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

Study room on the third floor of the School of Narrative Languages ​​at Weiming Academy.

The temperature control system maintained a comfortable 22 degrees Celsius, but the atmosphere in the study room was quite cold.

"Bang!"

Lu Zhao slammed his hand heavily on the holographic worktable, making the teacup on it vibrate loudly.

The playful and nonchalant attitude that he usually had on his face had completely disappeared.

"Bullshit! Are these online trolls brainless?!"

Lu Zhao pointed at the trending search terms scrolling wildly on the retinal projection, his voice trembling with extreme anger:

"Manual data entry? A heartless typewriter? Stealing rare old books? How dare Cloud Atlas's PR department fabricate such heinous lies!"

Lin Wan sat beside her, her eyes swollen and red.

She cried a lot last night while watching the finale of "To Live," but when she woke up this morning, she was met with a barrage of accusations, which made her cry again.

"How could they smear Professor Yu like this... Who is that self-proclaimed 'historical research expert' big V? What gives him the right to say that a twenty-year-old can't write about suffering?"

Lin Wan's voice was trembling with tears:

"Does one have to be seventy or eighty years old, half-buried in the ground, to understand pain?"

Cheng Shuqiao sat in the corner, staring intently at the "exposé post" that had gone viral across the internet.

As the most academically gifted and brilliant doctoral student, his anger was colder and sharper than Lu Zhao's.

"This is an extremely malicious fallacy of logic."

Cheng Shuqiao pushed up his glasses:

"YunTu exploits public stereotypes about the downtown area, equating 'poor living environment' with 'spiritual poverty,' and forcibly derives the conclusion of plagiarism—it's utterly absurd!"

Jiang Ci sat at the other end of the table, in front of her on a holographic screen that was playing a silent loop of the recording of Teacher Yu's live stream from the previous night.

The image freezes on the very last moment...

A warm tear fell straight down from off-screen, crashing heavily onto the scratched mechanical keyboard and shattering into pieces.

"They said he was just a typewriter that copied from piles of old papers..."

Jiang Ci's voice was cold:

"Have you ever seen a copyist whose hands trembled so much when copying the part about his son being drained of blood that he even pressed the wrong backspace key? Have you ever seen a cold-blooded plagiarist shed such a tear when typing the last line of the book?!"

"So what do we do?"

Lin Wan wiped away her tears and looked anxiously at the others:

"We've been watching his livestream every day for the past few days, ever since there were only four people online! The restraint and frankness he shows when replying to comments doesn't seem like that of a plagiarizing fraudster at all!"

Lu Zhao gritted his teeth and replied:

"That's right! Uncle Shen and Teacher Su also tested him in the live stream! The person who said 'Making money isn't important, finishing the book is more important,' the person who even dared to retort 'Whatever ending you can read is what it is' when Uncle Shen asked him about the ending, how could he possibly plagiarize someone else's work?"

Cheng Shuqiao pushed up his glasses, his tone extremely cold and hard:

"He said back then that the book was only a few hundred thousand words long, in one volume. Someone who plagiarizes for money would never voluntarily cut off his source of income just when he's barely passed the signing threshold and could start earning money. Yuntu's online trolls don't even know what kind of person he is, yet they're measuring him with the logic of capital!"

"We'll testify for him on StarNet!"

Lin Wan suddenly stood up:

"We still have the original offline backup of the entire book! We'll go and tell everyone that he wasn't just a typewriter; he was a living, breathing person who wrote with his soul!"

"It's useless. In the face of millions of online trolls from capital, your testimony won't even make a ripple."

The study room door was pushed open, and Su Huaijin strode in, his expression equally solemn.

"Let's go, take the offline backup, and go to your Uncle Shen's study."

……

Shen Yanqiu's study in the Weiming Academy family compound.

When Su Huaijin led four students through the door, Shen Yanqiu was sitting at the large solid wood desk.

A huge holographic screen floated in front of him, densely packed with various conspiracy theories and trending topics about "To Live" from all over the internet.

"Master Uncle".

Jiang Ci stepped forward, her voice filled with barely concealed indignation, "Yun Tu's trolls..."

"I saw it all."

Shen Yanqiu raised his hand, interrupting Jiang Ci.

This 62-year-old literary giant had an unusually calm expression.

He pushed up his frameless glasses, his gaze fixed intently on the four students before him. His tone betrayed no anger, but rather a chilling rationality.

"Do you really think that Cloud Atlas's explanation is just baseless nonsense?"

The students were all stunned.

"Senior Uncle Shen, could it be that even you...?"

Lu Zhao's eyes widened.

"Don't let your emotions cloud your academic judgment."

Shen Yanqiu leaned back in his chair, his voice steady yet incredibly penetrating:

"Leaving aside the shady motives of capital, the logic itself makes perfect sense."

The study fell into a deathly silence.

Su Huaijin stood aside and nodded silently, without refuting.

"Literature is rooted in experience."

Shen Yanqiu pointed to the analysis post on the screen and analyzed it clearly and logically:

"How could a young man in his early twenties, who grew up in the lower city eating synthetic starch and had never even seen real loess soil or oxen, possibly write about land reform before the Great Cataclysm? How could he write with such precise rural slang and a profound sense of the era's pain?"

The old man looked at the bewildered students before him and said, word by word:

"In the common sense of sociology and literature, this is a huge paradox. The general public and rational netizens believe this conspiracy theory of 'stealing a rare book' because this theory is the most in line with common sense. Anyone with normal thinking ability will have the same doubts."

Lin Wan's eyes reddened again:

"But...but we watched him finish typing it while crying, that kind of emotion can't be faked!"

"Feelings can't be faked, but the academic community doesn't believe in tears, only in evidence."