He threw back the blanket and sat up.
He removed the foam plugs from his ears and reached out to grip the iron railing of the bed.
"Chu Ge..."
Lu Jia’s voice was quiet, tinged with a hoarseness from lack of sleep and anxiety.
The keyboard was too loud, and with his headphones on, Chu Ge didn’t hear a thing.
Lu Jia took a deep breath and raised his voice slightly.
"Chu Ge, could you... be a little quieter?"
Chu Ge typed the last semicolon and hit run.
A line of red error messages popped up on the screen.
He was seething with frustration. He ripped his headphones off and hung them around his neck.
"What?"
Chu Ge turned his head, his tone impatient as he looked at the dark figure on the opposite bunk.
Lu Jia swallowed.
"Your keyboard is too loud, and so is the sound of you spinning that coin. I can’t sleep."
Chu Ge stared at the red error code still scrolling across his screen and ran a hand through his messy hair in frustration.
"Dude, it’s just a little past one."
Chu Ge’s voice was laced with the irritability of a late-night coding session gone wrong, but he tried to keep it in check.
"My program is stuck in an infinite loop. If I shut down now, the last three hours of data scraping will be completely wasted."
He reached out, stopped the spinning coin on his desk, and tossed it into a drawer, sliding it shut.
"Fine, I’ll stop spinning the coin. But I really can’t stop typing."
Chu Ge turned back around, placing his hands on the keyboard. A lollipop stick was clenched between his teeth, his eyes glued to the screen as he mumbled in a perfunctory, helpless tone.
"Just squeeze those earplugs in tighter and tough it out for the night. This damn code has me by the throat. I really can’t stop..."
As the keyboard began to CLATTER again, Chu Ge added without turning his head:
"Bear with me, alright? Lunch at Cafeteria Number Two tomorrow, my treat."
Sitting on the top bunk, Lu Jia slowly loosened his grip on the railing.
Chu Ge had put away the coin, which was a concession.
According to what he’d been taught his whole life, when someone apologized and even offered compensation, the matter should end there. Both sides should compromise.
But he couldn’t care less about what he’d be eating at Cafeteria Number Two tomorrow.
What he cared about was that his six-thirty alarm was set to go off in less than five and a half hours.
The whirring of the coin was gone, but the sound of the keyboard was still like a series of fine needles, pricking at his frayed nerves.
Reasoning with him was useless.
Start a fight?
He was even worse at that.
Lu Jia silently picked up the two foam earplugs he had left by his pillow.
He squeezed them between his fingers until they were thin and flat, then shoved them deep into his ear canals.
The foam slowly expanded, muffling the sound slightly. But the thud of the keys on the desk still seemed to travel straight up his nerves.
Lu Jia slowly lay back down.
He pulled the thin summer blanket up over his head.
From head to toe, he wrapped himself tightly, forming an airtight cocoon.
「The next morning.」
「Six in the morning.」
The entire dormitory was still deep in slumber.
「Dorm 216.」
In the darkness, the hands on the mechanical alarm clock by Lu Jia’s pillow silently converged.
The next second.
"RING RING RING RING—"
The piercing clang of metal exploded through the small dorm room.
Lu Jia sat up instantly, a conditioned reflex.
He slammed his hand down on the alarm clock.
No lingering in bed, no groggy transition from sleep.
He was like a machine forcibly powered on, fumbling in the dark to pull on his cool clothes.
After dressing, he didn’t get down from his bed.
Instead, he leaned against the cold wall, holding a dog-eared Level-4 English vocabulary book.
Using the faint light from the window, he began to memorize vocabulary.
"Abandon, abandon... Abnormal, abnormal..."
His voice wasn’t loud.
But in the morning silence, the low, rapid, emotionless drone was like a persistent mosquito testing the boundaries right next to one’s ear.
Across the room.
Chu Ge, who had only managed to finish a block of code and get to sleep at four-thirty, was in a deep slumber.
The sharp ringing of the alarm made him jolt.
He had just pulled the blanket over his head to go back to sleep when the sound of English words, chanted like a monk’s scripture, came from the opposite bunk.
Chu Ge rolled over in annoyance.
He pulled the blanket tightly over his head.
