393: Chapter 393 Suffering Doesn't Give You a Chance to Cry

Su Mubai's voice carried a piercing quality, as if it had burrowed out from beneath the earth to strike directly against everyone's eardrums.

The sentence circled beneath the dome of the lecture hall,

and by the time it settled back down, the gazes of all thirty people converged at almost the exact same second.

First row. The center.

The youth who, from the start of the reading to the end, had kept his back against the chair and his hands resting on the table.

No one called out a name.

But there was no need.

The classroom fell silent for two seconds.

Then came the soft sound of a spring's friction as a chair was folded up.

Lin Que pushed off the tabletop with both hands and stood up straight, neither rushed nor slow.

In the third row, Zhang Yiyu's gaze was pinned to Lin Que's back.

His lips moved slightly, but no sound came out.

He looked down at the word "thin" in his notebook and wanted to cross it out, but his fingers froze there.

In the fourth row by the window, the boy from Sichuan Province who had written about the ER intern,

stared at the standing Lin Que with his mouth slightly agape, remaining that way for several seconds before closing it.

In the corner, Dan Yi pushed the brim of his hat up by two inches.

This was the first time since entering the classroom that he had proactively revealed most of his face.

His gray-blue eyes stared unblinkingly at the standing figure ahead.

Standing at the side of the podium, Professor Liu Zuoqing was the first to speak.

His gaze fell on Lin Que, his tone steady, as if posing a fundamental question in class.

"Your short story is less than eight thousand words. It is the shortest among the thirty manuscripts."

Professor Liu Zuoqing paused for a beat.

"Do you believe such a length can carry the entire core of what you wish to express?"

The question seemed simple, but everyone present could hear its weight.

Seven days ago, Professor Liu Zuoqing had personally opened the works of Xu Changge and Lin Que in this very classroom.

Seven days later, while thirty people desperately piled words toward the ten-thousand-word mark, only one person had gone against the grain, submitting something under eight thousand words.

It was either arrogance.

Or genuine confidence.

Lin Que stood in place, not moving a step, nor intentionally straightening his back.

He looked at Professor Liu Zuoqing, his tone no different from when he usually chatted with Xu Changge in the dorm.

"The weight of literature does not lie in word count."

He spoke very briefly.

"The key is how deep the words can pierce. For this story, it is enough."

After hearing this, Professor Liu Zuoqing did not press further.

He turned to look at Su Mubai on the main judging panel, stepping aside slightly to yield the floor for questioning.

Su Mubai had his hands folded over the handle of his cane, his withered fingers pressing one over the other.

The old man's gaze moved from the manuscript to Lin Que's face, slowly, as if measuring the thickness of something with his eyes.

"Young man."

Su Mubai's voice was hoarse, but every word was articulated clearly.

"I have lived a long time and read thousands of articles about suffering.

Disease, natural disasters, war, famine—I have seen every kind of peak."

The old man patted the manuscript on his lap.

"But in your piece, the highest point of suffering for the entire work falls on a 'strained back.'"

When those two words popped out of Su Mubai's mouth, several people in the classroom frowned almost simultaneously.

On the stage, Su Mubai's cane tapped lightly against the floor.

"This old man wants to hear you explain.

Why did you choose that as the explosive point for the whole piece?"

Silence.

Everyone was waiting.

Lin Que stood by the aisle of the first row, not in a hurry to speak.

His gaze swept past Su Mubai's face, glanced at the last few lines of text remaining on the projection screen, and then retracted.

"Elder Su, you were right just now.

Disease, natural disasters, and war are all common peaks of suffering.

Writing about them is indeed tragic enough, impactful enough, and readers will feel miserable after reading it."

Lin Que's voice wasn't loud, but in this silence, every syllable carried far.

"But those things, for those at the bottom of society, are actually not the most hopeless."

Su Mubai's cane stopped moving.

"What is the most hopeless?"

Lin Que did not avoid the follow-up.

"It is when the body breaks."

As those six words landed, someone in the classroom drew in a breath.

"For people in the city, straining one's back is a minor matter.

You go to the hospital, get an X-ray, apply some medicated patches, take three days off, and your salary still comes in.

A strained back is a repairable accident; it doesn't affect anyone's life trajectory."

Lin Que paused for a beat.

"But for this father, his body is his only tool of production."

When this sentence came out, the pen in Zhang Yiyu's hand dropped onto the desk.

"He has no savings, no pension, no medical insurance.

