At the far eastern end of the third floor of Provincial Experimental Middle School’s administration building, there was a small seminar room.
A floor-standing air conditioner in the corner hummed quietly, its vents oscillating slowly up and down, blanketing the room in cool air.
The room and the world outside felt like two different seasons.
Six people sat around a long, mahogany conference table.
This was the entire team selected by the province to compete in the National Junior High Mathematics Competition finals.
On the left side of the table sat Chen Zhuo, Zhou Kai, and Lin Yi.
On the right side of the table were three unfamiliar faces, two boys and one girl.
They were the top mathletes who had battled their way out of the province’s other top-tier junior high schools.
One of the boys was named Zhang Bai. He wore thick, black-framed glasses and had a short haircut.
The other, Li Nanbai, was slightly chubby.
The girl’s name was Mo Xiaoyu. She had her hair in a ponytail, with a thin black clip holding back the bangs at her forehead.
In front of each of them lay a thick, neat stack of blank scratch paper.
On the table were pencils, ballpoint pens in black, blue, and red, and a set of clear plastic rulers and compasses.
Across from them,
Zhou Kai pulled a few sheets of scratch paper from his backpack, aligned the edges, and weighed them down with his pencil case.
Lin Yi pulled out her chair, picking a spot directly under the AC vent. She hadn’t taken any scratch paper, holding only a single blue gel pen.
She leaned back, her eyes half-lidded as she gazed at the tabletop. With a slight flex of her fingers, she skillfully spun the gel pen, leaving a blue blur in its wake.
Chen Zhuo pulled out a chair and sat down.
He placed his backpack by his feet.
On the table in front of him, there was only a black mechanical pencil and a white eraser.
Nothing else.
The seminar room door swung open.
Coach Xu, the head coach of the provincial team, walked in.
Coach Xu was a man in his forties with a receding hairline. He wore a gray, short-sleeved shirt and carried a massive stainless steel thermos.
The lid was ajar, revealing steeped green tea leaves within.
Coach Xu walked to the end of the long table and put the thermos down.
He dispensed with the pleasantries, pulling six test papers directly from a file folder.
"One test each this morning. You have three hours. Let’s see where you’re all at."
Coach Xu split the test papers into two piles and slid them down the table.
"No talking. No books. Turn them in when you’re finished."
The papers were passed down to each student.
Time passed quickly.
The final, high-stakes problem on the back of the test was a hybrid of spatial geometry and combinatorics.
The diagram was exceedingly complex, its conditions deliberately obscure.
Zhang Bai’s brow furrowed instantly.
He picked up his ruler and pencil and began to replicate the complex geometric shape on his scratch paper.
Solid lines, dashed lines... he sketched it out bit by bit.
’His mind raced, sifting through past problems, searching for the auxiliary line that would crack this one open.’
Beside him, Li Nanbai and Mo Xiaoyu were also deep in thought.
Mo Xiaoyu tapped her pen on the paper twice, then began rapidly scribbling lines of derivations. After half a page, she realized her logic was flawed. With an irritated scrawl, she crossed it all out and started again.
The rustle of turning pages and the scratch of pen on paper seemed to be amplified by the drone of the air conditioner.
Lin Yi stared at the intricate diagram for the final problem.
She didn’t even start to sketch it.
She stared at the diagram for about five or six minutes.
Her gaze grew unfocused, as if she were looking right through the paper at something else entirely.
Suddenly, she blinked.
She picked up her blue gel pen and, in the large, empty answer space, wrote down a core lemma.
There were no preceding derivations.
Using that lemma, she derived the final result in just a few sparse lines.
Finished, she tossed her pen aside, leaned back in her chair, and tilted her head to gaze absently at the wind-rustled leaves outside.
Chen Zhuo, sitting next to Lin Yi, held his mechanical pencil.
His eyes were fixed on the final spatial geometry problem.
Chen Zhuo’s pencil tip touched the paper.
Using an intersection point at the base of the figure as the origin, he drew three mutually perpendicular lines.
The x-axis, y-axis, and z-axis.
He had established a three-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system right on the paper.
Then, he converted all the given side lengths and angles into coordinates.
In that moment, he had transformed a geometry problem into a problem of algebra.
There was no need to guess the problem-setter’s intent, no need to search for some stroke of geometric genius.
Chen Zhuo’s pencil moved steadily across the paper.
Calculating the plane’s normal vector.
Setting up the third-order determinant.
Matrix transformations.
His pace wasn’t fast, but there was a breathtaking coherence to his work.
Not a single formula was redundant; he never paused to wonder what came next.
The logic was airtight.
The mechanical pencil lead left even, gray impressions on the page.
The layout was clean, the formulas perfectly aligned.
It was his signature approach.
Like a roaring industrial bulldozer, it flattened the winding geometric maze into a straight, paved road.
Chen Zhuo wrote the last number.
He clicked the mechanical pencil once, retracted the lead, and placed it on the desk.
Then he stood up.
The legs of his chair scraped lightly against the floor.
Instinctively, Zhang Bai and Mo Xiaoyu looked up at him.
They were only halfway through the problem.
Chen Zhuo paid no mind to their stares.
He picked up his test and walked to the end of the long table.
Coach Xu, who had been reading a thick mathematics journal, looked up at the sound.

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