546: Chapter 546 The Thirty People Pushed Away

8:05 AM.

The Qinglan Project group chat was unusually quiet.

For a whole night, thirty people, not a single new message.

After the Dream Weaver left those three sentences at the end of the ghost blows out the light chapter last night, everyone seemed to have pressed the mute button at the same time.

"Read it yourself, judge it yourself."

These four words suppressed the fire in their hearts.

Tang He sat at her dormitory desk with a few printed pages spread out in front of her.

That was the excerpt from qin opera that Lin Que had brought out during the small-group text reading yesterday; it was only three short chapters, yet she had read it twice over.

This morning, she opened it again.

That passage about Old Zhao.

Writing about him sitting by his wife's grave for an entire afternoon.

No crying, no shouting.

Not even a single internal monologue.

There was only one sentence on the paper.

"Old Zhao's fingers rested on his knees, tapping once every so often."

Once.

And again.

Tang He stared at that line, her throat feeling tight.

She thought of her own glass.

Skyscrapers.

Curtain walls.

Reflections.

Soundproofing layers.

She had used many cool-toned images and arranged quite a few delicate sentences.

In the past, she thought it was beautiful.

Looking at it now, she suddenly understood that beauty can sometimes block people.

Lin Que only wrote about a finger tapping on a knee, yet he gave weight to the silence.

Her phone vibrated.

In the Program group chat, Chen Jiahao sent two words after the message sent by Professor Liu Zuoqing.

[ "Let's go." ]

Tang He glanced at the time.

8:10 AM.

She picked up her phone and opened the Wenyuan Pavilion app.

The public reading portal for this year's Kunpeng Youth Award was hanging on the homepage; in the center of the page, the countdown was still ticking.

3 hours, 49 minutes, and 58 seconds.

The works were still locked.

The comment section hadn't opened yet.

But the wind outside had been blowing all night.

"Tourist-style field research."

"The foundation is too shallow."

"Forcing growth."

"Web novel readers can't understand serious literature."

These words were like nails buried in advance, waiting to pierce into every work page after twelve o'clock noon.

Tang He exited the page, put her phone in her pocket, and put on her coat.

Today, all Qinglan Student would go to the small lecture hall of the School of Liberal Arts.

They had to guard their respective works.

They also had to wait for the first real stranger to click in.

Before pushing the door open, Tang He glanced out the window.

The sky in the capital was gray and heavy.

The clouds were pressed very low.

The sun was not visible.

Yet she suddenly felt less afraid.

The words they had painstakingly written in the Gobi Desert, urban villages, old factory areas, and farmers' markets were right there.

Those words would not disappear into thin air because of a few articles or a few comments.

In the elevator lobby on the floor, Lin Que had already arrived.

He was carrying a computer bag, standing in front of the elevator door, looking very calm.

Xu Changge came out of his room with a black folder tucked under his arm.

He walked to Lin Que's side and stood still.

Neither of them was in a hurry to speak.

The elevator door opened.

They walked in and pressed the button for the basement level.

There was an underground corridor between the dormitory area and the School of Liberal Arts; few people usually walked there, but it was quiet today.

The metal walls of the cabin reflected the shadows of the two men.

Xu Changge suddenly spoke:

"How long did you sleep last night?"

"It was okay."

"Okay? How long is 'okay'?"

"Seven hours."

Xu Changge was silent for a moment.

Lin Que looked at him.

"What about you?"

"I woke up once at three o'clock."

"I read the forum for a while."

There was no expression on his face, but there was a faint bluish-black tint under his eyes.

Lin Que withdrew his gaze.

"Today will be a long day."

Xu Changge looked at Lin Que, then nodded.

The elevator stopped.

The doors opened slowly.

The two walked through the underground corridor toward the School of Liberal Arts.

The Qingbei campus at eight in the morning was still quiet.

Occasionally, students would walk by, and upon recognizing Lin Que, they would pause, but quickly look away without coming over to disturb him.

