548: Chapter 548 Understanding the Feeling of Being Separated

Shizhuang City.

The top floor of an old residential complex.

Sun Qiming sat in front of the computer, his finger hovering over the mouse, the light from the screen hitting his face.

The window was half-open, and the intermittent calls of a waste collector drifted in from downstairs.

He refreshed the backend page.

Zero.

The comment count was still zero.

Sun Qiming leaned back, and his chair made a soft creak.

In just eight minutes, he had refreshed it seventeen times.

The reading channel had opened at exactly twelve o'clock, and eight full minutes had passed since then, but there was nothing under his work's page.

Three years ago, he participated in the Kunpeng Youth Award for the first time, and that year he lost to Shen Jiangping by only three points.

Later, he read that winning work over and over seven times and admitted that he hadn't lost unjustly back then.

At that time, Shen Jiangping's characters were well-established, his writing technique was mature enough, and he could use a very subtle detail to support the emotions of an entire chapter.

But three years later, looking at Shen Jiangping again, what Sun Qiming saw was no longer just a pen; lectures, interviews, trending searches, and publicity had become the web that trapped him.

This time, Shen Jiangping's entry was "A Few Tales of Jin City," which told the fate of another group of people in the same textile factory.

The introduction stated "one year of polishing" and "interviewed a hundred people," and every word seemed to have been repeatedly honed.

Sun Qiming could tell that while there was hard work, there was even more of the scent of behind-the-scenes packaging.

The page refreshed again.

Comment count: 1.

Sun Qiming's finger paused on the mouse, not clicking in immediately.

He stared at that number for two seconds before slowly moving the cursor over.

The comment content was only two words.

"Keep it up."

Sun Qiming looked at these two words and suddenly smiled.

There was no triumph in this smile, but rather a sense of relief and reassurance.

At least, someone had clicked in.

He moved his chair back and took a sip of the cold tea on the table.

His mind turned back to Shen Jiangping's work from back then, as well as the overwhelming trending searches and press releases from the past few days.

It had been very noisy outside these past few days, and he had scrolled through many posts; those posts repeated the same few phrases over and over:

The Qinglan Program students from Tsinghua and Peking University had too shallow a foundation, and a month of fieldwork couldn't support true grassroots writing.

He had glanced at them a few times but didn't rush to make a judgment.

The main text hadn't even opened yet, but the verdicts were already flying everywhere; he had seen this kind of scene too many times.

When newcomers just start to emerge, they always have to endure a round of judgment first.

Sun Qiming had been in this circle for a few years and was too familiar with this kind of formation.

He suddenly remembered that he hadn't checked how the works of those Qinglan Program students were actually written.

He logged out of his backend and clicked on the overall popularity ranking of the Kunpeng Award.

The red line at the top of the list was still high, marked with the name "Shen Jiangping."

Flipping down, he saw an area where all the names had a "First-time Entry" mark in front of them.

It was them.

That patch of gray "First-time Entry" tags looked as if someone had pushed these thirty young people alone into the spotlight.

Sun Qiming scrolled with his mouse and saw a name that stood out among a string of Chinese names.

Author Name: Danyi Lopivich.

Sun Qiming was stunned.

A foreigner?

He scrolled down to read the introduction and discovered that this was actually a mixed-race Chinese-Russian teenager who grew up in Mo City and was the third-place winner of the Fu Zhi Yao Competition.

He raised an eyebrow, curiosity stirring in his heart.

A mixed-race teenager who grew up in the far north went to write about a southern urban village?

This contrast immediately hooked Sun Qiming.

He scrolled down, wanting to see what this work called "The Southern Rainy Season" was actually about.

But the comment section jumped into his line of sight first.

Sun Qiming looked at the number in the comment section.

Comment count: 306.

For a work that had only been open for ten minutes, this number was unusually dense.

He expanded the comment section and read through them one by one.

"I don't get it, it's just pretentious."

"It's that 'selling misery' routine again."

"Does being mixed-race get you extra points? This is a literature award, not a charity selection."

"Writing something like this after a month of fieldwork is just too sloppy."

One after another, the tone was all the same.

Sun Qiming hadn't been in this business for just a day or two; the wording of these comments was too uniform, as if they were carved from the same mold.

Real readers would latch onto a specific sentence or character; even if they were criticizing, they would criticize specific points.

These critical comments had no characters, no paragraphs, no specific sentences; only a few labels being swapped back and forth.

