Chapter 124: The Stunning Spectacle of Flight and the Seeds of Doubt

The main filming took no great amount of time, requiring only a single afternoon.

Amid the laughter and merriment on set, the final sequence came to a perfect close. The crew wrapped smoothly and withdrew, while that evening the hotel hosted a banquet to celebrate the successful completion of the shoot—and to bid one another a temporary farewell.

The Spring Festival was approaching. Familiarizing the team with the cultural background had taken considerable time, and the specially commissioned props and music had pushed the schedule beyond its original estimate.

The main issue was that Li Lekang had taken certain things for granted. Foreigners needed time to digest and understand Chinese culture, after all! As a result, the scheduled performances ran overtime, and they had no choice but to postpone the magic show until after the Spring Festival.

The dancers had to return home for the holiday. The next time they met would be after the festival, when they would reunite on the stage of Li Lekang’s solo show and perform before an audience of tens of thousands.

Li Lekang’s team therefore had to leave as well. They would return to the United States to produce the performance video, then hurry to release it online and keep the momentum alive.

While China was plunging into a sea of Spring Festival celebrations, Li Lekang was watching a lion dance in the Chinatown across the ocean, accompanied by his beautiful younger sister. They ate sugar paintings and watched the performances together.

Old White had no concept of a Spring Festival holiday, so the production team worked overtime throughout February, laboring tirelessly to prepare an appetizer for the audience who adored him.

Before long, the finished video of the Flying Apsaras was ready.

Li Lekang personally reviewed every detail, and he was immensely satisfied with the result.

Once he gave his approval, the video was naturally uploaded to the internet.

It would serve as an appetizer for the stage performance of the Flying Apsaras—and could just as easily be regarded as a trailer.

It premiered worldwide across YouTube, TikTok, Bilibili, and Weibo. The five-and-a-half-minute dance film began burning through its budget from the very first second.

In smooth 4K high-definition footage shot at 120 frames per second, a barefoot woman walked across the yellow sands. As the camera pulled back, her gauzy robes and brocade garments fluttered in the wind. Ancient-style music rang out, and her figure flickered in and out of sight.

Half-concealing her face behind a pipa, she emerged from behind a stone pillar and stepped lightly onto the stage. Then she performed a continuous spinning movement while holding the pipa, displaying astonishing technical skill. To experts, it was technique; to everyone else, it was sheer beauty.

The video broke entirely from Li Lekang’s usual documentary style. Every frame and every frozen moment could have served as a computer wallpaper. Whether in the camerawork or the performers, every detail had been handled to perfection.

It was enough to make people forget that this was a magic video at all.

Some viewers even glanced toward the producer, confirming once again that the work had indeed been released by Li Lekang.

Although the brief opening contained no magic, the exquisite imagery still seized everyone’s attention.

Domestic viewers were already feasting their eyes on it, with countless comments flooding the screen: “Beautiful enough to make me cry.”

Foreign audiences might not have understood the story behind it, but the novelty of the content still dazzled them. Most had never seen anything like it before.

Western media had never made a point of promoting such things, but their interest in Li Lekang had now led them to experience the mysterious allure of the East.

Thirty seconds after the dance began, the principal dancer spun and sent her ribbons flying into the air. Amid the billowing smoke, a man suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

Dressed as a man from the Western Regions, Li Lekang had descended upon the stage.

More miraculous still, he seemed to ride upon clouds and mist, a halo shining behind him. He was unmistakably playing a deity.

That was something audiences from both East and West could understand. Flying immortals circled him in dance, while the fluttering gauze and swirling smoke outlined the forms of still more women. Limbs and features gradually took shape, and then the figures emerged from the mist.

The transformation was imbued with an almost divine poetic grandeur. One woman, then two, then three—they merged into the art, surprising the audience while also seeming perfectly suited to it.

The flying immortals began to dance around their god, pleasing him and seeking his favor.

The sequence remained graceful, ethereal, and breathtaking.

Then Li Lekang exhaled a stream of white smoke and dissolved into the clouds drifting through the air.

He extended his palm toward the dancing spirits.

One of the dancers raised her foot and gently placed it in his palm. With a casual upward lift from Li Lekang, she rose from the ground and floated weightlessly in place.

At that sight, countless viewers cried out in astonishment.

Western audiences had generally understood flying immortals only as “angels with wings.” For the first time, they were seeing something so novel: long silk streamers fluttering through the air as a woman stepped upon clouds and ascended into the heavens.

The weightless fairy drifted through the sky as though standing on wisps of smoke, carried wherever the wind blew. Holding her pipa, she played a melody. Then a second woman rose, followed by a third.

One after another, they ascended.

The spreading clouds seemed to bear up their bodies. The fairies displayed a thousand different postures—not the stiff poses of performers suspended by wires, whose centers of gravity could only face downward with their feet toward the ground.

Their movements remained supple and free, even more varied than they had been on the earth. In the midst of a leisurely turn, the pipa fairy performed a reverse pipa flourish, a feat of incomparable skill.

Li Lekang walked through the curling mist while the fairies danced and played music around him. In that desolate wilderness, they enacted a radiant and colorful legend of the immortals.

By then, the audience was utterly stunned.

“Even setting aside the magic, every second of this could be used as a desktop wallpaper. I’m giving it a perfect score!”

“Is this damn well magic? Isn’t it sorcery?”

“I’m starting to suspect that Li Lekang really is a wizard!”

Domestic viewers were broadly shaken to the core. Astonishment filled the comments, and praise poured forth without end. It was as though they were enjoying a grand feast, soaring through the heavens alongside Li Lekang.

The response overseas was equally full of wonder.

“I honestly never expected to see a performance this exquisite. It has given me an entirely new understanding of China. This is spectacular!”

“After watching it, the thing troubling me most is how I’m supposed to introduce Li Lekang from now on. A great magician—or a living myth?”

“Perhaps I finally understand the culture they are always talking about. This is truly a visual feast. I feel as though I’ve entered heaven, as though I’ve stepped into Eden!”

The video satisfied both artistic and magical appetites, earning a wave of enthusiastic praise. People marveled at its beautiful imagery and praised the ingenuity of its methods.

The video also began trending in both China and the United States. Its exposure continued to rise, and more and more people learned of it.

But gradually, voices of doubt began to emerge.

They were not questioning the art or the visuals. They were questioning Li Lekang’s magic.

Someone wrote, “The imagery is beautiful, but I still feel disappointed. With all those obvious cuts between shots, has Li Lekang finally resorted to the magic of video editing?”

Another commented, “Aside from the costumes and setting, this is just a fairly ordinary levitation trick. It might have been astonishing ten or twenty years ago, but today it isn’t particularly impressive.”

“He has created countless miracles, but perhaps his talent has finally reached its limit. He is not a god, and he has no real sorcery. We cannot even see an audience in the wide-angle shots!”

Video magic was a relatively new phenomenon in the magic industry, but it was also among the most criticized. Performers used camera angles or blind spots in the venue to accomplish their effects, and some people even believed such tricks no longer qualified as magic.

Chris Angel’s levitation was a classic example. Because the camera was pointed toward the sun, the traces of the supporting cables were concealed. It was therefore not difficult to understand why audiences assumed Li Lekang had used the same method.

Perhaps Li Lekang had been too formidable in the past. Now that his “obvious technique” had appeared, his detractors felt they had finally seized upon a flaw and found a reason to pick at him.

They believed that beneath Li Lekang’s dazzling performances lay the same old technical limitations. This man, who had stolen the spotlight countless times since his debut, was finally about to fall from his pedestal.