470: Chapter 470 The Mentor Team is All Here

As Tang He's words fell, the air in the entire lecture hall seemed to be drained away.

This question was too sharp.

Ever since the video from that day at Beihai Park had spread across the internet like wildfire, every student in the Qinglan Project sitting there had the same thought running through their minds.

Barely two minutes long. A hostile environment.

A phone camera. A crowd of onlookers.

Under such conditions, it wasn't a matter of whether one could write good lines; it was that the ability of the vast majority of people to even think normally would be crushed.

Tang He had taken what everyone wanted to ask but was too embarrassed to, and laid it out on the table, word by word.

Two boys in the front row turned halfway around simultaneously.

The three people in the group by the window, who had been passing manuscripts to each other, froze in their tracks.

Even the tall, thin boy sitting by the door, his eyes circled with dark, purple shadows, lifted his head from the pile of draft papers.

Almost at the same moment, all eyes bore down on Lin Que.

Lin Que leaned back in his chair, idly spinning a carbon pen with his right hand.

The pen twirled twice between his knuckles before he caught it steadily.

He looked at Tang He, without striking any inscrutable pose.

"The wind was quite strong at the time."

Tang He blinked.

"The brother next to me insisted on pressing people's heads toward the ground, making everyone feel sentimental about the autumn poem."

Lin Que set the pen on the table and clasped his hands behind his head.

"I just felt that the bones of a literary person shouldn't be softer than the willow trees in Beihai Park."

"Those willow branches were blown about, swaying and bending, but at least their roots were still anchored in the soil."

"If we writers don't even anchor our roots and just collapse at the first sign of wind, then what are we even writing?"

He paused for a beat.

"So, I just drew a breath and stood firm."

Drew a breath and stood firm.

After these seven words fell, no one in the classroom replied.

Someone in the front row held a pen, the tip hovering over the paper, unable to make a mark for a long time.

But the expression on everyone's face in the room had changed.

Tang He stood where she was, her lips slightly trembling.

She looked down at the notebook in her hand, filled with annotations—timelines precise to the second, word-by-word imagery analysis, and the tracing of allusions from the I Ching to the Shipin.

She had spent three days using the most professional academic tools, attempting to reconstruct the creative mystery behind those forty seconds.

And then Lin Que told her the answer was "just drew a breath and stood firm."

Tang He's fingers gripped the corner of the notebook, her knuckles turning white from the pressure.

The hint of confusion in her eyes didn't fade; instead, it began to brighten bit by bit.

"Bones shouldn't be softer than willow trees."

She rolled these words over on her tongue, once, then again.

Besides literary works, she had always been engaged in poetry research.

Tonal patterns, Poetic Metre, imagery combinations, and the density of allusions.

She treated poetry as a math problem that could be dismantled, trying to find that variable within the formula.

Lin Que's words were like pulling her out of the table of Poetic Metre.

She suddenly understood: technique could explain the shape of a poem, but what supported that poem was the breath of a person who, even after being pushed down, still insisted on looking up.

Tang He's gaze shifted rapidly from confusion to clarity, and her entire aura changed along with it.

She closed her notebook and gave a slight nod to Lin Que.

"I understand."

She turned and walked back to her seat, her footsteps much lighter than when she had come.

The classroom was silent for a full three seconds.

Then, whispers emerged from all directions.

A boy by the window rubbed his hands, his voice pressed low but unable to hide his excitement:

"He says it so lightly, but how much must be buried underneath for him to dare to speak up in such a situation?"

The girl next to him was scribbling something in her notebook, shaking her head as she wrote:

"It's not just a matter of technique. Didn't you hear what he said earlier? A writer's bones shouldn't be softer than a willow tree. It's about having that spirit first, and then the words just follow. First the backbone, then the poem."

"Exactly, exactly," a boy with glasses in the back row chimed in.

"He wrote the steps》 before, and now he's written autumn poem》. Looking at it, the themes are far apart, but the spirit inside is the same."

The murmurs grew denser.

Chen Jiahao, sitting next to Lin Que, listened to these discussions and muttered in a low voice, full of admiration:

"Master Que, did you know that every time you open your mouth, it's like a whole lecture?"

Lin Que didn't speak; he reached out and flipped the carbon pen on the table.

Xu Changge sat on the other side, his fingers resting on his knees, watching Lin Que's profile.

He didn't participate in any of the discussions.

But a faint smile appeared at the corner of his mouth.

He knew this kind of power all too well.

From the first day he entered the camp until now, he had been observing Lin Que's way of expression at close range.

That expression had no traces of the academic school; it didn't cite classics, didn't pile up flowery language, and even the grammar was colloquial.

But every sentence could pierce directly to the core of the matter.

Stripping away all disguises, laying out the most essential things in the most simple language.

This was Lin Que.

Xu Changge lowered his eyes, recalling the dense modification marks on his own draft papers.

In that instant, he suddenly felt that he had been polishing things too finely these past few days.

Writing certainly needs to be sharp, but sometimes, the first punch thrown is more important.

