He’d skipped the reduction and limit-finding steps entirely.
Wang Dayong drew in a sharp breath, snatching the scratch paper and workbook back.
He didn’t even bother sitting down, just bent over the desk and quickly wrote out the adjacency matrix. In less than three minutes, the limit constant that had stumped him for over an hour was neatly written on the paper.
"Damn, that’s incredible..."
Wang Dayong stared at the simple number and shook his head in disbelief.
He turned to look at Chen Zhuo, his eyes filled with the kind of awe one might have for a monster.
"Brother Zhuo, how did you see through all those complex integral symbols and realize at a glance that at its core, it was an algebraic matrix?"
Chen Zhuo capped his pen and put it back in the pen holder.
"Because I don’t like using infinitesimals for approximation, either."
He leaned back in his chair, his tone tinged with a resigned frankness.
"Dealing with continuous things feels too much like manual labor. It’s much more convenient to break them down into discrete points."
Wang Dayong nodded, only half-understanding. He hugged his workbook, satisfied, and returned to his seat to battle the next problem.
Chen Zhuo’s gaze returned to his own scratch paper.
He looked at the two pages of field theory formulas he had just spent half an hour deriving and flexed his slightly sore wrist.
CREAK.
Chu Ge walked in, yawning. His hair was a bird’s nest from sleep, giving him the look of a disheveled youth.
"Is the fan in your room faster than ours?"
As soon as Chu Ge came in, he grabbed a small stool, sat in the middle of the dorm, and closed his eyes to feel the faint breeze from above.
"In our room, 216, that clunky old computer starts blasting hot air after it’s been on for a while. And Lu Jia won’t let me open the door. He says people reciting English in the hallway disturb his calculations. I just woke up and almost got steamed alive in there."
Wang Dayong turned around, took one look at Chu Ge’s sorry state, and chuckled.
"If you hadn’t said you just woke up, I’d have thought you were about to join a rock band. Were you up all night again, modifying the website backend for that boss of yours?"
"Join a rock band? Please."
Chu Ge rubbed his face and sighed.
"My boss insisted that the inventory management page was loading too slowly and told me to optimize it. I spent all night looking up database calls. If it weren’t for that matrix mapping method Brother Zhuo taught me last time, I’d probably still be writing nested loops."
As he spoke, Chu Ge opened his eyes, looked at Chen Zhuo, and leaned over curiously to glance at the book on Chen Zhuo’s desk.
"What’re you getting into now?"
"Theoretical physics."
Chen Zhuo closed the book and drank the last of the water in his cup.
"Physics?"
Chu Ge pursed his lips.
"Is that stuff any use? Can you trade it for money or put it on the table? If you ask me, the future belongs to computers. With a brain like yours for writing low-level logic, if you worked with me, we could earn back the money for your computer in two months."
Chen Zhuo looked at Chu Ge’s money-grubbing expression and couldn’t help but laugh.
"Coding too much makes your hair fall out."
Chen Zhuo pointed at Chu Ge’s messy hair.
"If you keep pulling all-nighters like this, by the start of sophomore year, we’ll have to pool our money to buy you some anti-hair loss treatment."
"Oh, get outta here."
Chu Ge touched his hair and chuckled.
"This is called dedicating myself to my career. When the lockdown ends, I’ll treat you guys to barbecue on the back street. All you can eat."
At the mention of barbecue, Wang Dayong swallowed hard.
"When the hell is this campus lockdown going to end? I’m so sick of eating the same few dishes at the cafeteria every day, I feel like I’m going to puke. At this point, I’d eat a plate of edamame and pretend it’s meat."
"Should be soon."
Chu Ge leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs.
"I heard Lu Jia say this morning that a few neighboring provinces have already started lifting their alerts. It’ll probably just be a few more weeks. Final exams are coming up, so the school can’t keep us locked up until summer break, right?"
At the mention of final exams, Wang Dayong’s face fell again.
"Don’t talk to me about exams. I still have more than half of my Advanced Mathematics book left to review."
Wang Dayong looked at the book on his desk with a pained expression.
"How’s Lu Jia doing with his review?"
"Him?"
Chu Ge rolled his eyes.
"He’s been up since six-thirty this morning, sitting at his desk. He spent the whole morning memorizing Marxist philosophy and started on linear algebra this afternoon. His self-discipline is something else; I’m seriously impressed. If the sound of him flipping pages hadn’t kept me awake, I wouldn’t have had to take refuge in your room."
The group chatted idly.
It was mostly meaningless small talk—complaining about the weather, guessing when the lockdown would end, or debating which cafeteria lady’s hand trembled the least when serving food.
Chen Zhuo would chime in with a word or two occasionally. He didn’t find this kind of idle chatter to be a waste of time.
After spending hours deriving formulas, listening to these casual complaints was a nice way to relax.
The ceiling fan continued to whir overhead.
As Chu Ge chatted on, his eyelids started to droop, and his head began to nod.
"I can’t take it anymore. I need to go back and get some more sleep."
Chu Ge stood up and gave a huge stretch, his bones making a series of cracking sounds.
"When you’re heading to dinner tonight, remember to swing by 216 and haul me out of bed. I’m not setting an alarm."
"Yeah, yeah, go ahead."
Wang Dayong waved his hand dismissively.
"I’ll tell Lu Jia to be a bit quieter with his calculations so he doesn’t disturb our big boss’s rest."
"If he actually listened to me, he wouldn’t be Lu Jia."
Chu Ge mumbled something, swayed unsteadily out of dorm 215, and pulled the door shut behind him.
The dorm room fell quiet again.
Wang Dayong took a deep breath and once again dove headfirst into the sea of Advanced Mathematics problems.
Chen Zhuo glanced at the wall clock. A quarter past four.
He glanced at the closed copy of the *Theoretical Physics Tutorial* on his desk but didn’t open it. He had already completed his self-assigned quota of reading and derivations on continuous field theory for the day.
’The remnants of partial and differential equations lingered in his mind. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, but he knew he needed to clear his head.’
Chen Zhuo stood up, pushed his chair back a little, and bent down to pull a long, black rectangular box from under his bed.
Hearing the noise, Wang Dayong looked up from his workbook and glanced at the instrument case in Chen Zhuo’s hands.
"Going to play?" Wang Dayong asked.
"Yeah."
Chen Zhuo nodded, casually patting the dust off the case a couple of times.
"Going to the activity center for a bit."
"Alright, go ahead. I’ll try to finish the exercises in this Chapter before you get back."
Chen Zhuo picked up the instrument case, pushed the door open, and walked out of the dorm.
It was the hottest part of the afternoon. The sunlight hitting the window at the end of the hallway was a bit glaring.
On the blackboard in the first-floor lobby, the various preventative regulations for the current period were still written in chalk, the words now slightly blurred.
The dorm supervisor, an old man, sat in a rocking chair by the entrance. He held a cattail fan, his eyes closed, listening to the warbling of Huangmei opera on the radio.
Chen Zhuo stepped out of the dormitory building, and a gust of hot wind blew against his face.
The trees on campus had grown lush and green, casting a large patch of shade over the main path.
There weren’t many students on the path. Occasionally, a few would hurry past on bicycles, their tires making a soft rustling sound on the asphalt.
Everything was peaceful.
No disturbances, no pressing problems that needed to be solved.
In this steady, measured rhythm, time moved forward, bit by bit.

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