My IQ has been increasing year by year.

In October, the wind in Huizhou already carries a hint of coolness.

The second floor of the old library at USTC.

The ivy leaves swayed outside the narrow wooden lattice window, blocking some of the afternoon sunlight.

Chen Zhuo sat in his usual spot against the wall.

Several yellowed draft papers lay flat on the table, covered with matrices and partial differential equations.

On the left side of the paper was a thick foreign journal, its cover edge worn and frayed; it was a bound volume of Physical Review Letters published in 1998. Chen Zhuo's pen paused in mid-air.

The ink on the pen nib had dried slightly because it hadn't been used for a long time.

He looked at the mathematical model on the paper, which was only half-derived, and his brows furrowed slightly.

It's a dead end.

He attempted to use the tools of algebraic geometry to reconstruct a classic topological boundary problem in string theory from the 1980s.

However, when calculating the fourth nested step, the parameters became an infinity that could not be eliminated.

He flipped through the 1998 journal beside him.

The experimental data inside is too outdated.

Physics developed too fast at this stage, especially regarding the assumption of quantum states.

He needs the latest preprint.

We need those papers that haven't been officially published yet, even those from yesterday or this morning.

There are no printed copies of the collection.

Chen Zhuo closed the pen cap with a soft click.

He folded the draft paper, tucked it into the book, and stood up.

Borrowing from the first floor.

Su Wei was tidying up a box of brand-new library cards with her head down, her sleeves rolled up to her wrists.

Chen Zhuo placed the thick PRL bound volume on the wooden surface.

Su Wei raised her head.

He pulled out the card from the back of the book and took the seal.

The movements were clean and efficient.

"The return date is not overdue."

Su Wei inserted the cards into the sorting box and put the books on the cart behind her.

Is it possible for HKUST to subscribe to the print version of a foreign physics preprint for the current month?

Chen Zhuo asked casually.

Su Wei continued working with her hands, her voice calm.

"Impossible. Even the fastest print journals take one or two months to arrive. They go by sea, through customs, and then to the departments for distribution. Even if it's a Mature or Science journal, it will be outdated by the time it reaches the library." She glanced at Chen Zhuo.

"If you want to see the latest content, you can only go to the computer room of the network center. However, the computer room is connected to the education network, so domestic websites are fine."

"But if you're downloading foreign literature, you have to squeeze into that pitifully small amount of international bandwidth. If you can't find a good foreign proxy IP, the download speed... is basically a matter of luck." Chen Zhuo nodded.

"Okay, thank you."

He turned and walked out of the old library.

Two days later.

8 PM.

USTC Network Center, Third Computer Lab.

The air was filled with a mixed smell of plastic shoe covers and computer case ventilation.

The server room was full of people.

Most of the screens flashed early text-based Undead game interfaces, or 0-character chat windows.

The keyboard clattered and clicked incessantly.

Chen Zhuo sat in front of a computer in the corner.

This is a Pentium 4-equipped machine, and the 15-inch flat-screen monitor is a bit too bright.

Chen Zhuo did not open the browser.

He is manually configuring the CTeX compilation environment in a newly created folder on drive D.

He needs to type out the mathematical formulas he has been working out on paper over the past few days into an electronic version for easy reference and modification later.

Ten minutes later, the environment was set up.

Chen Zhuo opened the black-and-white text editor, placed his hands on the keyboard, and began to type in the code from memory.

He was banging very fast.

But the computer is very slow.

Each time a compilation preview is performed, the computer case emits a dull hum, and the funnel icon on the screen spins for several seconds.

Chen Zhuo waited patiently.

After typing out two pages of formulas, he minimized the editor and opened Internet Explorer.

I entered the arXiv URL into the address bar.

The webpage loads very slowly.

The progress bar at the bottom is crawling forward like a snail.

It took a full two minutes for the rudimentary English search interface to appear.

Chen Zhuo entered a few keywords.

Refresh the list.

He found a preprint paper that had been uploaded just three days earlier from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Click to download.

The file is small, a 2.5WB PS format file.

However, when the download dialog box popped up, the speed displayed was only a few KB per second.

Estimated time: 45 minutes.

Chen Zhuo leaned back in his chair, watching the slowly moving blue progress bar.

He took two brand-new 3.5-inch floppy disks out of his bag and placed them on the table.

A floppy disk has a capacity of only 1.44 WB.

He still needs to compress and split the downloaded document into multiple volumes before he can copy it away.

Time passed little by little.

The air in the computer room was getting increasingly stuffy.

9:50 p.m.

The download progress has reached 98%.

