He grabbed a ballpoint pen from nearby.
Chu Ge froze for a moment. His hand hovered in mid-air, but he didn’t try to stop him.
Lu Jia pressed the notebook against the corner of the desk. His wrist trembled slightly as the tip of the pen flew across the paper.
There was no hesitation, no thought.
Line after line of complex mathematical symbols materialized on the paper.
Not a single line was code.
It was all pure algebraic formulas.
A dozen seconds later.
Lu Jia stopped writing.
He tore the page out and gently placed it beside Chu Ge’s keyboard.
"Your boundary conditions are set wrong."
Lu Jia’s voice was quiet and thick with nasality, as if he were on the verge of being pushed to tears.
His shoulders trembled slightly.
"You’re making the variables converge at both ends simultaneously. The data in the middle will keep colliding. It’s a dead end."
Chu Ge was stunned and wanted to argue back.
"I don’t understand what you’ve written here."
Lu Jia lowered his head and pointed at the paper he had just written on, his tone filled with deep exhaustion and pleading.
"But if you change it to this topology matrix, the data won’t get stuck anymore."
Lu Jia took a step back, his eyes bloodshot.
"Just change it. Please, stop typing... I want to sleep."
Chu Ge looked at Lu Jia’s shaky, fragile state.
He forcefully swallowed the words in his throat.
He lowered his head.
His gaze fell upon the sheet of scratch paper.
He was a geek and a slick coder, but his foundation in math was merely passable.
He stared at the few ingenious topological transformation steps on the paper.
He didn’t understand it at first glance.
He ran through the formula in his head.
Chu Ge’s pupils contracted slightly.
It was an exceptionally elegant mathematical substitution.
It bypassed the trap the computer had been wrestling with, transforming the infinite loop into an equation with a definite solution right at the source.
Chu Ge swallowed.
He didn’t say a word. He silently took the paper and placed it next to his mousepad.
He put his hands back on the keyboard.
Following the mathematical logic on the scratch paper, he began to modify his code.
He broke apart the nested loops and substituted in the parameters of the topology matrix.
Two minutes later.
The modifications were complete.
Chu Ge took a deep breath.
His finger pressed F9.
No small error window popped up.
In the black command prompt window, the cursor blinked once.
Immediately after, lines of data cascaded down smoothly like a waterfall.
No lag.
No timeout.
The data packet that would have previously taken half a day to run and still crashed the system was fully retrieved in five seconds, providing the final feedback result.
Process returned 0 (0x0)
Execution successful.
Chu Ge sat frozen in his chair.
He stared at the "0" that represented success.
The agitation and frustration from being unable to solve the problem were replaced in this moment by a profound sense of powerlessness.
He had spent an entire night trying four different methods on a deadlock, getting nowhere.
And this guy had just stood behind him for a minute, pitifully scrawled a formula, and solved it.
Chu Ge turned his head.
Lu Jia had already turned around and was climbing the ladder to his bunk.
Just then.
WHIIIIINE—!
The computer case at Chu Ge’s feet suddenly let out a piercing shriek.
The sound was ear-splittingly loud.
Immediately after, the indicator lights on the case’s front panel began to flash wildly.
A burnt smell spewed from the heat vents.
Chu Ge’s expression changed.
He whipped his head down to look.
Although the program had run successfully, the topology matrix Lu Jia had provided had mobilized a massive amount of concurrent data in an instant.
In those few seconds, the CPU of that second-hand Pentium 3 had its load completely maxed out.
The aging cooling fan simply couldn’t handle the instantaneous spike in temperature.
The motherboard sounded an alarm.
If he didn’t do something, either the chip would fry or the power supply would catch fire.
Without hesitation, Chu Ge bent down and yanked the power cord from the power strip.
The screen went black in an instant.
The fan’s shriek came to an abrupt halt, replaced by a whining hum that slowly wound down.
The room was plunged into darkness, with only a sliver of moonlight filtering in from the window.
Silence.
A sudden silence.
Chu Ge crouched on the floor, his hand still clutching the power cord.
He could feel the searing heat coming off the computer case.
He stood up.
Lu Jia had just climbed back onto his bed and was about to lie down.
Stunned by the sudden commotion, he sat on his bed and looked down.
Chu Ge stood by the ladder.
He stood in the darkness for a moment.
Chu Ge looked at the slender figure on the bed and lowered his head slightly.
"Just now... I’m sorry."
Chu Ge’s voice was low and awkward, but it carried a genuine sincerity.
"That paper you wrote just now... it was brilliant."
Lu Jia clutched his blanket and said nothing.
"The computational load for this job is too much. My rig can’t handle it."
Chu Ge bent over, unplugged the mouse and keyboard, and then disconnected the monitor’s data cable.
He reached down and lifted the heavy, still-hot metal case.
"I need to go across the hall and borrow a fan from Wang Dayong to cool this thing down. I’ll finish up in his room tonight."
Chu Ge walked toward the door, holding the computer case.
His hand on the doorknob, he paused.
He glanced back at Lu Jia.
"Go to sleep. I won’t bother you again tonight."
The door was pulled open.
A sliver of light from the hallway leaked in.
Cradling the case, Chu Ge stepped out quietly, using his shoulder to slowly push the door shut.
CLICK.
The door closed securely.
Dorm Room 216 fell completely silent.
Only the old-fashioned alarm clock by Lu Jia’s head made a faint ticking sound.
Lu Jia slowly lay down.
He pulled the blanket up over himself.
No more keyboard clatter, no more humming from the computer, even the bed frame had stopped vibrating.
He finally had the silence he had craved all night.
Logically, he should have been able to get a good night’s sleep now.
But he couldn’t.
Lu Jia lay with his eyes open, staring at the dark ceiling.

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