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

Xiacheng District, the 13th Public Basic School.

This is a building pieced together from discarded industrial shipping containers and cheap alloy panels.

The classroom's air circulation system constantly emits a hissing sound similar to asthma, and the air is filled with a mixture of smells of engine oil, rust, and cheap synthetic starch.

This afternoon was the weekly "Psychological Intervention and Language Expression Class".

In an era of extreme class rigidity, where the lower classes are at risk of developing "cyberpsychosis" due to high pressure, the federal government mandates that schools in the downtown area offer such courses, ostensibly as "psychological counseling," but in reality, it is simply to prevent these future cheap laborers from collapsing prematurely.

On the podium, Teacher Chen was rubbing his temples wearily.

Teacher Chen is in her early twenties and was once a top student who was admitted to the Central District Teachers' College. She even has a private obsession with those "pre-civilization physical books" that have been eliminated by the times.

But she ultimately failed to outmaneuver her competitors who had been implanted with advanced memory chips and was relegated to this downtown area filled with waste and despair.

Over the past ten years, her spirit has long been worn down.

"Okay, next, who would like to share something interesting that happened recently?"

Teacher Chen tapped the blackboard listlessly.

The children below wore dirty gray uniforms, and most of them had somewhat numb eyes.

A little boy named Tie Tou raised his hand and shouted:

"Teacher, my dad found a nutrient solution packet that smelled like meat at the recycling center yesterday! Our whole family licked it all night, it smelled so good!"

Another girl quickly chimed in:

"The other day I saw some semi-mechanical stray dogs on the street corner biting each other, their intestines were spilling out, it was so exciting!"

Listening to these "stories" filled with the wild and desolate atmosphere of the wasteland, Teacher Chen felt a pang of sorrow.

These children, raised on cyber garbage and violence from a young age, have mental worlds as barren, desolate, and lifeless as the streets of this downtown area.

Is anyone else here?

Teacher Chen sighed.

At this moment, Yu Yin, who had been sitting quietly in the corner like a kitten, timidly raised her hand.

"Teacher, I...I want to tell you a story that my brother told me."

Teacher Chen was taken aback.

She knew Yu Yin; the child's family was extremely poor, and her only brother was paralyzed.

She had assumed Yu Yin would recount her hardships, such as how she scavenged for trash or how she was bullied, so she nodded and softened her voice:

"Okay, Yu Yin, you can come up and speak."

Yu Yin walked up to the podium, nervously clutching the hem of her clothes. She took a deep breath, and her clear, childlike voice rang out in the buzzing classroom.

"My brother said that a long, long time ago, there was a very, very small planet called B612. There was only a little prince and a proud rose there..."

At first, the classroom was a bit noisy, with some boys secretly playing with discarded screws.

But as Yu Yin continued her story, the classroom gradually quieted down.

The kids in the downtown area, who were used to the roar of machinery and the flashing of neon lights, had never heard such words before.

"Planet", "Rose", "Volcano", "Sunset".

Yu Yin recounted how the Little Prince left the rose and wandered the universe;

He talked about coming to Earth, meeting a fox, and how they "tamed" each other.

"Later, when the little prince was leaving, the fox gave him a secret as he said goodbye."

The lingering sound paused slightly, and those clear eyes swept around the dimly lit classroom. In a childish yet incredibly earnest voice, she repeated, word by word, what her brother had told her the night before:

The fox said, "This is my secret, and it's very simple—one can see rightly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye."

The moment those words were spoken, the classroom fell into an extremely unusual silence.

Sitting in the first row, Tie Tou subconsciously touched the cheap, frequently worn-out secondhand retinal assist lens on his left eye.

In the year 2077, as long as you have money, you can get a titanium alloy prosthetic eye, see holographic GG fibers thousands of meters away, and scan the composition of any object.

The survival rule this world taught them was: only data that can be seen with the eyes is real; anything that cannot be seen is worthless cyber junk.

But now, the little prince from planet B612 tells them: what is important cannot be seen even with your most advanced cybernetic eyes.

You have to put your heart into it.

An unprecedented and extremely unfamiliar bittersweet feeling quietly gripped the hearts of these children in the lower district.

The lingering sound gradually faded, bringing the story to a close.

Finally, in order to return to his planet and care for his fragile rose, the Little Prince allowed himself to be bitten by a poisonous snake in the desert. He fell like a tree, without making a sound...

The story is now completely finished.

In the huge classroom, only the monotonous "whoosh" of the exhaust fan echoed.

There was no applause, nor the usual noise before get out of class ended.

Tie Tou kept his head down, his fingers unconsciously digging into the dented surface of the table, his throat feeling like it was stuffed with a wet sponge.

Several girls buried their heads in their arms and sniffled.

They didn't understand existentialist philosophy, but the pure sorrow about "loss" and "attachment" was like an extremely gentle breeze, silently brushing over these barren hearts that had grown up amidst steel and scrap.

On one side of the podium, Teacher Chen remained silent for a long time.

She slowly took off her glasses, took out a yellowed cloth from her pocket, and wiped the lenses very slowly.

"What is essential cannot be seen with the eyes..."

She pondered this extremely simple sentence over and over in her mind.

In this era where computing power determines everything and large models can generate hundreds of thousands of words of ornate language in a second, all AI texts are desperately trying to stimulate readers' eyes and fill the void in humanity with the most straightforward visual imagery.

But it had been too many years since he had heard such language, stripped of all its embellishments, that struck straight to the depths of the soul.

There was no roar of machinery, no piling up of data, only a sigh belonging to the human soul.

"The lingering sound..."

Teacher Chen put her glasses back on, her voice unusually gentle, even with a hint of restraint as if afraid of disturbing something, "What's the name of this story?"

"It's called 'The Little Prince'," Yu Yin replied softly.

"Who taught you that?"

"It's my brother."

When Yu Yin mentioned her brother, a rare glimmer of light appeared in her eyes, which usually held a hint of timidity:

"My brother types on the computer every night; that's what he told me."

Teacher Chen fell into a long silence.

Of course she knew Yu Yin's brother.

The school's home visit records for impoverished students clearly state:

Yu Wen is paralyzed in both legs and has been confined to a dark basement in the lower city for many years, relying on meager relief funds to depend on his ten-year-old sister for survival.

Teacher Chen's heart involuntarily tightened.

She was used to the despair in the lower city, where people would fight tooth and nail for half a bottle of substandard nutrient solution, and the air was always filled with the smell of engine oil and decay.

She simply couldn't imagine how clear the mind of a paralyzed young man, who was pinned down by fate in the damp mud and for whom even sunlight was a luxury, must have been to write "Planet B612," "The Tamed Fox," and the line "What is essential is invisible to the eye."

Deep within the rusty and despairing sewers, someone is using a discarded keyboard to meticulously depict the gentlest starlight in the universe.

A wave of indescribable sorrow and awe washed over me.

"Echoes of the past,"

Teacher Chen said softly:

"Could the teacher visit your home after school?"