436: Chapter 436 Galactic Trial (Part 2)

The green cursor stopped on the eight words: "If there is still a tomorrow."

On the panel, everyone clearly saw the cursor linger in place for four seconds.

Four seconds.

It didn't go back to re-read, nor did it move forward.

It just stayed there, as if pinned down by something.

In the emotional fluctuation area at the top right of the brain-computer interface panel, a pale red pulse rose from the bottom; it wasn't a large amplitude, but it was visible to the naked eye.

The air in the entire classroom changed.

The sighs from the back row vanished.

Those gazes that, a second ago, were still doubting whether Lin Que had misread the prompt, were all withdrawn at this moment.

Because Elder Cui's eye movement data would not lie.

That four-second stagnation was the instinctive reaction of a reader who had experienced countless texts after being struck by a single line.

Xu Changge's fingers, resting on his knees, slowly clenched.

His breathing grew shallow, and something extremely complex was fermenting in his chest.

He couldn't say what it was, but he knew he had never written anything with this kind of weight in his heavenly questions.

The cursor restarted.

The story pushed forward.

[Teacher Li did not wait for tomorrow.

In the early hours of the next day, when he climbed up from the earthen bed, he spat out a whole enamel mug's worth of blood.

It was dark red, thick, and carried a scent of rust.

He leaned over the edge of the bed, gasping for over ten minutes.

Then he washed his face, put on that old padded jacket patched seven or eight times, pushed open the door, and walked toward the school.]

The green trajectory on the brain-computer interface panel entered an extremely special state.

Lin Que recognized that pattern.

It was exactly the same as the one that appeared in Xu Changge's heavenly questions when Old Zheng was moving equipment.

Constant speed.

An extremely slow, extremely uniform constant linear motion.

No jagged edges, no jumps, no backtracking.

Line by line, punctuation by punctuation, it steadily ground forward.

This was the second time such a trajectory had appeared in class today.

The first time belonged to Old Zheng, who was moving equipment in a zero-gravity cargo hold in Xu Changge's writing.

At the window, Dan Yi had leaned forward at some point.

With both hands propped on the desk, the text on the screen was reflected in his grayish-blue irises.

His lips were pressed into a thin line.

Chen Jiahao was no longer looking at the brain-computer interface panel.

He stared at the coarse words on the light screen, his throat bobbing a few times, but not a single word came out.

In the story, Teacher Li walked into the classroom and used his final strength to write Newton's Third Law on the blackboard.

He wrote very slowly, needing to steady himself on the podium with every word he wrote.

[The children sat below, watching quietly.]

[The smallest girl asked, "Teacher, why is your face so white?"]

[Teacher Li didn't answer; he just gave a small smile.]

[He finished writing the last letter and put down the chalk stub.]

[The chalk stub, only the size of a fingernail, rested on the brick podium, wobbled twice, and stopped.]

[Teacher Li leaned against the wall, walking step by step back to the low stool behind the podium.]

[He sat down and folded his hands over his knees.]

[Then he looked at those seven or eight children, trying hard to remember every face.]

["Did you remember it?"]

[Seven or eight heads nodded desperately.]

["Then Teacher can rest easy."]

The green cursor moved extremely slowly over these three lines.

The emotional fluctuation graph on the brain-computer interface panel climbed near the red peak that had appeared during Xu Changge's piece.

The curve was still climbing, with no sign of stopping.

Elder Cui's hands gripped the edge of the podium, his knuckles turning white from the force.

His eyes behind the lenses did not leave the screen.

Not one of the thirty people in the classroom spoke.

The air conditioner's vent hummed overhead.

When the next paragraph of text rolled up, someone in the front row's fingertips stiffened, and a chair leg tapped lightly against the floor.

Because the scene on the light screen changed.

There was no gradual transition, nor was there any foreshadowing through a character's perspective.

It was as if it had been sliced open; the entire Loess Plateau collapsed, revealing the cold starry sky beneath.

It was a clean cut.

As if someone had lifted the entire Loess Plateau off the screen, revealing something completely different underneath.

[On a spiral arm of the Milky Way, fifty thousand light-years from Earth, the Carbon-based Federation's First Fleet flagship, "The Ultimate Producer," was carrying out an interstellar project spanning twenty thousand years.]

[A routine extinction to clear out low-level civilizations.]

The words on the light screen stood there quietly.

White font, light gray background.

The format was the same as every preceding line.

But the moment this line crashed into the classroom,

Lin Que clearly heard the sound of chair legs rubbing against the floor all around him, and several gazes snapped from the light screen toward one another.

Elder Cui stood on the podium.

His glasses were still perched on his nose, and the green cursor was still lit.

But his hands had released the podium and were hanging at his sides.

Something that had never occurred since the start of today's class happened on the brain-computer interface panel's emotional fluctuation graph.

That red curve wasn't climbing.

It broke.

It was as if the sensor had overloaded at that moment, the data stream had been overwhelmed, leaving a blank gap.

A line of tiny gray text popped up in the upper right corner of the panel:

Emotional sampling overload, recalibrating.

Half a second later, the system recaptured the signal.

When the red curve reappeared from the other side of the gap, it had already surged to the very top of the fluctuation graph.

Elder Cui's right hand slowly rose and took off his glasses.

He didn't look at any of the students.

He stared at those two lines on the light screen and remained silent for a long time.

Then he put his glasses back on and pressed the temple tips with his thumb.

The green cursor resumed its movement.

The next section of text began to scroll.

[The Carbon-based Federation's interstellar fleet carved a straight wake through the Milky Way's spiral arm; wherever it passed,]

[three thousand star systems were scanned, evaluated, and archived one by one.]

[Planets that had not developed a sufficient level of civilization would be added to the clearance list.]

[Blue Star, the third planet of the Solar System, happened to fall on the edge of the fleet's course.]

[The evaluation program initiated.]

[There was only one standard.]

[Randomly select biological individuals from the planet and test whether they possess basic scientific cognitive abilities.]

[If they do, preserve.]

[If they do not, extinguish.]

...