All his output in this life depends entirely on that skeletal frame.

Farming depends on it, chopping wood depends on it, carrying water depends on it, and building steps depends on it."

Lin Que's speaking speed did not increase; instead, it slowed down.

"Once the back is strained, the tool is scrapped.

He hasn't just suffered an injury; his entire production line has stopped.

And he knows clearly that this production line will never restart again."

There was no sound in the classroom.

"Parting by death at least has a moment of intensity.

Someone cries, someone screams, someone collapses.

That kind of pain is sharp; it stabs once and it's over.

But the slow collapse of the body is blunt."

Lin Que's gaze rested steadily on Su Mubai.

"It doesn't give you a chance to collapse.

It just makes you realize more clearly day by day that

those few steps you spent most of your life to earn no longer have anything to do with you."

In the corner of the classroom, Dan Yi's fingers tightly gripped the armrest of his chair.

In those gray-blue eyes beneath the brim of his hat, something was shattered.

Before, he had always felt his grandmother was strong.

She wouldn't make a sound when the straps left red welts on her collarbone, nor when her knees bled from a fall.

A sixty-three-year-old carrying half a frozen pig carcass up the steps, falling and getting back up to keep walking.

He called that toughness.

But Lin Que's few sentences just now had stripped away that shell of "toughness."

It wasn't that his grandmother didn't want to make a sound.

It was that she knew even if she did, no one could carry that half a pig for her.

When the machine of the body breaks, there is no repair station in Mo City.

...

Lin Que retracted his gaze.

"So I didn't write any dramatized scenes."

"I didn't have the father weep bitterly on the steps, I didn't have him smash anything, and I didn't have him roar at the sky about the injustice of fate."

"Because those reactions are the reactions of city people. They are things only people who have seen movies and read novels would do."

"This father wouldn't."

"He would only sit on the threshold, bury his head in his knees, and ask, 'What's happened to this person?'"

Lin Que finished speaking.

The silence in the classroom lasted for a long time.

Chen Jiahao had been clutching his coffee-stained manuscript throughout the session, and at these words, it slipped through his fingers.

The pages drifted to his feet; he looked down at them but did not bend over to pick them up.

Su Mubai sat on the main judging panel, his cane propped between his legs and his hands folded on the handle, staring unmovingly at Lin Que.

The silence continued for a long time.

So long that Professor Liu Zuoqing thought the old man didn't intend to speak.

Then the base of the cane slammed hard against the floor.

Just once.

*Thud*

—That dull sound was heavier than all the previous taps.

Su Mubai's voice squeezed out from deep in his throat, hoarse and burning.

"What a 'scrapped tool.'"

"These kids, every one of them writes suffering as if it's a tapestry of flowers, wishing they could stick gold leaf on every line of text."

Su Mubai's voice rose by half an inch.

"But what is real suffering? Real suffering is what is written in this article—it doesn't even have a proper climax!"

"It doesn't give you a chance to cry. It makes you sit on the threshold and slowly, bit by bit, accept that you are broken."

Su Mubai slapped the manuscript hard.

"I've seen too many people who write about suffering.

The skilled ones can make the readers cry.

But this piece doesn't write to make you cry.

It drags suffering down from the stage and presses it back into the mud. That is where suffering belongs!"

Xu Changge sat next to Lin Que, both hands resting on his knees, his fingertips trembling slightly.

That day in the dorm, when Lin Que told him this story, he had only heard a framework.

Now that Lin Que stood before everyone and flipped over the cruelest layer of logic beneath that framework,

he finally saw clearly how deep the entire root system of this article reached.

Su Mubai's breathing gradually leveled out.

The old man leaned back against his chair again, his gaze falling on the thin manuscript in his hand.

After a silence of five or six seconds, his tone suddenly changed.

It was no longer intense admiration.

It was an extremely cautious focus, like a hunter discovering an unusual pattern on his prey.

"However."

Those two words made the classroom, which had just breathed a sigh of relief, tense up again.

Su Mubai's withered index finger pressed down on a certain page of the manuscript, applying slight pressure until a shallow indentation appeared on the paper.

"Within the text of this article, there is something else hidden."

Su Mubai's gaze went over the top rim of his reading glasses, pinning directly onto Lin Que.

"Something even more ruthless than a 'strained back.'"

Lin Que's expression did not change. But his right index finger tapped silently once on the tabletop.

Su Mubai moved his cane forward half an inch.

"Do you dare to personally tear it open in front of these thirty people?"

...