In late August, Huizhou finally condescended to shed its stifling shell of heat.
For the first time, a hint of coolness rode on the morning and evening winds.
Outside the old library window, the leaves on the row of trees were beginning to yellow at the edges. When the wind blew, one or two would occasionally spiral down onto the paving stones below.
Inside the foreign language reading room on the third floor, the ceiling fan overhead still spun stubbornly, but the air it circulated was no longer that vexing, hot kind.
Chen Zhuo sat in his usual spot by the window, flipping through a hefty monograph on algebra.
He read slowly, sometimes lingering on a single page for over ten minutes. The pencil in his hand would occasionally tap on the scratch paper beside him, jotting down a few terse symbols.
Across the wide, solid wood table, Su Wei sat diagonally from him.
SNAP.
The sound of a book closing—not loud, but very crisp—broke the quiet in the corner.
Chen Zhuo looked up.
Su Wei was pressing her hand on the cover of the thick *Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics*.
The book was now in a truly miserable state.
Its once-stiff spine had been bent until it was completely limp, and the edges were frayed. The cover even had two layers of clear tape applied for reinforcement.
From countless readings and note-takings, the pages had swelled to nearly a third thicker than their original state. Viewed from the side, it was a dense mass of dog-ears and marks from a black ballpoint pen.
Su Wei let out a long breath.
She didn’t speak right away. Instead, she raised her hands and pressed her thumbs firmly against her temples and eye sockets, as if trying to forcefully compress all the numbers and formulas she had crammed into her brain over the past two months.
Chen Zhuo set down his pencil and leaned back in his chair.
"Finished?"
he asked softly.
Su Wei lowered her hands and opened her eyes.
Her eyes were filled with fine red veins, the price of prolonged, intense concentration. But right now, they shone with an exceptionally bright sense of satisfaction, like a soldier who had just won a difficult battle.
"The last Chapter, parameter estimation and hypothesis testing, is done."
Her voice was a little hoarse from not having spoken for a long time.
"How does it feel?"
"Like chewing on raw iron at first."
Su Wei picked up the cup on the table and took a sip of water that had long gone cold.
"But then I used that matrix dimension reduction method you taught me. After breaking down all those continuous integral formulas into discrete grids, it was like I’d found a seam in the raw iron. I could just take a hammer and smash it right open along the crack."
She paused, looking at Chen Zhuo with a rare note of admiration in her voice.
"That method of yours is really effective. It saved me at least half the calculation work. Many of the continuous probability density functions that originally required taking very roundabout derivatives became simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division after you sliced them into matrices. You’re brilliant."
"As long as it works."
Chen Zhuo smiled.
"The continuous calculus taught in textbooks aims for absolute mathematical rigor and perfection. But you’re learning this to calculate financial models and assess risk in the future. A pragmatist doesn’t need perfection. They just need a knife that’s fast enough and sharp enough."
Su Wei nodded in deep agreement.
She carefully placed the nearly falling-apart textbook into her faded canvas bag and zipped it up.
Then, she pulled a somewhat worn coin purse from her pocket, undid the clasp, and carefully pinched out two one-yuan coins, placing them in her palm.
"Let’s go."
Su Wei stood up and pushed her chair back under the table.
"Where to?"
Chen Zhuo raised an eyebrow.
"Downstairs. I’m treating you to a soda."
Su Wei looked at him, her tone calm, but her gaze was serious.
"Consider it a thank-you for your help this summer. Without the path you laid out, I probably would have died on this book over the break."
Chen Zhuo was taken aback for a moment.
He turned his head, pretended to glance at the sky outside the window, then turned back to look at Su Wei.
"It’s not snowing outside today,"
he said with a straight face.
All summer, Su Wei had been frugal to the extreme. She’d squeeze every last drop of ink out of a single ballpoint pen refill, and her scratch paper was covered front and back so densely you couldn’t see through it.
