From top to bottom, although he had stopped halfway, the preceding logic was rock-solid, like a code being patiently and meticulously deciphered.
"Done reading for today? Putting it into practice?"
Su Wei asked casually, standing by the desk with a clean water glass in her hand.
The pen in Chen Zhuo’s hand paused.
He didn’t rush to continue writing. Instead, he capped the pen, set it aside, and shook his slightly sore wrist.
He looked up at Su Wei, who was standing beside him, a gentle smile on his face.
"Not really ’solving problems’."
He pointed to the open copy of *Discrete Mathematics* beside him, his tone easygoing and a little playful.
"Watching others struggle to assemble the blocks piece by piece looked too tiring. Since I had nothing better to do, I thought I’d see if I could just lay a plank over it all."
Su Wei glanced down at the all-English journal.
The dense combinatorial diagrams and conditional branches on its pages made her frown instinctively. Then she glanced at Chen Zhuo’s half-finished matrix on his scratch paper.
She couldn’t grasp the intricacies of graph theory, but she could see the enormous difference in volume between the two.
Over thirty pages of printed text.
Less than two pages of handwritten notes.
"Did you manage to lay the plank over it?"
Su Wei took a sip of the cold water in her glass, her tone as placid as ever.
"Not yet."
Chen Zhuo picked up the sheet of scratch paper and held it up to the light.
The algebraic framework on it was already established. The general direction was sound, and the elegance from the dimensionality reduction was definitely there.
But to turn it into a truly watertight mathematical proof, it still needed some meticulous work to fill in the gaps.
"I just finished cutting the plank into shape."
Chen Zhuo put the paper down and smiled.
"Now I have to find a few suitable nails to fasten it in place. It’s delicate work, and I won’t finish today."
Su Wei didn’t ask any more questions.
She nodded, returned to her seat with her glass, and went back to wrestling with her actuarial data.
To her, even if Chen Zhuo could calculate the positions of all the stars in the sky, it wouldn’t be as tangible as her solving a single problem correctly.
Chen Zhuo withdrew his gaze.
He didn’t force himself to finish deriving the remaining inequality bounds that evening.
Scholarship was like making soup; it would all come together when the time was right. Forcing it with high heat would only boil off the water and ruin the original flavor.
He straightened the two half-finished pages of scratch paper and tucked them neatly into his notebook.
Today’s round of mental gymnastics had left him feeling quite content.
He had found an interesting angle of attack. All that was left was to spend a little time each day over the long summer, gradually polishing and perfecting it, like shaping a small wood carving.
’No rush.’
The summer vacation had only just begun. He had all the time in the world to slowly chip away at this problem.
He closed the journals on his desk, stacked them neatly, and placed them back on the top of the cart.
Outside, the sky was beginning to darken.
The afterglow of the sunset hit the reading room’s glass windows, casting a warm, orange hue.
Chen Zhuo checked the time. It was about time to head to Dining Hall No. 2 for dinner. When he’d passed by its window yesterday, he’d seen the small blackboard announce sweet and sour pork ribs for tonight’s dinner.
He picked up his water bottle and slung his bag over his back.
"I’m heading out."
He said as usual as he passed by Su Wei’s desk.
"Mm."
"Same time tomorrow," Chen Zhuo added casually.
"I know."
Su Wei flipped over a sheet of scratch paper, her voice as calm as an emotionless robot.
"I’ll put the books you want on the bottom of the cart. You can get them yourself tomorrow."
"Alright."
Chen Zhuo pushed open the wooden door of the reading room.
A breeze from the half-open window blew down the hallway, carrying the distinct coolness of early evening. It was no longer as stuffy as it had been in the afternoon.
That evening, he ambled downstairs at his usual unhurried pace, carrying two feather-light, half-finished sheets of scratch paper.
There was no excitement of having discovered a great truth, nor any impatient anxiety to prove himself.
His pace was steady and unhurried.
Compared to proving a lower bound in graph theory, he was currently more concerned with whether the server with the shaky hands at Dining Hall No. 2 would take pity on his youth and mercifully scoop him an extra piece or two of sweet and sour pork ribs.

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