徐霞客

``` [Intro] [Spoken Word] [Whispered] [No Drums] [Reversed Piano] [Snow Wind] Four hundred years ago, I walked off the edge of the map. No one sent me. No one stopped me. I had a stick, a pair of shoes, and one question — what if the road is the answer? [Build] [Half-Time] [Taiko Rise] [Guzheng Pluck] [Verse 1] [Rap] [Gritty Male Vocal] [Boom Bap Drums] [Upright Bass] I was twenty-two when I walked out of the exam hall, no rank, no name, no road, no protocol. My mother sewed a hat and told me, "Go and find the sky." I asked her how. She said, "By putting one foot past the line." First thief took my silver, second took my coat, third one took the last of it and left me on the road. I ate nothing in the mountains, wrote my notes with frozen hands, 'cause starving for a story is a hunger I could stand. Every gate I never entered had a name above the door, and every peak I climbed has never asked me what I'm for. So when they ask me, "Boy, what office do you hold?" I say: "The one that's forty thousand miles of unmarked road." [Pre-Chorus] [Building] [Double-Time Hats] [Strings Rise] [Rising Male Vocal] They drew the world for me and signed it with a seal, but a drawing isn't land and a fear isn't real. I can't read a life that somebody else has written — so I tore the paper, and I kept on walking. [Chorus] [Belted] [Choir] [Crowd Chant] [Taiko] [Orchestral Drop] No one lent me wings — so I walked the snow, no one drew my road — so I drew my own. They gave me a map and said the world is this; I said the world is everything the map forgets. No one lent me wings — but I still got to fly, not because I was chosen — 'cause I chose to try. No one lent me wings — so I became the wind. Now walk your road. Walk your road. Walk. [Verse 2] [Rap] [Gritty Male Vocal] [Beat Switch] [Trap Hats] [808 Bass] [Guzheng Riff] Thirty-four years, never settled, never crowned, twenty-one provinces, my shoes were my hometown. Two hundred and ten caves — I crawled in with a lamp, wrote how water turns to stone across ten thousand nights. A friend died on the road; I carried him up a mountain, 'cause a promise doesn't care if the weather's burning. And when they asked me what I did to make a living, I said: I turn the world into remembering. [Bridge] [Beat Drop Out] [Chinese Opera Vocal] [High-Pitched Female Hook] [Falsetto] [Guzheng Solo] [Taiko Roll] [Epic] 朝碧海，暮苍梧， 丈夫何必，问归途。 荷锸耒，埋吾骨， 何处青山，不埋人。 [Build] [Riser] [Impact] [Choir Rise] [Final Chorus] [Belted] [Choir] [Crowd Chant] [Full Orchestra] [Double-Time Drums] No one lent me wings — so I walked the snow, no one drew my road — so I drew my own. They gave me a map and said the world is this; I said the world is everything the map forgets. No one lent me wings — but I still got to fly, not because I was chosen — 'cause I chose to try. No one lent me wings — so I became the wind. Now walk your road. Walk your road. Walk. Walk. Walk. Walk your road. [Outro] [Break] [Stripped Back] [Spoken Word] [No Drums] [Reversed Piano Fade] They'll put my name in a book and call it history. But I was never trying to be a page in anything. I was just a man who couldn't sit inside a room while the world was out there, waiting, under snow. The map ends here. Keep walking. [End] ```