international school in Malaysia, I managed to become an introvert offline as well. My English was awful. Truly awful. Ripping songs and making lyric files between classes became my pastime. Occasionally, I wanted to share the LRCs I had made. At first I only dared paste them in the comments. Later I found a better way that preserved the original formatting: Bilibili Notes. Scroll back through my posts and you can find plenty of my LRCs. NetEase Music already had most of them, but I did not know that then, so I duplicated a lot of work. (

For Stardust’s 2023 birthday, the official account said nothing and merely reposted old songs. Yet Shattered Mirror, which astonished me, was also released that day. For the first time, I realized that beyond the official team and its regular collaborators, a whole group of creators was also building and brightening this community. I had followed Yiwang back when they were still transcribing Wangchuan songs. We have barely interacted, but I suppose that makes me an old fan. ()

At the beginning of 2024, I finally started watching the Virtual Singer New Year Gala. Polar Night of Wandering remains my favorite Wangchuan song to this day. (Nine-Light-Year Universe had not been released when I finished this entry, so the original verdict stands.) At the same time, I finally began listening to other songs. Wow, only now? As more Luo Tianyi tracks appeared in my playlist, I began wondering where I could find more songs of this quality. The answer would arrive half a year later.

After the controversy over Minus changing her name to Yongye, the bomb dropped on Valentine’s Day 2024. The comments under Zero-Sum once exceeded three thousand. Having watched the weekly chart by now, I can finally appreciate what that number meant. Back then, I sat in self-study and slowly scrolled through chat logs, watching people I knew and people I did not voice their opinions. The only thing I did was timidly ask in a danmaku—not even the comments—“What is the official group number?”

Naturally, no one answered.

After that, the official team entered its Great Playing-Dead Era (?), doing nothing except posting old songs on each singer’s birthday. On July 12, 2024, as I watched the splendor of Luo Tianyi’s twelfth birthday, I posted an emotional WeChat Moment. The gist was: “It is lively outside… apparently the girl next door is turning twelve… let us look at Medium⁵ in the distance instead. If next month can be one percent this lively, perhaps my corpse will feel warm again.”

On July 20, 2024, I began watching the weekly chart.

“Wow. So many brilliant creators are shining.”

Through the chart’s secondary rankings, I revisited my gateway song and the classics no journey through Chinese vocal synth music is complete without. The Master’s songs need no introduction; that August even brought an entire ilem anniversary celebration. I had heard COPY’s Stardust Descends ages ago, but when I learned she had also written Singer at the End of the World, my reaction was basically, “My apologies, officer, I did not recognize you just now.” I had listened to Araragi Ken’s songs since the New Year Gala, and not one has failed to enter my playlist. I caught up on the Paranoia series, after which all its videos became solid-color screens. When the album Chinese Girl: Remeet appeared, I filled in Pure White’s Chinese Girl series and was delighted to discover that Muse Dash contained both Paranoia and Chinese Girl. If I keep reciting this menu, there will be no room left, so I will stop with the few names that left the strongest impression.

Thank you as well to Yingge and Yuwanjun for their explainer videos, which introduced me to the Chinese vocal synth world beyond Medium⁵.

I have not missed a single weekly chart since. On Sunday car rides, I usually plug in my earphones and listen the whole way. By the time the chart ends, I have generally reached my destination. From then on, the weekly chart became my playlist’s main source of new songs. I also learned how to rip music from NetEase. I have never installed its app on my phone, yet somehow I have used the service countless times.

And now the timeline finally reaches this year. I left school and gained more freedom. In Beijing, I became “the otaku” in my classmates’ eyes. I also began writing things, trying to preserve my feelings and share them with others.

During this year’s gaokao season, the Return to the Stars Club published a Medium⁵ “college entrance exam.” When I saw that there were prizes, I lost my head and completed it while traveling in Xinjiang, guessing wildly—with some searching mixed in. I wrote a short answer for the final essay question. For some reason it feels painfully awkward to me. Whatever. Do not look too closely; I am pasting it below:

The Phoenix in Nirvana

I once read a history of Quadimension on Zhihu titled Phoenix Reborn, Long Road Ahead. Its central image stayed with me—what a tangled sentence—so I borrowed it here.

