438: Chapter 438 Determining the Extinction of Planets Using Only Laws

After Elder Cui's low curse fell, the classroom became so quiet that only the light hum of equipment fans remained.

No one in the classroom dared to speak first.

Even the mineral water bottle that had just been squeezed out of shape sat quietly in Chen Jiahao's palm.

Elder Cui's chest heaved as he reached into the pocket of his faded jacket and felt around twice.

His fingertips touched a flattened cigarette pack, but he slowly withdrew them a second later.

He picked up the black-rimmed glasses again, rubbed them haphazardly on the corner of his clothes, and placed them back on the bridge of his nose.

Those eyes hidden behind the lenses...

...passed over the heads of everyone in the front row and locked directly onto Lin Que.

"Good lad."

Elder Cui spoke, his voice coarse and buzzing in the quiet classroom.

"You have forcibly sewn together the coldest judgment in the universe with the hardest suffering on this land."

His fingers tapped forcefully on the lectern, each strike hitting the edge of the solid wood with a dull thud.

"Using the coarsest yellow earth to strike the most unsympathetic starry sky."

"You've made a few kids who can't even get enough to eat, armed with things taught with half a stub of chalk, stand before a civilization capable of crushing stars."

Elder Cui's voice grew louder; several students in the front row subconsciously held their breath, their hands holding pens frozen mid-air.

"This is what you call tension!"

The deathly silence in the classroom was completely shattered by this sentence.

This evaluation was too heavy.

Xu Changge sat to Lin Que's left, looking at the person beside him with an extremely complex gaze.

He thought of his own piece, 'heavenly questions,' and recalled the dignity and discipline Old Zheng showed while moving three tons of equipment in the space station.

He finally understood how much weight was carried by the sentence Lin Que said in the first class of the Qinglan Project: 'A small tree grows different leaves.'

At that time, he thought Lin Que was comforting him; only now did he realize that the man had long seen the roots that should exist behind every style of writing.

Chen Jiahao was flushed with excitement, his hands clenched tightly into fists resting on his knees.

If the occasion weren't wrong, he probably would have slammed the words 'Master Que is awesome' onto the table by now.

Beside him, Yuan Ningning let out a soft breath and whispered, "This structure is terrifying. The harder you suppress it at the start, the higher it bounces at the end."

"The harder the compression in the beginning, the more explosive the rebound at the end."

Tang He nodded from the side, her gaze falling back to her own manuscript.

Her fingertips pressed against those few lines she had originally been quite satisfied with, and she hesitated to turn the page.

Just when everyone thought this critique would end with extremely high praise...

Only Xu Changge's shoulders tensed up again.

Lin Que didn't move either.

They both knew that Elder Cui wouldn't just give applause.

The truly lethal stuff usually follows the applause.

Elder Cui's fingers stopped tapping.

The fanaticism on his face receded instantly, replaced by an extremely cold and hard scrutiny.

The speed of his change in expression was caught people off guard.

"But."

When this word came out of Elder Cui's mouth, the temperature in the classroom dropped abruptly.

"Don't think a few pretty words will let you off."

Elder Cui leaned forward, his hands gripping the edge of the lectern tightly.

"Your Carbon-based Federation."

Elder Cui's voice turned cold, each word carrying a precision found only in a laboratory.

"A fleet capable of carving tracks across the galactic arms and scanning three thousand star systems one by one."

"A supreme civilization that has mastered interstellar travel, high-dimensional sensing, and cross-light-year communication."

He paused for a beat, his gaze pinned on Lin Que's face.

"Deciding the survival of a planet using only Newtons Laws?"

Someone in the classroom gasped.

Elder Cui took a step forward, his voice rising.

"They crossed fifty thousand light-years and deployed an entire Extinction Fleet..."

His finger tapped heavily on the lectern.

"Are you writing an advanced civilization capable of destroying galaxies as a charitable organization that does home surveys using basic exam questions?"

The sudden increase in volume caused several students in the first row to tense their shoulders simultaneously.

This question accurately stabbed into the seemingly perfect structure of 'rural teacher.'

The atmosphere in the classroom instantly tightened to the limit.

The students in the front row looked at each other; their brains, which had just been immersed in shock, were forcibly dragged back to the track of rationality by this question.

"Yeah, the assessment scale doesn't match."

The boy with glasses from another province lowered his voice.

"If the other party has already mastered high-dimensional sensing and interstellar travel, it's hard to use basic mechanical common sense as a threshold for civilization preservation."

"If this threshold is weak, all the preceding emotions will be left hanging."

Yuan Ningning's brow furrowed; she keenly realized the lethality of this problem.

The emotions in a science fiction novel can be surging, but the pivot point must be hard enough.

If the pivot point is soft, all the previous tears will become tissues the author forcibly stuffed into the reader's hands.

Xu Changge's fingertips tapped silently on his knee twice.

He had already followed Elder Cui's question and reviewed the entire structure of the article from beginning to end.

The threshold for hard sci-fi is extremely high; it's not something that can be crossed solely by stacking emotions.

He was waiting—waiting to see how Lin Que would break this deadlock.

Dan Yi sat by the window, his palms already sweating.

He wanted this story to hold up more than anyone.

Because if those children in tattered cotton jackets were proven to be just emotional illusions...

...the version of himself he had just seen in them would also collapse.

All eyes gathered on Lin Que once again.

Lin Que didn't answer immediately.

What flashed through Lin Que's mind wasn't some ready-made line of an answer.

Instead, the stars of another world and the dust he had seen with his own eyes in this life pressed onto his shoulders at the same moment.

Three seconds later, Lin Que unclasped his interlaced fingers.

The legs of his chair scraped lightly against the floor.

He stood up under the tense gazes of the entire classroom.

He didn't look at the whispering classmates, nor at the nervous Chen Jiahao beside him.

He stood straight and looked at Elder Cui.

"Elder Cui."

"The core of the loophole you pointed out lies in the scale."

"Between the evaluator and the evaluated, there is a gap of fifty thousand light-years, and also an entire chain of civilization levels."

Lin Que's speaking pace was steady, his voice carrying clearly to every corner of the classroom.

Elder Cui didn't speak, only slightly lifting his chin.

"The Carbon-based Federation crossed fifty thousand light-years and scanned three thousand star systems."

"At this scale, what they need is not an accurate assessment of every planet's technological level."

He paused for a beat.

"What they truly want to see is whether a stable spark of rationality has appeared on this planet."

He paused again, his gaze sweeping over the students in the front row who had just been questioning him.

"It's like humans looking at ants."

There was no mockery in Lin Que's tone, only a certain coldness in stating facts.

"One ant picks up a grain of sand, another ant picks up a leaf."

"In ant society, the one that picks up the leaf might already be at the peak."

"But what can truly make a human stop their gaze and look down at them won't be which ant carried something heavier."

"Rather, it is when one ant finally stops its millions of years of unchanging footsteps and looks up at the starry sky above."

...