My IQ has been increasing year by year.

On the playground of USTC, the plastic track was softened by the sun.

Military training has been going on for a week.

The formation of students from the gifted youth program stood under the trees at the very edge of the playground.

Because the students were of varying ages, the youngest was only eleven or twelve years old, and the oldest was only fifteen or sixteen.

Their instructor was a young man in his early twenties. Looking at this group of teenagers, he simply couldn't bring himself to subject them to any kind of grueling training. Meanwhile, other colleges were marching and practicing drills under the sun, drenched in sweat.

The gifted youth class only practiced standing at attention for ten or twenty minutes before the instructor waved them over to sit under a tree and sing. Wang Dayong sat on the grass, took off his camouflage hat, and fanned his face vigorously like a fan.

He was tall and sweated a lot; the back of his shirt was soaked through, leaving a large stain on his body.

"This military training is a joke." Wang Dayong picked up his water bottle and took a big gulp of water. "It's not as tiring as helping my dad with farm work back home." Chu Ge sat next to him, a foxtail grass he had just pulled from the ground dangling from his mouth.

He rolled up the sleeves of his camouflage uniform to his shoulders, revealing his arms.

"Utterly boring."

Chugo spat out the foxtail grass.

"Standing around in a daze all day is a waste of time. My computer's motherboard was just powered on, and the network cable was just installed the day before yesterday. I'm waiting to go back to the dorm to try out a new program." Chen Zhuo sat cross-legged against the tree trunk.

He didn't find it difficult to endure.

When standing at attention, he adjusts his breathing and puts his weight on the balls of his feet, treating it as a form of meditation.

He sat down and watched the energetic college students training hard on the playground, the wind occasionally rustling through the treetops. Suddenly, he felt that this military training wasn't so bad after all. At least it was pleasant to watch.

Chen Zhuo turned his head and glanced at the first row of the formation.

Lu Jia sat there.

Even during breaks, Lu Jia didn't slouch like the others.

He sat cross-legged upright, with his hands neatly placed on his knees.

"Neuropathy."

Chu Ge followed Chen Zhuo's gaze, pursed his lips, and muttered something.

"He's always so tense, it's exhausting just watching him."

Chen Zhuo withdrew his gaze, looked at Chu Ge's disgusted expression, and smiled.

"If you go over there now and force him to relax, he'll probably dismantle his skeleton right there and then."

Chen Zhuo's tone carried a hint of casual teasing.

"Let him stay tense. That's his shell. Without it, he won't know how to stand."

Chu Ge snorted and ignored him.

The two-week military training ended in monotony and sweltering heat.

During the performance, the junior class's formation marched sparsely, with uneven steps and varying heights.

The leader, sitting in the chairman's seat, simply smiled and clapped.

After all, the school didn't recruit them to march in formation.

With the National Day holiday over, the freshman courses were officially scheduled.

It's one o'clock at night.

216 Dormitory.

The main lights were not on inside.

On Chu Ge's desk, the heavy CRT monitor screen was lit, illuminating half of Chu Ge's face in a deathly pale light.

The cooling fan in the computer case emitted a low hum.

Chu Ge was wearing a pair of headphones, blasting loud rock music that blared out of the headphones, the faint drumbeats audible even in the quiet dormitory. His fingers flew across the keyboard.

It wasn't a regular keyboard, but an old-fashioned mechanical keyboard that he specifically found at a second-hand market.

It makes a crisp, even slightly harsh, sound when tapped.

He slammed the Enter key down hard.

Chu Ge stared intently at the scrolling black DOS window on the screen, where strings of white code rapidly scrolled upwards.

He was writing a web crawler to automatically scrape forum data, but he encountered a small problem: a certain port was being denied access.

He scratched his already messy hair in frustration.

He reached out and touched the coins and candy box on the table.

He tore open a lollipop and put it in his mouth, then pressed a one-yuan coin on the table and twisted it sharply with his fingers.

The coin spun rapidly with a crisp sound, resembling a silver top under the monitor's light, emitting a low, grating buzzing sound. Lu Jia lay on the bed.

He was covered with a thin blanket and curled up in a ball.

Two wads of sound-absorbing foam earplugs were stuffed into my ears.

But it didn't work.

The vibrations of the mechanical keyboard, and the seemingly endless low-frequency hum of a spinning coin.

Lu Jia was extremely sensitive to this subtle yet persistent noise.

The buzzing of the coins entered his ears, making his temples throb and his breathing become somewhat difficult.

He opened his eyes in the darkness and stared at the ceiling.

Can't sleep.

