457: Chapter 457 Autumn Lyrics

Lin Que gazed up at the high, distant clouds above the surface of Beihai Lake.

The autumn sky was very blue, so clean it looked as if it had been scrubbed vigorously.

The golden light on the spire of the White Pagoda was compressed by the sunlight into a single bright dot, and in the distance, a bird was flying upwards along the edge of the clouds.

He withdrew his gaze and let it fall onto the letter paper in the Tall Male Student's hand.

Lin Que spoke.

"Since ancient times, autumn has always been met with sorrow and loneliness."

Seven characters.

They landed in the pavilion corridor like a copper coin dropped into a deep well.

The Tall Male Student's expression froze.

This sentence was not refuting him; it was summarizing for him.

All the withered lotuses, fallen leaves, setting sun, and cold crows in his poem—everything that every literary figure from Song Yu to the present day had written about autumn—was scooped up by these seven characters into a single net.

Since ancient times.

Met with autumn.

Sorrow and loneliness.

Three phrases, packaging centuries of tradition into a single sentence.

In that instant, several members of the Renmin University Poetry Society suddenly had an illusion.

These seven characters were like a monument, standing in the center of the pavilion corridor on behalf of everyone who had bowed their heads to write about autumn for thousands of years.

So where would this poem go from here?

If it continued to be sorrowful, it would just be repeating the Tall Male Student's path with different wording.

But if it wasn't sorrowful, how could one turn the entire poem in another direction after the line "Since ancient times, autumn has always been met with sorrow and loneliness"?

Everyone in the pavilion corridor was waiting.

Lin Que's voice rose slightly.

It wasn't a raise in volume, but something lighter, like the clarity of the first ray of morning light piercing through a cloud.

"I say that autumn days surpass the spring morning."

The whole place fell silent.

Even the wind on the lake seemed to have been pressed on pause.

The douzhi cup Chen Jiahao was holding dropped to the ground, and he didn't even notice.

The girl with short hair had her mouth open, and the printed manuscript in her hand slid to her feet.

The Tall Male Student looked as if he had been nailed to the stone bricks by a hammer, and his whole body retreated a step.

It wasn't distance he retreated, but his confidence.

"Since ancient times, autumn has always been met with sorrow and loneliness" had served as a conclusion to a thousand years of autumnal sorrow.

As the seven characters of "I say that autumn days surpass the spring morning" fell, it was like someone lifting their head amidst the fallen leaves, forcibly pushing autumn up by an inch.

The Tall Male Student's knuckles tightened little by little.

He finally realized that the entire scene of desolate autumn he had laid out just now had been split down the middle by these seven characters.

Xu Changge stood where he was, as if he had been struck by something.

His breathing stopped for nearly two seconds.

In those eyes, usually calm and composed, a layer of extremely piercing light ignited.

Since childhood, he had read all the poems written about autumn by the ancients. Everyone bowed their heads in autumn.

The deeper they bowed, the better they wrote. This had almost become an ironclad rule he believed in deep down in his bones.

But today, someone stood under the pavilion corridor at Beihai and overturned this ironclad rule with seven characters.

I say that autumn days surpass the spring morning.

There was something in these seven characters that was heavier than Poetic Metre and sharper than the use of allusions.

That was courage.

It was the courage of a person daring to stand amidst all those who bowed their heads and tilt their chin up to say "I don't."

Lin Que did not stop.

He pulled his right hand out of his hoodie pocket, lifted it, and pointed his finger toward the high, distant sky outside the pavilion corridor.

Just then.

The bird flying upwards along the edge of the clouds was flapping its wings to pass through a thin cloud, its white wingtips flashing in the sunlight.

"A single crane in the clear sky soars above the clouds."

Lin Que's voice did not rise, remaining at that same unhurried pace, yet every character that fell into the air carried a force that pushed upward.

Clear sky. A single crane. Parting the clouds. Soaring up.

The scene was forcibly torn open by these six characters.

The withered lotuses, fallen leaves, setting sun, and cold crows all retreated to the edges of the scene at this moment.

Outside the pavilion corridor, only that living, hot, soaring crane remained.

It didn't care if it was autumn or winter beneath its feet, and it didn't care if the lake behind it had frosted over.

