410: Chapter 410: For that land, it was an offense.

Xu Zhengqing did not rush him.

Lin Que glanced down at the book in the center of the lectern, its edges frayed from use.

Then he looked up, meeting Xu Zhengqing's gaze directly.

"I can't write it."

Three words, flat, without any hesitation.

The classroom fell silent for a beat.

A few people below instinctively exchanged looks, waiting for him to explain himself.

Lin Que didn't.

Nor did he care about the reactions from below.

"I didn't live through that era."

He didn't speak fast; there were gaps between his sentences. He wasn't thinking about how to say it, but choosing which words were worth saying.

"I've never truly been hungry.

When Sun Shaoping waits for everyone to leave before taking the black flour buns, the class consciousness suppressed behind that action is something carved into a person's bones from birth.

That isn't poverty itself; it's the shape left by poverty after living within a youth for over a decade."

He paused for a beat, slowing his subsequent words even further.

"I don't have that shape.

I know its outline, I know roughly what color it is, but I've never lived inside it.

If I were to write it, the Sun Shaoping I produced would be a suffering imagined through the lens of a modern person's mindset.

He would look the part, but the yellow earth on him would be fake, merely pasted on."

No one in the classroom made a sound.

"To that land and that era, that would be an offense."

There wasn't a single unnecessary sound in the lecture hall.

The pencil in Xu Changge's hand stopped mid-air, not put down.

He stared at Lin Que, the things in the depths of his eyes sinking, replaced by an expression he rarely showed toward his peers.

After Lin Que finished, he didn't rush to add anything.

He just stood there, his expression no different from five minutes ago.

It was just flat.

Without a hint of a desire for self-defense, and without the frustration of admitting defeat.

Jian Shen was him, and Lin Que was also him.

But the roots of ordinary world were, in the end, the fire that burned in a previous life's furnace.

He was merely a fire-bearer, carrying it one step further for the people of that land.

Thus, this answer was utterly candid.

Xu Zhengqing looked at Lin Que, his palm pressed against the book cover, his fingers tightening slightly on the cover of ordinary world.

He smiled.

Though it was only a slight deepening of the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the whole classroom saw it.

"The path of scholarship is not inherently difficult."

Xu Zhengqing spoke, his voice still steady, but his tone held something different than before.

"Talent and diligence—none of the thirty people in this room lack those, otherwise you wouldn't be standing here."

He moved his thermos to the side and folded his hands on the table.

"The difficulty lies in the word 'reverence'."

"Knowing what you can write and what you cannot—figuring these two things out is much harder than blindly daring to write anything."

Someone below lowered their head, pressing these words into the paper character by character.

Zhong Hengyuan gripped his pen a bit tighter; after finishing writing, he looked up and read the line again.

Xu Zhengqing's gaze lingered on Lin Que for a second, then he said no more.

He closed the frayed book, pushed it toward the center of the lectern, and lifted his palm from the cover.

The atmosphere relaxed.

It was like the feeling of a string that had been stretched to its limit finally snapping back into place.

Weighty, but no longer suffocating.

Xu Changge gently rested his pencil back on the desk, his finger pausing on the barrel for a breath.

He thought of his first draft of the tailor. The version where the old tailor held a bone china teacup and was teased by Lin Que for looking like he was accompanied by two maidservants.

He had thought that was called "being able to write" at the time.

Looking back now, that was merely a scion of a prominent family using his most exquisite imagination to paste a layer of fake yellow earth onto someone he had never truly been close to.

Lin Que refused to even "paste" it.

This self-awareness was heavier than the act of writing itself.

In the back corner, Dan Yi's hat brim was pulled very low, revealing only the lower half of his face.

The word "offense" was stuck in his throat.

He thought of how he wrote about the snow in Mo City—beautifully and piercingly.

But the loneliness in those words was his own, not the loneliness of everyone on that land.

For the first time, he realized that speaking for the suffering of others was also a form of overstepping.

Chen Jiahao let out a long breath, almost making a sound, but he bit his lip hard to suppress it.

He nudged the student next to him with his elbow and whispered something; the other person rolled their eyes and ignored him, but the corners of their mouth were already twitching.

Just then, the door opened without any warning.

