460: Chapter 460, twenty-eight characters, turned the page on a thousand-year-old path of sorrowful autumn.

Qingbei School of Literature, Dean's Office.

Dai Shengzong's hand, which had just put down a red pen, hovered in mid-air, slow to return to the desk.

The video on his phone screen had finished playing.

The image of the youth in the navy blue hoodie pointing to the sky in the Beihai Park corridor was frozen on the final frame.

He dragged the video back to the start and watched it again.

After finishing, he didn't say a word.

He simply slowly removed his reading glasses and wiped them with a cloth for a long time.

He wiped them for so long that Professor Liu Zuoqing, sitting opposite him, had already finished two cups of strong tea, the tea leaves piled at the bottom into a small heap of dark brown residue.

"You've been wiping those for three minutes."

Professor Liu Zuoqing set the empty teacup on the table, a suppressed energy in his voice that he couldn't quite contain.

"Those glasses aren't that dirty."

Dai Shengzong placed the glasses back on the bridge of his nose, his gaze falling on the paused image on the phone screen.

Silence lasted for five seconds.

He recited the first two lines of the poem.

Until he finished the last word, Dai Shengzong took off his glasses again.

This time, he didn't wipe them.

He just held them in his hand, looking at the ginkgo leaves outside the window shining in the autumn sun, and only after a long while did he exhale a long breath.

"Twenty-eight characters." His voice was a bit raspy.

"Twenty-eight characters, and he's completely overturned the thousand-year-old path of writing about the sorrow of autumn."

Professor Liu Zuoqing stood up from his chair, hands behind his back, and took a couple of steps around the bookshelf.

A button on the collar of his grey zhongshan suit was undone; he looked thirty percent less serious and seventy percent more restless than usual.

"Do you know what the most brutal part is?"

Professor Liu Zuoqing stopped in his tracks and turned to look at Dai Shengzong.

"It's not that this poem is well-written. We've seen good poems; they're not that rare."

"The brutal part is that this kid didn't take it seriously at all."

He pointed a finger at the phone screen.

"Look at his expression after reciting the last line.

'Let's go, there seems to be someone selling Tanghulu up ahead.' He casually tossed out four lines of poetry in Beihai Park,

And it's as if he's made all those young people in the capital's university poetry circles, who pride themselves on knowing Poetic Metre, shut their mouths all at once."

"And yet, his metre is precise, his imagery is accurate, and the flow of energy is seamless; you can't even find a place to nitpick if you tried."

Professor Liu Zuoqing laughed as he spoke. There was thirty percent sentiment and seventy percent satisfaction in that laugh.

"I've been teaching for decades, and the students I've mentored could line up twice around Weiming Lake.

I've seen those who are great at novels, great at sci-fi, and great at prose."

He looked at Dai Shengzong.

"But one who can fight across novels, sci-fi, and classical poetry? This is the only one."

Dai Shengzong was silent for a few seconds before locking his phone screen.

"Give Su Mubai a call."

"No need to call."

Professor Liu Zuoqing glanced out the window, the curve of his lips deepening.

"I just received news that Elder Su went to the Xu Family home this afternoon."

Dai Shengzong's fingers tapped twice lightly on the desk.

"Then we'll wait until they're done talking."

He put his reading glasses back on, picked up the red pen, and his gaze returned to the manuscript on the desk.

But the tip of the pen hovered for a long time; not a single word of critique was written.

"Then it leads my poetic soul to the azure sky."

He recited it as if talking to himself, then shook his head.

"Seventeen years old."

He stared at the manuscript for a moment, finally set the red pen down, and reached out to pull open a drawer.

At the very top of the drawer lay a Qinglan Project student observation form.

He lightly pressed his fingertip against Lin Que's name.

...

The Capital, the Xu Family Courtyard.

The autumn afternoon sunlight filtered through the lattice windows, spreading across the mahogany desk.

Xu Zhengqing sat in a grandmaster's chair, a pot of freshly steeped Mingqian Maojian tea by his side; the tea was a vibrant green, with steam curling upwards.

The tablet computer in front of him was propped up on a red sandalwood stand, the screen playing the live video from the Beihai Park corridor.

The video quality wasn't great, filmed on a phone by a bystander.

The image shook, and the audio was noisy; the distant sound of a security guard's megaphone mixed with the nearby gasps of tourists.

But those four lines of poetry, every single word was heard crystal clear.

Xu Zhengqing's hand, holding the teacup, stopped mid-air.

