11:30 PM.
The snow in Huizhou showed no signs of stopping. In fact, it was falling thicker and faster.
The hallway was quiet. Most of the dorm rooms had already turned off their lights.
The pressure of final exams hung like an invisible net over the dorm building, a place filled with geniuses, making even breathing feel urgent.
Dorm 216.
Lu Jia sat at his desk, the glasses on his nose fogging up slightly from the room’s warmth.
He held a black gel pen, writing rapidly in a thick scratchpad.
The scratchpad was covered in dense calculus formulas and probability theory derivations.
The whiteboard that had previously been filled with diagrams of potential "accidental" encounter routes between the library and Cafeteria No. 3 was now wiped completely clean, not a trace remaining.
Lu Jia finished a line of calculation, then jabbed the tip of his pen hard onto the paper and stopped.
He stared at the result for two seconds, seemingly displeased with it. Then, as if in a fit of pique, he drew two heavy black circles over it, blotting the formula into a dark mess.
Chu Ge sat in a swivel chair by the window opposite him, a lollipop stick dangling from his mouth.
Rows of green characters flickered across his computer screen as his hands flew across the keyboard.
After typing the last line and hitting enter, Chu Ge stopped, leaned back in his chair—which let out a CREAK—and turned to look at Lu Jia.
"Lu Jia, you’re really not gonna look?"
Chu Ge asked, his words muffled by the lollipop stick he was chewing on.
Lu Jia didn’t even look up. His back was ramrod straight, and his pen was scratching aimlessly on the paper.
"You know, I spent a good while writing this packet-sniffing script."
Chu Ge slid his chair forward about half a meter, getting closer.
"The logistics center’s crappy server doesn’t even have a decent firewall. The senior’s meal card records for the past month are all sitting in my backend right now. Twelve rice bowls on the first floor, four clay pot congees on the second. I even dug up the fact that she got scrambled eggs with tomato for lunch today."
Chu Ge reached out and tapped the edge of his computer screen.
"With this raw consumer data, you can build a model and go intercept her on the second floor tomorrow at noon. Those Markov chains you drew on the whiteboard before would be perfect for this. So, you wanna see it or not?"
Lu Jia stopped writing.
He didn’t turn around, but his shoulders slumped slightly, like a sullen gourd nursing a great injustice.
"No," Lu Jia said, his voice muffled.
"Why are you so stubborn? The data’s being spoon-fed to you."
Chu Ge raised an eyebrow in confusion.
"Isn’t this better than just guessing wildly?"
Lu Jia finally turned his head.
He pushed up the glasses that had slid down his nose and stared intently at the advanced calculus workbook on his desk. His tone was a mix of resentment and neurotic muttering.
"Your meal card data has a physical blind spot..."
Lu Jia’s voice wasn’t loud. It was as if he were arguing with Chu Ge, but also with himself.
"You can hack the cafeteria’s card scanners, but can you hack the convenience store under the girls’ dorm? Do you know how many packs of Master Kong Braised Beef Noodles she has stashed in her drawer? Do you know if her roommate happened to buy a case of sausages today?"
Lu Jia muttered in a rapid-fire burst, his voice growing more aggrieved with each word.
"You haven’t even identified all the core hidden variables! Any probability you calculate is just useless garbage... Do you hackers even understand the concept of *force majeure*? Instant noodles are a *force majeure*..."
Hearing Lu Jia’s tirade of instant noodle-induced PTSD, Chu Ge froze for two seconds before nearly falling out of his chair with laughter.
"HAHAHAHA, seriously, Lu Jia, did that thing Brother Zhuo said before completely break you?"
Chu Ge slapped his thigh as he laughed.
"Did a single bowl of instant noodles shatter your academic convictions?"
Lu Jia ignored Chu Ge’s mockery.
He petulantly flipped the page of his scratchpad, making the paper RUSTLE loudly.
He buried his head even lower, his pen flying across the page as he jotted down a new integral equation, all while muttering under his breath in an aggrieved tone.
’Human behavior is so illogical... I should just stick to my advanced calculus. At least in this problem, the trajectory of a small ball won’t change because it decides to hide under the covers during a blizzard...’
"Alright, Professor Lu, you’ve seen the light."
Chu Ge chuckled and turned back to his computer.
"If you won’t look, I will. I’m curious to see what these logistics folks eat all day."
Just as he spoke, the sound of footsteps echoed from the hallway.
The footsteps stopped outside the door to 216.
The door was pushed halfway open, and Wang Dayong stood in the doorway, holding a canvas bag stuffed with books and scratch paper.
"Yo, still up?"
Dayong stomped the snow off his feet and called out in a loud voice.
Lu Jia put down his pen and turned around. Chu Ge also looked away from his computer screen.
"Dayong, does your lab always keep you this late?" Chu Ge asked, looking at Dayong. "It’s almost midnight, and you’re just getting back?"
"Don’t even ask."
Dayong walked in, casually dropped his canvas bag next to Chu Ge’s desk, and stretched his stiff neck.
The moment Lu Jia heard "PhD students solving a problem," his eyes lit up behind his glasses. His instinctive curiosity about difficult problems overpowered his earlier resentment.
"What kind of problem? Partial differential equations? Or deriving boundary conditions in quantum mechanics?" Lu Jia asked.
He always had an innate thirst for knowledge when it came to theoretical challenges.
Dayong leaned against Chu Ge’s desk and grinned.
"It was partial differential equations. They filled up two huge whiteboards."
Dayong pointed to the corner of the room.
"The same kind of whiteboards you guys use for your calculations, completely filled."
"What were they solving for?" Lu Jia pressed.
"They were trying to figure out why a piece of vacuum equipment was producing a 50-hertz background noise spike at fixed intervals," Dayong said.

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