335: Chapter 335 Narrow Path Between the Mountains

At 7:30 AM, there were still two full hours before the Wangfujing Bookstore in Beijing would open.

The early autumn sun had just climbed over the skyline of the commercial building opposite.

Orange-red light spilled across the square, stretching the shadows of everyone in line thin and long.

The scene on the square was spectacular; the clamor of voices was so lively it even surpassed the busiest periods of the Wangfujing Pedestrian Street on ordinary days.

The massive square was rarely divided into two distinct queues.

On the left was a phalanx of hardcore fans for Jian Shen, all wearing matching light yellow support uniforms.

They held banners printed with the cover of "ordinary world," and their line folded back and forth seven or eight times across the square, creating a grand momentum.

A few core members of the fan club at the front held megaphones to maintain order,

occasionally leading the crowd in shouting slogans, drawing waves of responses.

Had this display occurred yesterday, it would have been enough to crush any competing product on the same stage.

But today, the queue on the right, pointing directly toward the "Fu Zhi Yao Competition" exhibition area, left all the early-arriving staff members stunned.

This queue was extremely "motley."

At the very front stood a dozen or so high school students carrying backpacks.

Behind them was a group of young white-collar workers wearing black-framed glasses.

Some hadn't even had time to change out of their suits; their buttons were open, and their ties hung loosely around their necks.

Looking further back, the line even included migrant workers wearing old work clothes with mud stuck to their soles.

Several delivery riders in fluorescent vests had parked their electric scooters at the edge of the square,

helmets hanging from the handlebars, as they stood obediently at the end of the line.

A middle-aged woman carrying a white canvas bag clutched a slip of paper in her arms,

upon which the four characters for "folding beijing" were scrawled crookedly.

She stood at the intersection of the two lines, looking a bit lost. A high school student nearby leaned over to glance at the words on the paper,

then nodded toward the right side:

"Auntie, line up over here."

The numbers on the left still held the advantage, but the queue on the right had already gathered three or four hundred people, and it was still growing steadily.

Several official staff members who had arrived early stood under the bookstore's porch, incessantly calling for logistical support over their walkie-talkies.

Their store manager had said last night to increase manpower, but they had only prepared twice as many guides and crowd-control ropes as yesterday.

No one expected that the situation on the second day would swell to the point of needing temporary security reinforcements.

Those bottom-tier workers, who were usually the most inconspicuous in this city,

were now standing quietly and firmly under the rising sun just to buy a book.

Second floor of the bookstore, VIP lounge.

Xu Changge stood before a massive floor-to-ceiling window, holding a cup of freshly poured black coffee.

His usually gentle and composed features were now slightly drawn together,

his gaze lingering on that motley queue for a long time without moving away, his fingers tightening slightly around the paper cup unconsciously.

After yesterday's signing event ended, he had returned to his hotel,

and the first thing he did was tear open the plastic wrap on the cover and open the copy of "folding beijing" he had bought just before the bookstore closed during the day.

He had originally only intended to flip through a few pages to understand his opponent's style.

As it turned out, he read it in one breath from 9:00 PM until 3:00 AM, even forgetting to answer a call from his grandfather in the middle of it.

When he reached the part where Old Knife crawled into the trash chute, Xu Changge's hand turning the pages stopped for a full half-minute.

It wasn't that he couldn't keep reading, but rather those few lines of restrained, almost cruel plain sketching had pinned him to the headboard.

A bottom-tier trash collector, in order to scrape together ten thousand yuan for his foundling daughter's kindergarten sponsorship fee, risked being crushed into fragments by the space-flipping mechanism.

The writing wasn't sentimental or sensationalized; there was only an extremely cold, objective presentation.

When Xu Changge turned that page, his fingertips lingered on the paper, slow to let go.

Sitting at the hotel desk late that night, he spent a long time digesting the impact of that reading experience.

When he wrote "soul of the ancient wall," his pen depicted the mottled arrow scars on a thousand-year-old city wall.

He wrote that wall as the backbone of a nation, and then wrote of another invisible wall already erected in the hearts of modern people as they passed by indifferently behind car glass.

That was a perspective looking back from the upper reaches of the long river of time, a writing style imbued with a sense of historical depth.

But Lin Que's writing was crouching on the ground.

He didn't go to write about "how great suffering is"; he simply recorded the suffering itself truthfully.

This kind of writing was something Xu Changge could not achieve.

It wasn't a lack of literary skill, but rather that his life experience lacked this kind of soil.

Growing up in a prestigious family estate in Beijing, ancient books and rare editions were within reach; his worst days were merely being punished by his grandfather to transcribe "The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons" three times.

He could understand suffering, and he could write about it.

But he knew clearly that the suffering in his writing was seen through a layer of glass.

While Lin Que was on the other side of the glass.

Standing before the floor-to-ceiling window now,

Xu Changge watched the motley queue below composed of high school students, white-collar workers, and laborers.

This queue had no uniform support colors, no grand slogans; many people hadn't even spoken a single word to one another.

But they were lining up in the early morning for the same book.

Whether wearing old work clothes or delivering food, they all recognized their own lives within those pages.

"He has achieved something I cannot."

Xu Changge's voice was very soft, carrying a unique sense of magnanimity.

Several fellow creators behind him looked over upon hearing his voice.

They had also scrolled through that long review by the pianist on their phones last night, as well as the overwhelming reader feedback.

Although they were mentally prepared for today's popularity, seeing this scene with their own eyes through the floor-to-ceiling window now,

everyone's expression was filled with the speechlessness that follows being directly struck by reality.

