Nighttime.
The night sky over Jinling glowed with a faint red.
The boys’ dormitory at Shida Affiliated Middle School.
Second floor, room 204.
10:30 p.m.
The lights were off.
Only the moonlight from outside and the faint glow of distant streetlights shone through the window.
They cast the mottled shadows of plane tree leaves onto the floor.
Four ninth-grade boys lay on their beds.
After the exam that afternoon, everyone was exhausted.
The dorm room was quiet.
The only sounds were the steady, heavy breathing of the boys.
And the occasional CREAK of a metal bedframe as someone turned over.
In the darkness, a long sigh came from the bottom bunk on the left, near the door.
The voice was listless, completely lacking its usual daytime energy.
"Guys..."
Wang Huashao’s voice piped up in the dark.
"My stomach is growling louder than the cicadas outside right now."
"I feel like I burned through three days’ worth of food this afternoon. That one problem completely fried my brain."
"Even after that sweet and sour pork, my stomach still feels empty."
He rolled over to face the other side of the room.
"Chen Zhuo."
"That Inner Mongolian beef jerky of yours... care to help a guy out?"
From the bottom bunk on the right, Chen Zhuo was propped up on his pillow.
His face was hidden in the darkness.
He shifted, and the bed board creaked slightly.
"It’s on the footboard."
"The kraft paper bag is open. You can feel around for it."
"Give some to Shian and the others, too."
"Oh, you’re a lifesaver!"
Wang Huashao shot up in the dark.
A RUSTLING sound followed.
He clambered out of bed in the dark, his bare feet hitting the floor.
He walked to the foot of Chen Zhuo’s bed and felt for the kraft paper bag.
"Shian, Brother Kai, He Gui."
Wang Huashao lowered his voice.
"Want some? I’ll grab a piece for each of you."
"I’ll take one," Miao Shian sighed from the opposite bottom bunk.
"I wasted six sheets of scratch paper this afternoon, all on useless energy conversion equations."
"I ended up crossing them all out."
"My wrist is still cramping. Chewing on something tough will be like a workout for my jaw muscles."
"I’ll have one too," He Gui said quietly from the corner.
Wang Huashao passed out the beef jerky in the dark.
The dorm room was suddenly filled with the down-to-earth, CRUNCHING and CHOMPING sounds of chewing.
The air-dried beef jerky was tough, requiring a good deal of effort to tear and chew with their molars.
On the bottom bunk on the right, by the window, Zhou Kai lay on his bed, also holding a piece of beef jerky.
He took a bite.
The salty, savory flavor of the jerky spread through his mouth.
Zhou Kai chewed on the meat.
He rolled onto his back and stared at the dark ceiling.
His tone was incredibly sincere, filled with a genuine curiosity about physics itself and even a hint of self-deprecation.
"Chen Zhuo."
Zhou Kai’s voice was gentle, drifting slowly through the night air.
"I nearly broke my brain working on that problem this afternoon."
"Halfway through my derivation, I already had a feeling that applying Ohm’s law to a rotating motor was wrong."
He paused, chewing forcefully on a tough piece of gristle.
"But I just didn’t know how to set up the equation for the conservation of energy."
"I kept thinking that if it wasn’t taught in the book, I couldn’t just write it down."
"How did you get past that mental block?"
"How did you know you could just separate the Joule heating to offset the back electromotive force?"
Nearby, Miao Shian also stopped chewing.
He chimed in with a laugh.
"Yeah."
"I got completely stuck there too. I felt like a condition was missing, like a piece of a puzzle."
Chen Zhuo was leaning against his headboard.
He held a half-eaten piece of beef jerky in his hand.
Moonlight from the window illuminated the edge of his bunk.
He didn’t launch into some profound principle of electromagnetism.
Nor did he start lecturing like a teacher.
"Honestly, I wasn’t thinking that deeply when I was doing the problem."
Chen Zhuo took a bite of his jerky.
"I just suddenly remembered my childhood friend’s Auldey Double Diamond 4WD race car."
As soon as he said that, the chewing in the room abruptly paused.
Chen Zhuo continued, his voice filled with the particular ease of a boy reminiscing about a childhood toy.
"You guys have all played with them, right?"
"Those 4WD cars, you put in some Nanfu batteries and they run super fast on the ground."
"But if it crashed into a corner or got stuck somewhere and couldn’t move,"
"the wheels couldn’t turn, and the motor would just be stuck inside, straining like crazy."
Chen Zhuo looked up at the ceiling.
"If you picked it up then and touched the motor,"
"it would be scorching hot."
"You might even smell burning plastic."
In the darkness, the other boys listened quietly.
"The electricity wasn’t turning into kinetic energy. It was all turning into heat."
Chen Zhuo’s voice was steady.
"So I figured, when the motor is stalled, it’s basically a pure resistor, and all the energy is used for heating."
"But when it’s spinning, the heat generated must be less, because you have to subtract the energy used for the rotation."
"Following that line of thought,"
"the conservation of energy equation just falls into place."
In the dorm room, there were two seconds of silence.
There was only the SWISH of the gentle breeze through the plane tree leaves outside.
Then, a series of low, pained, but joyful cries erupted.
"Oh, damn it!"
Wang Huashao slapped his thigh hard, producing a sharp SMACK.
"Auldey Double Diamond! Dragon head, phoenix tail!"
"A few years ago, I burned my hand a bunch of times trying to modify a 4WD motor by winding my own copper wire!"
"When that motor stalled, it was hot enough to fry an egg!"
"How did I not connect that to this afternoon’s exam paper!"
Wang Huashao thrashed around on his bed.
His voice was filled with the agony of someone who’d just missed out on a million bucks.
"What a huge loss! A total loss!"
On his bed, Zhou Kai couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
It was the laugh of someone who had finally understood, a laugh of relief. He also completely grasped why Professor Wang had hit them with that show of force.
"I’m impressed."
Zhou Kai shook his head, still smiling.
"Professor Wang talked about the ’real world’ this afternoon."
"So this is what he was getting at."
"Physics is life. We’ve just been doing too many of those ideal model problems. We’ve gotten stupid, forgetting something as basic as a 4WD motor burning out."
From his corner, He Gui quietly added,
"Um..."
"I used to play with a homemade 4WD car. To make it faster, I put in two batteries."
"Later, it got stuck under my bed, and the motor let out a puff of blue smoke... it even burned a hole in the bed..."
The moment He Gui finished speaking, all four boys in the dark room couldn’t help but burst out laughing.
The academic pressure of the day was gone.
The posturing of being first or second in the province was gone.
Here in the slightly stuffy room 204, a few fifteen and sixteen-year-old boys chewed on tough Inner Mongolian beef jerky.
They felt a powerful sense of camaraderie, bonded by the shared childhood memory of burning out a 4WD motor.
The moonlight slowly shifted.
The tree shadows stretched across the floor.
The laughter gradually subsided, replaced by the sound of even breathing.
Chen Zhuo closed his eyes.
He listened to his roommates’ breathing.
The Jinling night breeze blew in, carrying with it a hint of summer.

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