391: Chapter 391 "The Steps" - Part 1

When Su Mubai's words fell, the air in the classroom felt as if half of it had been sucked away.

Professor Liu Zuoqing turned his head to look at Dai Shengzong in the center of the judges' panel.

There was no extra expression on Dai Shengzong's face; he merely gave a very solemn, slight nod.

Professor Liu Zuoqing said nothing, standing up and walking toward the multimedia console at the side of the podium.

His pace was not fast, the sound of his leather soles clicking against the floor tiles echoing one after another, exceptionally clear.

The eyes of every student in the classroom followed him closely.

Not until the projector motor emitted a low hum did the white screen slowly descend from the top, swallowing the entire wall in front.

The moment the beam of light hit it, the lighting in the entire classroom dimmed by half a notch.

On the screen, the title consisted of only two characters.

"the steps."

No subtitle, no author's signature, no decoration whatsoever.

Just those two characters, standing squarely in the dead center of the white screen.

The word count in the upper right corner strikingly displayed: 7,839 words.

Someone in the audience gasped.

This number was the lowest among the thirty manuscripts.

Zhang Yiyu sat in the third row, his brow furrowing slightly.

He stared at that number for two seconds, an instinctive question surfacing in his heart:

Less than eight thousand words—how could it hold up?

His own piece about the shoemaker was twelve thousand words long; he had overturned and restarted it five times, adding meat to the bones with every draft.

Seeing this length now, his first reaction was that it was thin.

Professor Liu Zuoqing stood by the projection screen, his gaze sweeping across the various expressions in the room.

Some were confused, some were curious, and some were as tense as a fully drawn bow.

"Screen reading speeds vary. To let everyone feel the weight of these words simultaneously..."

Professor Liu Zuoqing turned to look at Song Yuan, who was standing at the side of the podium, his voice steady.

"Song Yuan, I'll have to trouble you to read it for everyone."

Song Yuan was taken aback for a moment.

From the start of the camp until now, his role had always been that of a teaching assistant, a manager, and a mouthpiece.

But now, Professor Liu was asking him to stand on the podium and use his voice to deliver a work from beginning to end into everyone's ears.

He quickly adjusted his breathing, walked to the center of the podium, and picked up the printed manuscript from the desk.

He adjusted the microphone's position and held it in his right hand.

His gaze fell upon the first line of text.

He had already seen that line once last night in Professor Liu's office.

At the time, he hadn't made a sound, only reading it silently from start to finish; after finishing, he had sat in his chair for a long while without speaking.

Now, he was going to read those words aloud.

Song Yuan cleared his throat.

"Father always felt that the steps to our house were low."

The voice came through the microphone, reflecting off the dome of the lecture hall and falling upon everyone's heads.

In the third row, Zhang Yiyu's pen tip tapped against his notebook.

Steps. Low.

Two extremely mundane images, pieced together, formed an opening he hadn't expected at all.

No environmental setup, no character sketches, no carefully designed narrative hooks.

Just a declarative sentence.

As flat as a bowl of plain water.

Zhang Yiyu wrote a single word in the margin of his notebook:

Thin.

He prepared to wait for the following text to verify his judgment.

Song Yuan continued reading.

"There were three steps to our house, paved with three slabs of bluestone.

Those slabs were carried down from the mountain by Father many years ago, each weighing about three hundred catties."

The details of Father carrying the stone slabs unfolded.

The stonemason had jokingly said that if he could carry them home in one go, he wouldn't charge; Father carried three loads in a row without feeling like he'd exerted much effort.

It was only that the mountain path there and back had worn out a pair of hemp-cord straw sandals, which Father felt was a pity.

Someone in the audience shifted.

The focus of that "pity" wasn't on the three-hundred-catty stone slabs, but on a pair of straw sandals.

A boy from Sichuan Province sitting by the window in the fourth row looked up, staring at the text on the projection screen.

He saw something familiar.

That way of calculating—viewing effort as cheaper than gold, and straw sandals as more precious than effort—he had seen it in his own grandfather.

