A live-streamed Chinese language lesson under the sky—the ancients were taken aback.

On the evening when the sky brightened, Guan Hanqing was sitting backstage at a brothel in Dadu, mending an old theatrical costume.

He is in his fifties, with most of his hair turned white, and his finger joints are large. His fingers tremble slightly when he holds the needle, but the stitches are still fine.

Now he is a veteran of the Beijing opera scene, having written plays such as "The Single-Sword Meeting," "Saving the Courtesan," and "The Pavilion Overlooking the River." He has spent most of his life writing, and he wants to do his best to speak up for those who are kneeling.

A young apprentice ran in and said that it was dawn.

He put down his needle and thread, stood up, and walked to the open space outside the brothel.

It was already autumn, and the wind was a bit chilly. He pulled his coat tighter and looked up at the light on the horizon.

He saw eight names: Zhou Puyuan, Fanyi, Zhou Ping, Zhou Chong, Lu Gui, Shiping, Sifeng, and Lu Dahai. Then Shen Moyan drew lines on the blackboard to connect these people.

Several onlookers gasped in surprise. Some cursed, "Shameless!" while others shook their heads and said, "Indecent."

Guan Hanqing remained silent, squinting as he stared at the lines connecting the names on the sky, equally astonished.

But it wasn't a look of disdain or surprise, but rather a surprise at seeing a colleague make ruthless and decisive moves.

He almost instinctively cheered in his heart: So this is how it can be written.

When Shen Moyan recounted the scene of "forcing someone to drink the medicine" in the first act, Guan Hanqing frowned.

Zhou Puyuan made Zhou Ping kneel before Fanyi, crushing the dignity of both of them in the most dignified way.

Guan Hanqing's fingers unconsciously clenched his clothes.

His poem "Lament for Cunxiao" tells the story of Li Cunxiao being unjustly killed by his adoptive father, Li Keyong.

Li Cunxiao cried out for justice until his death, while Li Keyong only realized his mistake at the very end.

When he wrote that play, he hated the tyrannical emperor and the treacherous ministers, and respected the loyal ministers and filial sons.

He was young then and thought the root of the tragedy lay in the power of treacherous officials, and that as long as the king was wise and the ministers were loyal, the world would be at peace.

Later, he wrote "Zhao Pan'er Saves a Prostitute from a Bully," which tells the story of how a prostitute rescues her sister from a bully.

After he finished writing it, he discovered that there was not a single honest official or loyal minister in the play, and the person who saved him was a prostitute who was looked down upon by everyone.

The play became a huge hit after it was performed, and it was sung in brothels all over the capital.

But no one ever asked him: Why was the person who saved him not an official, not a saint, but a prostitute?

Looking at Zhou Puyuan's respectable face on the screen, he suddenly realized that none of the dramas about loyalty and treachery he had written in his lifetime could compare to the scene in this play where a stepmother was drinking poison.

Loyal ministers being unjustly killed by incompetent rulers is a matter of the court and power, far removed from ordinary people.

But which family hasn't had a father who forces his son to kneel down and his wife to drink medicine under the guise of "for your own good"?

Shen Moyan begins to tell the second act: Shiping recognizes the Zhou family, Zhou Puyuan recognizes Shiping, and Lu Dahai bursts into the Zhou mansion.

When Guan Hanqing delivered the lines "Who sent you here?" and "It's fate, an unfair fate that sent me here," he suddenly sat down.

When Guan Hanqing recounted the scene of Lu Dahai and Zhou Ping fighting each other, and Shi Ping watching her two sons wrestling without being able to utter a single word, he closed his eyes.

When he closed his eyes, his lips moved slightly, as if he were silently reciting something.

He was reciting a line from the play "The Injustice to Dou E".

"Earth, you cannot distinguish between good and bad, what kind of earth are you? Heaven, you wrongly judge the wise and the foolish, what kind of heaven are you!"

Those were sentences he spent half his life writing. He had Dou E curse heaven and earth on the execution ground, cursing so much that the heavens and earth changed color and snow fell in June.

He opened his eyes, and Shen Moyan on the sky was narrating the third act.

"Shi Ping forced Si Feng to make an oath." Shen Moyan's voice came down from the sky. "Si Feng knelt on the ground, facing her mother and the sky, and said, word by word: 'Then let the lightning strike me.'"

