490: Chapter 490 The knife only cuts rotten flesh

The silence in the dormitory was like a string pulled to its limit. Dan Yi lowered his eyes, his fingertips almost digging a white mark into the edge of his phone case.

Lin Que's gaze swept over Dan Yi's clenched knuckles, his voice falling softly: "Judging by Jian Shen's teaching style last time, his knife only cuts away the rotten flesh without harming the bones and tendons."

Lin Que didn't even fully lift his head when he said this.

Chen Jiahao's neck whipped around to look at him with a 'whoosh.' Xu Changge's hand, which was spinning a pen, also paused for a beat. Dan Yi finally raised his head.

"The manuscript you submitted last time, the part about Mo City, how many days did it take you?" Lin Que asked. Dan Yi was silent for two seconds. "Three and a half days."

"How many times did you scrap it in between?" "Twice." "You submitted the third version."

Lin Que's thumb began to slide slowly across the screen again. "That just means you found what you felt was the most honest way to put it in the third version."

He looked up at Dan Yi, his eyes steady. "That is what the teacher wants to see; he doesn't care if you write beautifully or not. He only cares whether you were lying to yourself while you were writing."

Dan Yi's shoulders relaxed a little. His lips were still pursed tightly, and his fingertips were still hooked onto the edge of the phone case, but the stiffness in his shoulders and back had eased a fraction.

Chen Jiahao looked up from the floor, watching Lin Que's rock-steady demeanor, and let out what was probably the umpteenth wail of the day. "Master Que, how are you always so steady? Aren't you nervous? You submitted a manuscript too!"

Lin Que glanced at him. "What's there to be nervous about?" "It's behind the backend, is he going to crawl through the internet cable to beat me up?"

He said this lightly. Chen Jiahao widened his eyes: "Your mentality is too abnormal."

Xu Changge didn't speak, but his hand resumed spinning the pen at a normal speed. He wasn't surprised by Lin Que's composure.

From the first day of the camp until now, this person had always given him the feeling of a reef repeatedly washed by the tide; no matter how strong the wind was, it only splashed a little white foam on the surface.

Silence settled back into the dormitory. The four of them each occupied a spot, consuming the anxiety brought by the wait in different ways.

Chen Jiahao leaned against the chair leg and started counting the cracks on the ceiling. He gave up at the seventeenth one and switched to repeatedly turning his phone on and off.

Xu Changge picked up the cup of tea that had long since gone cold, took a sip, frowned, and put it back down.

Dan Yi placed his phone face down on his knees, crossed his arms, and his gaze fell on the darkening sky outside the window.

Lin Que was still half-lying down, his thumb seemingly nonchalantly scrolling through the news feed, with only the remote command hidden beneath the camouflage layer at the bottom of the screen silently waiting for final confirmation.

He was waiting for the perfect moment. Thirty sets of annotations had already finished proofreading at 2:12 PM, were packed into an encrypted file package, and were lying quietly in the sending queue of the studio computer.

From 2:00 PM until now, these four hours of blank space were a performance in themselves.

For a reclusive senior to personally annotate thirty manuscripts, releasing the results too quickly would seem perfunctory, while dragging it out too long would snap the students' nerves.

6:40 PM to 7:00 PM was the window Lin Que had preset. By then, the day's anxiety would have reached its peak, and the hunger before the cafeteria closed would pin everyone's attention to the progress bar in the backend.

Time ticked forward, minute by minute. 6:10 PM.

Chen Jiahao finally couldn't sit still, sprang up from the floor, and began pacing back and forth in the limited space of the dormitory. Three steps for a round trip, his movement path as precise as a caged tiger.

"I can't take it anymore. I need to think about something else to distract myself." He stopped, suddenly looking at Xu Changge. "Brother Xu, who do you think Jian Shen will annotate first?"

Xu Changge thought for a moment: "If we sort by submission time, Tang He should be the first." "I ran into her in the cafeteria, and she said she submitted it yesterday at noon."

"No, no." Chen Jiahao waved his hand. "Someone like Jian Shen wouldn't go by submission order. He'll definitely rank them according to his own standards. Either by skill level or by the severity of the problems."

Dan Yi spoke up from the corner. "If it's by skill level." His voice was still very soft. "The first one to appear should be the best one in the batch, or the worst one."

"The best one." Chen Jiahao took over. "Then the first one..." His gaze slowly turned towards Lin Que.

Xu Changge did not deny it. He had a certain amount of confidence in his third draft of "the tailor" that he had scrapped and rewritten, but the vicious eye and high standards Jian Shen had shown in the last lecture made it impossible for him to predict what kind of evaluation the other would give.

