The door to Dorm 215 was propped open for ventilation.
The ceiling fan overhead was on its highest setting. Its blades spun rapidly, and the whirring sound it made echoed in the quiet hallway.
Wang Dayong, shirtless, came out of the bathroom with a towel in his hand.
"This weather is seriously hot."
Wang Dayong slung the towel over his shoulder and glanced at Chen Zhuo, who was lying on his bed reading a book.
"You’re not going to sleep a bit more? We have to go to the Red Building for that placement test at two. You could still catch another twenty minutes or so."
"Nah, I’m wide awake."
Chen Zhuo answered without looking up.
The door to the adjacent Dorm 216 slammed shut. Chu Ge, his hair a complete mess, stormed in looking irritated.
He didn’t stand on ceremony, immediately pulling out the chair at Wang Dayong’s desk and plopping down. He began furiously twisting a Rubik’s Cube in his hands.
CLICK-CLACK-CLICK-CLACK, it went, nonstop.
Wang Dayong glanced at Chu Ge and asked casually.
"Perfect timing. I was just about to knock on your door. It’s almost two, time to get ready for that placement test in the classroom."
"Test, my ass."
Chu Ge tossed the Rubik’s Cube onto Wang Dayong’s desk and reached into his pocket for a coin.
"There’s nothing to it. They just give you a blank sheet of paper and tell you to write a formula. That old guy is just bored out of his mind."
"Who cares if he’s bored or not."
Wang Dayong wrung out his towel in the basin, replying casually.
"If he tells you to write, just write something. It doesn’t count toward your grade anyway. Even if you turn in a blank sheet, what’s he going to do? Kick you out of the school? By the way, what are you doing in our dorm?"
Chu Ge spun the coin between his fingers a couple of times, then pointed toward his own room, 216, and rolled his eyes dramatically.
"I don’t care if the old man is bored. What I don’t get is the psycho I’m rooming with."
"Just now, I was finally starting to feel a little sleepy and was about to take a nap. All of a sudden, like he was having a fit, he starts frantically pacing around the room, muttering who knows what!"
Chu Ge looked completely baffled.
"After pacing for a while, he grabbed his backpack and just left. I asked him where he was going, and you know what he said? He was going to the classroom to save a seat! For this test, at this time, what the hell kind of seat does he need to save?"
Wang Dayong found this hilarious. He asked while wiping his back with the towel.
"So he left, and your room is quiet now. That’s the perfect time to catch up on sleep. What are you doing over here?"
"Sleep, my ass."
Chu Ge let out an exasperated breath.
"After all his jumpy antics, any sleepiness I had was completely scared away. I was tossing and turning in bed but couldn’t fall asleep for the life of me. The longer I lay there, the more annoyed I got, so I just came over here to kill time with you guys."
"That blank sheet of paper has no standard answer, which makes him feel deeply insecure."
"Perhaps only by sitting in the classroom can he find some sense of security."
Chen Zhuo, still lying on his bed, chimed in quietly.
Chu Ge paused for a moment, then pursed his lips and said nothing more.
The afternoon sun beat down on the asphalt road, so bright it was hard to keep one’s eyes open. The leaves on the trees lining the road were curled from the heat, drooping listlessly.
The group of them walked slowly in the shade of the trees, heading toward the administration’s Red Building.
They reached the multimedia classroom on the second floor. As they pushed the door open, a wave of cold air washed over them.
Quite a few people were already seated inside the classroom.
It was the same group from last night, about forty new students, scattered in twos and threes in their seats.
Chen Zhuo walked to the same seat he had occupied the previous night.
Lu Jia was already there.
Today he wore a light blue short-sleeved shirt, the buttons still fastened up to the top.
Seeing Chen Zhuo approach, Lu Jia stopped what he was doing and gave a proactive nod.
"You’re here."
Lu Jia’s voice was quiet, still tinged with a shyness that hadn’t completely faded.
Chen Zhuo pulled out a chair and sat down, giving a grunt of acknowledgment.
He glanced at Lu Jia’s desk.
The thick, line-ruled notebook was gone. On the desk were only two sharpened pencils and a white eraser, arranged very neatly.
Chen Zhuo looked away and said nothing.
In the last row of the classroom, in the corner by the back door.
Su Wei sat there quietly.
She wasn’t looking around, nor was she speaking to the person next to her. She just kept her head down, her gaze fixed on the clean, light wood-colored desktop.
Her presence was so faint she was like a wisp of air.
1:58 PM.
The classroom door opened.
Xue Boyong walked in.
He wasn’t wearing his gray jacket today. Instead, he had on a white shirt that had been washed soft, with a pair of reading glasses perched on his nose.
In one hand, he held his thermos, and in the other, a small stack of A4 printer paper.
The classroom fell silent.
Xue Boyong walked to the lectern and placed the stack of white paper on the desk.
He unscrewed the lid of his thermos and took a sip of water, his eyes scanning the students below through the lenses of his reading glasses.
"Alright, time for the test."
Xue Boyong pointed at the paper on the desk.
"Each of you gets one sheet. Write down your name, then write down a formula that you find most pleasing to the eye, the most beautiful. Add a sentence or two below it explaining why."
He waved his hand, signaling for the students in the front row to come up and pass out the papers.
"There are no subject limits. Math, physics, chemistry, computer code, even the ratios from a recipe—as long as you can explain what makes it beautiful, it counts."
"You have one hour. When you’re finished, place your paper on the lectern, and you can leave."