It just kept flying upwards. If the clouds blocked its path, it flew right through them.

Dan Yi stood in the crowd, his hat brim having been pushed up to the top of his head who knows when.

In those gray-blue eyes, the shadow of that bird in the sky was reflected.

His lips moved. There was no sound, but the lip shape was very clear.

Soaring above the clouds.

Three characters, as if he were holding them in his mouth and chewing them over and over.

That crane didn't need anyone's permission, didn't need anyone's understanding, and didn't need anyone to admit it was right.

It just flew.

Even if it was only one, even if it was the only one left in the entire sky.

Dan Yi's fingers slowly loosened.

Those two steamed buns were originally meant to be eaten while hot, but he had forgotten all about them on the walk from the alley entrance to Beihai.

By now, the dough was completely cold, and he had gripped it, leaving deep finger marks.

But when he let go, his shoulders also relaxed.

Like a string that had been taut for many years, it was finally gently plucked from the outside.

Lin Que turned around.

He withdrew his gaze from the sky and let it fall on the Tall Male Student's face.

The Tall Male Student had already taken a second step back. He hadn't even realized he was retreating.

The letter paper in his hand rustled in the wind, and the characters "Rustling autumn winds roll through the blue sky" were particularly glaring in the sunlight.

At this moment, those characters looked like something very old. Old and yellowed.

Lin Que's voice fell.

Very flat. So flat it was as if he were reciting an utterly ordinary sentence.

"Then I lead my poetic sentiment, up to the azure heavens."

The final note was not deliberately drawn out, nor was there any affected, deep pause.

It slipped out of his mouth so naturally, caught by the autumn wind on the lake, and scattered in all directions.

The pavilion corridor was silent for a full three seconds.

Then, applause exploded.

It wasn't the polite, symbolic kind of applause. It was the kind where people couldn't stop even after their palms turned red from clapping.

A college student carrying a backpack held his phone above his head, his hands shaking: "Holy crap!"

The elderly man next to him, holding a child's hand, nearly dropped his thermos onto his own feet.

The man in the windbreaker who had been recording the whole time had his mouth open wide enough to fit an egg, and his phone almost slid out of his hand.

"What level is this?"

"Was this written on the spot?"

"It can't be written on the spot, right? This is too polished!"

Regardless of whether it was written on the spot, if these four lines were hung up, Beihai would have to open a separate exhibition board just for it!

In the Yinfu livestream room, the viewer count jumped from a few hundred to three thousand, and the comments flowed like water from an opened sluice.

[My hands are numb from clapping.]

["Since ancient times, autumn has always been met with sorrow and loneliness; I say that autumn days surpass the spring morning." Autumn has stood right up, who understands!]

[The guy from the Renmin University Poetry Society earlier still has the nerve to challenge him? He just killed it instantly with a wave of his hand.]

["A single crane in the clear sky soars above the clouds." I can savor just this one line for a month.]

The Tall Male Student stood where he was, the color fading from his face layer by layer.

He understood.

He understood every single character.

The first line was like erecting a monument for the old path of thousand-year-old autumnal sorrow.

When the second line fell, light from the sky suddenly shone in from behind that monument.

The third line sent a living crane into the sky.

The fourth line finished it off, clean and neat, without a trace of redundancy.

Four lines. Twenty-eight characters.

No hidden meanings, no allusions, no tricks of any kind.

It was just the simplest, most straightforward seven-character quatrain.

Yet it accomplished something that no amount of tricks could achieve.

It made autumn stand up.

"Student Lin."

The Tall Male Student's voice was hoarse, and his Adam's apple moved twice.

The surrounding applause slowly died down.

Everyone was looking at him.

The phone cameras were pointed at him, and the recording red dots were still flashing.

The Tall Male Student knew that this moment would be recorded.

No matter what he said or did, it would be saved as a video by dozens of phones, uploaded to the internet, and replayed repeatedly by countless people.

He looked down at the letter paper in his hand.

Rustling autumn winds... ... cold crows enter the sky.

Those characters suddenly felt light.

So light that they were like a handful of old paper ash; as soon as the wind blew, they scattered into the shadow of the crane that Lin Que had just sent soaring above the clouds.

He folded the letter paper once.

And folded it again.