But Lin Que's words just now also made him suddenly realize a problem.

He had been revising over and over, polishing the sharpness of the blade.

But Lin Que never polished the blade.

He just smashed it with his fist.

This realization made Xu Changge make a mental note.

Once this submission was over, he would re-examine his excessive obsession with "exquisiteness" in his creative process.

Dan Yi sat next to Chen Jiahao and hadn't made a sound the whole time.

But today, the brim of his hat was pushed higher than any other day, his grey-blue eyes fully exposed under the fluorescent lights.

There was no gloom in those eyes, replaced instead by a very quiet light.

He remembered the day at Beihai Park, the way Lin Que looked when he recited "A single crane soars through the clouds into the clear sky" while standing in the pavilion corridor.

At that time, everyone was analyzing the Poetic Metre and imagery of that poem.

Only he saw another layer of meaning.

When that crane flew up, it wasn't because the sky was beautiful; it was because it refused to stay on the ground.

Today, Lin Que had personally confirmed his judgment.

Dan Yi looked down at the manuscript spread out on his table.

The ending detail he had added after returning from Beihai was about the courage to "press forward even while knowing the taboo."

The direction was right.

The discussions in the classroom continued, with no sign of the heat fading.

A girl in the front row with a ponytail raised her hand, seemingly wanting to ask Lin Que more questions about his creative mindset.

But before her hand was even halfway up, it froze in mid-air.

Because a series of footsteps came from outside the classroom door.

Heavy, synchronized, steady.

The soles of leather shoes tapped against the stone floor of the corridor, pressing into the classroom with every step.

There was an aura in those footsteps that didn't need to be deliberately created.

The footsteps grew closer and closer.

The last lingering whispers in the classroom vanished completely within three seconds.

Every student's spine straightened almost at the same time.

This wasn't a deliberate reaction; it was an instinctive perception at a physical level.

The weight carried in those footsteps came through the wooden door and walls, forcing everyone's attention to be dragged in the same direction.

Lin Que stopped spinning his pen.

His gaze shifted to the closed wooden door at the front of the classroom.

Chen Jiahao subconsciously swallowed, muttering in a low voice: "This lineup doesn't feel right."

The doorknob was pressed down from the outside.

With a "creak," the door slowly pushed inward.

The first person to step in was wearing a dark grey suit jacket, his greying hair combed back meticulously.

His figure wasn't burly, and his steps weren't fast, but with every step he took, the temperature in the classroom seemed to drop by a degree.

Professor Liu Zuoqing.

Professor of the Qingbei School of Literature.

After entering, he didn't head straight for the podium; instead, he stood to the side of the door, tilting his head slightly, as if making way for the person behind him.

This action made the students in the front row collectively gasp.

The people who could make Professor Liu Zuoqing step aside to let them pass could be counted on one hand in the entire Chinese Literary World.

The second person to enter was Dai Shengzong.

Wearing a grey zhongshan suit, full of scholarly air, his steps were half a beat faster than Professor Liu Zuoqing's, carrying his usual briskness.

He swept his gaze over the students in the classroom, a faint smile hanging at the corner of his mouth; it was hard to tell if it was gratification or scrutiny.

As soon as the third person appeared, the expressions of some in the back two rows changed.

Especially after seeing the silver-grey briefcase in his hand, the spines of several students went rigid simultaneously.

Cui Wen.

Elder Cui.

His unkempt appearance stood out starkly among the crowd of suited and leather-shoed titans.

He was wearing a faded dark blue jacket, and the stubble on his chin looked like it hadn't been shaved for at least three days.

But his way of walking was different from others.

His eyes didn't look at the students, didn't look at the podium, but only stared at the silver-grey briefcase in his hand.

That case, the last time it appeared in this classroom, contained the classified third-generation brain-computer interface system.

Today, he had brought it again.

When the fourth figure stepped over the threshold, some in the front row even held their breath.

The air in the classroom felt like it was being tightly gripped by an invisible hand.

Su Mubai.

This literary recluse, who had stopped writing for eleven years, was wearing an extremely plain dark brown crew-neck sweater, with a grey-white cotton-linen jacket over it.

His pace was slow, carrying a kind of detachment from worldly affairs.

After entering, his gaze swept over the crowd of students, stopping for a very brief moment on Lin Que before sweeping to the other side.

Xu Changge.

That glance was very faint, yet it caused Xu Changge's fingers to tighten subconsciously.

Su Mubai withdrew his gaze, without any extra expression.

The last person to walk in made Xu Changge's fingers tighten violently on his knees.

Xu Zhengqing.

The anchor of the beijing school of literature, and also the high mountain that Xu Changge had never been able to bypass since childhood.

He was also Xu Changge's grandfather.

The old man was wearing a dark Chinese-style cotton jacket with front toggles; his hair was completely white, but he was in high spirits.

When he entered, he glanced at his grandson, but there was no emotion in that look, just as if he were looking at any ordinary student in the classroom.

Xu Changge sat properly in his chair, his back straight.

Qinglan Project training camp, the Mentor Dream Team.

All present.