The winter of 2000 lingered, like a deadbeat who refused to leave.
It wasn’t until the first humid spell of 2001, when the walls of the house were beaded with moisture, that spring finally managed to squeeze its way into the small southern city.
For Chen Zhuo, the past two years had been like a flattened black-and-white photograph: monotonous and dull, but with sharp, clear lines.
5:30 in the morning.
The alarm hadn’t gone off yet, but his biological clock had already woken him.
Chen Zhuo sat up in bed and, with a practiced motion, pulled on a pair of sweatpants. They were getting a little short, exposing his ankles.
This was a good sign, proof that his bones were growing.
He walked to the window and pushed it open.
Outside, the sky was still dark. The streetlights cast a dim yellow glow, and the air carried the damp smell of earth.
To Chen Zhuo, getting up meant running, and running was simply maintenance for the machine that was his body.
He washed his face, brushed his teeth, and drank a glass of warm water.
In the living room, Chen Jianguo was already putting on his shoes.
Old Chen hadn’t been idle these past two years, either. Accompanying his son on his runs had sculpted his body into lean muscle, and even the smoker’s cough that had plagued him for years had improved significantly.
"Let’s go."
With a short word, Chen Jianguo pushed open the door and headed downstairs.
Father and son ran along the riverside path.
Their footsteps fell in a steady rhythm.
Chen Zhuo’s breathing was steady now.
In the first few months, every step had felt like a fire burning in his lungs, the back of his throat filled with the taste of blood.
Now that sensation was gone, replaced by a simple sense of conditioning.
Three kilometers.
It was a distance that was neither long nor short.
As Chen Zhuo ran, he felt the contraction and relaxation of his calf muscles.
He could feel the lactic acid building up, his heart rate climbing, and the slight itch of sweat trickling down his spine.
These were all just physical reactions.
He didn’t need to fight it with willpower; he just had to adjust his breathing, matching his oxygen intake to his body’s consumption.
By the time they reached the end of their run, the sky was just beginning to lighten.
It was the same old beef noodle stall.
When the owner saw the father and son, he didn’t even have to ask. He immediately started on two large bowls of noodles, adding an extra scoop of braised beef to Chen Zhuo’s bowl as usual.
Chen Zhuo sat down, took off his glasses, and wiped the fog from the lenses.
He was nine years old now.
He’d shot up to 1.42 meters tall.
He wasn’t tall for his age, but he was no longer the little pipsqueak in the front row who had to sit on a cushion just to see.
His cheeks had finally filled out a little. Although he still looked quiet and gentle, beneath that placid exterior was a tenacity rarely seen in a boy his age.
"Eat."
Chen Jianguo broke apart a pair of disposable chopsticks, tapped them on the table to even them out, and handed them to his son.
Chen Zhuo took the chopsticks and dug in.
After they finished eating, Chen Jianguo would give him a ride to school on his bike before hurrying off to his job at the factory.
Sitting on the back of the bicycle, Chen Zhuo watched the sycamore trees fly past on the roadside.
This was how the days passed, one by one.
There was no great drama, no life-or-death rush.
Just eating, sleeping, going to school, and reading.
That Russian-language copy of the *Calculus Tutorial* had been read to tatters.
It was truly in tatters.
The spine was broken in two, the first few pages of the table of contents were gone, and the cover was stained with sweaty fingerprints.
He was like a greedy thief, prying open the shell of a foreign language and indiscriminately stuffing his brain with its most valuable contents—formulas, theorems, and logical proofs—without bothering to truly comprehend them.
It wasn’t a pleasant feeling.
It was like eating compressed biscuits without any water: dry, choking, and bloating.
His mind was filled with knowledge that had no practical application. He’d look at a telephone pole by the road and want to perform a stress analysis, or see a sprinkler truck and want to calculate its fluid dynamics, but without experimental data or calculation tools, all he could do was stare blankly.
It was suffocating.
Second period, math class.
In the classroom of Grade 5, Class 3 at Yu Hong Primary School, the air was so hot and stuffy it made you want to sleep.
The math teacher was an old lady nearing retirement. She was very kind, but her lectures were painfully slow.
She drew a circle on the blackboard, then a square.
"Class, today we’re going to review the area of composite shapes..."
She spoke in a slow, deliberate manner, tapping the chalk here and there on the blackboard.
"To find the area of the shaded region, we can take the area of the large square and subtract the area of the circle in the middle..."
Chen Zhuo sat at his desk, twirling a ballpoint pen in his hand.
He stared at the blackboard.
The problem was very simple.
He could solve it in his head in two seconds.
But the teacher had already been explaining it for fifteen minutes.
She kept stressing that they should use 3.14 for pi and correcting students who confused the radius with the diameter.
Some of the students were diligently taking notes, some were secretly passing notes, and others were just spacing out.
Zhang Qiang, sitting next to Chen Zhuo, was having the time of his life cutting an eraser into countless tiny pieces.
Chen Zhuo sighed.
He gently placed the ballpoint pen on the desk, making an almost inaudible sound.
’This is so boring.’
It was like someone who already knew how to run being forced to the ground to crawl with a group of babies who were just learning. On top of that, he had to pretend to enjoy it while listening to a coach yell commands:
"One, two, one... stay in line!"
It was torture.
He opened his schoolbag and felt for the *Physics Lecture Notes* inside.
It was his only antidote.
But if he took it out to read now, the teacher would definitely confiscate it. Then would come the call to his parents and the written apology... a huge hassle.
Chen Zhuo pulled his hand back.
He started playing a game in his head.
He stared at the circle on the blackboard.
’What if I don’t see it as a rigid geometric shape, but as a spinning flywheel?’

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