He has to get up at 6:30 tomorrow morning to memorize English words and preview new lessons.

If he doesn't sleep well, he'll be sleepy in class tomorrow.

If you doze off, you'll miss the key points the teacher emphasizes, and if you miss those points, you'll make mistakes on tests.

This chain of logic was running wildly in his mind, amplifying his anxiety.

Lu Jia turned over.

The bed frame creaked softly.

The clicking of the keyboard and the buzzing of the coins never stopped.

He closed his eyes tightly, trying to force himself to fall asleep.

Ten minutes have passed.

The buzzing of the coin finally reached its limit, and with the loss of inertia, the metal coin slammed onto the table with a dull thud.

Immediately afterwards, there was the sound of Chu Ge's fingers fiddling with a coin, and a new round of buzzing sound began again.

Lu Jia finally couldn't hold back any longer.

He threw off the blanket and sat up.

He removed the earplugs and reached out to grab the metal railing beside the bed.

"Chu Ge."

Lu Jia's voice was soft, with a slight hoarseness caused by lack of sleep and tension.

The keyboard was too loud, and with headphones on, Chu Ge didn't hear it at all.

Lu Jia took a deep breath and raised her voice slightly.

"Chu Ge, could you... keep your voice down?"

Chu Ge typed the last semicolon and pressed run.

A red error message popped up on the screen.

He was seething with anger, so he ripped off his headphones and hung them around his neck.

"What?"

Chu Ge turned his head and looked at the dark figure on the opposite bed, his tone very impatient.

Lu Jia swallowed hard.

"The keyboard noise is too loud, and the sound of you spinning a coin keeps me awake."

Chu Ge stared at the constantly scrolling red error codes on the screen, and irritably ruffled his messy hair.

"Brother, it's only a little past one o'clock."

Chu Ge's tone carried the frustration of someone who had stayed up all night unable to produce code, but he still managed to control himself somewhat.

"My program is stuck in a loop. If I turn off the power and shut down the computer now, all the data I captured in the past three hours will be lost."

He reached out and grabbed the spinning coin on the table, tossed it into the drawer, and pushed it closed.

"Fine, I'll stop spinning the coin, but I really can't stop typing."

Chu Ge turned back around, placed his hands on the keyboard again, a lollipop stick between his teeth, his eyes fixed on the screen. He muttered dismissively and helplessly, "Just squeeze that earplug tighter and get through the night. This damn code is stuck in my neck, I really can't stop..."

As the keyboard clattered again, Chu Ge added half a sentence without turning his head:

"Please bear with me. It'll be my treat at the second canteen tomorrow at noon."

Lu Jia sat on the upper bunk and slowly loosened her grip on the railing.

Chu Ge withdrew from the hard market, which can be considered a step back.

According to the teachings he'd been taught since childhood, since the other party had apologized and promised compensation, the matter should end there, with everyone compromising. But he didn't care at all what they'd eat at the second cafeteria for lunch tomorrow.

What he cared about was that there were less than five and a half hours left until his alarm clock went off at 6:30 in the morning.

The buzzing of the coins had indeed stopped, but the clatter of the keyboard still pricked his taut nerves like fine needles. Reasoning with him was useless.

Go and start an argument?

He certainly wouldn't.

Lu Jia silently picked up the two wads of foam earplugs that she had just placed next to her pillow.

He squeezed the sponge tightly with his fingers until it was thin and flat, and then stuffed it deep into the back of his ear.

The foam slowly expanded in her ear canal, reducing the sound slightly, but the sound of the keyboard slamming against the desk still seemed to travel up her nerves. Lu Jia slowly lay back down.

He pulled up the thin summer blanket and covered his head with it.

He wrapped himself up completely, head to toe, into an airtight cocoon.

the next morning.

Six o'clock in the morning.

The entire dormitory building was still deep in sleep.

216 Dormitory.

In the darkness, the hands of the mechanical alarm clock beside Lu Jia's pillow silently overlapped.

next second.

"Ring ring ring ring one"

The ear-piercing sound of metal clashing exploded in the cramped dormitory room.

Lu Jia sat up almost reflexively.

He turned off the alarm clock.

There was no lingering in bed, no buffer period after just waking up.

He was like a machine that had been forcibly powered on, groping in the dark to put on his cool clothes.

After getting dressed, he didn't get out of bed.

Instead, he leaned against the cold wall, holding a well-worn English vocabulary book for the CET-4 (College English Test Band 4).

Using the extremely faint light from the window, he began to memorize vocabulary words.

"Abandon, abandon, give up, aanermal, abnormal, abnormal..." His voice wasn't loud.

