382: Chapter 382 You... want to rent a place outside?

"Click."

The sound of the door closing felt like the lifting of a seal in some physical sense.

When Professor Liu Zuoqing walked out of the lecture hall, he did not look back at a single student.

Dai Shengzong and several old professors followed behind him.

The sound of leather shoes in the corridor grew more distant, eventually cut off by the heavy fire door.

Thirty people in the classroom exhaled simultaneously.

But no one felt relaxed.

Professor Liu Zuoqing's words, "In seven days, I want to see just how hard your bones really are," echoed in the air,

like an invisible rope tightening around everyone's neck.

The sounds of chairs moving rose and fell across the room.

Some began to pack their notebooks, while others sat in a daze, processing the massive amount of information.

Zhang Yiyu stood up from the third row and walked out, carrying his notebook filled with academic jargon.

As he passed the first row, his pace slowed noticeably.

Lin Que happened to be turned sideways, talking to Chen Jiahao.

Zhang Yiyu's gaze swept over the back of Lin Que's head without stopping, heading straight for the exit.

But in the two steps he took past him, his shoulders tilted left by an almost imperceptible margin.

Giving way.

The boy with metal-framed glasses behind him followed closely, head lowered.

Clutching his notebook to his chest, he even deliberately lightened his breathing as he passed Lin Que.

Wei Yiming saw this scene, his lips twitching slightly, but he said nothing.

Yuan Ningning passed in front of Lin Que with her notebook in her arms.

She simply dropped a "Thanks" before turning and leaving.

Tang He followed behind, nodding with a look of wanting to say more but hesitating.

The notebook in her hand was open, and the words "No heroes under gravity" were circled layer upon layer.

Dan Yi was the last to leave the classroom.

By the time he stood up from the corner of the third row, almost everyone was gone.

His grayish-blue eyes looked up from beneath his hat's brim, gazing across the empty seats,

falling on Lin Que's back as he walked out the door side-by-side with Xu Changge.

That gaze lingered for a full three seconds.

It carried something inexplicable.

Outside the main building, the September sun made the ginkgo leaves translucent.

Xu Changge and Lin Que walked side-by-side down the tree-lined path.

Their shadows stretched long on the asphalt, almost overlapping.

"I learned more today than I did in the entire past year combined."

Xu Changge spoke, his pace slower than usual.

He didn't look at Lin Que, his eyes fixed on the dappled shadows on the road ahead.

He paused for a step and turned to look at Lin Que.

"For this short story, I'm going to smash all those 'bricks' I couldn't bear to throw away."

Lin Que walked beside him at a steady, unhurried pace,

the soles of his slippers making a lazy slapping sound on the asphalt. Hearing this, he tilted his head slightly.

"Smashing them is good. Only after you smash them will you know what the scenery behind the wall looks like."

Xu Changge was silent for two seconds, then suddenly laughed.

That laugh was deeper than the relaxation in the dorm this morning, carrying a kind of excitement that only arises after being pushed to the limit by an opponent.

"Just wait and see."

The two didn't continue the topic.

Trailing their respective shadows, they turned into the dormitory corridor one after the other.

The entire afternoon was silent.

But starting from the evening, the dormitory area exploded.

The hallways were filled with the sounds of footsteps, pages turning, and keyboards clicking.

Some moved their laptops to the long tables in the common area,

while others squatted by the windowsill at the end of the corridor, using the natural light to flip through the reading materials Professor Liu Zuoqing had distributed.

The door to Room 306 was tightly closed. Chen Jiahao's wailing pierced through the wooden door and echoed around the corridor.

"Aaaaaah, what am I supposed to write?! Ten thousand words! Seven days! Old Man Liu is trying to kill me!"

From next door in 305, Zhang Liang's lowered voice offered consolation:

"Keep it down. My inspiration just popped up and your howling scared it back in."

"Wait, you have inspiration already?!" Chen Jiahao's voice instantly jumped an octave.

"What direction? Can you give me a hint?"

"No." Zhang Liang refused flatly, followed by the sound of a door locking.

At the other end of the corridor, Su Xiaotang came out of the hot water room with a cup of instant coffee and hurried back to her room.

Her roommate was a girl from Xiang Province, currently sitting on her bed staring blankly at her laptop.

Su Xiaotang set her coffee on the desk, pulled out her chair, opened her notebook, and spread out a sheet of white A4 paper.

Her pen touched the paper, wrote two words, then crossed them out.

She wrote three more words and crossed them out again.

