The academic path is a long one. I wish you all the best at Princeton.
Zhuo Chen."
Chen Zhuo double-checked the spelling.
There were no fancy words, no pretentious implications. The entire message was written in plain language, exuding an honest frankness that laid everything bare.
If he didn’t know something, he said so. If he couldn’t do something, he admitted it.
Just as he was about to click send, Zhang Qiang suddenly leaned in close.
"Brother Zhuo, what are you doing? You’ve been staring at the screen for ages."
Zhang Qiang craned his neck to peek at the screen, which was filled with dense lines of English letters.
"What is all this? Is it garbled text? Or are you downloading cheat codes for some foreign game?"
Chen Zhuo’s hand twitched, and he nearly pressed the wrong key.
He moved the mouse cursor over the send button.
"Yeah."
Chen Zhuo answered without missing a beat.
"It’s a cheat code for infinite health in CS. I’m just swapping notes with an American friend online."
"Holy shit, you even have American friends online?"
Zhang Qiang’s eyes went wide.
"Infinite health? Let me get a copy. I can use it next time I play a LAN game against those bastards from No. 2 Middle School."
"You can’t just use it whenever. It’ll get you banned."
Chen Zhuo clicked the mouse, and a progress bar appeared on the screen.
Two seconds later, the page refreshed.
It read: Email sent successfully.
"Alright, stop looking."
Chen Zhuo casually closed the web page and cleared the browser history.
"How much time do you have left? You should be about done. My mom should be finishing up the pork ribs soon."
"I’ve still got two yuan left on my account. It’s not worth cashing out."
Zhang Qiang stared wistfully at his warrior on the screen.
"Just wait a little longer. I’ll leave after I finish this potion."
Chen Zhuo didn’t stop him. He leaned back in his chair and stared blankly at a flickering fluorescent light on the internet cafe’s ceiling.
He didn’t care in the slightest what the people at Princeton would think when they received his email.
All that mattered was that he had made himself clear.
His main priority now was to wait for Chu Ge to send over the code so he could earn some extra cash.
"Hey, Brother Zhuo."
Zhang Qiang asked casually while slaying monsters.
"So what do you guys actually learn in that gifted class of yours? Do you just do impossible test papers that look like gibberish all day?"
"No."
Chen Zhuo watched the game on his screen.
"In our first class, our homeroom teacher had us write down what we thought was the most beautiful formula."
Zhang Qiang pursed his lips.
"Isn’t that still just doing problems? What’s the fun in that? Hey, Brother Zhuo, with my grades, do you think I can still get into City No.1 Middle School after the entrance exams?"
Chen Zhuo turned to look at Zhang Qiang.
"You can," Chen Zhuo said.
"For real?"
Zhang Qiang’s eyes lit up, and his hands slowed on the keyboard.
"Just save the money you spend on game credits and buy a couple more sets of practice exam books."
Chen Zhuo’s tone was flat, as if he were stating the obvious.
Zhang Qiang’s face fell.
"It’s the New Year holiday, can you please not talk about studying? It gives me a headache."
"You have to study even if it gives you a headache."
Zhang Qiang mumbled something under his breath, but his mood had clearly improved a lot.
Just then, the web page on Chen Zhuo’s screen stuttered, then slowly refreshed.
A red (1) popped up in parentheses next to the inbox.
Sender: Chu Ge.
Chen Zhuo sat up straight. This was the real reason he had braved the cold wind to come here today.
He clicked open the email. Chu Ge hadn’t even bothered with extra punctuation; the body contained only a single line.
"Pulled two all-nighters, the third-level search logic still times out and freezes. SOS, SOS."
Below it was an attachment.
Chen Zhuo clicked download and opened it directly with the internet cafe computer’s built-in Notepad.
Dense lines of code scrolled across the dim screen.
Zhang Qiang, waiting for monsters to respawn, glanced over. The screen full of English letters and parentheses made his head spin.
"What’s this now? Your infinite health cheat code is this long?"
"It’s not a cheat code."
Chen Zhuo stared at the screen, his right hand moving the mouse.
"It’s a side job. Helping someone fix something to earn a little spending money."
"You know how to fix computers too?"
Zhang Qiang’s eyes went wide.
Chen Zhuo didn’t answer. His eyes scanned rapidly over the nested loops. The refresh rate on this crappy computer was so low that staring at the screen for too long made his eyes sore.
Two minutes later, the mouse cursor stopped in the middle of a large block of code.
’Found it.’
When handling the retrieval of low-level image data, Chu Ge had used an extremely bloated old algorithm, causing it to deadlock as soon as the data volume increased.
Chen Zhuo placed his hands on the keyboard.
After a few crisp keystrokes, he unhesitatingly deleted several lines of redundant conditional statements and typed in four lines of extremely streamlined logical structure to replace them.
He saved the document.
He went back to the email page, added the attachment, and clicked reply.
"Fixed."
He clicked send.
The progress bar had just hit one hundred percent and the page displayed "Send successful."
CLICK.
The screen in front of Chen Zhuo suddenly went black, immediately replaced by the billing system’s blue lock screen with white text. His balance had hit zero.
His timing was perfect.
"Fuck!"
Zhang Qiang’s screen locked at the same time. He had just gotten a wild boar down to low health and was so pissed he ripped off his headset, cursing.
The two of them walked out of the internet cafe, one after the other.
The sky outside had already started to dim. A cold wind blew, and Chen Zhuo shivered, pulling up the collar of his down jacket.
The streetlights came on, their dim yellow halos blurring in the frosty air. At the entrance of a nearby convenience store, bright red lanterns were hanging, and a radio played festive New Year songs.
"Brother Zhuo, wanna go buy some firecrackers?"
Zhang Qiang pointed at the little shop ahead, rubbing his hands together.
"The really loud ones. They’re awesome to throw down the sewer drains."
Chen Zhuo thought for a moment, then nodded.
"Sure. My treat."
The two walked side-by-side along the potholed sidewalks of Zeyang City. Dirty snow that hadn’t completely melted was piled up on the roadside, and it crunched under their feet.
Chen Zhuo stood next to a manhole cover, watching Zhang Qiang light a firecracker.
"Get back, get back! It’s gonna blow!"
Zhang Qiang ran backward, covering his ears.
Chen Zhuo deftly took two steps to the side.
BANG!
A muffled explosion echoed from the sewer, followed by a puff of white smoke.
"Awesome!"
Zhang Qiang roared with laughter.
Chen Zhuo sniffed the faint smell of gunpowder in the air and glanced in the direction of the family housing compound.
"Let’s go," Chen Zhuo said.
"I can smell the braised pork ribs."

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