415: Chapter 415 That alley was my only teacher

The air in the study grew heavy.

Xu Zhengqing's gaze fell on Lin Que's face; those were eyes that had read manuscripts for half a century,

having seen too many flashes of genius and too many instances of teenagers putting on airs.

Xu Changge sat to the side, his breathing extremely light.

His fingers rested on his knees, motionless.

Lin Que did not speak immediately.

He knew what Xu Zhengqing was waiting for.

Not a clever answer, but a background that could withstand scrutiny.

"Elder Xu, I indeed have no formal lineage of teachers."

Lin Que's voice was steady, his pace not fast;

every word coming from his throat carried a weight that settled deep.

"The questions you asked in class about grassroots narratives,

including the real reason you invited me here today, probably all point to the same thing."

He looked at Xu Zhengqing.

"You feel that a seventeen-year-old child shouldn't have these kinds of eyes."

Xu Zhengqing did not deny it.

Holding his thermos, his thumb lightly rubbed the lid as he waited.

Lin Que leaned back half an inch against the chair.

"When I was young, my family lived in the old district of Jiangcheng.

Not the kind of developed faux-antique streets, but real old alleyways.

The road was uneven and pitted; after it rained, the gaps between the bricks were full of mud."

As he spoke, his gaze didn't fix on anyone, as if he were looking at some non-existent scene in the study.

"My mother used to sell vegetables at the wet market. It was the open-air shed type; in summer, the corrugated iron roof would get scorching hot, and in winter, her hands would be covered in frost cracks.

When she closed her stall, she'd squat on the ground using newspapers to wrap fish innards, and the fish scales stuck to her trouser legs wouldn't even be dry by nightfall."

Xu Changge's fingers twitched.

He had grown up in this courtyard house since childhood.

The family employed Aunt Lu; groceries were delivered to the door, and the fish was already cleaned.

In his life, he had never seen anyone squatting on the ground wrapping fish innards in newspaper.

Lin Que continued.

"There was an old man at the entrance of the alley who repaired shoes, surnamed Wu.

His toolbox was a tin biscuit box, stuffed with shoe nails of various sizes and half a roll of tape.

Every morning, he would wipe that biscuit box once before opening it. While wiping, his fingers would pause on the lid for two seconds."

"A faded golden phoenix was printed on the lid.

I only found out later that the biscuit box was a leftover wedding cake box from his daughter's marriage.

His daughter had married into another province and hadn't returned for five years."

Xu Zhengqing's hand holding the cup missed a beat.

"When I passed his stall on the way home from school, he would sometimes call me to help hand him a hammer.

He wouldn't say thank you after I handed it over; he'd just pull a fruit candy from his pocket and shove it to me.

The kind where the wrapper sticks to the candy, and when you peel it, a layer always comes off with it."

Only Lin Que's voice remained in the study.

"And then there was Uncle Wang from our alley.

He moved bricks at construction sites, leaving at five every morning and returning at eight or nine in the evening.

When he came back, he never took the main entrance, but detoured through a narrower alley in the back.

I asked him why. He said the road by the main entrance passes the mahjong room, and the lights are too bright."

Xu Zhengqing's brow twitched.

"He wasn't afraid of people seeing him dirty," Lin Que's voice remained flat.

"He was afraid of seeing the faces of those sitting in the mahjong room.

Those people play cards until midnight, smoking, cursing their wives, living as if they have an endless supply of time.

Uncle Wang didn't want to look. He moved bricks for twelve hours a day; he couldn't afford that kind of surplus time."

Xu Changge lowered his head, his fingers slowly tightening.

There was no flowery rhetoric in these words, no framework of academic theory.

It was all people. All living people.

A woman squatting on the ground wrapping fish innards, an old man wiping a biscuit box, a bricklayer taking the long way through dark alleys.

He had studied in the Xu Family for over a decade, from memorizing the collection of ancient prose to the Records of the Grand Historian, from writing Tang poetry and Song lyrics to contemporary literary theory.

But in his writing, these people had never appeared.

It wasn't that he was unwilling to write about them. It was that he had simply never seen them.

Lin Que looked up and faced Xu Zhengqing.

"Elder Xu, you asked where my eyes came from.

The answer is simple. I lived with these people since I was a child.

They lived before me for over a decade; I just remembered what I saw."