In a corner of the lounge, Dan Yi still occupied his usual spot.

But unlike yesterday, he wasn't facing away from the window today.

Dan Yi stood before the window glass, his pale eyes fixed intently on the queue on the right side below.

His gaze was locked onto several middle-aged men wearing worn-out work clothes.

Their hands were rough and chapped, with dirt and grime embedded in their fingernails that couldn't be washed away.

They stood among the well-dressed white-collar workers and energetic high school students, their bodies slightly hunched with a curve formed by years of being weighed down by life.

But they were standing there.

Quietly, firmly, standing in the sunlight.

Dan Yi's Adam's apple bobbed once.

He thought of Mo City.

He thought of the fishermen carving ice to catch fish by the Black River in winter, and the workers crouching by the roadside gnawing on cold steamed buns in minus forty-degree weather.

When he wrote "the ice surface of black river," he wrote about his own loneliness.

The pain of a mixed-race youth being treated as an outsider in a closed-off small town.

That loneliness was real and bone-deep.

But looking at this group of people below now, Dan Yi suddenly realized one thing.

The Old Knife in Lin Que's writing was not lonely.

Old Knife had a daughter, companions, and fifty million people just like him living in the night.

But precisely because he wasn't lonely, his pain was even more immense.

Because what he carried was not the weight of one person, but the collective fate of an entire class folded into the underground.

This kind of weight was much heavier than loneliness.

Dan Yi's shoulders, leaning against the glass, slowly tensed.

Last night, near the end of the event, he had avoided the gazes of his other classmates and gone to the checkout counter alone to buy a copy of "folding beijing."

In the cramped corner of the hotel sofa, he had originally expected to see the high-and-mighty pity of a superior,

but was instead cut to the point of breathlessness by the cold, almost cruel words on the page.

Old Knife's struggle for his life against mechanical gears in the trash chute

made him uncontrollably think of those fishermen on the ice of Mo City whose knuckles were deformed from the cold for the sake of a few yuan.

It wasn't jealousy, nor was it refusal to accept defeat.

It was a shock.

It was the first time in his seventeen years that he realized words could hold something much larger than a single person's loneliness.

On the square below, the boundary between the two queues was not monolithic.

Within the "Jian Shen" fan camp on the left, several young people who looked like college students were full of curiosity about the display on the right.

A girl with a ponytail craned her neck to watch for a long while, finally unable to resist pulling her companion over.

"Are you guys also here to buy 'ordinary world'? Why are you lining up here?"

A delivery rider in a fluorescent vest at the very front of the right queue turned around.

His face was tanned dark and his lips were chapped, but he spoke with a strong, resonant voice.

"No, I'm lining up here to buy 'folding beijing.'"

"Last night I scrolled past a book review on the Microblogging platform saying this book writes about the lives of bottom-tier workers in a folded space."

"I was thinking, isn't that time allocation in the Third Space the same thing as my night shift schedule?"

A programmer nearby wearing a plaid shirt and sporting dark circles under his eyes took up the conversation.

"Exactly, fifty million people sharing a few hours of night."

"I sit at my workstation until 2:00 AM every day; by the time I leave the office building, even the streetlights are out."

"That author is only seventeen; I'm really baffled, how does he know more about my life than someone like me who's been working for seven or eight years?"

The delivery rider gave a chuckle:

"Who cares how he knows, as long as he writes it right."

The girl with the ponytail and her companion looked at each other.

They had originally just come to join the excitement, but they were now firmly gripped by the sense of resonance that transcended professions between these two complete strangers.

"Um... what exactly is the deal with that Third Space time allocation? Could you guys explain it to me?"

The girl's voice was a bit hesitant when she asked, after all, she was lined up on Jian Shen's side.

The delivery rider and the programmer, however, didn't care about these self-imposed identity labels.

One described the setting, the other supplemented with details, back and forth,

breaking down that cruel and ingenious spatial class system in "folding beijing."

The girl became more and more enthralled as she listened, finally simply pulling her companion over as well.

The two of them stood at the boundary of the two queues, neither returning to the left nor officially joining the right.

They just stood there quietly, listening to a delivery rider and a programmer use their respective life experiences to interpret the same book.

By the second-floor window, Xu Changge took in this entire scene.

He withdrew his gaze and gently placed the paper cup on the windowsill.

Turning around to face the fellow creators behind him who had complex looks in their eyes, Xu Changge's tone was calm.

"Yesterday we were still lamenting Senior Jian Shen's towering heights, feeling that he was unbeatable."

He paused, his gaze sweeping over the still-silent Dan Yi in the corner, before finally landing back in the middle of the group.

"Today, Lin Que has already carved out a path of his own right beside that high mountain."

No one responded.

After a full five or six seconds of silence, a contestant spoke with a bitter smile:

"Wait, Young Master Xu, with you saying that, how are we supposed to stay seated?"

"It's right that you can't stay seated."

Xu Changge picked up the copy of "folding beijing" from the table—the one he had bought yesterday, its edges already slightly worn from his flipping—and walked toward the lounge door.

"Since someone dares to carve a new path beside the absolute peak, we can't lack the courage to even step onto it and take a look.

Come, let's go downstairs to witness the true wind and frost."

At 9:30 AM, the broadcast announcement for the bookstore's opening rang out on time.

The two queues on the square surged simultaneously.

Hundreds of people, stepping through the sunlight, flooded into the bookstore's doors in single file.

...