Chen Zhuo sat up straight, preparing to compress.

At the entrance to the computer room, the elderly administrator was shaking a brass bell vigorously.

"It's 10 o'clock! Time to shut down the internet and power on! If you haven't saved yet, save now!"

The old man's voice echoed in the computer room.

Chen Zhuo glanced at the screen.

The download speed suddenly stopped and dropped to OKB/s.

The surrounding computers began to go black one after another, and the students pushed back their chairs, complaining as they walked out.

9:55.

The download box on the screen suddenly displayed a red cross.

Connection timed out.

Almost there.

Chen Zhuo stared at the red cross for a while, his finger hovering over the mouse for an extended period. He rubbed his temples, a slight headache nagging at him, and sighed. 99% chance of crashing and disconnecting from the internet.

I'm in an unusually wonderful mood.

Close the browser.

Save the LaTeX code file you just typed and drag it to drive A.

A series of clicking sounds came from the computer case.

The file has been copied in.

Chen Zhuo pulled out the floppy disk, put it in a plastic box, and put it back in his schoolbag.

He stood up and followed the flow of people out of the computer room.

If this computer restarts tomorrow, the restore card on the motherboard will erase both the C and D drives.

He has to set up the LaTeX environment today, but he'll have to do it all over again tomorrow.

A few more days passed.

An afternoon without classes.

When the computer lab network was finally working, Chen Zhuo downloaded all the papers in their entirety, compressed them into multiple volumes, and put them onto two floppy disks. He took the floppy disks and went into a printing shop outside the south gate of the school.

The print shop wasn't big; it contained two huge secondhand copiers, and the air was filled with the smell of a print shop.

The boss was a fat man in his thirties, smoking a cigarette as he copied teaching materials for someone.

"Boss, get some things ready."

Chen Zhuo walked to a printer connected to a computer and handed over the floppy disk.

"I'll insert it myself, create a folder, copy it out, and print it. Floppy disks are prone to viruses, so I'll have to delete them after I'm done."

The boss didn't even look up.

Chen Zhuo inserted the first floppy disk into the computer case.

"Clatter clatter."

The reading sound rang out.

Chen Zhuo double-clicked to open drive A.

The screen froze for a moment.

Immediately afterwards, a dialog box popped up:

[Disk not formatted, do you want to format it now?]

Chen Zhuo's hand, which was on the mouse, stopped.

He stared at the notification box for a full five seconds.

Damn it!

The floppy disk developed bad sectors, and the compressed files inside were corrupted.

This meant that his paper couldn't be decompressed, and all the mathematical formulas and code he had typed out on that disk all night were also lost. The print shop was noisy.

The copier makes a regular whooshing sound.

Chen Zhuo stared at the notification box and sighed silently in his heart.

He clicked "No".

With the sound of the floppy disk being ejected, he pulled it out, squeezed it in his hand, and then threw it into the wastepaper bin next to him with some regret.

"What's wrong? Is the hard drive broken?"

The boss leaned over and took a look.

"That's how this thing is; it'll be ruined if you squeeze it in your bag or get it a little damp. Do you have a backup?"

Chen Zhuo patted the dust off his hands and smiled helplessly.

"The backup is in my head, but can I just copy it directly from my head?"

Chen Zhuo looked at the floppy disks in the wastebasket, his tone revealing a self-deprecating sense of resignation.

The boss chuckled and flicked his cigarette ash.

"If I had that kind of high technology, I would have been working at the Academy of Sciences long ago. Let's start over, young man."

Chen Zhuo sighed and inserted another intact floppy disk, which contained two more slightly shorter paper PDFs.

Open it and click Print.

The laser printer next to it started preheating and began feeding paper.

A dozen minutes later.

Chen Zhuo held a stack of A4 papers that were still warm and smelled of ink.

It has a total of 120 pages.

"Double-sided printing, 15 cents per page, 18 dollars in total."

The boss pressed a few buttons on the calculator.

Chen Zhuo took out a twenty-yuan bill from his pocket and handed it over.

He took the two coins as change.

Stepping out of the print shop, the wind outside made the A4 paper in my hand rustle loudly.

Chen Zhuo walked along the path towards his dormitory.

As he walked, he did some mental calculations.

It cost me eighteen yuan to type up these two not-too-long articles today.

To keep up with the research progress of those people, he needs at least dozens of preprints of this volume every month, plus printing his constantly revised deduction manuscripts. The printing costs alone amount to several hundred yuan a month.

Moreover, there's the risk of having to rush to the server room to grab a computer, configure the environment, and risk damaging the floppy disks.

It feels a bit like a bad deal.