He paused for a beat.

"Those two seconds Old Wu spent wiping the biscuit box, Uncle Wang's habit of detouring through dark alleys, the fish scales on my mother's trouser legs when she closed the stall.

These things don't need anyone to teach them. They just grow in that alley where I lived.

I stepped on them every day going to school, stepped on them coming home, for over a decade."

"If I must speak of a lineage, that alleyway was my teacher."

After Lin Que finished speaking, the study remained quiet for a long time.

Xu Zhengqing placed his thermos back on the desk, his fingers lightly tapping twice against the side of the cup.

"The old shoemaker you just mentioned," the old man spoke, his voice half a degree softer than before.

"Those two seconds his fingers paused while wiping the lid—did you notice it then, or did you only realize it later when looking back?"

"Then," Lin Que answered quickly.

Xu Zhengqing looked at him for three seconds.

"A child who could see what was hidden in those two seconds at the time is either born sensitive or has known pain himself."

As those words fell, the air in the study became very thin.

Lin Que did not respond.

His expression was as calm as ever.

Xu Zhengqing did not press further.

A very faint smile appeared at the corners of the old man's mouth, and he nodded slowly.

Xu Changge sat to the side, feeling as if he had been struck all over by a hammer.

The fish scales from the wet market, the biscuit box from the shoe repair shop, the footsteps in the dark alley Lin Que spoke of—

every detail was like a nail, driven into the hardest wall he had known since childhood.

He thought of the old tailor holding a bone china teacup in his first draft of 'the tailor'.

That character was refined, decent, and meticulous. Not a speck of dust on him.

Because in his own life's trajectory of over a decade, he had never touched a single speck of worldly dust.

From birth, the high walls of this courtyard house had strictly protected him in another spotless world.

He ate prepared meals, wore clothes custom-made by a tailor,

and read rare ancient books from his grandfather's shelves. He couldn't even clearly describe what a wet market looked like.

Lin Que was the same age as him.

But the ground beneath Lin Que's feet was one he had never walked upon.

Xu Changge turned his head and looked at the old locust tree outside the window.

The autumn wind swept a withered leaf from the branch, flipping it in mid-air before it silently pressed against the brick ground.

Immediately after, a grayish-black bird swept over the courtyard wall,

its wings cutting a shallow arc as it flew toward the sky outside the courtyard that he couldn't see.

He stared in the direction the bird vanished for a long time.

Xu Zhengqing's gaze crossed the desk and fell on his grandson's face.

He saw that look.

It wasn't dejection or an inferiority complex.

It was the look of one tree seeing another's roots digging into deeper soil and starting to ponder where its own roots should extend.

The smile at the corners of Xu Zhengqing's mouth deepened slightly.

He didn't point it out, but simply cleared his throat and spoke in a very casual tone.

"Jingwen."

Xu Changge snapped back to his senses and looked at Xu Zhengqing.

"Grandfather."

"That pot of Longjing in the front courtyard has been steeping too long; go brew a fresh pot."

Xu Changge immediately stood up from his chair.

He nodded and walked toward the door.

When his hand rested on the doorknob, he paused and turned his head.

He gave Lin Que a look.

There were no extra emotions in that gaze. It was just a calm, solemn look.

Then he pulled the door open, stepped out, and gently closed the heavy wooden door.

"Click."

The sound of the door latching into the frame was light, yet it was like a dividing line, cutting the inside and outside of the study into two worlds.

The sound of the wind in the courtyard, the rustling of the locust leaves, the clicking of a bicycle chain at the distant alley entrance were all blocked outside.

Only two people remained in the study.

Xu Zhengqing and a seventeen-year-old youth.

The leisurely atmosphere in the air seemed to have its surface layer brushed away by an invisible hand, revealing a sturdier texture beneath.

Xu Zhengqing did not respond but slowly rose and walked to the bookshelf, his fingertips brushing over rows of ancient books before finally accurately pulling out a thin volume.

A warm yellow cover with slightly curled corners, clearly rubbed repeatedly by its owner countless times.

In the autumn light filtering through the window lattice, the book title was clearly displayed before Lin Que's eyes.

The Miracles of the Namiya General Store

Xu Zhengqing's gaze fell on Lin Que.

"Student Lin, you've lived in Jiangcheng all your life, haven't you?"

...