437: Chapter 437 Galactic Trial (Part 2) – Bonus Chapter Sponsored by <Xi Mu Qian tide Who Likes Round Australian Turtles>

The text on the light screen gave no one time to breathe.

One line featured rural teacher coughing blood, and the next had already shifted to a civilization's judgment fifty thousand light-years away.

The white text continued to roll upward.

[The Carbon-based Federation's scanning waves expanded at the speed of light, covering the entire Blue Star domain.

High-dimensional sensor arrays completed the preliminary screening and positioning of the planet's seven billion carbon-based life forms within 0.003 standard time units.

Ultimately, the sampling coordinates were locked at 35.7° North Latitude, 109.2° East Longitude.

The Loess Plateau. A classroom with cracked earth walls.]

No one in the classroom made a sound.

Xu Changge leaned forward by five degrees.

His pupils constricted, his gaze pinned firmly onto those two sets of coordinate numbers.

35.7° North Latitude, 109.2° East Longitude.

These two sets of numbers were cold and precise, embedded like scalpels amidst the text about enamel mugs, chalk dust, and heated earthen beds.

He finally understood Lin Que's true entry point into science fiction.

From the very first word until now, Lin Que had hardly deployed any explicit sci-fi window dressing.

All the preceding pages were weighed down by a dying teacher, a dilapidated classroom, and several children without enough clothes to stay warm.

Then, the judgment of the universe bore down without warning.

Those coordinates did not fall upon a military base, nor a research center,

nor did they fall upon any elite who considered themselves qualified to represent humanity.

Instead, they fell upon the most inconspicuous place in the world: a country classroom with cracked earth walls and nearly exhausted chalk.

Xu Changge's fingertips trembled violently against his knee.

He turned his head and glanced at Lin Que.

Lin Que sat there, his posture unchanged throughout.

By the window, Dan Yi's hands gripped the edge of the desk tightly. The white text on the light screen was reflected in his grayish-blue irises; he looked as if he had been lifted by the scruff of his neck and pinned to his seat.

He understood.

Lin Que had entrusted the perspective to a few hungry kids and to a country teacher whose very name would be washed away by the rain.

He had placed the life and death of seven billion people upon the shoulders of a few children who couldn't even get a full meal.

Dan Yi's Adam's apple bobbed.

A feeling welled up from deep within his chest, as if telling him:

Those pushed to the margins of the world might also be the bones that support it.

The green cursor on the brain-computer interface moved forward at a near-static pace.

Elder Cui's reading speed had dropped to its lowest point in today's class.

The light screen refreshed.

[Target locked. Test Subject No. 1, carbon-based life, juvenile stage. Commencing Level 3C Civilization Test.]

[This test will determine whether this planet possesses basic cognitive understanding of physics.]

[Number of test subjects: Seven.]

[Test time limit: Thirty standard time units.]

[Countdown begins.]

The cold mechanical judicial instructions were arranged against a light gray background.

No exclamation marks, no rhetoric, no emotional embellishments.

It was a near-vacuum procedural language—dry, precise, and devoid of any human emotion.

This near-vacuum coldness collided with the previous atmosphere of enamel mugs, chalk dust, and blood-coughing loess.

In the classroom, fine hairs stood up on the backs of almost everyone present.

Elder Cui stood at the podium, both hands propped on the edge of the desk.

His shoulders were steady and his back was straight, but the second knuckle of his left index finger twitched slightly.

The red emotional curve in the upper right corner of the brain-computer panel began to climb once more.

This time, the red curve ascended along a slow but irrepressible arc.

The next line of white text appeared on the screen.

["Level 3C Civilization Test Question 1: Please briefly state the basic physical laws of this universe."]

[The seven children huddled in the classroom.]

[They did not know that above the sky over their heads, a fleet was waiting for their answer.]

[They did not know that the answer to this question would determine the survival or extinction of seven billion lives on Blue Star.]

[They knew nothing.]

[They only knew one thing.]

[Teacher Li had taught this yesterday.]

In the third seat of the front row, Yuan Ningning's fingers clutched the hem of her school uniform, her eyes burning.

Tang He sat next to her, her lips pressed into a thin line.