But that faint, rapid, emotionless buzzing sound, in the quiet morning, was like a persistent mosquito, frantically probing near one's ear. Across from me.

Chu Ge, who had barely finished typing a piece of code at 4:30 a.m., was now in a deep sleep.

He was startled by the sharp sound of the alarm clock and shuddered.

I had just pulled the covers over myself, wanting to go back to sleep, when I heard a chanting of English words coming from across the room.

Chu Ge turned over in frustration.

He covered his head tightly with the blanket.

Useless.

The word "Abnormal" clearly penetrated his ear along the metal pillars of the bunk bed.

Chu Ge suddenly threw off the blanket.

He was still grumpy from being half-asleep.

"Are you summoning a spirit this early in the morning?!"

Chu Ge closed his eyes, his voice hoarse as if he had swallowed sand, and roared angrily.

"Memorizing English at six o'clock? Do you think this is a senior high school cram school? Are you trying to kill us?!"

The sound of reciting texts from the upper bunk paused for two seconds.

Lu Jia neither refuted nor apologized.

Two seconds later.

"Abolish, Abolish, abolish."

The buzzing continued.

He just lowered his voice a little bit.

But it was only a little bit.

Chu Ge, lying on the lower bunk, desperately scratched his hair, pressed the pillow tightly against his head, and let out a mournful cry on the verge of collapse.

In this dormitory 216, which houses only two people, no one is innocent.

Chu Ge used the mechanical keyboard late into the night to exhaust Lu Jia's energy.

Lu Jia, on the other hand, precisely tormented Chu Ge's nerves with a double-ring alarm clock at six in the morning and English words.

As for the neighbor across the street...

Sunlight streamed through the gaps in the curtains, creating a beautiful scene of a blue sky with white clouds and a little backpack on a shoulder.

The door to dormitory 215 opened.

Wang Dayong was still snoring on his bed, fast asleep with his head sprawled out.

Chen Zhuo put on a clean short-sleeved shirt, grabbed his schoolbag, and tiptoed out the door.

The corridor was quiet.

When I passed by dormitory 216, the door was closed.

Chen Zhuo went downstairs and bought a fried dough stick and a cup of soy milk at the cafeteria.

After breakfast, he did not go to the large classroom.

The first and second periods this morning are general education courses.

It discusses the fundamentals of mechanics in university physics.

Chen Zhuo is exempt from this course.

I have no classes this afternoon.

He walked along the path in front of the forest, deeper into the campus.

The school bell rang.

In the large classroom of the third teaching building.

The old professor stood at the podium, holding chalk in his hand, drawing a force analysis diagram on the blackboard.

Dozens of students were sitting below.

Lu Jia sat in the middle of the first row.

He had a noticeable dark circle under his eyes, and his face was somewhat pale.

But he still sat upright.

The thick notebook was spread out in front of me.

The old professor wrote a formula on the blackboard, and Lu Jia immediately lowered his head and copied it into his notebook word for word.

The professor casually gave an example of forces in everyday life, and Lu Jialian quickly jotted it down in the blank space.

He was in a state of high tension, afraid of missing a single character.

The last row of the classroom.

Wang Dayong sat in the seat against the wall.

He rested his chin on his right hand, his eyes half-open and half-closed.

The speaker's voice was like a lullaby.

His head drooped little by little, his elbow slipped, and his chin hit the table.

Wang Dayong suddenly woke up, looked around, and found that no one was paying attention to him.

He quickly sat up straight and pretended to flip through the brand-new textbook in front of him.

I could only hold on for less than five minutes before my eyelids started drooping again.

Finally, he gave up resisting, crossed his arms, slumped onto the table, buried his head in it, and began to breathe evenly.

Chu Ge sat next to Wang Dayong.

He didn't sleep.

He opened the thick book "University Physics" and placed it on the table.

At the back of the textbook lay a copy of the magazine "Hacker Defense," published two months prior.

Turning to the middle page of the magazine, I saw it densely covered with code analyses about network protocol vulnerabilities.

Chu Ge was holding a ballpoint pen.

He didn't look at the blackboard, nor did he listen to the professor talk about Newton's laws.

On a piece of scrap paper next to him, following the train of thought in the magazine, he quickly wrote strings of characters and logical statements.

His writing was messy, with arrows and crossed-out corrections all over the paper.

He still hasn't found a solution to the bug in the web crawler program from last night; it keeps getting on his mind.

He tapped his pen on the table impatiently, making a soft tapping sound.

The old professor turned around during the lecture, erased part of the blackboard writing with the eraser, and chalk dust danced in the sunlight.