Lin Que knew that after twelve o'clock, the quiet days for these thirty people in the Program would be completely pushed away.

Their names.

Their works.

Every word they had painstakingly crafted in the mud, sand, smoke, and rust would be pushed in front of the people of the whole country.

Some would like it.

Some would curse it.

This path was one they had chosen themselves.

Lin Que walked out of the corridor and looked up toward the east.

Behind the thick clouds, there was a small patch of brighter sky.

The sun had not come out yet.

But it was there.

At the same time.

Huanyu Publishing Group Publishing Group headquarters, Technical Department.

Fifty computers were arranged in five rows and ten columns.

What was flickering on the screens was not the actual backend of the Kunpeng Award, but Huanyu Publishing Group's self-built public opinion monitoring dashboard and data returned from the open platform.

Vice President Chen Mo stood in the front row, holding a walkie-talkie.

Vice President Lin Wei's voice came through.

"Vice President Chen, the matrix accounts have finished the pre-check. The first batch of eight thousand accounts didn't trigger any anomalies; at twelve o'clock sharp, they can enter in batches."

Vice President Chen Mo asked: "Confirm the comment content again."

Vice President Lin Wei's speaking pace was very steady.

"The first batch is three hundred seed comments."

"Keyword coverage: foundation is too shallow, like a field research report, forcing growth, can't get into it."

"The first batch of fifty, only leave short comments."

"The second batch of two hundred, add reasons."

"The third batch of fifty, link to Chu Pengshu's long review, and steer the topic back to tourist-style writing."

Vice President Chen Mo nodded.

"Understood."

There was a two-second pause on the walkie-talkie.

Vice President Lin Wei said again.

"Vice President Zhao just called."

"He said, today's goal isn't necessarily to crush them."

Vice President Chen Mo raised his eyes.

Vice President Lin Wei said word for word.

"It is to let everyone see with their own eyes how weak the Program is at the data level."

The call ended.

Vice President Chen Mo put down the walkie-talkie and turned to look at the fifty screens.

The countdown was still ticking.

3 hours, 42 minutes, 11 seconds.

He walked to the main console and opened the encrypted folder shared by the publicity department.

Inside was the preview material for the contest works authorized in advance by Shen Jiangping's team.

Title: Three or Two Things in Jincheng.

A realist novel.

The story focuses on the fate of several generations of workers in a textile mill in a small city during the wave of state-owned enterprise reform in the nineties.

The synopsis of the work was written very fully.

[ "This work took three years to polish, with seven field research trips and over two hundred interview subjects." ]

[ "From workshop directors to loom operators, from retired veteran cadres to laid-off female workers, every character has a prototype, and every detail has a source." ]

Vice President Chen Mo continued to flip down.

The last paragraph of the creative notes had an even more beautiful tone.

[ "I have always believed that literature is not self-congratulation by the elite, but a bridge that connects with the hearts of ordinary people." ]

[ "This work is dedicated to everyone who moves forward silently in the waves of the era." ]

Vice President Chen Mo closed the file.

Shen Jiangping was indeed prepared this time.

The subject matter was not light.

The material was also thick.

Taken alone, it was enough to enter the reviewer's field of vision.

But what Huanyu Publishing Group wanted today was far more than "being read seriously."

They wanted to write the victory into the data before the readers opened the first page.

Today, the works were just the names placed on the front stage.

What was really being pushed onto the table was the entrance, the traffic, and a set of reader reactions written in advance.

Vice President Chen Mo picked up the walkie-talkie again.

"Attention all groups, the countdown has entered the final three hours."

"All accounts start warming up."

"First browse the homepage, randomly bookmark three to five works."

"You must also click on the Program's pages."

"Control the dwell time between twenty and forty seconds, don't make it look too clean."

"At twelve o'clock sharp, switch comments according to the task keywords."

A series of responses came through the walkie-talkie.

"Received."

"Received."

"Received."

...