He capped the pen and tossed it onto the desk.
He let out a long breath.
"Finished?"
Chu Ge had been watching from behind for a while. He didn’t really understand the specific meaning of the symbols, but he could recognize the smooth flow of someone finishing their work.
"Finished."
Chen Zhuo leaned back in his chair.
Chu Ge glanced at his watch.
"It’s almost twelve. Pack up, let’s go grab a bite at the cafeteria. We should head to the train station after."
Chen Zhuo didn’t get up to grab his suitcase.
He bent down.
His hand reached for the computer case under the desk, his fingers finding the power button.
He pressed it.
The screen flickered once, then lit up with the Windows XP startup screen.
Chu Ge was stunned.
He looked at the booting computer, then back at Chen Zhuo.
"Hey, man."
Chu Ge pointed at the computer screen.
"We’re about to leave, why are you turning on your computer now? You wanna play a game of Minesweeper before we go?"
Dayong also stopped what he was doing and looked over.
"I need to send a letter."
Chen Zhuo gripped the mouse and double-clicked the network connection icon on the desktop.
Dial-up, connecting to the campus network.
"A letter? You can just mail it downstairs," Dayong said.
"The post office downstairs can’t deliver this one."
Chu Ge leaned in a little closer.
He watched as Chen Zhuo placed his hands on the keyboard and began to type.
The crisp sound of keystrokes echoed in the dorm room.
Chen Zhuo wasn’t typing Chinese characters.
He was directly typing lines of English and formatting commands.
Chu Ge stared at the screen full of backslashes and English curly braces.
"Are you writing code?" Chu Ge was puzzled.
This stuff looked neither like C nor assembly language.
"A typesetting language."
Chen Zhuo’s eyes were fixed on the screen, his fingers never stopping.
He was translating the dozen or so lines of mathematical formulas he had just derived on the scratch paper, line by line, into machine-readable LaTeX code.
Under his fingertips, those once-abstruse symbols of algebraic geometry transformed into precise strings of characters.
「Fifteen minutes later.」
The derivation section was completely entered.
Chen Zhuo stopped typing, picked up the mouse, and clicked "Compile" at the top of the software.
A progress bar flashed by in an instant.
A PDF preview window popped up beside it.
Chu Ge glanced at the PDF.
The screen full of what had looked like gibberish code had transformed into a formal, clean English document of mathematical formulas. The equations were perfectly aligned, like a printed work of art.
The document was only two pages long.
There was no fluff, just mathematical derivations that got straight to the point.
"You’ve made this look like a proper academic paper," Chu Ge said, clicking his tongue in admiration. "Who are you sending it to, anyway?"
Chen Zhuo didn’t answer.
He typed in the URL for the Keda campus email.
Clicked "Compose."
In the recipient field, Chen Zhuo picked up the Princeton preprint from his desk.
He flipped to the first page.
Below the title, there was a row of authors’ names.
Chen Zhuo looked at the address and typed the same characters onto the keyboard.
Watching from the side, Chu Ge’s eyes slowly widened as he saw the email domain.
"Princeton?"
Chu Ge looked at the computer screen, then down at the English paper on Chen Zhuo’s desk.
Suddenly, he connected the two things in his mind.
"Holy shit..."
Chu Ge lowered his voice, looking at Chen Zhuo as if he were a monster.
"Don’t tell me you’ve been staring at this paper for the past two weeks just to find fault with it? And now you’re going to send what you found to the professor?"
Chen Zhuo’s hands rested on the keyboard.
He smiled, his tone gentle.
"It’s not about finding fault."
Chen Zhuo looked at the blank body of the email on the screen.
"They were building a road and ran into a big boulder. They decided to build a long overpass to go around it. I’m just writing to tell them that the boulder can actually be blown up."
Chu Ge swallowed hard.
He looked at Chen Zhuo and suddenly felt that this usually mild-mannered classmate possessed an inexplicably cold arrogance.
Yet he acted as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Chen Zhuo began to write the body of the email.
He didn’t use any flowery pleasantries.
It was a very proper academic email.