He now has a bank card.

Inside was 18,000 yuan, accumulated from various competition prizes.

In 2002, the average college student's monthly living expenses were only three or four hundred yuan.

18,000 yuan is enough for a down payment on half a small apartment in Huizhou.

But if he goes to the printing shop at his current pace, that money will be wasted.

It will only last two more years before it runs out of steam.

Knowledge is expensive.

Chen Zhuo pushed open the door to dormitory room 215 in building 4.

The room was a bit messy.

Wang Dayong, wearing shorts, was squatting in the middle of the aisle.

Several old newspapers were spread on the floor in front of him, with motherboards, capacitors, a few old memory sticks, and a soldering iron scattered on them. The air smelled strongly of pine resin.

"You're back?"

Wang Dayong, with a pencil in his mouth and a pair of tweezers in his hand, was carefully fiddling with something on the motherboard.

"Da Yong".

Chen Zhuo walked to his desk and put down the stack of freshly printed, still-warm A4 papers.

"If you keep welding like this in the room, when the dorm supervisor checks the rooms, she'll really think we're doing some kind of underground electrification."

Chen Zhuo pulled out a chair and sat down, casually making a joke.

Wang Dayong grinned and placed the soldering iron on the metal stand.

"Just messing around. I found a broken ASUS motherboard at the secondhand market yesterday. I saw that the chips weren't burned, but a few power capacitors were blown. I'll replace them and maybe it'll work." Wang Dayong dusted off his hands, stood up, picked up the water glass on the table, and took a big gulp.

Chen Zhuo glanced at the somewhat yellowed motherboard on the ground.

"Da Yong".

Chen Zhuo picked up the cup on his table and poured some hot water into it.

"If we were to build a Pentium 4 machine here, with top-of-the-line motherboard and graphics card, a large hard drive, and a flat-screen monitor for eye protection, how much would it cost?" Wang Dayong was taken aback.

He put down his water glass and wiped the sweat from his face with the towel draped around his neck.

"You want to buy a computer?"

"Um."

Chen Zhuo took a sip of hot water.

"Going to the server room to store code is too much of a hassle, and another floppy disk broke today."

Wang Dayong sat cross-legged on the edge of the lower bunk, starting to mentally process the price quote.

"If you only want this top-of-the-line host and monitor... a brand-name computer would probably cost around 12,000 or 13,000."

Wang Dayong touched his chin.

"But if you're sourcing the individual parts yourself, I can help you get the price down to around seven or eight thousand, but that configuration is incredibly expensive." For a hardware enthusiast, being able to access the top-of-the-line components at the time to build a PC...

Wang Dayong immediately became excited.

"OK."

Chen Zhuo nodded, his tone calm, as if he were buying a box of chalk.

"How about adding a private laser printer?"

Wang Dayong coughed twice, almost choking on his own saliva.

He stared wide-eyed at Chen Zhuo.

"What? A printer?" Wang Dayong thought he had misheard. "Laser?"

"Um."

Chen Zhuo pointed to the stack of printed documents on the table.

"Reading electronic versions hurts my eyes; I want to be able to print out the information whenever I need it."

Wang Dayong swallowed.

"Quite a few, buddy. Who buys one of these in their dorm? Even the most basic HP black and white laser printer costs several thousand yuan! The consumables for those things are ridiculously expensive." Chen Zhuo put down the water glass in his hand.

"Is 12,000 enough in total?"

Wang Dayong fell silent.

He looked at Chen Zhuo's calm face, which showed no hint of a joke.

"enough."

Wang Dayong nodded.

More than enough.

"it is good."

That's settled.

But after spending 12,000 yuan, the remaining 6,000 yuan simply cannot support his massive consumption of toner and paper a few years later.

He still needs to find a way.

To earn some money from consumables.

10 PM.

The dormitory building started to get noisy.

Dormitory 216 across the street.

A faint, rapid, muffled sound of keyboard typing could be heard.

Along with that, there was a creaking sound from the bed turning over.

Chen Zhuo sat at the table.

He opened the stack of documents that had just been printed that day and picked up his pen.

The noise from across the hall is much louder than usual.

He ignored it.

He lowered his head, and began to draw lines and write annotations on the blank spaces of the paper with his pen.

The ecosystem in this dormitory building is quite interesting.

Some are cobbling together scraps for hardware, some are pouring their hearts and souls into a few lines of code, and some are on the verge of collapse just to get a peaceful night's sleep. Chen Zhuo quietly turned a page.

He still needs to wait for an opportunity.

Chu Ge's keyboard clatter grew increasingly frantic.