297: Chapter 297 is quite frightening to think about.

Jinling, Huijin International.

Dusk pressed in layer by layer from the direction of Zijin Mountain, soaking half the city in deep blue ink.

The curtains of the third-floor bedroom were not drawn.

Only a single desk lamp was lit in the room, its warm yellow light barely reaching a corner of the piano.

The lid of the Steinway grand piano was still propped open; though the vibration of the last note on the strings had long since dissipated, a certain tense frequency seemed to linger in the air.

Ye Xi stood up from the piano stool and shook out her wrists.

After an hour and a half of playing Chopin Etudes back-to-back, her fingertips had turned a faint shade of pink, and the sides of her middle and ring fingers felt slightly hot.

The schedule Sister Yang had arranged for her was too full—shooting for magazines during the day, ensuring enough piano practice at night, and a rehearsal for a brand event tomorrow.

She didn't go to wash her hands, nor did she get an ice pack to soothe them.

Instead, she walked straight to the desk, pulled out her chair, sat down, and lit up the computer screen.

The screen was still on the chat window with "Mu Xia."

The last message she had sent—

"I always feel like between these lines, it's a bit... familiar."

—was hanging quietly at the bottom of the dialog box.

The other party had not replied.

Ye Xi's gaze lingered on that line for two seconds before she switched to the browser and refreshed the Microblogging platform.

The entire homepage had been completely dominated by that long comparison image.

On the left was Red Plum on Snowfield, on the right was Lone Flower in the Abyss, and in the middle were four words—each holding their own grace.

The atmosphere in the comments section was completely different from a few hours ago.

Those murderous flame wars and personal attack posts from before had been swept clean as if by a broom.

In their place were uniform declarations of reconciliation, crying emojis of being moved, and an overwhelming wave of "Plum-Snow CP" fan art.

Someone had turned the two poems into a calligraphy scroll animation, with running script on the left and regular script on the right, each marked with a vermilion seal at the end. It had already surpassed five million views.

Others had drawn chibi comics—

—a plum blossom wearing a scarf and a snow flower wearing an abyssal cloak sitting together and drinking tea, with the caption: "Plum-Snow duo, each holding their own grace. Thank you for today's peace in the literary world."

As Ye Xi looked at these, the corners of her mouth curled up slightly.

She scrolled through a few more.

Over on the Wenyuan Pavilion forum, Chen Jiahao and Dan Yi's truce statements had been pinned to the featured section.

The two messages hung there side by side, with thousands of replies below uniformly spamming "The legendary scene of the Plum-Snow reconciliation."

"That's good," Ye Xi said softly.

But as soon as those words left her mouth, her brow furrowed again.

She minimized the browser and reopened the chat window with "Mu Xia."

That sense of "familiarity" had been stuck in her chest ever since the moment she saw Dream Weaver's reply poem this afternoon.

She couldn't quite put her finger on what it was.

It wasn't on the level of content. The themes, imagery, and emotional colors of the two poems were completely different.

One was warm and solid, the other cold and sharp.

One leaned downward, while the other drew a boundary upward.

But there was one aspect that made her professional instinct repeatedly send out signals.

Rhythm.

Ye Xi was a pianist.

Her sensitivity to rhythm wasn't something developed through training; it was a talent ingrained in her bones.

Even if she heard a melody only twice, she could deconstruct all the accent placements, breath pauses, and dynamic changes within it.

When applied to poetry, this ability meant that every time she read a poem, she would automatically "play" it in her head.

tonal patterns were the black and white keys.

phrasing was the beat line.

The structural progression was the breath of the musical phrase.

In the dressing room that afternoon, she had silently read the two poems back and forth no less than twenty times.

For the first ten times, she only thought they were well-written.

From the eleventh time onward, a faint sense of discord began to surface.

By the twentieth time, she had finally caught that thorn.

The tonal turning points of both poems fell at almost exactly the same positions.

In Jian Shen's "The plum and snow contend for spring, neither willing to yield," the tonal switch is completed on the fourth character, "Spring."

In Dream Weaver's "Each guards its own universe, not competing in fragrance," the tonal switch is also completed on the fourth character, "Kun."

A coincidence?

There are only so many rules in regulated verse; it's normal for switching points to overlap.

But Ye Xi continued to deconstruct further.

In the second line of both poems, the positions of the breath pauses were identical.

The dynamic climb curves of the third lines were identical.

Even the way the final lines concluded—

—that specific rhythmic pattern of rising then falling, reaching a peak at the third-to-last character and then slowly descending—was identical.

This wasn't determined by the poetic rules themselves.

Rules only define the framework of tonal patterns; they don't dictate the habits of one's breath.

Just as a musical score defines the notes but doesn't dictate the force with which a pianist strikes a key or the timing of their release.

Under the same set of rules, a hundred poets would write with a hundred different rhythms.