In the back row, those students from other provinces—those who had previously doubted if Lin Que had misinterpreted the prompt—not a single one of them moved now.

The light screen continued to scroll down.

[The smallest girl stood up.]

[She wore a cotton-padded jacket two sizes too large, with sleeves rolled up three times, revealing dirty wrists.]

[She opened her mouth and, in a thick Loess Plateau accent, recited word by word.]

["When... when an object is not acted upon by an external force, it remains at rest... or in uniform linear motion..."]

The green cursor was pinned to the words 'uniform linear motion,' as if pinning down the very breath of human civilization.

At that moment, the brain-computer system triggered its second emotional sampling overload alarm of the day.

Small gray characters jumped out again:

<Emotional sampling overload, recalibrating.>

But Elder Cui did not take off his glasses.

He stood at the podium, his fingers gripping the edge of the desk so hard his arms were as rigid as iron bars.

Behind the lenses, no one knew how long his eyes lingered on those words.

Seven seconds.

The timer on the panel ticked away for seven seconds.

After seven seconds, the cursor trembled and moved forward.

In the second row of the classroom, Xu Changge closed his eyes for a moment.

He thought of his own work, 'heavenly questions'.

He thought of the passage where Old Zheng moved three tons of equipment in the space station, and he remembered Elder Cui saying he 'couldn't bear to let the people under his pen be undignified'.

Yet the children under Lin Que's pen had never had any dignity from start to finish.

They were wrapped in ill-fitting, ragged cotton jackets with sleeves rolled up three times; they had missing front teeth that made their speech whistle; they didn't understand what inertia was,

and could only memorize their teacher's words like an incantation.

Xu Changge suddenly understood that truly heavy grassroots narratives didn't even need the shell of dignity.

This group of children in ragged cotton jackets, using Newton's Laws taught to them by a dying teacher at the cost of his life, had upheld the life and death of seven billion people.

Something felt stuck in Xu Changge's throat; he couldn't swallow it, and he couldn't spit it out.

The text on the light screen did not stop.

[The scanning system received the sound wave feedback from the test subject; the automatic translation program initiated. Spectral analysis took 0.07 standard time units.]

["Answer valid. Completeness of basic mechanical law expression: 87.3%. Grammatical errors automatically corrected."]

["Proceed. Question 2: Please briefly state the relationship between force and motion."]

[Another child stood up. A boy. He was missing a front tooth, and his speech whistled.]

["F... F equals m times a. Force equals mass times acceleration."]

[After the boy finished reciting, he habitually glanced back at the low stool behind the podium.]

[The stool was empty.]

The data on the panel had already exceeded all normal thresholds.

The red curve was like a string stretched to its limit, trembling as it hung at the very top of the fluctuation chart.

Elder Cui's breathing grew heavy.

It wasn't panting, but the dull sound of exhalation made when a person is trying their best to suppress something in their chest.

Lin Que sat in his seat, fingers interlaced.

The panel, Elder Cui, and the vibrating gazes around him all temporarily receded from his field of vision.

He only looked at the words he had written on the light screen.

Those words contained his memories, and the stars and dust left behind by a certain Mr. Liu from another world.

They also contained the light he had seen in the old alleys of Jiangcheng in this life, and the weight he had learned from that white shirt in Sarajevo.

He knew that these words were no longer just memories; they had already grown into new bone and blood within his body.

The light screen rolled to the final judgment.

["Level 3C Civilization Test completed."]

["Valid answer rate for the seven test subject groups: 100%."]

["Conclusion: The carbon-based civilization of this planet possesses Level 3C basic physical cognition and meets the standard for preservation."]

["Cancel purge protocol."]

["Fleet turning."]

Two words.

Fleet turning.

That extinction fleet on the galactic arm that had swept across three thousand star systems,

was pushed away from Blue Star by a few children in ragged cotton jackets using Newton's Laws spoken in a local accent.

Blue Star continued to rotate quietly.

Streets, villages, cities, and classrooms all woke up as usual,

no one knowing that an extinction event had once brushed past their heads.

Those children didn't know.

The seven billion people on Blue Star didn't know either.

The only person who might have known the answer was already lying in the yellow earth.

Yuan Ningning covered her mouth, her shoulders trembling slightly.