Chu Ge’s English was decent. Standing behind him, he silently translated the English Chen Zhuo was typing in his head.
Dear Professor Demian:
I have read your recent preprint on arXiv regarding the boundaries of multidimensional topological manifolds. The vision of this paper is admirable.
However, upon reading the derivation on Singularity elimination in Part Four, I found that the renormalization process may introduce additional computational redundancy.
I have attempted to introduce a partitioning method from discrete algebraic geometry; the specific derivation can be found in the attachment.
In the fourth step of the nesting, if this substitution is adopted, the Singularity can be naturally canceled out at the algebraic level, thus skipping the renormalization step.
I hope this crude derivation may be of some help to your research.
The body of the email was very brief.
The wording was formal and down-to-earth, without a trace of showing off. It was entirely the posture of a junior discussing academics.
Finally, Chen Zhuo hit the Enter key and typed out his sign-off.
Chen Zhuo.
Hua Country Science and Technology University.
He didn’t write that he was a freshman.
In the world of academia, all that matters is being right or wrong, not age.
Including his year would have made it seem like he was either fishing for sympathy or deliberately posturing.
Chen Zhuo clicked "Add Attachment."
He uploaded the two-page PDF file he had just generated.
Chen Zhuo gripped the mouse, moving the cursor to the "Send" button in the upper-left corner of the screen.
He didn’t hesitate. With a light tap of his index finger...
A blue progress bar appeared at the top of the webpage.
Two seconds later, the page refreshed.
A line of text appeared in the center of the screen:
Email sent successfully.
Chen Zhuo released the mouse.
He leaned back in his chair and gave a long stretch.
It was as if he had just finished a trivial piece of homework.
"Alright." Chen Zhuo stood up.
He bent down and pressed the power button on the computer case.
The system began to shut down.
The screen went dark.
Chen Zhuo unplugged the main power strip from the wall socket.
He placed the Princeton preprint, his own notes, and the scratch paper covered in derivations into a file folder.
He unzipped his suitcase and laid the folder flat at the very bottom.
Then he placed a few sweaters on top.
He zipped it up.
Chu Ge, who had been watching for a long time, finally snapped back to his senses.
"You just sent it like that?" Chu Ge was incredulous. "What if you calculated it wrong? What if they don’t even look at it?"
"If I got it wrong, then it’s just a joke. If they don’t look at it, I haven’t lost anything."
Chen Zhuo pulled out the handle of his canvas suitcase.
He picked up his slightly worn backpack and slung it over his shoulder.
"It’s an academic exchange, not a life-or-death contract. Just let it be."
By now, Dayong had already zipped up his huge suitcase and was holding a thermos full of hot water.
"Let’s go, let’s go. I don’t care about Princeton or whatever-ton. If we don’t leave now, we’ll miss the bus," Dayong urged.
Chu Ge also shouldered his backpack and zipped his down jacket all the way to the top.
The three of them walked out of dorm room 215.
Chen Zhuo, walking last, reached for the doorknob and pulled it shut.
THUD.
The door closed, and he put a padlock on it.
"Let’s go."
Chen Zhuo dragged his suitcase behind him.
In the hallway, the dorm supervisor was walking toward them from the other end, holding a megaphone.
"All rooms, make sure to cut the power before you leave! Close your windows tight! Take your trash with you! Don’t leave it to get moldy over the New Year!"
Chen Zhuo, Dayong, and Chu Ge followed the crowded flow of people down the stairs.
They walked out of the dormitory building’s main entrance, and the cold afternoon wind of Huizhou hit them in the face.
The main road at the campus gate was packed with taxis and three-wheeled rickshaws looking for fares, and students were carrying bags of all sizes.
Chen Zhuo blended into the crowd.
He looked up at the gray, overcast sky.
The green-skinned train would depart on time at three o’clock that afternoon.
It would rattle and sway through plains and farmland.
And in the dim light of the next morning, it would take him back to the familiar yet distant Zeyang City.
A place always filled with the hustle and bustle of city life, the aroma of egg crepes, and the boisterous voice of Zhang Qiang.
The New Year was coming.

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