The moment the video ended, Xu Zhengqing set down his teacup and threw his head back in laughter.

The laughter drifted out from the study, crossing the courtyard,

Startling two grey pigeons perched under the eaves into taking flight with a flurry of wings.

"Good! What a 'I say that autumn days surpass the spring mornings'!"

He slapped the armrest of his chair, the mahogany letting out a dull thud.

Inside the study, Su Mubai, sitting across the mahogany desk, was looking down at an old book.

He had a lean build and wore a navy blue button-up cotton shirt; his hair was grey, his expression gentle, and his entire being exuded a composure like a cool mountain breeze.

Hearing this hearty laugh, Su Mubai set down the volume in his hand and looked up:

"Old Xu, what's made you so happy?"

Xu Zhengqing beckoned him over and pushed the tablet across.

"Old Su, come take a look at this."

Su Mubai sat down across the desk, picked up the tablet, and tapped the screen.

The video played again.

He watched very seriously.

From the moment Lin Que opened his mouth to recite the first line,

To the final line "Then it leads my poetic soul to the azure sky," his gaze didn't shift an inch from the screen.

When the video finished, Su Mubai gently set the tablet back on the table.

Silence lasted for three seconds.

Then he raised his hand and slapped his knee hard.

"What a beast."

Coming from Su Mubai's mouth, these three words carried ten times more weight than from anyone else.

He had retired from the literary world for eleven years; the number of times he had used the word "good" to start an evaluation of a junior could be counted on one hand.

"Before, I saw him write 'rural teacher' and 'the steps', and I thought he understood how a person crawls up from the mud, step by step."

Su Mubai's fingers lightly stroked the edge of the tablet, as if caressing the cover of an old book.

"The coarseness of the Loess Plateau and the weight of the grassroots narrative were already enough to make the entire literary world take notice."

He looked up at Xu Zhengqing, the light in his eyes even brighter than before.

"Seeing this 'autumn poem' today, I realize he can even see the path in the sky.

One writes of steps, the other of piercing the clouds; at the core, it's all about upward movement."

Xu Zhengqing picked up his teacup and took a sip, his gaze distant.

"You should have also noticed, he used the most orthodox Seven-Character Quatrain metre."

Su Mubai nodded.

"The first line enters the rhyme, the second and fourth carry it,

'Liao', 'Chao', and 'Xiao' all belong to the same rhyme group, and the third line uses the word 'shang' to break open the momentum.

The Tonal patterns and rhymes are stable; in any classical poetry examination, you couldn't find a single flaw."

"That's the most terrifying part." Xu Zhengqing set down his teacup and tapped his index finger twice on the desk.

"He wants to subvert the tradition of sorrowful autumn, yet he didn't use any rebellious methods.

He stood within the rules, played the rules to the absolute limit, and then, within the scope allowed by those rules, he blew off the ceiling."

Su Mubai picked up the conversation.

"There are two kinds of game-changers. One smashes the wall, the other opens the door.

The one who smashes the wall looks fierce, but the fragments can hurt them.

The one who opens the door uses the lock and key that were already on the wall; it's just that everyone else thought that door couldn't be pushed open."

He looked at the frozen image on the screen, the frame where Lin Que pointed his finger to the sky.

"This child has pushed open more than just one door."

Xu Zhengqing smiled.

Su Mubai was stunned for a second, then shook his head and laughed.

"His roots are much deeper than I thought, and his branches and leaves reach much higher than I imagined."

Xu Zhengqing's smile deepened.

He picked up the teapot to refill Su Mubai's cup, the sound of the tea pouring into the white porcelain cup exceptionally crisp in the quiet study.

Su Mubai picked up the teacup, suddenly thinking of something.

"By the way, Old Xu, sci-fi, grassroots narratives, and classical poetry—these three paths seem to share a literary pulse, but in reality, they are extremely far apart."

"Yet the things this child writes have a skeleton that seems to be from the same body."

"Tell me, is this kind of consistency really something a seventeen-year-old boy grew on his own?"

Xu Zhengqing smiled slightly, the teacup brought to his lips, then stopped half an inch away.

Some answers he had already heard when that youth left the Xu Family study.

It's just that these answers shouldn't come from his mouth right now.

On the old locust tree in the courtyard, the grey pigeons that were startled away earlier had returned, settling peacefully on the branches.

Xu Zhengqing gently set down his teacup.

"Drink your tea."

Su Mubai glanced at him but didn't press further.

...