Military training was still tough to get through.
Especially for these half-grown kids who had just started junior high.
They would occasionally glance over at the nine-year-old kid sitting under the shade of a tree, engrossed in a book.
They were incredibly envious, but there was nothing they could do about it.
After all, you couldn’t very well make a nine-year-old like Chen Zhuo do military training with them.
They considered themselves older than Chen Zhuo. Facing a classmate who was younger than them in every way, they consciously or unconsciously wanted to act like adults in front of him.
As a result, no matter what they did, they seemed a bit more mature than the students in other classes.
This made the school leaders and instructors on their inspection rounds marvel.
As expected of the cream of the crop—the top students. They really were different.
It had to be said, it was a curious phenomenon.
The military training passed quickly, over before they knew it. Chen Zhuo had simply spent those few days reading under a tree.
The first class in the afternoon was math.
Old Zhao walked into the classroom, his lesson plan tucked under his arm.
The first Chapter of seventh-grade math was about rational numbers.
Positive numbers, negative numbers, the number line.
For these top students, selected as the cream of the crop, this was all material they had already learned. But the curriculum was set in stone, so the teachers had to follow it step by step, treating it as a way to reinforce their fundamentals.
"For example, negative 5 degrees Celsius can be written as -5..."
Old Zhao drew a thermometer on the blackboard.
Down below, some students were spinning their pens, while others were pretending to listen.
Chen Zhuo sat in the special, cushioned chair in the front row.
On his desk, a high school math textbook, *Set and Function Concepts*, lay open.
Beside it were sheets of scratch paper, densely packed with derived formulas.
He was deriving Morgan’s laws.
Although this was a very basic concept in set theory, he had previously only memorized the conclusion by rote. Now, he was trying to prove it again himself.
The tip of his pen rustled across the paper as he became completely immersed in the joy of seamless logic.
The voice from the teacher’s podium suddenly stopped.
Chen Zhuo felt a tug on his sleeve from the girl sitting next to him.
A shadow fell over Chen Zhuo’s desk.
Without any unnecessary movements, Chen Zhuo simply stopped writing, looked up, and calmly met the gaze of Old Zhao, who was standing in front of his desk.
Old Zhao wasn’t angry.
He glanced down at the book on the desk, then at the scratch paper.
As a veteran math teacher with over twenty years of experience, he certainly recognized these formulas.
Intersection, union, complement.
And the proof process—the logic was clear, the steps concise, without a single wasted move.
Old Zhao raised an eyebrow.
He pointed a finger, tapping lightly on the last line of the scratch paper.
"Here."
Old Zhao lowered his voice, speaking at a volume only the two of them could hear.
"Use a Venn diagram to help illustrate. It’ll be more intuitive."
Chen Zhuo paused for a moment. He glanced at the spot, thought for a second, and nodded.
"Yes, combining a diagram with the text is more intuitive."
Old Zhao smiled. It was the smile of someone who had found a kindred spirit.
"You can understand it?" Old Zhao gestured to the high school textbook.
"Yeah."
"Then are you still listening to what’s on the blackboard?"
"It’s a bit of a waste of time," Chen Zhuo said honestly.
The whole class fell silent.
But Old Zhao just nodded.
"Fine."
Old Zhao straightened up, his voice returning to a normal volume.
"Then you can work on that. But one condition: don’t make any noise, don’t disturb others, and hand in your homework as required."
With that, Old Zhao turned and walked back to the podium, picked up his chalk, and continued his lecture about the thermometer.
"Now, let’s see, if the temperature rises by 3 degrees..."
Chen Zhuo lowered his head again and quietly whispered "thanks" to the deskmate who had just tugged his sleeve.
He picked up his pen and drew a small Venn diagram next to his proof.
’Not bad at all.’
School let out for the afternoon.
The other students were either busy cleaning the classroom or walking out in groups of two and three, telling each other "see you tomorrow."
Chen Zhuo slung his backpack on and headed straight for the administration building.
The math department office.
Old Zhao was grading homework. He wasn’t surprised at all to see Chen Zhuo walk in, as if he had been waiting for him.
"Teacher."
Chen Zhuo walked over and greeted him.
"You’re here?"
Old Zhao put down his red pen, pulled open a drawer, and took out a card and a key.