He sneered, ignored the comment section, and pulled the page directly to the main text.

He wanted to see for himself what this child, who was being criticized so harshly, had actually written.

The first paragraph jumped into his eyes.

[On the utility pole at the entrance of the alley hung seven or eight pairs of trousers of different colors.]

[When the wind blew, the pant legs slapped against the wall, making a very soft sound.]

[Daniel stood at his own window, looking at the window directly across the building that was also lit up.]

[That family was eating, speaking a dialect he couldn't understand, their laughter loud.]

[He couldn't understand those words, but he could understand that feeling of being isolated.]

Sun Qiming's hand paused on the mouse and didn't move again.

He continued reading.

It wrote about a mixed-race teenager shoved into an alley crowded with migrant workers.

The people in the alley spoke five different accents, none of them finding the others strange; only his face became the only thing that was repeatedly scrutinized.

There was a small paragraph later on that made Sun Qiming's breathing lighten as he read it.

[The power went out on a rainy night, and everyone in the alley crowded downstairs to wait for the electrician.]

[Someone shouted: "Hey kid, where are you from?"]

[Daniel held an umbrella, standing at the edge of the crowd, and said: "Third floor, 305."]

[The man laughed: "I asked what nationality you are, not for your house number."]

[Rainwater dripped down the umbrella ribs, and he suddenly felt that even 305 couldn't keep him.]

Sun Qiming felt a chill down his back.

That chill rose up along his spine, as if someone had pressed the sense of detachment he hadn't been able to explain for years onto the screen.

He didn't have such experiences himself, but he could feel that this kind of loneliness wasn't made up.

It was too concrete, too quiet, so quiet that it made one unable to breathe.

He finished scrolling through the first few screens and only then realized his palms were damp.

Sun Qiming pushed his chair back, leaned against the backrest, and let out a long breath.

Those who said the Qinglan Program's foundation was shallow should at least open the main text first.

Sun Qiming even suspected that what they feared most was someone actually reading on.

He straightened his body again.

The curiosity in his heart was completely ignited.

He exited Dan Yi's page and returned to the popularity list.

A strange name had suddenly appeared on the list, and it was shooting up.

"qin opera."

Author: Lin Que.

It was hard for Sun Qiming not to recognize this name.

The Tsinghua/Peking University recommended student who caused a huge stir online a while ago, the Fu Zhi Yao Competition champion, and the one who had that cyberbullying counter-attack incident.

He clicked on the page for this work, and the moment the page loaded, the number in the comment section stunned him.

One thousand and thirty-seven.

Sun Qiming's brows furrowed.

It hadn't been open for twenty minutes yet, and this number was more than three times that of Dan Yi's; it didn't look like natural growth anymore.

He pulled down and saw that the rhetoric in the comment section was denser and more urgent than the previous batch.

"A classic example of forcing growth."

"No matter how big the Tsinghua/Peking University name is, it can't make up for the gap of a month of fieldwork."

"Tourist-style writing; I knew the routine after reading the beginning."

"I suggest you learn what true realism is before talking about any qin opera."

One after another, almost all of them were repeated variations of these few sentences.

Sun Qiming scrolled down, and when he reached nearly fifty comments, he suddenly stopped.

A comment was buried under dozens of negative reviews.

The profile picture was gray, and the account was new, but the content was very specific and poignant.

"That part where Old Zhao sat in front of the stele tapping his knee made me cry. He didn't say a word, which was more painful than crying out loud."

A dozen or so comments down, it was another new account.

"The aftertaste is too strong; I'm still recovering."

"Where is the prototype for this book? I really want to go see it."

Sun Qiming's gaze lingered on these two comments for a long time.

He had seen too much fake buzz piled up by internet trolls and too many real voices drowned out.

These few comments, hidden among hundreds of uniform negative reviews, were like two blades of grass growing out of the cracks in a rock.

Sun Qiming stared at the words "Old Zhao sitting in front of the stele tapping his knee," suddenly very curious about what had happened to this Old Zhao.

Sun Qiming's finger moved to the button to read the main text and paused for half a second.

Outside the window, the waste collector's calls continued, one after another, drifting into the distance.

Sun Qiming looked at the screen again, his gaze not moving away.

He clicked it.

The page slowly unfolded, and the first line of text jumped into his line of sight.

[In the autumn of 1998, I stood in front of the rusty iron gate there, hearing the sound of the wind blowing through the empty factory building.]

Sun Qiming's finger stopped.