In mid-March, the dreary rain that had plagued Huizhou for days finally let up.
Once the last cold snap of winter passed, the temperature shot up like a rocket. Along the campus’s main road, the branches that had been bare all winter were now, seemingly overnight, covered in a fine layer of green buds.
The season of renewal had arrived.
A restless energy that made it impossible to sit still began to fill the air.
For sixteen-year-old Lu Jia, who was in the throes of puberty, this restlessness was a deadly catalyst.
It was a little after two in the afternoon.
Chen Zhuo walked out of the applied physics laboratory building.
He had spent the entire morning and half the afternoon in the computer lab, staring at a screen and sifting through complex data to troubleshoot testing errors. Now, his eyes felt a little sore.
As he stepped out of the building, a warm spring breeze greeted him. Chen Zhuo stopped, tilted his head back, and gave a long stretch, raising a hand to rub his neck.
He temporarily cleared his mind of everything—fluid dynamics, boundary conditions, all of it.
His mouth was dry, and all he wanted was to go back to his dorm, drink some water, and collapse in his chair for a bit.
He slowly ambled back to the dormitory.
He went up to the second floor and pushed open the door to Room 215.
Wang Dayong wasn’t there. The room was quiet.
Chen Zhuo pulled out his chair, sat down, and let out a long sigh of relief.
He went out to get a cup of hot water and started walking back.
As he passed Room 216, he saw its door was wide open.
Chen Zhuo heard a series of heavy sighs coming from inside. He stopped and glanced in.
Lu Jia was the only one in the dorm.
Lu Jia hadn’t gone to study hall, nor to the library.
He was slumped over his desk like a cat with its fur standing on end.
He had carefully taped two pieces of scratch paper together, and they now covered his entire desk.
Chen Zhuo, cup in hand, sauntered inside.
He didn’t say a word, simply standing behind Lu Jia and looking down at the sheet of paper that took up the whole desk.
It was a massive, complex tree diagram with countless branches extending outward.
The nodes of each branch were covered in formulas and annotations, like P(A|B), Nash equilibrium, and sympathetic nerve threshold.
Seeing these hardcore derivations, Chen Zhuo’s academic instincts twitched.
At first glance, his immediate thought was that Lu Jia was working on some kind of hardcore, interdisciplinary mathematical model.
After all, they were in the program for gifted youth; it was perfectly normal for them to be tinkering with academic projects far beyond the standard curriculum.
Driven by pure academic curiosity, Chen Zhuo even took half a step forward, cup in hand, wanting to see which boundary condition Lu Jia was stuck on. He was ready to offer a casual word or two of advice.
Then, at the very top, a line was written in bold:
The Optimal Solution Deduction Model for Making an Approach.
The air fell silent for a few seconds.
Chen Zhuo’s hand, holding the cup, paused mid-air.
He took a sip of his hot water to hide the smile creeping onto his face, then gently tapped the back of Lu Jia’s chair twice with his knuckles.
"So, how long has this... national-level research project of yours been underway?"
Lu Jia jumped, startled, and the pen in his hand streaked a long black line across the scratch paper.
He whipped his head around. Seeing it was just Chen Zhuo standing behind him with a cup, his tense shoulders finally slumped.
"Brother Zhuo, you walk so quietly!"
Lu Jia heaved a long sigh, deflating like a punctured ball. He tossed his pen onto the desk and slumped back in his chair.
He pointed at the scratch paper on his desk—the fruit of his painstaking labor—his voice thick with frustration and a sense of being wronged.
"Don’t laugh at me. I’m about to die from stress."
Lu Jia rubbed his face in frustration.
"I spent all of winter break on this. Then, for the past half-month since the semester started, I’ve been doing fieldwork, collecting all sorts of data and constantly correcting for environmental variables."
"But I’ve discovered that no matter how I combine the parameters, no matter what time or place I choose, the equation simply won’t resolve."
Chen Zhuo looked at his woeful expression and couldn’t help but let out a soft chuckle.
He casually pulled over Chu Ge’s nearby chair and sat down next to Lu Jia.
He set his cup on the corner of the desk, folded his hands in his lap, and assumed a posture of someone ready to listen intently.
"Tell me about it," Chen Zhuo said, his tone placid.
"What scenarios have you considered?"
The moment the conversation turned to his model, Lu Jia’s scholarly intensity returned. He sat up straight, pulled the scratch paper closer, and pointed to the largest branch on the left with the tip of his pen.
"For the first scenario, I imagined approaching her while in line for food at Cafeteria No. 2."
Lu Jia’s speech quickened, as if he were presenting an academic paper.
"The braised pork window at Cafeteria No. 2. She goes there every Wednesday at noon, without fail. I’ve observed that the window’s foot traffic reaches its absolute peak between 12:10 and 12:20 PM every Wednesday."
"This is a classic open-environment setting."
Lu Jia drew a circle on the scratch paper.
"According to my calculations, if I get in line behind her, there will be an average of 3.5 eyewitnesses within a one-meter radius."
Chen Zhuo leaned back in his chair and nodded slightly.
Lu Jia continued.
"In game theory, being observed by a group drastically alters an individual’s decision-making process. In an open environment like this, with at least three and a half strangers looking on, a person’s self-preservation instinct and social defense mechanisms are activated."
"If I suddenly ask for her WhatsApp number, the probability of her issuing a defensive rejection increases by forty percent due to environmental pressure. This is because, in a public setting, rejection is the safest option and carries the least social risk."

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