Because everyone's breathing habits are different, their way of phrasing thoughts is different, and their subconscious accent preferences are different.

These things are harder to forge than fingerprints.

And the rate of overlap between these two poems on these "fingerprints" was high enough to make her skin crawl.

It was as if—

—the same musician had sat at two different pianos and played the same chord progression.

The timbre was different, the piece was different, the emotion was different.

But the angle of the fingers hitting the keys, the speed of leaving them, the timing of the pedal... all came from the same skeleton.

Ye Xi stared at the chat window and waited for three minutes.

Four minutes.

Five minutes.

A small line of gray text suddenly jumped up above the chat box.

"The other party is typing..."

Ye Xi's body involuntarily leaned forward a little.

She curled her legs up onto the chair, rested her chin on her knees, and locked her gaze onto that line of text without blinking.

The gray prompt flickered for a few seconds and then disappeared.

Ye Xi's heart sank along with it.

Then the prompt reappeared.

Disappeared again.

Appeared again.

He was typing. Then he deleted it. Typing again. Deleted again.

Ye Xi bit her lip and hugged her knees tighter. She couldn't say why she was so nervous.

She was clearly just sharing thoughts with a friend she got along with; it wasn't like she was waiting for some monumental judgment.

But the feeling was just like having finished the last note of a piano competition and sitting backstage waiting for the judges to reveal the scores.

Both expectant and apprehensive.

What was she expectant of him saying? What was she apprehensive about him saying?

She couldn't answer that herself.

Finally.

"The other party is typing" appeared for two seconds one last time, and then a message popped into the dialog box.

【Mu Xia】: "How so?"

Two words.

Ye Xi looked at those two words, her lips slowly pursing.

It wasn't a perfunctory "Haha, really?", it wasn't a casual "You're overthinking it," and it wasn't a topic-dodging "The magazine photos you took today look great."

How so.

He was asking seriously.

That feeling of being treated with such gravity was like a feather lightly brushing across her heart—itchy, yet warm.

Ye Xi sat up straight, took a deep breath, and placed her fingers on the keyboard.

She didn't rush to type; instead, she first reorganized the analysis she had repeatedly refined that afternoon in her mind.

Then she began to send them one by one.

【Fugitive Beethoven】: "Conclusion first, I think the 'breath' of these two poems is too similar."

【Fugitive Beethoven】: "You know, when pianists look at a score, the first thing they look for isn't the notes, but where the breath pauses of the musical phrases are."

【Fugitive Beethoven】: "The breath pause is where the breathing happens. Every performer's breathing habits are different; this thing can reveal a person's identity more than technique."

【Fugitive Beethoven】: "The tonal patterns of poetry work on the same principle."

【Fugitive Beethoven】: "The rules define the framework, but specifically which character the turn happens on, where the pauses are, and how the dynamics climb and conclude—"

【Fugitive Beethoven】: "—these are the poet's own 'breath pauses.'"

【Fugitive Beethoven】: "I deconstructed the two poems over twenty times. The tonal turns in Jian Shen's poem are on the fourth character of each line; Dream Weaver's are too."

【Fugitive Beethoven】: "The breath pause in Jian Shen's second line is after 'putting down the brush'; Dream Weaver's second line pause is also on the exact same beat."

【Fugitive Beethoven】: "Even the way the final lines conclude is the same! Both reach a peak at the third-to-last character and then slowly descend."

【Fugitive Beethoven】: "It's like the same pianist sitting at two different pianos—different timbres, different pieces, but the habits of the fingers are completely identical."

After typing this long passage, Ye Xi's fingers hovered over the keyboard for two seconds.

She added one more.

【Fugitive Beethoven】: "Of course, it's also possible that Dream Weaver intentionally mirrored Jian Shen's tonal rhythm to correspond with his rules [thinking emoji]"

After sending it, Ye Xi withdrew her hands from the keyboard, interlaced her fingers, and curled herself up in the chair.

Her heart was thumping.

She felt she might be overthinking it.

Two regulated poems hitting a similar rhythmic pattern is entirely possible in terms of probability.

Especially since Dream Weaver's was clearly a response to Jian Shen's, consciously mirroring the other's rhyme and sentence structure; it's normal for the rhythm to be close.

But she just couldn't convince herself.

The cursor for "The other party is typing" on the screen flickered for a few seconds.

This time, there was no repeated deleting.

A few seconds later, a message popped in.

【Mu Xia】: "Master Ye, with this analytical ability, you could go straight to being a guest on a treasure appraisal show [clapping]"

【Mu Xia】: "But if you posted this brain-hole online, those two groups of fans who just made up would probably team up to hang you on a wall."

【Mu Xia】: "A middle-aged literary giant who writes about the suffering of the Loess Plateau and a dark master who writes about the horrors of the cosmic abyss—if they really were the same person, just how schizophrenic would that person have to be?"

【Mu Xia】: "It's quite scary to think about [doge]"

...