For Su Wei to offer to buy someone a soda was indeed rarer than snow in August.
"Cut the crap," Su Wei said, ignoring his teasing. "The budget is two yuan. You want it or not? If not, I’m taking it back."
"I’ll take it. When a skinflint plucks a feather, only a fool would refuse."
Chen Zhuo stood up with a laugh, closed the book on the table, casually slipped his scratch paper between the pages, and gathered his things.
The two of them left the reading room, one after the other.
The light in the hallway was dimmer than in the reading room, and the air was filled with the smell of old books.
As they walked down the stairs, they could faintly hear the sounds of a basketball game from the sports field outside.
Stepping out of the old library’s main entrance, the cool evening breeze blew against them, dispersing the stale, bookish air that had accumulated after a long afternoon indoors.
The sun had already dipped behind the buildings to the west, dyeing the sky a soft orange-red.
The main path on campus was gradually filling with people. Most were students who had stayed for the break, heading back to their dorms or walking to the cafeteria in twos and threes.
They followed a smaller path toward the dormitory area.
There was a small tuck shop by the side of the path. The owner was sitting on a small stool by the entrance, waving a cattail fan, while a radio next to him played a storytelling performance from Shan Tianfang.
Su Wei walked up to the drink cooler and slid open the glass door.
A cloud of white, cold air instantly billowed out.
Inside, glass bottles of orange soda were lined up in neat rows, their surfaces covered in condensation.
Su Wei took two bottles, walked to the counter, and placed the two one-yuan coins she had been clutching in her palm onto the glass countertop.
They made two crisp clinking sounds.
"Sir, could you open these?"
The owner stood up slowly, picked up an iron bottle opener tied to the side of the counter, and expertly pried off the caps.
PSSST—
PSSST—
Two puffs of sweet, orange-scented air escaped from the bottles.
Su Wei handed one of the bottles to Chen Zhuo.
The glass bottle was very cold, and he could feel the chill in his hand.
Chen Zhuo took the soda and tilted his head back for a big gulp.
The icy liquid slid down his throat and into his stomach. The tingling sensation of carbonated bubbles bursting on his tongue was enough to make one shiver.
But on this late summer evening, it felt just right.
"Refreshing,"
Chen Zhuo sighed.
Su Wei also took a small sip, drinking very slowly.
They didn’t leave right away, instead walking over to a flower bed next to the tuck shop and stopping.
The edge of the flower bed was lined with white ceramic tiles. Chen Zhuo leaned against the tiles, watching the streetlights in the distance gradually turn on.
"What’s the plan now?"
Chen Zhuo asked casually, looking at the cold vapor rising from the glass bottle in his hand.
"You’ve chewed through probability theory. What new dish are you planning to tackle?"
"Not in a hurry for a new dish."
Su Wei shook her head.
"I need to spend some time running these theories against actual data. The stuff in books is ultimately static. When the semester starts, I’ll go to the computer lab, find some real historical stock market data, and use your discrete model to build a simple market depth simulation. Now that I have the tool, I need to test it out to see how fast it really is."
"What about you?"
Su Wei turned her head to look at Chen Zhuo.
"This whole summer, you’ve just been sitting at that table every day, writing symbols only a ghost could understand. What are you planning to do?"
Hearing this, Chen Zhuo looked down at the soda bottle in his hand, fell silent for a moment, and then gave a soft chuckle.
’Rebirth. In novels, it sounds like a massive golden finger. Many characters in stories come back with decades of memories and suddenly become omnipotent.
But only Chen Zhuo himself knew with perfect clarity that in his past life, he was just an ordinary person.
His brain wasn’t filled with ready-made advanced technology. He didn’t come equipped with blueprints for jet engines, and he certainly hadn’t memorized the low-level source code for a lithography machine.
His knowledge of that magnificent and turbulent future was limited to the grand terms he occasionally heard in news reports: chip blockades, algorithmic barriers, material sanctions, EDA software chokeholds.
