580: Voting for Chapter 580 begins

Six red avoidance lights were still lit above the terminals.

That patch of red reminded everyone: they could speak, they could write comments, but they could not turn any judgment into a score.

Elder Cui Wen brought up Chu Pengshu's verdict on the main screen.

[The raw, authentic field research lacks structure; the piling up of material cannot support the depth of the theme.]

He looked at the main screen, his tone steady.

"Now we can look back at this sentence."

He raised his hand and dragged three passages from "qin opera" onto the same split screen.

The first was the qin opera that Auntie Song sang until she went mute halfway through in the evening.

The second was Liang Shoushan teaching Old Zhao to sing opera outside the heat treatment workshop.

The third was twenty years later, Old Zhao sitting before the monument, beating time for that old tune with two fingers.

With the three texts placed together, the evaluation hall instantly fell silent.

Elder Cui Wen did not touch the scoring key, but typed a line into the training comments section.

"qin opera runs through time, characters, and emotions. What Chu Pengshu calls the piling up of material has lost its basis here."

Professor Zhang stared at the screen, his brows slowly relaxing.

"And it's not just this one."

He brought up another set of text.

On Old Zhao's first day at the factory, Liang Shoushan snatched the cigarette from his hand, confiscating the matchbox along with it.

Liang Shoushan scolded him: "The oil and gas pipes are right there; if you really light it, who would have time to save you?"

Twenty years later, Old Zhao stood before the monument and fished out that cigarette, which had never been lit, from his pocket.

He broke the cigarette in two.

Half was buried in the damp soil before the monument.

The other half he put back into his pocket.

Professor Zhang's pen stopped on the paper.

"The cigarette enters at the beginning and is divided into two parts at the end."

"One part for Liang Shoushan, one part for Old Zhao to keep guarding."

"This object has a beginning and an end."

He continued to scroll down.

[Liang Shoushan: Quit the day I entered the workshop.]

[Old Zhao: In twenty years, never lit a fire outside the east wall.]

[Liang Shoushan: I'll keep teaching you to sing tomorrow.]

[Old Zhao: Sitting before the stone monument, finishing the beat.]

[Liang Shoushan: Take him away quickly.]

[Old Zhao: Open the old door and bring the people who come later inside.]

Several comparisons landed on the main screen, like a row of driven nails as evidence.

Those details that had been mocked by the outside world as "field research material" were now, one by one, locked back into the skeleton of the story.

Professor Zhang was silent for a moment, then changed his previous doubts in the evaluation column.

[Key objects achieve echoes; character actions possess continuity.]

Elder Cui Wen looked at the final set of chapters.

"This density has already surpassed the level of hasty stitching."

"The author has grasped the most critical threads of Muchuan, so this town has not fallen apart."

Gu Changfeng's red light was also lit.

He could not vote.

But he still pulled the three threads separately into the comments area.

qin opera.

Cigarette.

Old key.

When the three words appeared side by side, the main text on the screen had reached its end.

[I stayed in Muchuan for a full month.]

[The night before I left, Old Zhao placed that polished old key into my palm.]

[I asked him: "Are you not guarding it anymore?"]

[Old Zhao shook his head.]

["Someone from the outside has to come in and take a look."]

[The key was very cold, but when it landed in my hand, it seemed to carry warmth.]

[He turned and walked back along the patrol line, his footsteps swallowed bit by bit by the rain.]

[I looked back at the east wall.]

[Over by Building No. 3, Auntie Song's voice rang out again.]

[This time, she sang that high-pitched aria that had been blocked for twenty years to completion.]

[The rain stopped.]

Before the terminal, Su Mubai's fingers stopped.

He did not write a comment immediately.

Those three words were very light, yet they pressed everything before—the dampness, the rust, the old walls, the broken arias—into the same position.

"The rain stopped."

Su Mubai read it aloud in a low voice.

"This rain finally has a place to land."

Gu Changfeng highlighted "old key," "high-pitched aria finished," and "rain stopped" in yellow.

"Old Zhao handing over the key means he is willing to let Muchuan be seen."

"Auntie Song singing the full sentence means that old affair stuck in her throat can finally settle."

"With the rain stopping, the whole town finally has room to move forward."

He did not write a recommendation.

The system would not accept his recommendation either.

He only left two lines of text in the training comments.

[The tragic conclusion retains the power to move forward.]

[The ending is restrained; the lingering aftertaste is established.]

