Chapter 168 Fire in the Stone, Body in the Dream

Chapter 168 Fire in the Stone, Body in the Dream

Chapter 168 Fire in the Stone, Body in the Dream

Lu Qingxuan was surprised: "How do you know each other?"

Du Kezhu blinked for a long time and finally said, "It is said in history books that through seven people, one can get to know anyone in the world."

"There's no such thing in history books, and what does this theory have to do with what I just said?"

Du Kezhu blinked even more violently, just like a butterfly that wanted to collect nectar but landed on someone's wig and flew away with its wings fluttering awkwardly.

Finally she said, "Are you always as serious in your daily life as you are in an exam?"

"what?"

“It feels so disgusting.”

After Du Kezhu finished speaking, he quickly walked away.

"Ugh!" Lu Qingxuan felt a gunshot wound to the chest. He covered his chest with one hand and waved the other hand helplessly in the air several times.

She had never suffered such a sincere and humiliating blow, so sincere that it was difficult to refute, and so humiliating that she was unwilling to admit it.

She quickly followed him and said in a low and hurried voice: "I'm not serious, I'm serious. I'm always serious. Is it bad for me to be serious? What's so annoying about it?"

Du Kezhu rolled his eyes at her in a cocky way: "Is it okay if I just simply hate being so serious?"

"No, you have to tell me why. Pouring hostility at someone without any reason is a form of bullying."

Du Kezhu sighed: "Okay, don't worry about it. I don't hate you. I hate everyone equally. I hate myself the most. Can you stop dwelling on this issue?"

"No, how can you be annoying? You are so popular, and so many students in the college like you. You are just degrading yourself to avoid my questions."

Du Kezhu held her head in her hands. It was the first time she had met such a difficult person.

"I don't hate you, okay? I just said I hated you just to make you shut up and get out of here, okay?"

Lu Qingxuan nodded with satisfaction: "Well, this is more like that..."

Halfway through her speech, she realized something was wrong: "Wait a minute, did I offend you in any way? You just want to get rid of me. You're a bit unfriendly."

Du Kezhu said, "You just realized I'm unfriendly, right? I'm notoriously bad-tempered. I punched and kicked people in kindergartens and nursing homes, snatched lollipops from kids, and occupied seats for the disabled. I'm really bad, I tell you."

Lu Qingxuan shook her head: "I don't think you are like that. I think you should have a kind heart."

Du Kezhu took a breath and said, "Don't be so cheesy. I, I can't stand it."

The sound of the two people's casual chatting reached Prince Xu's ears, and he couldn't help but sigh that the friendship between girls was really good.

……

The postgraduate examination subjects are divided into four categories: ideological and political education, foreign language and two professional courses.

Wang Zixu applied for ancient literature, and his two major courses were ancient Chinese literature and the foundation of Chinese and foreign literature. On the first day, he only took the ideological and political education and foreign language exams.

At 8 a.m., a huge crowd of people were already waiting outside the examination room. Many institutions along the way were distributing postgraduate entrance examination document bags and brochures. People were serious and quiet. Some people sat on the edge of the flower bed to cram for the exam, while more people waited expressionlessly.

Wang Zixu blended into the crowd and stood there for a while before realizing that he was completely unable to concentrate on the upcoming exam. His mind was beating fast and he was unable to extricate himself from the manuscript he had just sent to the editor of Get.

The manuscript was not finalized until 3 a.m., and I struggled with it for a full 5 hours before finalizing it.

This huge work finally ended up with 59 words, and each word, including punctuation marks, was polished more than 8 times. Looking at this work is like looking at a newborn baby. I feel that it has infinite possibilities, but I am afraid that I will waste its potential if I don't educate it properly.

The title of the book had become gradually clear during the final revision, and his hands almost trembled when he made the final changes to the file name.

He originally planned to name it "Eastern White". Although he liked the origin of these three words more, these three words had too strong political connotations and many people would understand them too simply. After considering for a long time, he finally decided to name it "Fire in the Stone".

The allusion comes from Bai Juyi's "Drinking" "What is there to fight about on the snail's horns? I live in the flash of stone." Su Shi's "Xingxiangzi·Shu Huai" has "Fame and fortune, vain suffering and exhaustion. Sigh the colt in the crack, the fire in the stone, the body in the dream."

After finishing writing the book, he re-examined it. A hundred years passed in a flash, like the turning of pages with fingers, and a gust of breeze. It was full of the weight of history, but also made him sigh at the insignificance of a human being and the brevity of life, just like a spark bursting out of a stone.

