My IQ has been increasing year by year.

In December, the air in Huizhou is filled with a damp chill that seeps into your bones.

A thick layer of condensation formed on the windowpane, and the outside was shrouded in a hazy gray, with the sun rarely visible.

At this time of year, Chen Zhuo would especially miss the central heating he had when he lived in the north in his previous life.

The door to dormitory 216 was tightly shut.

The atmosphere inside the room was much more relaxed than it had been a few months ago.

Chu Ge sat in front of the computer.

He was wrapped in a thick black down jacket and wore a pair of fingerless, half-length woolen gloves.

The original loud, clanging mechanical keyboard with blue switches has been replaced with a regular silent keyboard.

Chu Ge tapped his fingers on it, making a barely audible sound.

Although it felt soft, at least it wouldn't torture Lu Jia's nerves like a pile driver anymore.

On the opposite bed, Lu Jia sat cross-legged, wrapped in a thick quilt, with only his head and two hands showing.

He was working on a set of past years' math analysis papers.

The pen tip glides across the paper quietly.

Chu Ge finished typing a piece of code and stopped.

He breathed a puff of white vapor into his palm and rubbed his hands together.

I'm a little stuck.

He instinctively wanted to stand up and spin around, to toss the coin in his hand so it jingled, and to crunch the hard candy in his mouth. Chu Ge reached for the candy box on the table, and just as he took out a candy and put it in his mouth, he picked up the one-yuan coin again.

He glanced at Lu Jia across from him.

Lu Jia was looking down at a problem, his brows furrowed slightly.

Chu Ge sighed.

He clutched the coin tightly in his hand, stood up, opened the door to Yang's house, went out, and then closed the door tightly behind him.

The cold wind outside hit Chu Ge's face directly.

He shivered from the cold, leaned against the wall, tossed the coin high into the air and caught it again, then bit down hard on the lollipop, forcing himself to stay awake in the biting cold wind. Lu Jia put down his pen and looked up.

Through the condensed glass door, he could vaguely see Chu Ge huddled up in the sun, stamping his feet to keep warm.

That guy who usually acts all high and mighty was tossing coins in the cold wind while scratching his head in frustration.

Looking back, the newly replaced silent keyboard on Chu Ge's desk was lying there quietly.

Lu Jia's gaze lingered on the keyboard for two seconds before turning to look at Chu Ge outside the window.

In his mind, he seemed to have performed a very simple variable balancing.

Lu Jia put down her pen and crawled out of bed.

He picked up the empty soda can on Chugo's desk, which he usually used to throw away discarded candy wrappers and plastic sticks, and threw it into the trash can.

Then he picked up the thermos, poured half a cup of hot water into a clean glass, and placed it next to Chugo's mousepad.

After finishing these tasks, he quickly crawled back into his bed and continued working on his problems.

A few minutes later.

Chu Ge pushed open the Yangmen door and walked in, bringing with him a thick chill.

He quickly closed the door to keep the cold wind out.

As soon as I sat down, I saw the cup of steaming water next to the mouse.

Chu Ge was taken aback.

He turned to look at Lu Jia on the bed, his Adam's apple bobbing as he was about to say something.

"It's getting colder today."

Before Chu Ge could utter a sound, Lu Jia, as if she had eyes in the back of her head, spoke first at lightning speed.

He had his back to Chu Ge, wrapped himself tightly in the blanket, and spoke in a muffled voice with a stiff, unnatural tone.

"Don't catch a cold. Sneezing and coughing in the middle of the night is noisy."

In short, it was concise and to the point, effectively blocking all possible lines of dialogue from Chu Ge.

Chu Ge leaned back in his chair, watching Lu Jia's back curled up like a hedgehog. He swallowed the words that were on the tip of his tongue, and gave a silent smile. He picked up the water glass, warmed his frozen fingers in his hands.

"I won't die." Chu Ge took a sip of hot water. "I'm a man who's going to change the world. Even the King of Hell won't take me."

The room returned to silence, with only the muffled sound of keyboards and the scratching of pens.

215 Dormitory.

As soon as you open the door, you're greeted by a strong smell of pine resin.

Wang Dayong sat at the table, holding a soldering iron, and was working hard on a Walkman that had been disassembled into pieces.

Chen Zhuo came out of the bathroom carrying a washbasin. He had just washed his hair, which was still half-dry.

"Dayong, your business scope is getting wider and wider."

Chen Zhuo put down the basin and picked up a towel to dry his hair.

