439: Chapter 439 Ants Moving Sand

Xu Changge's eyes widened slightly, and his heart gave a heavy thud.

This metaphor was too cruel, and too accurate.

Lin Que's voice continued to echo through the classroom.

"So, the Carbon-based Federation doesn't need to know if humans can build a curvature engine, nor do they need to know if humans can solve the equations of the universe's origin."

"They only need to know one thing."

Lin Que looked at Elder Cui, emphasizing every word.

"Whether these carbon-based lifeforms have the ability to understand the existence of laws."

"As long as they can realize the universe has laws and attempt to summarize them."

"Then they have crossed the line from beast to civilization."

Lin Que's hands rested on the desk as he leaned forward slightly to meet Elder Cui's gaze.

"And Newtons Laws are that line."

"It isn't charity; it's just the most efficient, most ruthless...

screening process."

After saying those last four words, Lin Que straightened up and waited quietly.

No one else spoke in the classroom.

The few students who had been whispering just now all shut their mouths.

They realized their thinking had been trapped within human arrogance.

They had always assumed advanced civilizations would use humanity's peak technology to test them.

Yet they forgot that in the eyes of the truly advanced, humanity's peak and its foundation are on the same scale.

Dan Yi's clenched hands slowly relaxed, his fingertips sliding off the edge of the desk.

He suddenly felt as if the stone that had weighed on his chest for years had been pried open slightly from the side.

So it turned out that things placed on the margins could also serve as a measure of civilization.

Xu Changge leaned back in his chair, his fingers rubbing hard against the seam of his trousers.

For the first time, he clearly realized that when Lin Que wrote science fiction,

what he was truly lifting up wasn't the starry sky, but the land beneath it that had been ignored for too long.

On the podium.

Elder Cui stared fixedly at Lin Que.

Behind his black-rimmed glasses, the light in his eyes grew brighter and brighter.

He suddenly burst into loud laughter.

The laughter echoed in the classroom, carrying a sense of unbridled satisfaction.

"Ants... moving... sand..."

"Interesting."

The classroom was silent for three full seconds.

That metaphor about the ants was like a suddenly calibrated ruler,

pushing everyone's misplaced judgments back under a galactic scale.

Standing on the podium, Elder Cui's grip on the edge of the desk loosened slightly.

His gaze fell on Lin Que's face, and behind the lenses, an extremely complex light flowed through his eyes.

"Good."

Elder Cui uttered a single word, his voice kept very low.

He let go of the podium and took a step forward.

His old sneakers made a dull thud against the floor.

"I accept the ant theory."

The shoulders of several students in the front row, which had just relaxed, tensed up again.

Because in Elder Cui's tone, the word "accept" was followed by an invisible but.

As expected.

Elder Cui's next words came crashing down.

"Since Newtons Laws and string theory are equally minuscule in the eyes of advanced civilizations, let me ask you from another angle."

He stopped walking, his center of gravity shifting forward three inches as his gaze pierced into Lin Que's eyes like two probes.

"Why them, of all people?"

No one in the classroom moved.

"Why place the burden of saving seven billion people on a few kids from the Loess Plateau who can't even get enough to eat and don't understand the concept of inertia?"

Elder Cui's voice rose half a pitch, each word carrying the cold hardness of a controlled experiment in a laboratory.

"You could have set the coordinates at MIT, at CERN, or any highlight of human civilization.

People there could provide more elegant answers, making your story's logic more impeccable."

He paused for a beat.

"But you chose the poorest, most broken, and most inconspicuous corner."

Elder Cui's eyes narrowed, like a scalpel aimed at the most fragile tissue.

"In doing so, are you truly verifying the roots of civilization, or are you using poverty as emotional leverage?"

He paused, the corners of his mouth turning down slightly.

"To put it even more bluntly."

"Are you exploiting suffering to deliberately sell a sob story?"

These words fell in the classroom like four nails, pinning everyone to their chairs.

Xu Changge's breath hitched.

He knew all too well how lethal this question was.

If Lin Que's answer deviated even slightly, or if there was even a hint of hesitation in his phrasing,

the grand framework constructed by the entire story of 'rural teacher' would collapse at this moment.

Turning a Galactic Judgment into a mere tear-jerker only requires one flimsy reason.

Dan Yi sat by the window, his grayish-blue eyes fixed intently on the side of Lin Que's face.

His heart was racing unnaturally fast.

The kids from the Loess Plateau in that story overlapped with his own days of being ostracized in Mo City.

If the answer to this question was "selling a sob story," then all his resonance over the years would become a joke.

Every gaze in the room converged on Lin Que.

Lin Que stood by his seat, his posture unchanged.

In his mind, a pair of eyes looking down at the dust flashed by.

Many years ago, in another world, a gentleman surnamed Liu wrote the first line of this story.

That person's eyes also looked downward.

Those eyes had peered through the night shift lights of steel factories, through the winds and sands of the Loess Plateau, and through those who were so silent they were almost nameless.

It had never looked only at the starry sky.

It first saw the mud that held up the stars.

Lin Que spoke.

"Elder Cui, I'm afraid the premise of your question is incorrect."

Elder Cui's eyebrow twitched.

"You said the coordinates could have fallen on MIT or CERN."

He paused.

"But if the coordinates truly fell in those places, this story wouldn't hold up."

"Why?"

"Because it's only natural for people in those places to answer with Newtons Laws."

Lin Que looked at Elder Cui, his gaze calm.

"What does it prove if an MIT professor says F equals ma?

It shows the light at the spire is still on; it shows that resources, academies, and laboratories are still functioning."

"But a dying village teacher, using his last breath to teach those three letters to a few children in tattered padded jackets..."

Lin Que paused for a beat.

"This proves that knowledge has transcended laboratories and lecture halls,"

"and has been forcibly passed into the most barren land by a hand that can barely hold a piece of chalk."

Elder Cui's finger tapped lightly on the edge of the podium.

Lin Que continued.

"Whether a civilization can be passed on never depends solely on how many formulas are at the spire."

"It also depends on whether a crooked 'F equals ma' can be left on a dusty blackboard in the most remote village primary school."

As these words fell, someone in the classroom gasped.

Lin Que didn't stop.

"If a civilization only shines at its spire while its base is hollow, it won't withstand any storm.

When the people at the spire die, the knowledge is severed, and the spark is extinguished."

"But if even on the most barren land, in the most remote corners, there are people willing to use their lives to pass on even the most basic understanding..."

Lin Que's voice was soft, yet it commanded the entire room.

"Then the roots of this civilization have already struck deep into the soil."

"Even if a storm truly descends, the spark won't be limited to that tiny bit of light at the spire."

...