After speaking, Xue Boyong pulled over the wooden chair and sat down beside the lectern.
He pulled a folded newspaper for the day from his pocket, unfolded it, and began reading to himself.
The blank papers were quickly passed to everyone.
Wang Dayong stared at the stark white paper in front of him, a little troubled.
He was a practical man.
Growing up, he had dismantled more radios and repaired more televisions than he had taken tests.
The meshing of gears was beautiful. A well-soldered circuit board was beautiful. Even a freshly steamed meat bun was beautiful.
’This whole formula thing... isn’t it just a tool for calculation?’
Wang Dayong scratched the short hair on the back of his head.
He turned his head, wanting to see what Chu Ge was writing.
Chu Ge covered his paper tightly with his hand and shot him a sideways glance.
"What are you looking at? Think of your own."
Wang Dayong made a "tch" sound and turned back around.
"A tool is a tool," he muttered under his breath. "What’s all this fancy nonsense about?"
He picked up his pen and, decisively, wrote a large line of text in the middle of the paper.
Newton’s Second Law.
After writing it, he quickly added another line below.
"No complicated nonsense. Force pushes mass forward. The effort you put in is the result you get. It’s solid and useful."
After writing his name, Wang Dayong tossed his pen down.
Done.
Chu Ge sat beside him, spinning a coin in his hand, not putting pen to paper for a long time.
He looked out the window at the somewhat blinding sunlight.
’Physics is too old, math is too slow.’
His mind was filled with forums, code, and low-level protocols.
That was another world.
Chu Ge stopped spinning the coin and placed it on the desk.
He picked up his pen and, with a hint of mischievous provocation, wrote a simple equation on the paper.
Binary.
He scrawled a line of text below it in a wild cursive.
"The world is too chaotic, people’s minds are too messy. But in this set of rules, everything is just 0s and 1s. There are no gray areas. This is the language for creating a new world, cleaner than anything else."
Chu Ge read it over once, then capped his pen with satisfaction.
In a seat in the middle-left section.
Lu Jia’s hands were placed flat on his desk.
He knew this test had no score.
But some things were ingrained in his very bones.
He still craved order, craved rules, craved things that could absolutely not be wrong.
The real world was full of uncertainty: his parents’ expectations, his teachers’ evaluations, his classmates’ gazes.
Only in mathematical derivations was right, right, and wrong, wrong.
Lu Jia picked up the mechanical pencil and gently clicked the cap.
He lowered his head and, stroke by stroke, wrote with extreme neatness.
Euler’s Identity.
After finishing, he studied the symbols intently.
He wrote underneath:
"It connects the five most fundamental constants—the base of the natural logarithm, pi, the imaginary unit, 1, and 0—in a single equation. It turns all chaos into absolute order. Looking at it makes you feel safe."
After writing the last word, Lu Jia put his pencil down.
He let out a long breath.
In the corner.
Su Wei didn’t even pause for a second.
The moment the paper reached her hands, she uncapped her gel pen.
In her life.
There was only survival.
Survival required careful calculation.
Every penny, every bite of food, even every bit of memory space in her brain.
Waste was the original sin.
She placed the tip of her pen in the exact center of the white paper.
Her handwriting was very small, a habit born from not wanting to occupy any unnecessary blank space.
A line of formula appeared clearly on the paper.
Shannon’s Information Entropy Formula.
After writing the formula, she wrote a single sentence right below it in the same minuscule script.
"It gives the minimum amount of data needed to eliminate chaos, with zero redundancy, wasting not a single bit of space."
Su Wei capped her pen and slipped it back into her pants pocket.
Chen Zhuo sat in his seat and glanced out the window.
The leaves swayed gently in the wind.
He brought his gaze back to the paper in front of him.
Chen Zhuo picked up his pen.
There was no hesitation, no deliberation.
With a casual flick of his wrist, he left an extremely minimalist equation on the paper.
The Principle of Least Action.
He wrote only a very short sentence below it.
"The universe is lazy. All things, and all beings, seek the path of least effort."
After writing, Chen Zhuo put his pen down.
The sound of chairs scraping occasionally echoed through the classroom.
Some people had finished and were walking up to the lectern with their papers.
Xue Boyong didn’t even raise his head, his eyes still on his newspaper.
The students placed their papers down and quietly exited through the back door.
Wang Dayong stood up, picking up his paper.
"You leaving?"
He nudged Chu Ge’s arm.
"Yeah."
Chu Ge pocketed the coin from his desk and casually picked up his paper.
The two of them walked to the front, one after the other, and handed in their papers.
Chen Zhuo also stood up.
Lu Jia happened to have finished as well and walked over with him.
After placing their papers on the already sizable stack of answer sheets, the group left the classroom.
The wave of heat outside instantly enveloped them.
"Wanna go shoot some hoops?" Wang Dayong stretched his shoulders. "The sun’s gone down a bit now."
"Nah."
Chu Ge pulled a lollipop from his pocket and stuck it in his mouth.
"It’s so hot I can’t breathe. I’m going back to the dorm to lie down."
Chen Zhuo didn’t say anything, just started walking down the steps.
「Half an hour later.」
The classroom was empty.
Su Wei was the last to turn in her paper. She placed the sheet covered in minuscule handwriting on the very top of the stack and left quietly through the back door.
Xue Boyong put down his newspaper.
He took off his reading glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
Lifting his thermos, he finished the last half-mouthful of tea inside.
He stood up, straightened the stack of A4 papers on the lectern, and walked slowly out of the classroom, papers in hand.

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