Tang He turned her head away, the back of her finger brushing the corner of her eye,

while her other hand subconsciously pressed down on her manuscript, as if feeling for the first time that those beautiful sentences were somewhat light.

The boy in the back row who had been silent the whole time kept his head down, one hand pressed hard against the desk, while the webbing of his other hand was bitten into a deep mark by his teeth.

The light screen entered its conclusion.

A piece of dialogue surfaced, the font half a size smaller than the main text and centered.

It was as if the universe had whispered a footnote outside that dilapidated classroom on the Loess Plateau.

["The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible," said the Supreme Administrator.]

["The most comprehensible thing about the universe is that it is incomprehensible," said the Senator.]

These two lines stood quietly on the light screen for several seconds.

The green cursor stopped on the period, motionless.

Elder Cui stood behind the podium, fingers propping up his weight on the desk.

His glasses were still perched on the bridge of his nose, but his eyes behind the lenses had bypassed all the data and landed on the words themselves.

He was looking at those two lines.

Two civilizations, two kinds of cognition, completing a dialogue across fifty thousand light-years with two sentences.

The tension between the comprehensible and the incomprehensible was greater than the firepower of the entire fleet.

Dan Yi's fingers gripped the edge of the desk even tighter.

He understood that tension:

Believing the universe can be understood on one hand, while acknowledging that the unknown always hangs over one's head on the other.

They were like two sides of the same coin, quietly facing each other at the end of the light screen.

Just hanging there, at the end of the story, on that invisible line between the Milky Way and the Loess Plateau.

The echoes of the universe gradually faded, and the light screen returned to that patch of yellow earth.

[By the time the children finished building the new grave, the east was already brightening.]

[The teacher was buried on a door panel taken from the classroom; accompanying him into the earth were two boxes of chalk and a set of tattered primary school textbooks.]

The green cursor on the panel slowed to a near-stagnant pace, as if keeping a vigil for every word.

Elder Cui's reading speed dropped to its slowest value of the entire session.

[The children erected a stone slab on that small grave mound, with 'Tomb of Teacher Li' written on it in chalk.]

In the front row to the right, a hot sourness welled up in Chen Jiahao's nose.

He tilted his head back, teeth biting hard into the cap of his water bottle, leaving a ring of deep marks in the plastic.

[All it would take is one rain for that childish handwriting on the stone slab to disappear.]

[Before long, this grave and the person resting within would be completely forgotten by the outside world.]

Xu Changge's fingers involuntarily tightened on his knee.

Completely forgotten.

This stroke was crueler than the entire Galactic Judgment.

The extinction order was canceled, but that rain would come sooner or later,

and sooner or later, it would wash the name on the stone slab clean away.

The name on the grave of the man who saved seven billion people couldn't survive a single rain.

Xu Changge suddenly remembered the three seconds of romance when Old Zheng smashed the safety lock in his 'heavenly questions'.

Elder Cui had said he 'only wrote about the satisfaction, not the cost'.

And what about Lin Que?

Lin Que wrote the cost as something that occurred after death.

Lin Que made the cost seem lighter, yet also heavier.

It resided in a rain, on a stone slab written in chalk, before a grave destined to be forgotten by the world.

To be forgotten completely.

Xu Changge lowered his eyes, his knuckles tightening bit by bit.

The final few lines of white text rolled onto the screen.

[The sun revealed a corner from behind the mountain, casting a touch of golden light onto the still-sleeping mountain village.]

[The valley meadows were still steeped in shadow, dewdrops sparkled with crystalline light, and one or two timid bird calls drifted out from the mist.]

[The children walked along the path toward the village, their small figures soon disappearing into the pale blue morning mist of the valley.]

[They would live on, harvesting that meager yet real hope on this ancient and barren land.]

The moment the light screen went dark, no one in the classroom spoke.

Elder Cui stood behind the podium for a long time before slowly taking off his black-rimmed glasses.

On the brain-computer panel, the last three lines of system prompts were still lit.

<Reading trajectory recording abnormal>

<Emotional sampling unable to generate valid score>

<Please read again and retry>

Elder Cui stared at the lines and cursed in a low voice.

"Piece of junk machine."

...