Some people spend their entire lives having earth-shaking ideas in their hearts and doing shocking things, but what is finally put on paper is just like sparks produced by grinding stones. The only difference is that this person's sparks are brighter, while those of others are dimmer. Even more people are undetectable and lost in the dust.

However, it can never be said that life is meaningless. Countless sparks flicker and finally become a vast and shining Milky Way.

He wrote the poem from which the original name came on the first page of the work:
The apes bid farewell to each other.

Only a few stones were used to grind it when I was a child.

The flames in the copper and iron furnace are turning, so when will it be guessed? It's only a few thousand years of cold and heat.

It's rare to smile in this world, so we bow to each other on the battlefield.

flowed all over,
Jiaoyuan blood.

After reading this article, my head is covered with snow.

But I remember the spots and a few lines of traces.

The sacred things of the Five Emperors and the Three Sovereigns deceived countless passers-by. How many romantic figures are there?

After the reputation of Robber Zhi and Zhuang Qiao spread, King Chen stood up and wielded the yellow axe.

The song is not finished,
Oriental white.

……

Lu Qingxuan stood at the entrance of the examination room with a stern face, reminding everyone to hand over their phones. Wang Zixu threw all his things to the front of the classroom and sat down in his seat.

In addition to Lu Qingxuan and Du Kezhu, there was another slightly older male teacher standing in front, who said in a deep voice: "Please check your test number and seat carefully, and leave books and materials not related to the test in front of the podium. Do not whisper to each other or walk around. Now I will read out the examination room rules. The first rule is that candidates should enter the examination room in advance and are not allowed to enter the examination room ten minutes after the start of the test. The second rule..."

What he meant was that there was nothing to do except to be in a daze. So the prince was in a daze.

He sat in the back of the classroom, looking out over the lecture hall, all he could see were bodies full of energy and vitality, and he couldn't help but feel anxious about his age as he sat among this group of people. The wind blew in from the window, causing the curtains to swell.

Du Kezhu walked into the classroom wearing a baseball cap with a few strands of green hair sticking out from under the cap. This was her greatest respect for the examination rules.

Several students stared at her, rubbed their eyes, and then stared at her again, wondering if they were seeing things. Wang Zixu lowered his head, thinking to himself that he should not be as distracted as them.

The clock hanging in the middle of the wall ticked by, and Wang Zixu felt that time was becoming more and more unbearable. Because he found that he was in a very bad state, and he couldn't even concentrate on the next exam.

Since he finalized the manuscript in the early morning and sent it to the editor of Get at 8:30 in the morning, he has been checking his mobile phone. At 8:45, the message showed that the other party had received the file, but there was no reply.

He checked it one last time just before handing in his phone, but still hadn't received a reply. He consoled himself that his Fire in the Stone was a 60-word work, and even a cursory glance would take him several days, so the editor would definitely not reply so quickly.

Although this was the case, he still couldn't help but check the messages on his phone over and over again. After handing in his phone, he felt empty, as if he had lost something.

He knew that his behavior was called stereotyped behavior, just like the brown bears in the zoo turning in circles over and over again, or the chimpanzees running and jumping back and forth. He was like an animal enslaved by literature. His writing career had failed one after another, and he had lost all confidence. He really wanted the editor of "Get" to give his hard work a final verdict, whether it was good or not. If it was good, he would have no regrets even if he died, and if it was not, it would be a relief for him.

"The answer sheets will be distributed now. Please fill in your name and test number in advance. Be careful not to make mistakes."

Wang Zixu thought to himself that if it didn't work out, he would submit his manuscript to Xihe Literature and Art and have it serialized in Xihe Literature and Art. Since he won the first place in the Xihe Literature and Art Association and was honored as the vice chairman of the Xihe Literature and Art Association, no one dared to delay his manuscript, and Xihe Literature and Art would definitely publish the full text.

The circulation of Xihe Literature and Art is only one or two thousand copies. It doesn't matter if no one reads it. Let the big guys in Xihe have fun and see how powerful the vice chairman of the Literary Association is.

Lu Qingxuan's bare hands flashed before his eyes, and she gently handed the answer sheet to him. Although she was already very familiar with him, she did not show that they knew each other at all. As expected of a college student, even her movements were so gentle. Wang Zixu opened his pen and began to fill in the answer sheet.

"Now we will start distributing the test papers. Please check whether the sealed bags are intact."