"I saw the set theory you were studying in class."
Old Zhao pushed the card across the desk to Chen Zhuo.
"The student reading room in the school library is full of pop-science books and novels, nothing substantial. This is my faculty library card."
Chen Zhuo’s heart skipped a beat.
He had heard about the school’s faculty resource room, which was rumored to be one of the best-stocked in the entire province.
It contained complete sets of high school textbooks from previous years, various university-level subject analyses, foreign problem sets, and even subscriptions to a considerable number of original foreign journals.
"Thank you, Teacher."
Chen Zhuo accepted the card with both hands.
The thin plastic card felt as heavy as gold in his hands, especially in an era when the internet had yet to become popular.
Knowledge was truly precious.
"And this."
Old Zhao pointed to the key.
"This is from Old Zhou in the physics department."
"Physics?" Chen Zhuo was a little surprised.
"Old Zhou saw your answer to the bonus question on the middle school entrance exam," Old Zhao said with a smile.
"Old Zhou said you’re the first elementary school student he’s seen who thought to use conservation of angular momentum to explain it."
Chen Zhuo didn’t say anything.
’So, the seeds were sown long ago.’
"Old Zhou has a strange temper, but he cherishes talent," Old Zhao continued.
"This is a spare key to the physics lab. He said you don’t need to attend the junior high physics classes either. If you want to do an experiment, just go there."
"But one thing: be safe. If you dare to play with fire in there, he’ll skin you alive."
Chen Zhuo picked up the key. It had the faint smell of machine oil.
"I understand."
Chen Zhuo carefully placed the key and the library card into the innermost compartment of his backpack.
"Go on."
Old Zhao waved his hand.
"Don’t waste that brain of yours."
Chen Zhuo didn’t go home.
Holding the still-warm library card, Chen Zhuo went straight to the top floor of the library.
The faculty resource room.
He pushed open the door, and the musty smell of old paper washed over him.
It was quiet inside, with only a few teachers sitting in a corner, looking up materials.
The evening sun slanted through the tall, floor-to-ceiling windows, illuminating motes of dust dancing in the beams of light.
The scent of knowledge was something Chen Zhuo could never get enough of.
He walked slowly to the mathematics section, his fingers gliding gently across the spines of the books.
*Algebra*, *Analytic Geometry*, *Probability Theory*...
Finally, his fingers came to rest on a thick book.
A dark green hardcover, with large, gilt-stamped characters.
*Introduction to Advanced Mathematics*.
Author: Hua Luogeng.
This was a classic published years ago by Science Press, a textbook written specifically for the gifted youth program at Huake University.
Chen Zhuo pulled the book from the shelf and found a seat by the window.
He opened it to the first Chapter.
This time, there was no language barrier, none of the Russian declensions that had given him such a headache.
Just familiar, block-like characters.
"Functions and Limits..."
Chen Zhuo read very slowly.
As he read deeper, a strange sensation spread through his mind.
For over a year, he had brute-forced his way through memorizing all the formulas in the Russian edition of the *Calculus Tutorial*.
Those formulas were like a pile of precision parts scattered on the ground.
He knew what they looked like, knew what they were called, and even knew how to assemble them,
But he didn’t know *why* they were designed that way.
He was missing the blueprint.
And now, this book was that blueprint.
When he read the Chinese explanation of the ε-δ language in the book, the vague Russian definition that had always been hazy in his mind was suddenly struck by lightning.
"For any given positive number ε, there always exists a positive number δ..."
’So that’s what it means!!!’
’So that damn Russian word "окрестность" (neighborhood) was for this kind of rigorous approximation!’
CLICK.
A crisp sound.
That was the sound of a mental loop closing.
Chen Zhuo felt as if a lock in his mind had been opened.
At that moment, the Russian formulas he had memorized by rote were infused with a soul.
They were no longer rigid symbols. They came alive, beginning to flow, transform, and interlock across his cerebral cortex.
An indescribable thrill shot up his spine to his scalp.
’That’s it.’
’That’s it.’
’That’s it.’
’This is mathematics.’
’This is the power of logic.’
’It doesn’t require you to sweat buckets in the real world. It only needs you to complete a single derivation on paper to bring you a pleasure more intense than any sensory stimulation.’

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