"They fixed the radio the day before yesterday, the water heater yesterday, and today they're even fixing the Walkman! Where did they all come from?"

"The one next door."

Dayong touched the solder wire with the soldering iron and carefully soldered it onto a tiny contact point.

"The tape wouldn't turn. I took it apart and found the motor wasn't broken, but the drive belt inside had worn out and broken. I found a rubber band of about the same thickness and put it on, and also resoldered the loose wires." "Do you charge a labor fee?"

"It's nothing, we just couldn't resist their insistence on paying, and we haggled for ages."

Dayong blew the smoke off the circuit board and put down the soldering iron.

"Then they said they'd cover my breakfast for a week, and that was it."

Chen Zhuo shrugged and said nothing.

He pulled out his chair and sat down.

The book still contained that twenty-odd-page Princeton preprint.

The little question mark drawn in pencil still sits quietly next to the formula on the fourth page.

Chen Zhuo stared at the question mark.

This document has been sitting here for a while now.

To be honest, Chen Zhuo doesn't have any ideas yet.

I simply treated it as a complex after-school thinking puzzle.

Occasionally, after taking a shower, or during a break like now while listening to Dayong fixing things, he would think about it a couple of times in his mind.

Chen Zhuo took out a blank sheet of draft paper from the drawer.

He didn't look at the specific text of the paper; that massive renormalization formula had already been broken down into individual variables in his mind. He wrote an integral symbol on the draft paper.

Following Princeton's original line of thought, he attempted to retrace this path using traditional continuous calculus.

The pen tip moved smoothly across the paper.

The first step, defining the manifold, went smoothly.

The second step, boundary convergence, is fine.

The third step is to substitute the parameters.

Now we've reached the fourth step.

Chen Zhuo's movements slowed down.

He watched the variables accumulate on the paper, and as the calculations deepened, the value in the denominator began to approach zero geometrically. In a continuous mathematical model, the denominator approaching zero infinitely means that the entire result will inevitably lead to an abyss.

Infinity.

This is the deadlock.

That's why those people at Princeton insisted on adding a bloated patch here, using complex renormalization to forcibly offset this infinity. Chen Zhuo stopped writing.

Dayong had just finished working on his Walkman, closed the plastic casing, and pressed the play button.

A faint sound of music came from the headphones.

"It's done."

Da Yong clapped his hands in satisfaction, turned to look at Chen Zhuo, and leaned over to take a look at the draft paper on his desk.

The paper was covered with nested integrals and limit symbols.

Although Da Yong was a hands-on enthusiast, his background from the University of Science and Technology of China's gifted youth program was undeniable. He glanced at Chen Zhuo's pen and immediately spotted the crux of the problem. "At this point in the equation, the denominator just throws away zero."

Da Yong frowned and pointed at the variable.

"In circuit terms, isn't this equivalent to breaking down a capacitor and creating a short circuit? The current would become infinitely large instantly, and the board would burn through on the spot." "Yes, it definitely burned through."

Chen Zhuo capped his pen, speaking casually.

"What happened to the person who wrote this article?"

Dayong pointed to the English document pressed under the glass plate.

"They didn't turn off the power."

Chen Zhuo smiled.

"They found a whole bunch of extremely complicated compensation parameters and forcibly added an extremely huge heat sink to the short circuit point, which forcefully suppressed the overflowing energy." After hearing this, Dayong, out of his hardware geek instincts, showed an extremely disgusted expression on his face.

"Tsk~"

Da Yong pursed his lips.

"When the motherboard short-circuits, wouldn't the normal person's thought process be to quickly connect a resistor in front, or simply cut that section of copper foil with a blade and run a jumper wire around it? Who would risk a short circuit by adding such a heavy heatsink? Would the case even be able to hold it up?"

After listening, a hint of a smile flashed in Chen Zhuo's eyes.

Da Yong's most brutal theory of hardware repair precisely pierced through the obsession of the Princeton professors with mathematics.

"It can't be covered up, it looks terrible, and it severely slows down the entire system."

Chen Zhuo leaned back in his chair, looking at the discarded drafts on the paper.

"So, what I want to do now is cut the copper foil in this equation, and just send a line to bypass this singularity."

"Then let's use a flying line, your hand is so steady."

Da Yong nonchalantly picked up the rosin on the table, preparing to tidy up his tools.

"I'm still looking."

Chen Zhuo stretched, showing no signs of anxiety.

"What are you looking for?"

"Find a suitable tool."

Chen Zhuo did not fight to the death.

If it doesn't work, it means the tools are wrong.