He didn't look up to check, and then thought that after his works were published on Xihe Literature and Art, he would stop writing, rent out his house in Donghai, and go out to travel around the world, riding a bicycle from Donghai all the way to Kashgar, crossing the vast uninhabited area to Tehran, passing Damascus all the way west to Amsterdam, then abandoning the car and boarding a ship, passing the Cape of Good Hope all the way east across the Indian Ocean, and finally staying in Sadmandu to build Nepal.

When he came to his senses, he suddenly realized that he had already answered several questions on his test paper. He was shocked and looked back to check, only to find that he had answered them all correctly.

This year's ideological and political examination questions were rather tricky, especially the material analysis at the end, which tested several newly proposed concepts and were closely related to current affairs, torturing the examinees to the point of almost driving them crazy.

Diao Yiwen was sitting in the examination room, scratching her head. She clearly remembered the contents, but they were vague in her mind, as if she had seen them in Xiao Xiurong's place, but she could not find any trace of them.

As she wrote, she began to feel a little depressed and regretful: Why did she choose to work in Xihe? If she didn't have this free year, but took the exam as a fresh graduate like many students around her, without any free time to maintain her learning attitude forever, would she be in such a headache now?
Of course, Wang Zixu only found out about this later.

At that time, he pulled himself out of his thoughts and looked around the examination room. He found that the candidates were scratching their heads, then lowering their heads, their pens trembling, and the answers came out naturally.

Although the topic is tricky, these concepts are nothing in the Xihe City Research Office, and they were even written by Mei Rucheng. Politics itself is the same thing, and Mei Rucheng's materials are broken down and written clearly, so what are new concepts to others are old views to him.

Wang Zixu had been in the unit for nine years. He helped draft and organize the party-building and reporting materials every year. It was naturally a very tiring job at the time, but it also honed his writing skills and gave this science student a solid political foundation.

If it were a few years ago, he would have thought that writing materials was a waste of time, a waste of time, and he would never have thought that he would take the postgraduate entrance examination one day and put all these to use.

As long as you keep it in mind, all the experiences in life will come back to you in some form at some point, allowing you to live the life you want.

……

In the afternoon, there were visibly fewer candidates in the examination room, and Lu Qingxuan quickly removed the draft papers from their seats.

Deserter. Hum. She thought so. Then she filled in her absence on the signature form.

However, this year's exam questions were indeed biased, and she was a little worried about the two colleagues.

As an invigilator, she would walk around the examination room, sometimes specifically going to Diao Yiwen and Wang Zixu to see how they were doing.

But she was afraid of affecting the mentality of the two people, so she deliberately stood one or two rows behind them - this caused the guys in the two rows behind them to feel huge pressure - and judging from the way the two answered the questions, Wang Zixu wrote fast, but it was not clear whether it was correct, and Diao Yiwen did the questions more carefully, but did not look very confident.

Two days passed in a flash. Perhaps considering that Wang Zixu was taking an exam and fearing that it would affect his mentality, everyone tacitly did not contact him. I don’t know if it was because of this that even the editor of "Get" did not contact him.

The manuscripts he submitted fell into oblivion, not to mention feedback, not even a "received" reply. This made him feel depressed day by day.

After the last exam, the candidates were finally relieved. Lu Qingxuan was also relieved. She no longer had to pretend not to know them. After collecting the test papers, she asked Diao Yiwen and Wang Zixu:

"How did you do on the exam?"

Diao Yiwen looked upset and said, "It was a mess. I felt that the two subjects today were okay, but the two subjects yesterday were terrible. I almost didn't want to come today."

Lu Qingxuan asked: "Have you checked the answers?"

"No, I'm afraid it will affect my mentality."

"Forget it, let's not talk about this anymore. Relax after the exam," Lu Qingxuan said, "Sister Xiaochun told me that she will treat you two to dinner tonight and reward you well."

Diao Yiwen asked: "Who are they? Just a few from our magazine?"

"Yes, I heard that she even called Chief Editor Chen."

"Okay, I'll go."

"I won't go," Wang Zixu stared at his phone and put on his schoolbag, "I have something to do."

Lu Qingxuan begged, "Is there anything more important than eating?"

"Big news." Wang Zixu stared at the screen of his mobile phone. "Please tell Chen Qingluo and Ning Chunyan that my manuscript has a chance of being accepted."

On the phone screen, there was a message from the editor of Get:
"The manuscript is good, are you interested in meeting?"

(End of this chapter)