I asked you to write a light novel, but you wrote about living?

The old critics on the West Coast, known for their acerbic criticism and their usual disdain for bestsellers, remained silent.

Only after the hype had intensified did a critic publish a short commentary of just a few hundred words in his personal column.

"Over the past century, we have continuously increased sensory stimulation and expanded the scale of narratives in an attempt to allow readers to experience pain, fear, and greatness more directly."

"Yu Huashi did not use any of these methods."

"He gave an old man, a fishing line, a fish, and a heartless sea."

"Then he reminded us that human dignity does not need technology to prove it."

After the short review was published, there was no heated debate, nor was there an overwhelming amount of praise.

Many literary professionals simply forwarded the posts silently.

At this point, the popularity of "The Old Man and the Sea" no longer relies on any recommendations.

The cross-region message board on Xingwang was completely overwhelmed.

Tens of thousands of private messages flooded Yu Huashi's back-end system.

Someone was diagnosed with an incurable disease, but decided to go to the company as usual the next day to complete the last project.

Someone whose small shop, which they had run for over a decade, had just gone bankrupt, resubmitted their personal business application after reading this.

A drilling worker who had worked continuously for 30 hours in a deep-sea mining area sent only a photo of his hand covered in blisters.

It reads below:

The fishing line hasn't broken yet.

A wounded soldier at a rehabilitation center said:

I used to think that not being able to return fully meant I had lost.

Now I want to try again.

There are many more people who haven't told their stories.

They just kept quoting that sentence.

A person can be destroyed but not defeated.

In this era, almost every voice is telling people how to win.

How to upgrade a prosthetic body.

How to improve efficiency.

How to surpass one's peers.

How to turn yourself into a machine that never gets tired and never makes mistakes.

Santiago returned to shore with a skeleton that had been eaten clean.

He did not provide a method for success.

There is also no proof that hard work will necessarily be rewarded.

He simply made countless West Coast readers realize for the first time—

A person can admit that they have lost the final outcome.

You can also admit that you did lose.

But failure has no right to decide for him what kind of person he really is.

As the frenzy swept through, for the first time, a clear crack appeared in the long and solid cultural barrier between the two major regions of the east and west.

It wasn't a starship that pierced it, nor was it a meticulously planned cross-regional propaganda campaign.

It was just an ordinary harpoon.

An old man returned empty-handed.

And his hands, which never let go until the very end.

The West Coast region is starting to boil over completely.

……

Weiming Academy, School of Narrative Languages.

After "The Old Man and the Sea" was released online, Lu Zhao and the others gathered again in the study room.

When they received the update notification, they were still organizing research materials for "To Live".

The text, though only 50,000 words long, was read by several people until night fell completely outside the window, and no one spoke immediately.

In the time that followed, the news coming back from the West Coast revealed more and more facets to this seemingly simple story.

The same sentence was sprayed on the walls of an abandoned factory, engraved into the metal shoulder armor of mercenaries, and written in the recovery records of patients and the job applications resubmitted by the unemployed.

A story that takes place at sea is being read by different people and interpreted as completely different lives.

Lu Zhao simultaneously projected the text statistics and StarNet discussion data onto the central light screen.

"That's strange."

"This book rarely tells readers directly how much pain, fear, or despair the elderly are experiencing."

The most frequently occurring words in the text are "hand," "fishing line," "fish," and "boat," along with a series of almost repetitive actions.

Pull, grasp, eat, scratch, stab, smash.

"His emotions are all hidden in his actions."

Lu Zhao pulled up several paragraphs of text that were repeatedly marked.

"If his hand cramps up, he tries to get it back to normal; if the fishing line cuts into his flesh, he changes his position and keeps going; if he loses his harpoon, he goes to find another weapon."

"The author rarely speaks out for him in pain, but the readers can feel the pain instead."

Cheng Shuqiao then opened the structural diagram.

The plot of the entire work is unusually simple.

Go out to sea, fish, return home, encounter a shark.

"But it kept taking things from the old man's hands."

Cheng Shuqiao said:

"First they took away the strength, then the harpoon, the knife, the short stick, and finally even the fish was reduced to a skeleton."

"With each loss, the story ultimately asks the same question..."

What does he have left?

Lin Wan did not look at the structural diagram.

She was still browsing through the messages from the West Coast on StarNet.

Some people see failure in the elderly.

Some people see aging.

Some people recall what they once tried their best for, but ultimately failed to obtain.

She looked for a while and asked softly:

Why does a story about an old man fishing resonate with so many people, making them feel like it's about themselves?

The study room fell silent for a moment.

Cheng Shuqiao thought for a moment.

"Perhaps it can be interpreted as a parable."

"The old man is a person, the fish is what you want to get, and the shark is the external force that keeps taking away your achievements."

"Some people also interpret it as creation. A person exhausts all their strength to complete a work, and in the end, all they may bring back is a skeleton."

Lu Zhao looked at the ever-increasing discussion data on the west coast.

"But those people see things differently."

"Some people think about work, some about illness, some about aging, and some about something they failed at."

"Judging from this, that fish seems to represent everything."

Jiang Ci shook his head.

"If everything can represent something, then this kind of correspondence itself is unreliable."

She flipped back to the passage about the old man's first encounter with the marlin.

"The old man respected that fish, even treating it like a brother."

"It is not an ordinary target waiting to be conquered."

"The sea is not simply fate. The old man was close to it, understood it, and knew that it would never give extra rewards to anyone just because they worked hard enough."

She stopped where the shark had appeared.

"Even sharks weren't portrayed as villains who deliberately committed evil."

"They smelled the blood and were just doing what sharks do."

Cheng Shuqiao looked at the symbolic relationships he had just listed and did not add anything further.

A moment later, he posted the discussion in the large internal group chat for faculty and students of the School of Narrative Languages: [Pre-Civilization Documents Research Group].

Su Huaijin replied quickly.

[Su Huaijin]: Metaphors can be discussed, but novels should not be broken down into correspondence tables.

[Su Huaijin]: The old man equals willpower, the fish equals ideals, the shark equals malice... Such an explanation seems complete, but it turns a novel into a question with only a standard answer.

A while later, Shen Yanqiu also sent a message.

[Shen Yanqiu]: It did not first become a fable before becoming a story.

[Shen Yanqiu]: On the contrary, it is because the old man is first and foremost like a real old man, and the fish is first and foremost like a real fish, that this story can accommodate so many interpretations.

Lin Wan stared at those two sentences.

"So, is it a fable or not?"

[Shen Yanqiu]: A symbol can only be interpreted.

[Shen Yanqiu]: A living person who can make different people recognize themselves in him.

The study room fell silent again.

Cheng Shuqiao glanced at the unfinished symbolic relationship table and finally closed it.

He then created a new document next to his research project on "Living".

[Research on "The Old Man and the Sea"]

He paused for a moment, then wrote the first line in the text:

Why does the solitary journey of an elderly man reflect the lives of countless others?

Lu Zhao glanced at it and reached out to take the editing permissions.

If the elderly person has already admitted defeat, then what exactly does "not being able to be defeated" mean?

Lin Wan then added:

Why do so many people feel like they know that old man even though they've never seen that sea?

Jiang Ci thought for a long time, and finally wrote:

When the old man, the fish, and the sea are first and foremost simply themselves, where do the meanings that transcend the story itself arise from?

Several lines of text were quietly arranged in the center of the light screen.

No one was in a hurry to answer.

Because they suddenly realized that this novel, which is only a little over 50,000 words long, left behind far more questions than it provided answers.