Then he stuffed it into his pocket, raised his head, and met Lin Que's gaze directly.

"May I ask, Student Lin."

His voice was very low, but he enunciated clearly.

"What is the name of this poem?"

Lin Que looked at him.

"Autumn Verse."

The two characters landed in the pavilion corridor, as light as a leaf.

The Tall Male Student was stunned.

Autumn Verse.

No sorrow, no hurt, no wreckage, and no cold.

It didn't even add any superfluous prefixes to autumn.

It was as if to say that autumn could naturally be this high, this bright, and this head-held-high.

He suddenly understood that where he lost was never about tonal patterns, nor was it about antithesis.

He lost because he had bowed his head from the very beginning.

The Tall Male Student took a slow breath, and the bit of dignity he had been forcing himself to maintain in his chest finally dissipated.

"I lost."

The three characters were spoken slowly, but each one landed steadily.

"Compared to 'Autumn Verse', my poem is a firefly against the bright moon."

The Tall Male Student nodded and retreated back to his companions.

His spine didn't collapse, but everyone could see,

that the silver Poetry Society badge on his chest no longer had the bright, glowing confidence it had just a moment ago in the sunlight.

The crowd was still seething.

Some were loudly reciting the four lines of poetry,

some were grabbing their companions' arms and jumping with excitement, and some had rewatched the video three times and still weren't satisfied.

Chen Jiahao picked up the cup of douzhi that had spilled more than half its contents from the ground, the expression on his face no longer describable with the word "excited."

It was a complex look, unique to seeing Master Que achieve legendary status once again, mixed with pride, excitement, and a "I knew it all along" feeling.

Xu Changge stood where he was.

His gaze shifted from the two poems on the exhibition board and landed on Lin Que.

"Since ancient times, autumn has always been met with sorrow and loneliness; I say that autumn days surpass the spring morning."

These two lines were not just the opening of a poem.

They were more like someone standing in the center of the literary world, saying a sentence to everyone who was bound by old rules.

You have been bent for too long, stand up.

Xu Changge suddenly remembered the heat in that alley earlier,

remembered the half of the stone bench left for the sanitation worker's broom, remembered the soft sound in the old man's knee when he bent down to tie his shoelaces.

And he also remembered Elder Cui's word.

Gravity.

He suddenly understood that the gravity Elder Cui spoke of actually had another layer of meaning.

It allowed people to see the soil beneath their feet clearly, and also allowed them to know why they could still move upwards.

Dan Yi stood at the edge of the crowd, his hat brim pushed completely above his forehead.

His gaze was not directed at Lin Que, but rather he was looking up, gazing at the sky.

That bird had already flown far away. Its white wingtips had become a small dot, getting higher and higher in the gaps between the clouds.

"A single crane in the clear sky soars above the clouds."

Dan Yi's lips moved silently one last time.

"A single crane in the clear sky soars above the clouds."

Dan Yi recited this line of poetry in his heart once more.

Where that crane belonged never needed anyone else's nod of approval.

The wind blew over from the lake, carrying the scent of osmanthus and the coolness of water vapor.

Dan Yi closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again, the gloom that had followed him for many years in his gray-blue pupils had faded.

It hadn't disappeared; it had been pushed open by something from underneath, creating a crack.

Light leaked in.

Lin Que put his hands back into his hoodie pockets, turned around, and glanced at the three people.

"Let's go." His tone was understated, as if nothing had happened just now.

"It seems there is someone selling candied haws up ahead."

Chen Jiahao immediately jumped up:

"Let's go, let's go! My treat!"

Xu Changge straightened his trench coat cuffs and followed.

Dan Yi took one last look at the sky, pushed his hat brim back to its original position, and silently followed at the very back.

The figures of the four people disappeared behind the pillars.

In the pavilion corridor behind them, a girl who was repeatedly watching the video replay suddenly looked up and said to her companion:

"What do you think would happen if this 'Autumn Verse' were posted online?"

No one answered her.

She looked down and typed in the title—

Encountered the champion of Fu Zhi Yao Competition at Beihai Park, and they actually wrote a poem on the spot?! #TheSwayingSupportChampion #Lin Que #WritingPoetry

The next second, her finger tapped the 'Post' button.

A line of small text popped up at the bottom of the screen.

Video approved.