"It's also possible he'll start with the one with the most typical problems." Xu Changge said. "If Jian Shen wants to set the rules, the first knife will definitely fall on the place that best illustrates the standard."

"Then that's me." Chen Jiahao made a bitter face. "After I deleted six thousand words from mine, even I felt it looked like a skeleton frame."

"You're much better than a skeleton frame." Lin Que's voice drifted over from the bed. "At least your bones are hard. That's what the teacher cares about most."

Chen Jiahao let out a "Wow" and turned to look at him. "Master Que, are you comforting me or confirming that I really only have bones left?"

Lin Que ignored him. Over the next ten minutes or so, the topic in the dormitory changed three times. They first guessed who Jian Shen would annotate first, then guessed who would be criticized the harshest, and finally even discussed questions like "will the annotations have red marks."

Chen Jiahao insisted that he would be the first to bear the brunt. Xu Changge analyzed that the harshest knife would most likely be reserved for the person who was "the most promising but had gone the furthest astray." Dan Yi did not participate in this part of the discussion, but the strength with which he gripped his phone increased by another layer.

Lin Que leaned against the headboard, listening to the three of them dismantling, predicting, and comforting each other back and forth, the curve of his lips perfectly controlled.

6:40 PM. The sky outside the window had completely darkened. The fluorescent lights in the hallway turned on, and white light seeped in from under the door gap, drawing a narrow line of light on the floor.

Lin Que's thumb moved to directly above the button. Chen Jiahao was patting Dan Yi's shoulder and saying: "Don't be afraid, Jian Shen definitely won't tear into your unique perspective style, at most he'll point you in a direction..."

Xu Changge was listing a table on paper, ranking the thirty students according to the completion level of their work as he judged it, and was just about to share his predictions with Chen Jiahao.

Chen Jiahao's hand was still on Dan Yi's shoulder, Xu Changge was looking down to check the table, and Dan Yi was caught up in the comfort. Lin Que, under the guise of adjusting the corner of his quilt, lowered his wrist and his thumb pressed down lightly.

The button was pressed. On the screen, the words "Pending Release" jumped to "Executed." The computer far away in the studio lit up synchronously, and the encrypted file package was pushed into the independent review port of the Qingbei School of Literature.

Thirty sets of annotations and one notification template completed verification within seconds. The next moment, the Qinglan Project backend began pushing to all bound terminals.

Ten minutes later. In the dormitory, four mobile phones and two laptops emitted notification sounds almost simultaneously. Chen Jiahao's phone and laptop both let out a short "ding." Xu Changge's computer rang with the default notification sound of the Qinglan Project backend. Dan Yi's phone vibrated. Lin Que's phone also "dinged."

The four sounds overlapped, forming a short chord in the small dormitory. Then it was the hallway. The "ding" from next door, the "ding" from the next one over, the "ding" from the room across. Like dominoes, the notification sounds on the entire floor rang out one after another within a second, merging into a patch of fine electronic buzzing.

All sounds were drowned out in the next second by a raised voice. "It's here!!!"

Chen Jiahao's reaction speed was astonishingly fast. Within 0.3 seconds of the notification sound, he had already raised his phone in front of him, his pupils suddenly dilating under the light of the screen. "Jian Shen's annotations are out!!!"

He sprang up from the floor, his phone almost flying out of his hand. Xu Changge moved almost simultaneously. His pen was casually set on the table, and his five fingers had already landed on the computer trackpad, refreshing the page.

Dan Yi stood up from the chair, his knee hitting the edge of the chair, but he didn't care about the pain, gripping his phone with both hands, his thumbs rapidly clicking into the Qinglan Project backend.

Lin Que also picked up his phone a beat slow, clicking open the student end of the Qinglan Project backend. His movements were a beat slower than the other three, as if he had only just been pulled back to his senses by that array of notification sounds.

The Qinglan Project backend interface refreshed. The progress bar disappeared. A brand new page popped up. At the very top of the page, a line of bold, black font.

[Mr. Jian Shen's Personal Annotations · Qinglan Project Third Round Work Review · Thirty Annotations Have Been Publicly Released]

Below that was a line of small text: This round of review adopts the Qinglan internal all-member public mode; all student works and annotations can be viewed in the backend.

Below that was the list of thirty works. Behind the title of each piece hung a blue "View Annotations" button.

Chen Jiahao's gaze scanned rapidly across the screen, searching for his name from top to bottom. But just as he scanned to the first line, he froze completely.

The first page of the public review list, the first piece. Work Title: "Ether" Author: Lin Que ...