Song Yuan's voice advanced steadily.

The bluestone slabs had been laid at the doorway without being smoothed by a stonemason; years of wind and rain had worn small, coin-sized pits into them.

When the weather cleared and the breeze blew through, the stone slabs were a deep, cool blue, spacious and shady.

Mother would sit on the threshold working, while "I" was placed on the bluestone slabs.

"I was drooling a long string of saliva, and I opened my mouth to gnaw on the bluestone, only to end up with a mouthful of mud dust."

Someone in the classroom let out a very soft laugh.

That laugh was cut short as soon as it escaped.

The person laughing didn't even know why they were laughing, nor why that laugh would get stuck in their throat and turn into something sour.

Song Yuan turned a page.

"Father's soles were broad, with many dry cracks, sand and mud embedded in the fissures.

He usually went to the river to wash his feet, only washing them at home once during the New Year.

Mother would bring a large basin of hot water, and Father would sit on the steps and wash very patiently.

Because there was so much sand, he would ask for a scrub brush and scrub away, shua-la, shua-la."

"Later, Father's feet were finally washed clean, finally revealing their true color, yet they were still yellowish—the color of the earth."

"When I poured out the water for him, what came out was a basin of mud, with a layer of sand still accumulated at the bottom of the wooden basin."

The pen in Zhang Yiyu's hand stopped.

He looked down at that word in his notebook.

Thin.

He stared at the word for two seconds, instinctively wanting to argue.

The deformed knuckles of a shoemaker—he had researched it, watched documentaries; he hadn't failed to do his homework.

But as soon as that thought emerged, he extinguished it himself.

Because he suddenly realized that although he had scoured through data, he had never actually touched the hand of a shoemaker who had truly worked for thirty years.

Those hands in the data were a set of statistics, a piece of footage, a sociological sample he could cite.

But it wasn't a pair of hands.

Yesterday, Su Mubai had said that his piece on the shoemaker "hadn't even breathed a breath of life," and he had felt it was unfair at the time.

Now he understood.

What was that breath of life?

That breath of life was the layer of sand that settled at the bottom of a basin of foot-washing water.

That was something that couldn't be found even if one watched a documentary a thousand times while sitting in a study.

Song Yuan's reading pace remained steady throughout.

He didn't deliberately emphasize any words, nor did he draw out the endings of sentimental passages.

This restraint instead caused the weight of the words themselves to press down catty by catty onto the listeners' shoulders.

"the steps to our house are low!"

"Father sighed, as if to me, and as if to himself. He had said this sentence who knows how many times."

"If the steps are high, the house owner's status is correspondingly high."

"Father had been honest, kind, and submissive his whole life; no one had ever said he had status, and Father never felt he had status either.

But he hoped day and night, preparing to build a new house with high steps."

Xu Changge sat in the middle of the first row, his hands clutching the fabric on his knees.

He thought back to that afternoon.

In Dorm 303, Lin Que had stood by the window and told a story about steps in the most nonchalant tone.

When Xu Changge heard it then, he only felt the imagery was very heavy.

But now, as those narrated images turned into printed words,

read out line by line by Song Yuan, the sense of oppression was ten times stronger than that day.

Because narration can omit details, but writing cannot.

All those things Lin Que had glossed over in his narration were now completely filled in.

The color of every stone slab fragment, every straw sandal worn through at the sole, every jiao note stuffed into the black clay jar.

These things, pieced together, constituted the weight of a man's majority of a lifetime.

"In a year, he spent seven months farming, four months gathering firewood in the mountains, half a month picking foundation pebbles on the Great Stream Bank, and the remaining half month for the New Year and weaving straw sandals."

Song Yuan's voice had an extremely brief pause here.

He didn't even realize the pause himself.

But Yuan Ningning in the second row heard it.

The gel pen in her hand slipped from between her fingers, falling onto the desk and rolling twice.

Twelve months, sliced into four segments.

Farming, gathering firewood, picking stones, weaving straw sandals for the New Year.

Not a single day was idle, and not a single day was lived for himself.