He knew where the key points were.
He knew what kind of technological hegemony the powers across the ocean would use to seize this place by the throat in a dozen or so years.
But he didn’t know how to get to those key points.
So, he couldn’t be like those exceptionally gifted reincarnators who could simply pick up a pen and write down truths that transcended the era.
The only things he could rely on were this young brain—made more focused and acute by rebirth—and a future perspective that was just slightly ahead of its time.
Since he didn’t have any ready-made weapons in his mind, he had no choice but to build the machine tools to make them, piece by piece.
He was taking all the math journals he could access in the old library—algebraic topology, the fundamentals of graph theory—and chewing them up and swallowing them, bit by bit.
He knew the future belonged to the age of computers, algorithms, and high-tech industry. And the underlying logic of those things couldn’t be built on the old one-size-fits-all and brute-force approaches.
The process was tedious. It didn’t solve any concrete, real-world problems. To outsiders, it probably even looked like he was just scribbling meaningless matrix symbols on paper all day.’
"Me?"
Chen Zhuo took a sip of soda, the carbonation making him squint slightly.
He turned his head to look at Su Wei, his tone light, as if he were talking about the most ordinary thing in the world.
"I guess you could say... I’ve been firing a kiln of bricks for myself."
"Firing bricks?"
Su Wei clearly didn’t understand the metaphor, her brow furrowing slightly.
"Mm-hm."
Chen Zhuo nodded.
"You’re studying probability theory to build a ship, so you can rake in money during the financial tsunamis of the future. I’m not as practical as you. I just know that someday, there are going to be great winds and heavy rains."
He gently tapped the bottom of his bottle against the tiled edge of the flower bed, making a dull thud.
"I don’t have any finished skyscrapers in my head. This summer, I didn’t accomplish anything tangible. I just dug a pit in the ground, took all the scattered mathematical theories and logic I’ve been reading, used discrete algebra as firewood, and painstakingly fired them into solid bricks."
He didn’t use any grand vocabulary, simply boiling it all down to "firing bricks."
And now, that small, indestructible cornerstone of fundamental logic, formed from discrete algebra, was laid securely in the depths of his mind.
He didn’t need to rote-memorize any of his predecessors’ conclusions. Because as long as he had these foundational bricks, as long as the logic held, he could build a skyscraper to the heavens on this foundation, layer by layer, all by himself.
Su Wei looked at Chen Zhuo.
She had always found the young man before her to be a bit of a contradiction.
He clearly possessed the freakish computational ability to calculate an expected value with a single glance, yet he always went about things in a slow and methodical way, completely lacking the arrogance and impatience typical of a genius.
He was like a bottomless ancient well; you could toss a stone in and not even hear an echo.
"I don’t really understand what you’re talking about,"
Su Wei averted her gaze, looking at the sky as it gradually darkened in the distance.
"but it feels like you’ve also just finished something very tiring."
"I suppose so."
Chen Zhuo swirled the glass bottle in his hand. There was still about a mouthful of soda left inside.
For once, Su Wei smiled.
"It sounds pretty interesting."
She raised her soda bottle, as if making a toast.
"Well then, a pleasure working with you?"
"A pleasure working with you."
Chen Zhuo also raised his bottle and gently tapped it against hers.
The glass made a crisp clinking sound.
The late-summer evening wind swept across the open space where they stood, blowing away the last traces of the summer heat.
In the distance, lights began to turn on in the windows of the dormitory buildings.
The old man from the mailroom rode past them on a rickety old roadster, ringing a crisp bell as he went.
In a few more days, the upperclassmen would begin to return, and the first-year freshmen would pour onto the campus with their bags and luggage.
The school, which had been quiet for two months, was about to become bustling once again.
Chen Zhuo tilted his head back and drained the last mouthful of soda from his bottle.
He let out a long sigh of relief.
And just like that, the summer of two people came to a quiet and simple end.

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