In Huizhou, the December air was filled with a damp chill that seeped into your bones.
A thick layer of condensation coated the windowpanes. Outside, the world was a murky gray, and even a glimpse of the sun was a rare event.
At times like this, Chen Zhuo would find himself particularly missing the central heating from his time up north in his past life.
The door to Dorm 216 was shut tight.
The atmosphere in the room was much more relaxed than it had been a few months ago.
Chu Ge sat in front of his computer.
He was bundled up in a thick, black down jacket, his hands covered by a pair of fingerless wool gloves.
The clacky blue-switch mechanical keyboard that used to thunder through the room had been replaced with a standard silent one.
Chu Ge’s fingers tapped away on it, making barely a sound.
The keys felt soft and mushy, but at least they no longer tortured Lu Jia’s nerves like a pile driver.
On the opposite bed, Lu Jia sat cross-legged, wrapped in a thick quilt with only his head and hands showing.
He was working on a set of past exam papers for mathematical analysis.
The tip of his pen glided quietly across the paper.
Chu Ge finished a block of code and paused.
He blew a white puff of air into his palms and rubbed his hands together.
He’d hit a snag.
He had the habitual urge to stand up and pace, to send the coin in his hand CLINKING through the air, to CRUNCH the hard candy in his mouth to bits.
Chu Ge reached for the candy box on his desk. He had just stuck a lollipop in his mouth when his hand picked up the one-yuan coin.
He glanced over at Lu Jia.
Lu Jia was hunched over his work, his brow slightly furrowed.
Chu Ge sighed.
He clenched the coin tightly in his fist, stood up, slid open the balcony door, stepped out, and pulled it shut behind him.
The cold wind outside hit Chu Ge right in the face.
He shivered from the cold. Leaning his back against the wall, he tossed the coin high into the air and caught it, then forcefully crunched the lollipop in his mouth, using the biting wind to force himself awake.
Lu Jia stopped writing and looked up.
Through the condensation-covered glass door, he could faintly make out Chu Ge’s figure on the balcony, neck shrunk into his collar, stomping his feet against the cold.
The guy who was usually cocky as hell was out there in the freezing wind, flipping a coin and anxiously running a hand through his hair.
His gaze returned to the room, to the new silent keyboard resting quietly on Chu Ge’s desk.
Lu Jia’s eyes lingered on the keyboard for two seconds before turning back to look at Chu Ge on the balcony.
In his mind, he seemed to perform a very simple balancing of variables.
Lu Jia put down his pen and slipped out from under his quilt.
He picked up the empty soda can from Chu Ge’s desk—the one he usually used for discarded candy wrappers and lollipop sticks—and threw it in the trash.
Then he picked up a thermos, poured half a glass of hot water into a clean cup, and placed it next to Chu Ge’s mousepad.
After doing all this, he quickly burrowed back into his quilt and went back to his problems.
「A few minutes later.」
Chu Ge pushed open the balcony door and came inside, bringing a thick wave of cold air with him.
He quickly shut the door, sealing the wind outside.
As soon as he sat down, he saw the steaming cup of water next to his mousepad.
Chu Ge froze for a moment.
He turned to look at Lu Jia on the bed. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he was about to say something.
"The temperature dropped today."
Before Chu Ge could make a sound, Lu Jia spoke first, his words tumbling out quickly as if he had eyes in the back of his head.
His back was to Chu Ge, and he was bundled up tightly in his quilt. His voice was muffled and carried a stiff, awkward tone.
"Don’t catch a cold. Your sneezing and coughing in the middle of the night would be noisy."
The single, blunt sentence completely cut off whatever Chu Ge might have been planning to say.
Chu Ge leaned back in his chair, looking at Lu Jia’s back, curled up like a hedgehog. He swallowed the words on the tip of his tongue and let the corner of his mouth lift into a silent smile.
He picked up the cup and held it in his hands, warming his frozen fingers.
"It won’t kill me." Chu Ge took a sip of the hot water. "I’m the man who’s going to change the world. King Yama doesn’t want me yet."
The room fell silent again, leaving only the muffled tapping of the keyboard and the soft scratching of a pen.
「Dorm 215.」
The moment the door opened, a strong smell of rosin wafted out.
Wang Dayong was at his desk, soldering iron in hand, working on a personal cassette player that was dismantled into pieces.
Chen Zhuo walked out of the bathroom with a washbasin. He had just washed his hair, and it was still half-dry.
"Dayong, your range of services is getting wider and wider."
Chen Zhuo put down the basin and started drying his hair with a towel.
"The day before yesterday it was a radio, yesterday it was an immersion heater, and now you’re even tackling a cassette player. Where’d you get it?"
"From next door."
Dayong touched the soldering iron to a strand of solder wire, carefully applying it to a tiny contact point.
"The tape wouldn’t turn. I opened it up and saw the motor wasn’t broken. The drive belt inside had gotten old and snapped. I found a rubber band of about the right thickness to replace it, and while I’m at it, I’m resoldering a loose wire."
"Charging a service fee?"
"What’s there to charge for? But the guy insisted on paying and argued with me for ages."
Dayong blew the smoke off the circuit board and put down his soldering iron.
"In the end, he said he’d cover my breakfast for a week, so we left it at that."
Chen Zhuo shrugged but didn’t say anything.
He pulled out his chair and sat down.
The twenty-some-page Princeton preprint was still lying on his book.
The small, penciled-in question mark still sat quietly next to the formula on the fourth page.
Chen Zhuo stared at the question mark.
The paper had been sitting there for some time now.
To be honest, Chen Zhuo still had no idea how to approach it.

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