"Not at all."
Chen Zhuo’s voice was mild and even.
"It’s just that I’ve been reading in the library these past few days and realized some of the old methods are too cumbersome. You guys are over there working yourselves to death, while I’m over here just trying to figure out how to slack off. It’s too hot, after all. Thinking too hard makes you sweat."
"This guy..."
Zhou Kai let out a laugh on the other end of the line, the tension in him clearly easing.
"Alright, I can’t talk any longer. I’ve got an idea and need to go back and rework those calculations from this afternoon. Huashao, you still got money? If not, hang up."
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, don’t hang up! He Gui hasn’t said anything yet!"
After a burst of shuffling noises,
The voice in the receiver changed.
There was no longer Wang Huashao’s clamor, nor the intensity of Zhou Kai’s racing mind.
There was only the sound of steady breathing, betraying no hint of emotion.
"Captain."
He Gui’s voice was low, and he enunciated his words with a rigid precision.
"Yeah, it’s me."
Chen Zhuo replied.
"They’re too noisy."
He Gui stated a blunt truth from the other end of the line.
"Well, it is the national team. If it wasn’t noisy, how would you know everyone was hard at work?"
Chen Zhuo said, playing along.
The other end of the line went silent for about three or four seconds.
In the background, Wang Huashao seemed to be urging him on about something, but He Gui brushed him off.
"Captain."
He Gui said again.
"I’m listening."
"We’re going to win the gold medal."
When He Gui said this, his tone held none of the passion of a fiery vow, nor the teeth-gritting determination of someone trying to prove a point.
He stated it as if it were a foregone conclusion.
As natural as the sun rising tomorrow, or water boiling at one hundred degrees Celsius.
Chen Zhuo’s hand holding the receiver tightened slightly.
He pictured the somewhat bashful face from the first time he’d met He Gui, and the look in his eyes during training camp—a gaze so focused on the multimeter it was almost obsessive.
"I know."
Chen Zhuo’s voice was quiet, but clear.
"I believe in you guys."
"Mm."
He Gui grunted in acknowledgment from the other end.
"The card’s almost out of money, isn’t it? I can hear the warning tone."
Chen Zhuo could hear a faint beeping from the receiver.
"Twenty cents left," He Gui said. "Hanging up now."
"Alright. Take care of yourselves, and don’t just focus on the problems. If you can’t scramble for any meat in the cafeteria, send Wang Huashao. He’s nimble as a monkey; he’ll squeeze his way through."
A muffled protest from Wang Huashao came through the line, followed immediately by...
CLICK.
The line went dead, leaving only the cold, drawn-out drone of the busy signal in the earpiece.
Chen Zhuo slowly put the receiver back on the hook.
The hallway was still silent.
The voice-activated light remained off. Chen Zhuo stood in place for a moment, and he could even feel the faint warmth his palm had left on the earpiece slowly dissipating.
On this sweltering summer night, on this university campus emptied of its young people,
An invisible telephone line, spanning a distance of over a thousand kilometers, had briefly connected two completely different worlds.
On one side were the top geniuses of their generation.
They were confined to a gladiatorial arena known as the national team, battling the most abstruse formulas daily, struggling in a quagmire of continuous mathematics—all for the glory of their country, and for a chance to climb to a higher stage in their own lives.
They were anxious and exhausted, but an unquenchable fire burned in their eyes.
And on the other side, there was him.
Chen Zhuo turned, treading over shadows stretched long by the moonlight as he ambled back to Room 215.
He pushed open the door.
The room was just as he had left it.
The desk lamp cast a warm, yellow glow. On the desk, condensation on the glass bottle of Arctic Ocean soda had formed a small puddle, soaking a corner of the scratch paper beside it.
The stack of scratch paper, filled with algebraic matrices, lay quietly on the desk.
There were no coaches pushing him, no pressure from rankings, no infuriatingly complex continuous equations.
There was only a tranquil vacuum of physics and mathematics, one that belonged to him and him alone.
Chen Zhuo walked over and sat down in the chair.
He picked up his pen, his gaze once again falling on the scratch paper.
The idea he had just given Zhou Kai—of chopping up the continuous into a discrete grid—wasn’t just some exam-taking trick he’d spouted off the top of his head.
It was, in fact, the core conclusion he had reached after days in the library, repeatedly mulling it over.
Finding a perfect, continuous solution is often a dead end for many complex, real-world problems.
’If you can’t get through on one path, why not try another?’
Chen Zhuo leaned back in his chair, picked up the unfinished bottle of Arctic Ocean, and tilted his head back to take a swig.
The soda wasn’t very cold anymore, and most of the carbonation had gone flat. A cloyingly sweet orange flavor flowed down his throat.
He set the bottle aside.
This phone call acted as a small catalyst, making the "toolbox" of discrete algebra in his mind feel clearer and more defined.
Seeing Zhou Kai and the others struggling in their quagmire made him even more convinced that his current path was correct: building a solid foundation instead of blindly pursuing advanced theories of continuity.
’A blade makes the cleanest cut only when it is honed to its simplest, purest form.’
Chen Zhuo put down his pen and turned off the desk lamp.
The dorm room plunged into darkness. Only the moonlight from outside, filtering through the gaps in the leaves, cast mottled patterns of light and shadow on the floor.
Chen Zhuo lay down on his bed, his hands pillowed behind his head.
’Tomorrow, it’s back to the library again.’
He was nearly finished with the foundational literature. He planned to ask Su Wei for help tomorrow in finding some core foreign-language journals from the last few years.
Chen Zhuo closed his eyes and rolled over.
’In this stifling summer, being able to get a quiet night’s sleep without having to solve those damned partial differential equations... now that’s true bliss.’

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