Professor Zhang looked at the doubts he had written earlier.

"At first, I was worried that the author would write Old Zhao as a symbol."

He crossed out the words "heavy on symbolism" and added a new sentence.

[Individual memory advances into the town's collective memory; the theme is closed.]

Tao Zhiyan leaned back in his chair, his chest feeling as if it were being pressed by something.

He remembered the day Lin Que first arrived in Muchuan.

It was raining in the town too.

The youth stood under the eaves, looking at the faded signs by the street for a long time.

Tao Zhiyan asked him at the time: "What exactly do you see?"

Lin Que answered very softly.

"The rain here has been falling for too long."

At the time, Tao Zhiyan only thought the child was sharp.

Now he understood that from the very first day, Lin Que had already grasped the deepest thing in Muchuan.

Above the terminal, Xu Zhengqing's avoidance red light was still glaring.

His scoring column was locked, and the ranking column was also locked.

All he could do was write a written opinion that would not enter the voting chain.

The old man typed slowly.

[Old Zhao's personal memory eventually expands into Muchuan's collective echo.]

[qin opera carries the lingering sound of the era.]

[The rain stopping represents the beginning of reconciliation.]

[The scope of this manuscript has already gone beyond the fate of a single hero; it has written about how ordinary people use clumsy methods to hold onto their dignity during the turning points of the era.]

When writing to the last line, Xu Zhengqing paused.

He thought of Xu Changge's Gobi Desert highway piece.

That child had already walked out of the Xu Family's study and started to find his own path in the wind and sand.

But this "qin opera" before him still allowed Xu Zhengqing to see a deeper place.

That was the depth Xu Changge was approaching and must continue to trek through.

Xu Zhengqing pressed submit.

The red light did not go out.

This opinion would only enter the training file.

Su Mubai suddenly spoke up.

"I'll add one point."

Everyone looked at him.

He enlarged the passage where Old Zhao was before the monument.

Rainy night.

Stone monument.

Auntie Song's intermittent qin opera.

Old Zhao sat before the monument, tapping his index and middle fingers on his trouser leg, one beat after another.

Su Mubai looked at those lines of text.

"The deepest emotion suppressed in the entire text is right here in these two fingers."

"The author avoids crying and accusation, putting twenty years of pain into one action."

"When readers reach this point, they will complete the remaining emotions themselves."

No one in the evaluation hall replied.

Someone lowered their head to wipe their glasses.

Someone deleted the comment they had originally written and re-entered it.

That passage did not push Old Zhao to the front to beg for sympathy.

He was still standing on his patrol line, guarding that monument, guarding that half-cigarette, and also guarding that old aria that could no longer be continued.

Gu Changfeng picked up his paper cup and took a sip of water that had already gone cold.

"The steadiest part of this manuscript lies in the fact that the author always retreats behind the characters."

"He lays out the rain, the monument, the cigarette, the qin opera, and the key, and then hands the right of interpretation to the readers."

"This kind of restraint will allow the pain to slowly return after the reader leaves the page."

On the main screen, the last paragraph of "qin opera" remained before everyone's eyes.

[After the rain stopped, the qin opera also faded away.]

[I held the old key and left Muchuan.]

[I could no longer hear Old Zhao's footsteps behind me.]

[But that qin opera, which had been broken and then continued, would stay in my ears forever.]

The reading progress on the twelve terminals reached the end simultaneously.

The six red lights were still lit.

In the remaining valid scoring seats, no one immediately touched the voting key.

Xue Hongchuan did not rush them.

He glanced at the time.

"Three-minute break."

"After that, only the valid seats will vote."

Chairs were pushed back gently.

Tao Zhiyan walked to the window and closed his eyes.

In his mind, there were still those two fingers tapping on the knee.

And that half-cigarette buried in the mud.

Gu Changfeng stood nearby, silent throughout.

The text they could write into the system was limited.

But the lingering sound left by that qin opera had already exceeded the boxes the evaluation form could contain.

Three minutes later, everyone sat down again.

Xue Hongchuan pressed the final review confirmation key.

"Manuscript A-081, review concluded."

"Now entering the valid seat voting."

The six terminals without red lights lit up simultaneously, popping up options.

[Recommend] [Pending] [Not Recommend]

The air in the evaluation hall tightened instantly.

The first valid judge raised their hand.

The moment their fingertip fell, the counting column on the main screen jumped sharply.

...