The cold light from the hallway flooded through the crack, and three figures stepped in side-by-side.

Professor Liu Zuoqing walked in front, hands behind his back, the curve of his mouth unclear whether it was a smile or if he was waiting to see something.

Dai Shengzong was on his right, wearing thin-framed glasses, his hair combed meticulously, standing there with an inherent weight that commanded the room.

Su Mubai walked the slowest, but with every step he took, the whole classroom seemed to sink an inch.

Chen Jiahao was the first to spring up.

The other students followed suit, the sound of chairs scraping spreading from the front rows to the back in an uneven wave.

Professor Liu Zuoqing did not head for the podium; he stood in the patch of light by the door.

He scanned the students below, his gaze stopping on the wall at the side of the classroom covered by a dark curtain, the curve of his mouth tilting upward.

"Sit down, everyone," his voice immediately suppressed the remaining sounds of scraping chairs.

"The three of us heard everything from next door just now. You all have quite a lot of ideas."

He gestured toward that wall with his chin.

The curtain was attached to the entire wall, thick and dark gray, blending almost seamlessly with the surrounding walls.

But now that everyone was staring at it, they realized it wasn't an ordinary wall.

It was a curtain covering a piece of one-way glass.

People sitting inside could clearly see every desk and every face in the lecture hall, and hear every word.

Those outside could pull back the curtain, but the sounds from inside wouldn't leak out.

"Next door?" Zhong Hengyuan's mouth fell open slightly.

Someone below gasped; in the silence, everyone heard it.

Yuan Ningning bit her lip hard, the color draining from her face.

She quickly replayed every word she had just said in her mind, and the more she thought about it, the more a chill ran down her spine.

Tang He lowered her head and flipped her manuscript face-down on the desk, like a cover-up that came a step too late.

Xu Changge's gaze moved from the curtain back to his desk.

On the stage, he had been facing only his grandfather.

But three more were sitting next door.

Four pairs of eyes had been watching the entire time without missing a moment.

His fingers rubbed the kraft paper cover of the fourth draft of the tailor, then he let go.

Su Mubai walked toward the lectern and stopped beside Xu Zhengqing.

The two looked at each other and nodded simultaneously.

Like two old trees with roots intertwined for decades, they completed a form of confirmation without needing to speak.

Dai Shengzong stood by the lectern, scanned the classroom, and finally stopped on Lin Que in the second row.

Lin Que did not shy away.

He turned his head, his gaze meeting that look, neither avoiding nor inviting it.

It just rested there, like two open books happened to be placed face-to-face on the same table, each displaying its own content.

Dai Shengzong looked for two seconds before withdrawing his gaze.

But the weight of those two seconds was felt clearly by Xu Changge next to him.

He had grown up among the giants of the literary world.

For over a decade, he had learned to identify the looks in the eyes of his grandfather's peers and his father's mentors—those standing at the pinnacle of the pyramid—when they looked at the younger generation.

Polite, perfunctory, appreciative, or evaluative—he had seen them all.

Chen Jiahao didn't speak; he just nudged the corner of the manuscript next to him with his elbow, his fingers tightening.

Professor Liu Zuoqing walked a few steps from the light at the door, slowly pacing to the front row.

He didn't go up to the lectern but walked along the edge of the first row of desks, his gaze falling on the densely packed notebooks on the tables.

When he reached Zhang Yiyu's desk, he glanced down at the open notes.

In the center of the page, four words were heavily traced twice: "The Writer Retreats."

In the margin, a line was added in a different colored pen: "After crouching down, don't be in a hurry to stand back up."

The curve of Professor Liu Zuoqing's mouth deepened slightly.

He continued forward a few steps, stood still at the edge of the lectern, and turned to face the whole class.

"It seems everyone has gained quite a lot today."

He cleared his throat, the weight in his tone increasing imperceptibly.

His gaze started from the front row, pausing for a beat on Xu Changge's face, a beat on Chen Jiahao's face,

And finally rested on Lin Que, lingering for an extra half-beat.

"Just as class is about to end—"

He put his hands behind his back, his voice dropping half a tone.

"I have something to announce."

The air in the classroom, which had just been half-released, was sucked back in again.

...