Biting her pen cap, she stared at the scratched-up paper, her brow furrowed into a knot.

Her mind was full of Lin Que's phrase, "a brick with a missing corner."

Dorm 303.

Xu Changge sat upright at his desk, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up two inches above his wrists, and his collar buttoned all the way to the top.

Seven or eight books were spread out on the desk.

Sociology, structuralist narratology, and two poetry collections pressed at the very bottom.

His left hand flipped through the table of contents of one book while his right hand scribbled quickly in a notebook, occasionally stopping to rub his temples.

He was building the skeleton.

From the fragments of perception shattered in today's class, he was searching for a new support point that could make a story stand.

Three meters away.

Lin Que, wearing his large gray shorts, was half-sunken into his mattress, the back of his head resting on stacked pillows.

His right hand held his phone up, his left hand rested on his stomach, and his thumb moved occasionally.

In his private inbox, the notification bar was already piled with over forty unread emails.

Wang De'an's messages were at the top, twelve in a row.

"Teacher Jian Shen, good news! Regarding the overseas physical publishing rights for the first part of 'ordinary world,' Random House has finally relented!"

"Their terms are exclusive agency for the global English-speaking region, an initial print run of 500,000 copies, and a royalty ladder starting at 12%!"

"Also, the preliminary overseas release date is set for next weekend. I need you to confirm the coordination plan for the promotional rhythm."

Lin Que finished reading these messages but didn't reply immediately, his thumb scrolling down.

Hong Hu's messages followed.

"Great Master Dream Weaver! Since 'the colour out of space' went online, site-wide bookmarks have surpassed twenty-eight million, with a retention rate of 91.3%."

"Additionally, the Cthulhu category is now seeing an influx of copycat works, two of which have quite high completion levels. Do you want to take some time to look at them?"

Lin Que's thumb paused on the screen for a second before exiting the chat interface.

Two fronts, two completely different commercial ecosystems.

All of it required his single brain to handle.

The problem was, the place he was currently in was called Qingbei University.

The Qinglan Training Camp also enforced semi-closed management, with no leaving the dormitory building after 10 PM.

His roommate was Xu Changge, a top-tier genius whose observation and intuition were at a monstrous level.

Handling the business affairs of any persona in this environment was like dancing on a knife's edge.

Voice calls?

Impossible, Xu Changge was in the very next bed.

Writing late at night?

Xu Changge woke up at 6 AM to read literature; his schedule was more precise than an alarm clock.

Conference calls?

The corridor's soundproofing was practically non-existent; Chen Jiahao's wailing next door could be heard by the entire floor.

Lin Que locked his screen, then opened it again, switching to another app.

His fingers tapped a few words into the search bar.

Xu Changge finished rubbing his temples, his peripheral vision sweeping over the bed opposite him.

Lin Que's posture holding the phone was exactly the same as ten minutes ago, completely motionless.

The light from the screen hit his face, reflecting an expression of intense focus.

Xu Changge's gaze lingered on that image for two seconds.

He remembered clearly the evaluation Professor Liu gave Lin Que in class today.

"His writing is as sharp as a knife." That bottomless reserve of knowledge definitely couldn't have come from nowhere.

Right now, the level of focus Lin Que showed while looking at his phone was identical to when he was dissecting Zhang Yiyu in the classroom.

Xu Changge speculated that Lin Que was likely consulting some extremely niche sociological literature or a field investigation database in a specific field.

Xu Changge hesitated for three seconds before speaking.

"What kind of materials are you looking into?"

His tone was natural, carrying the normal curiosity between roommates and the instinctive focus a competitor has on an opponent's preparation strategy.

Lin Que looked up.

He glanced at Xu Changge and, without any hesitation, flipped his phone over, turning the screen toward Xu Changge.

On the screen, the interface of a real estate agency app filled the entire display. A line of text was typed into the search bar:

[Haidian District] [Commercial/Residential] [Monthly Rent]

Xu Changge's finger froze above his notebook, his entire body going still.

He had prepared a whole speech about structuralist narrative, about imagery and skeletal reconstruction, but it was all stuck in his throat.

He looked at the words in the search bar, then looked up at Lin Que's calm, expressionless face.

Thirty of the nation's top literary geniuses were currently at each other's throats for the bone-forging short story in seven days.

The corridors were full of frantic footsteps and the sound of turning pages.

And his roommate, the national champion, the creator of SSS-rank works,

was looking for a house.

Xu Changge opened his mouth.

"You... want to rent a house outside?"

...