Dou E made three vows before her death.

Blood splattered on white silk, snow fell in June, and a three-year drought ensued.

Each one is a question posed to heaven and earth.

Sifeng's oath was a curse upon herself, while Dou'e's oath was a judgment upon heaven and earth.

One is kneeling, and the other is standing.

Cao Yu made Sifeng die kneeling, but he wanted Dou E to die standing.

But Cao Yu and he were writing about the same thing.

They are all "heaven".

Sifeng said, "May lightning strike me from the sky."

Dou E said, "Heavens! You have wrongly judged the wise and foolish, and you have failed as Heaven."

Shiping said, "It's fate, an unfair fate that sent me here."

Three women, from different dynasties, facing the same sky, uttered the same question.

When Guan Hanqing was young, he wrote plays about loyalty and treachery, believing that the root of the tragedy lay in the rule of treacherous officials.

Later, when writing romantic plays, he believed that the root of the tragedy lay in class prejudice and parental orders.

Later, when he wrote "The Injustice to Dou E," he had Dou E curse heaven and earth, and he thought he had finally grasped the root of the problem.

But today, when he saw "Thunderstorm," he saw a contemporary who was born hundreds of years later than him, who put these eight living people in a living room, without giving them a treacherous minister or a foolish emperor, but only a father named Zhou Puyuan, only giving them an order called "rules," only giving them a kind of hypocrisy called "decency," and then letting the heavens strike down and kill them all.

The root of Cao Yu's tragedy was neither a bad person nor a foolish ruler.

He is criticizing a system, but there is something deeper, more hidden, and harder to catch than any of these.

It has no name, but it exists in the tone of Zhou Puyuan forcing his wife to drink medicine, and in the clan chief's tirade that "it is immoral and depraved and deserves to die."

It's something that's "taken for granted".

Zhou Puyuan naturally believed that his wife should obey him, his son should kneel before his mother, and that Shi Ping's existence should be erased.

The clan elders naturally believed that everyone should obey the rules, that juniors should die if they overstepped the rules, and that women should die if they did not uphold their virtues.

This kind of "taking it for granted" is harder to write about than corrupt officials, who have names, faces, and can be arrested and executed.

This sense of "taking things for granted" has no name, no face; it grows in everyone's bones.

Cao Yu wrote it down.

The sky has been dark for two days.

The sky doesn't have a fixed time; sometimes it's bright for several days in a row, and sometimes it's dark for ten days or half a month.

Farmers on the ridges went to work as usual, weeding and watering as needed. Only occasionally would someone straighten up, wipe their sweat with their sleeve, and glance up at the sky. There were only clouds in the sky, and the bright white sun was so strong that people could hardly open their eyes.

The next day, people started talking about it.

An old farmer squats on the edge of the field, sharpening his sickle. He sharpens it a couple of times, then looks up at the sky. He sharpens it a couple more times, then looks up at the sky again.

His son, carrying a hoe, walked over from the other end of the field. Seeing his father's posture with his neck tilted back, he didn't say anything, but also looked up at him.

"Dad, stop looking."

The old farmer grunted in agreement, lowered his head, and continued sharpening his sickle. After a while, he looked up again.

"Three are dead, two have gone mad, and one has left," the old farmer suddenly said. "Only the one who deserved to die the most is still sitting in the living room."

"When is the next class?" someone asked from the edge of the field.

"Aren't you done?" a young man scratched his head. "Most of them are dead, what's left to say?"

"I'm not finished." The old farmer stood up, tucked his pipe into his waistband, and said, "That Zhou Puyuan is still sitting in the living room. The teacher won't let him sit there like that. Just wait, it'll definitely be over."

The son paused for a moment, then asked, "How did you know?"

"That's how it's sung in operas. When someone dies, the opera singer comes out and says something like, 'Ladies and gentlemen, this is the clear justice of heaven,'" the old farmer said with certainty as he took a sip of his cold tea. "Otherwise, the person would have died in vain."

The sky lit up on the third night.

An elderly farmer and his family were enjoying the cool evening air at their doorway after dinner. The farmer, fanning himself with a palm-leaf fan, caught a glimpse of a flash of white light on the horizon out of the corner of his eye. He turned and shouted into the village, "It's light! The sky is bright!"