This way of allocating time was more cruel than any adjective.

The reading progressed to the middle section.

Father had prepared for most of his life; the clay jar had been filled several times, and the pebbles were piled as high as a small hill.

He finally felt he could build the house.

During those days of building the house, Father worked alongside the craftsmen by day, and by night, he moved bricks and carried mud alone until midnight.

After sleeping for three or four hours, he would get up again to arrange the next day's work.

Then, the steps finally began to be laid.

When Song Yuan reached the part about Father getting up before dawn to tread the yellow mud, his voice trembled for the second time.

This time it was more obvious than the last.

"It was as if a layer of fine rain was floating on Father's hair; every fine hair struggled to carry one or even several tiny water droplets, rising and falling with the rhythm of Father treading the yellow mud.

When they shook and broke, they rolled onto his forehead, which was soon covered in dew as large as soybeans."

In the shadows of the classroom corner, Dan Yi curled up in his seat, the brim of his hat pulled very low.

But the brim couldn't hide his eyes.

Those gray-blue eyes were fixed on the projection screen, not moving an inch.

He didn't flip through his notebook, nor did he use his usual method of building an analytical framework for this article in his mind.

He did nothing.

The father treading the yellow mud, every strand of hair hanging with dew...

He tried to fit this image into some literary coordinate he was familiar with in his mind,

to locate it, label it, and stick a tag on it that he could understand.

But it was useless.

That image didn't fall into any coordinate.

It was just there, like a stone sinking to the bottom of the water,

carrying the weight of Mo City's winter, carrying the temperature of white breath condensing into thin frost on eyebrows when an axe falls.

Dan Yi didn't move, but he stopped thinking.

This feeling was exceptionally unfamiliar to him.

Song Yuan turned a page.

"The new steps were finished—nine levels, exactly twice as high as the old ones."

When this sentence was read aloud, there was an indescribable loosening in the classroom.

It was as if everyone was breathing a sigh of relief for that father they had never met.

It was done.

the steps were built.

The obsession of most of a lifetime had finally landed.

But there were still several pages of manuscript left in Song Yuan's hand.

Anyone with even a bit of literary intuition felt that the following text wouldn't let that breath be fully released.

"As required, Father poured water over them once every day.

The next day, Father would press the steps with his hand and say, 'It's hard, it's hard.'

A few days later, he tapped them again with a thin wooden stick and said, 'It's solid, it's solid.'"

Chen Jiahao sat in his seat, his palms covered in sweat.

Since childhood, he had lacked for neither money, nor steps, nor any material things.

But these few paragraphs made his throat feel heavily blocked.

An old farmer, pressing with his hand, tapping with a stick, treading with his feet, confirming over and over whether those few concrete steps had dried through.

He wasn't testing the steps.

He was caressing half of his life.

Song Yuan's reading continued forward.

"On the day they moved into the new house, Father sat on the highest step smoking."

"He raised his pipe to knock out the ash; he gave it a knock and then froze."

"the steps were finished with concrete; they couldn't withstand the knocking."

"So he held back and didn't knock."

"Someone walked past the doorway and called out to ask if he'd had his midday meal."

"Father answered that he hadn't."

"Actually, he had eaten."

When Song Yuan reached this point, his voice trembled for the third time.

He stopped for a full two seconds before continuing with the next line.

"Father, for some reason, had answered incorrectly."

No one in the classroom moved.

Even the sound of breathing had vanished.

"The second time he sat on the steps, he sat one level lower than before; he always felt that sitting so high up made him feel a bit awkward when greeting people."

Song Yuan's voice began to become extremely slow, leaving gaps between every word.

"However, even one level lower, he was still uncomfortable, so he moved down level by level until he reached the lowest one, where he felt it was too low, so he simply sat on the threshold."

Song Yuan stopped.

He turned the manuscript to the next page, his gaze sweeping over the line of text, his Adam's apple bobbing.

"But the threshold was Mother's place.

In the countryside, there is a custom that in public, a husband and wife never sit together on the same bench."

...