It was useless.
The word "abnormal" traveled clearly up the metal posts of the bunk bed and drilled into his ears.
Chu Ge threw off his blanket.
He was full of the groggy rage of someone woken up too early.
"Are you trying to raise the dead at the crack of dawn?!"
Chu Ge roared, his eyes still closed and his voice as hoarse as if he’d swallowed sand.
"Memorizing English at six in the morning? You think this is a high school cram session? Are you trying to kill me?!"
The recitation from the top bunk paused for two seconds.
Lu Jia didn’t argue, nor did he apologize.
Two seconds later.
"Abolish, abolish..."
The droning began again.
Only this time, the volume was lowered just a tiny bit.
But only a tiny bit.
On the bottom bunk, Chu Ge clutched his hair in despair, pressed his pillow hard against his head, and let out a wail on the verge of a breakdown.
In Dorm 216, a room for two, neither of them was innocent.
Chu Ge had drained Lu Jia’s energy with his mechanical keyboard late at night.
And Lu Jia, in turn, was precisely torturing Chu Ge’s nerves with a six a.m. twin-bell alarm clock and English vocabulary.
As for the room across the hall.
Sunlight streamed through a gap in the curtains, painting a picturesque scene of blue skies and fluffy white clouds—the kind that made you feel like you should be skipping off to school with a little backpack.
The door to Dorm 215 opened.
Wang Dayong was still in his bed, snoring away, sprawled out and fast asleep.
Chen Zhuo, wearing a clean short-sleeved shirt, grabbed his schoolbag and quietly left the room.
The hallway was silent.
He passed by Dorm 216; the door was closed.
Chen Zhuo went downstairs and bought a fried dough stick and a cup of soy milk from the cafeteria.
After breakfast, he didn’t head to the large lecture hall.
The first two periods this morning were a general education course.
It was on the fundamentals of mechanics in college physics.
Chen Zhuo was exempt from this class.
He had no classes in the afternoon.
He followed the tree-lined path, heading deeper into the campus.
「The class bell rang.」
「In a large classroom in the Third Teaching Building.」
An old professor stood at the lectern, chalk in hand, drawing a free-body diagram on the blackboard.
Dozens of students sat below.
Lu Jia sat in the very center of the front row.
He had obvious dark circles under his eyes, and his face was a little pale.
But he still sat bolt upright.
A thick notebook lay open in front of him.
The old professor wrote a formula on the board, and Lu Jia immediately lowered his head, transcribing it into his notebook without missing a single character.
When the professor casually mentioned a real-life example of forces, Lu Jia quickly jotted that down in the margins as well.
He was in a state of high tension, terrified of missing a single character.
In the last row of the classroom.
Wang Dayong sat in a seat by the wall.
He propped his chin up with his right hand, his eyes half-closed.
The professor’s voice was like a lullaby.
His head bobbed lower and lower until his elbow slipped and his chin hit the desk.
Wang Dayong jolted awake. He glanced around and saw that no one had noticed him.
He quickly sat up straight and pretended to flip through the brand-new textbook in front of him.
He lasted less than five minutes before his eyelids began to feel heavy again.
Finally, he gave up the fight. He crossed his arms on the desk, buried his head in them, and soon, his steady breathing could be heard.
Chu Ge sat next to Wang Dayong.
He, however, was not asleep.
He had opened his thick *University Physics* textbook and stood it upright on the desk.
Behind the textbook, a copy of *Hacker Defense* magazine, published two months ago, lay flat.
The magazine was open to a middle page, densely printed with a code analysis of a network protocol vulnerability.
Chu Ge held a ballpoint pen.
He wasn’t looking at the blackboard or listening to the professor talk about Newton’s laws.
On a piece of scratch paper, he followed the logic from the magazine, rapidly scribbling strings of characters and logical statements.
His writing was messy, the paper covered in arrows and crossed-out corrections.
He still hadn’t found a solution to the bug in last night’s web crawler program, and the problem was still turning over in his mind.
He tapped his pen on the desk in frustration, making a faint TAPPING sound.
The old professor turned around at the lectern and erased a section of the blackboard, sending chalk dust dancing in the sunlight.

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