Four or five days had passed since he had casually sketched out that transition probability matrix in the old library.
Over the past few days, the temperature at Keda had remained persistently high.
The sky was always a pale, washed-out blue, without a single wisp of a cloud in sight.
Cicadas shrieked their lungs out from the treetops, their calls lasting from morning till night with barely a pause. It was a relentless sound, as if determined to burn summer to its very end.
Chen Zhuo’s life was as regular as a finely-tuned old pocket watch.
He’d leave in the morning, grab two meat buns and a cup of soy milk from the second canteen, then head straight for the foreign language reading room on the third floor of the old library.
He and Su Wei had developed a tacit understanding, their routines meshing together like interlocking gears.
Su Wei seemed to see him as a reliable tool for generating solutions, while Chen Zhuo, just as pragmatically, treated her as Keda’s most effective living search engine.
All he had to do each day was leave a note on the table specifying the era and general field he needed to research. By the time he returned from getting a cup of water, the heavy, archaic volumes would appear on the corner of his desk without fail.
Chen Zhuo was in no hurry.
He had been spending his time reading up on the fundamentals of algebraic topology and group theory from the 1950s to the 1970s.
He had decided to temporarily avoid the latest cutting-edge journals, choosing instead to trace the historical development of mathematics and physics backward, step by step.
He was searching for that sense of logic, the feeling of building the great edifice of science one brick at a time.
He wanted to understand how, in an era without the aid of powerful computers, the mathematicians of a bygone generation had built one scientific fortress after another on paper, using nothing but pure intellect.
And so the days slipped by, marked by the rustle of turning pages and the whir of the ceiling fan overhead.
Evening.
The sun finally relented its scorching assault, slowly sinking behind the roof of the academic building to the west.
Long shadows stretched across the campus, and waves of heat still radiated from the asphalt that had baked in the sun all day.
Chen Zhuo closed his notebook, pushed the thick, borrowed Russian books to the side of the table, and got up to pack his things.
Nearby, by the window, Su Wei was still wrestling with a pile of complex actuarial data.
Ever since she’d mastered the trick of using a Discrete Matrix to "dimensionally reduce" problems of continuous probability, her calculations had gone much more smoothly. It even seemed to make her glances toward Chen Zhuo a little less disapproving. (Chen Zhuo: ’Just a little less disapproving? How heartbreaking~’)
"I’m heading out."
Chen Zhuo picked up his empty water bottle.
Without looking up from her scratch paper, Su Wei just grunted in acknowledgment.
Chen Zhuo pushed open the reading room door and went down the stairs.
Outside the library, the heat in the air was still so thick it felt like it was sticking to his face.
Instead of heading straight back to the dorm, he followed a tree-lined path and turned toward a small convenience store next to the East District canteen.
Because it was summer break right after the lockdown had been lifted, pitifully few students had stayed on campus, and the store’s shelves were more than half empty.
The owner was a somewhat heavyset, middle-aged man, sitting bare-chested on a bamboo recliner by the entrance and waving a cattail fan. On a small table next to him, a transistor radio was droning on with Shan Tianfang’s storytelling performance of *The White-Browed Hero*.
"Hey, boss. A bottle of soda."
Chen Zhuo walked over.
The owner didn’t even open his eyes, just gestured with his fan toward a humming cooler on the side.
"Grab it yourself. The opener’s tied to the handle."
Chen Zhuo went over and pulled open the heavy cooler door.
He rummaged through a pile of popsicles and pulled out a glass bottle of Arctic Ocean soda. The orange liquid sloshed inside, and a thin layer of white frost coated the bottle’s neck.
He grabbed the opener, which was tied on with a piece of wire, and pried off the cap with a HISS.
A faint orange scent wafted out, carried on a puff of cold air.
Chen Zhuo placed a coin on the cooler’s lid and started walking back with the soda.
As the ice-cold glass bottle met the hot air outside, a dense layer of condensation quickly formed on its surface.
The droplets merged, trickled down between his fingers, and dripped onto the scorching pavement, where they vanished in an instant.
Chen Zhuo took a slow sip.
It didn’t really taste much like orange—it was mostly fizz. But as he took a long gulp, the icy sensation slid down his throat and into his stomach, washing away much of the stuffiness from a day spent cooped up in the library.
When he reached his dormitory, the building manager was sitting on a small stool by the entrance, snapping green beans. A basin next to him was already half-full.
"Enjoying the cool air, sir?"
Chen Zhuo paused and greeted him casually.
"Ah, Xiaochen, you’re back."
The building manager looked up with a wide smile.
"During this whole summer break, you’re about the only one in the entire building who still heads to the academic district every day."
"’Study hard and make progress every day,’ right? I’m a model student, you know."
Chen Zhuo replied with a grin.
The old man roared with laughter.
Chen Zhuo went up the stairs to the second floor.
Because of the break, the entire floor was so quiet he could hear his own footsteps.
Without the machine-gun-like clatter of Chu Ge’s keyboard, the mumbling of Wang Dayong memorizing English vocabulary for his exam, or the neurotic rustle of Lu Jia flipping through books, the hallway now felt strangely empty.
Chen Zhuo pushed open the door to his room. He walked to his desk and set down his water bottle and the half-finished bottle of Arctic Ocean soda.
His desktop was clean, holding nothing but a few rollerball pens and a stack of scratch paper from the past few days, which was covered in the algebraic structures and topological mappings he had extracted from those old foreign-language journals.
He didn’t sit down to read right away. Instead, he pulled a towel out from under his bed and went to the bathroom to take a cold shower.

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