At the beginning of 2023, Li posted, “There will be a new album. The last one.” Soon afterward, a video titled Medium⁵ Is Dead gained considerable traffic, and the same words spread through this tiny community at light speed. I was facing an important transition in my own life. Part of me responded with disbelief: “I just recruited a classmate, and now you tell me this?” Another part consoled itself: “Well, I can concentrate on studying from now on.” But deep down I never believed those words. Medium⁵ would not die.

What followed suggests that the official team’s retreat helped create the sight of “one whale falls, ten thousand creatures flourish.” Fan circles sprang up like mushrooms after rain, while some older ones, such as Secret Treasure Traveler, found new popularity. More gifted creators were discovered by fans.

Stardust Infinity’s power has kept Bilibili supplied with an endless stream of new songs. Food at every meal—hooray. I began watching the weekly chart in early 2024 and witnessed three Stardust birthday songs gathering on the chart that year, then Stardust overtaking Boss Luo on the singer rankings several times this year. Thank you, Utopia. This proves from another angle that these “fan songs” have remained strong not only in number, but in quality.

In truth, we often saw those familiar figures through many different channels during this period. Naturally the Virtual Singer New Year Gala and Summer Wave Party, both vocal-synth programs, featured them. Fan songs for games were plentiful as well. Thanks to the traffic around gacha games, some broke beyond the circle and brought fresh blood back with them. More importantly, we got songs to hear. Hooray. Even if Medium⁵ no longer seems to have a place among the ancient-style anthems in Bilibili’s New Year Gala, those familiar voices appear in some corner every year, as though they have never been absent. I am also grateful that Wangchuan never stopped using the Medium⁵ voicebanks. Ancient-style music lovers genuinely cannot live without this flavor. The in-game versions mostly use Synthesizer V voicebanks, but they usually reach Bilibili after a delay. Then it is favorite, listen, done. Yes, Bilibili is clearly a music app.

I rarely participate in fandom activities, but as an audience member I have witnessed a great deal.

For Stardust’s birthday in 2024, I sat on a tour bus much as I am doing while writing this now, jumping between Bilibili and Weibo and excitedly watching fan creators release work after work. I felt that flourishing vitality with unusual force. It was a miracle made by countless creators gathering together.

I also went to the Wuwanwu collaboration in April. Sadly, as a student with limited funds, I could afford only a single blind Polaroid pull. But I was lucky enough to meet a friend from the group at the venue. (He bought the entire acrylic-stand set in one shot. An absolute monster.) When we took a picture together, we cried “The world belongs to Medium⁵!” in perfect unspoken agreement, grinning brilliantly.

I think that was a rebirth. Medium⁵ itself has always been reborn, again and again. The Collected Works of Li Dike mentions that fans once summarized the three great miracles encountered by Quadimension. But looking back over these years, how could there have been only three? I have always believed that every meeting in life is a miracle. Meeting Stardust at a low point in mine, meeting Medium⁵ when I longed for song, and meeting creators in countless fleeting moments—each was a new miracle.

That is why I love the title of the new album, re: birth. Epic heroes return from death; why should Medium⁵ not do the same? Contradictions and conflict may be unavoidable, and the road to rebirth may be crowded with opposing voices, but miracles have always been here and will always appear. The phoenix’s rebirth is bound to bring a brighter future.

Yes, I may be rather optimistic. That is simply my personality.

Stardust’s ninth birthday has now drawn to a close. It is still August 12 here in America—I am trying to argue that I did not procrastinate—but in China it is already the thirteenth. There is a coincidence here: my father’s birthday is August 13. At this point, I no longer know which birthday helps me remember the other. (

This was the first Stardust birthday with a livestream celebration. I had something to do in the morning and missed the first half, but I stayed for the entire second half. At last, I also found the courage to speak—or gush—in several places, on Bilibili and QQ alike. I emptied the stockpile of coins I had saved for ages and stuffed both my favorites and my photo album to bursting.

It is wonderful to have such a lively group of creators.

One last thing while I am here: before that “gaokao,” I procrastinated on everything useful and tuned a cover of Autumn upon One’s Heart using resources I found online. It is the favorite song of the friend I recruited. The work was not difficult, and it did not take me long. When I think of it that way, perhaps the distance between being a listener and being a creator is not so vast after all.