Chen Zhu crumpled the half-written draft paper into a ball and casually threw it into the trash can next to the table.

He opened a basic physics textbook next to him.

That unique sense of relaxation, so characteristic of Chen Zhuo, appeared exceptionally calm under the lamplight of a winter night.

Mid-January.

Huizhou experienced its first snowfall of the winter.

The snow wasn't heavy, and it quickly melted into mud and water on the ground, making the damp and cold feeling even stronger.

Final exams are approaching.

The old library at USTC was filled with students preparing for exams, and the air was thick with a somber atmosphere of studying.

Chen Zhuo carried several foreign books that were as thick as bricks and walked to the borrowing station.

Su Wei was stamping an archive stamp on a stack of newly arrived journals with her head down.

The movements are mechanical, but extremely efficient.

The sound was neither too loud nor too soft, and had a good rhythm.

Chen Zhuo placed the book in his hand on the wooden surface.

Su Wei stopped what she was doing and looked up.

She glanced at Chen Zhuo, said nothing, took the library card from his hand, and swiped it on the card reader.

Then he turned to the title page of those books and skillfully stamped the return date on them.

"The Russian version of 'Fundamentals of Algebraic Topology' you're looking for is in a corner of the East Wing reading room, and no one has borrowed it yet."

Su Wei pushed the book and library card to Chen Zhuo in a flat tone, as if she were reporting the weather.

Chen Zhuo was somewhat surprised.

He had only asked her casually a couple of days ago, but he didn't expect her to remember.

"Your brain works much better than a library's search system."

Chen Zhu put away the library card and said with a smile.

"The retrieval system uses electricity, which is expensive." Su Wei picked up the stamp again, her gaze returning to the journals on the table.

"I use steamed buns from the cafeteria for energy, which should be more economical than that."

Chen Zhuo smiled.

"Exams are coming up soon, aren't you going to study?"

Chen Zhuo asked casually.

"I just finished reading it, and I've written it all down."

Su Wei turned a page without looking up.

Chen Zhuo gave a thumbs up.

"sharp."

He didn't linger, picked up the book, and turned to walk towards the East District reading room.

Let's leave each other alone and live our own lives peacefully.

Go back to dorms.

The atmosphere of the first-year final exams has completely enveloped this floor.

The corridor was filled with the muttering of people reciting politics and English.

Even Chu Ge, who lived across the hall, opened the door to room 215 with a worried look on his face, holding a book on ideological and political education.

"Dayong, can I borrow some Brain Gold (a health supplement)?"

Chu Ge plopped down on Da Yong's bed and threw the book aside.

"This stuff is way harder to understand than code. Why do we still have to take this exam? When were these policies and guidelines set? Why do we still have to take this exam?" Dayong was checking the answers on an electrical engineering exam paper without turning his head.

"Aren't you a geek with a photographic memory? Just create an index and you're done."

"Damn it, code is supposed to be logical, this has no logic at all!"

Chu Ge frantically rubbed his hair.

He turned to look at Chen Zhuo sitting at the table.

Chen Zhuo was reading the book "Fundamentals of Algebraic Topology" that he had just borrowed from the library.

"The advanced mathematics exam is tomorrow." Chu Ge leaned over and glanced at the book full of Russian letters.

"Aren't you going to study instead of reading gibberish?"

Chen Zhuo shifted his gaze from the book, turned to his advanced mathematics textbook, and casually picked up a pen.

"Didn't the professor mention the key points of advanced mathematics during his lecture last week?"

Chen Zhuo spoke calmly, with a hint of taking it for granted.

"The inverse and existence of Taylor expansion, and complex integrals with parameters and limit commutation—once you memorize these two patterns, the rest is just manual labor." Chu Ge was stunned.

He recalled his advanced mathematics class from last week.

He seemed to be thinking about how to debug a software interface at that time.

"When did he say that? Wait, you were here that day?"

Chu Ge was on the verge of collapse.

"In the ten minutes before he took his second sip of water and wiped the blackboard, I came over during that class to see what the test was about. It was very simple."

Chen Zhuo looked at him.

"Back then, you seemed to be about to fall asleep."

Chu Ge gasped.

He silently picked up his political science textbook, turned around, and walked out of room 215.

"They're all perverts."

Before leaving, he muttered something under his breath.

The dormitory fell silent again.

After checking the answers, Dayong yawned and went to bed.

Chen Zhuo sat at the table.

He closed his calculus textbook and pushed it aside.

My gaze fell once again on the Princeton preprint on the side.

For more than a month now.

He was like a passerby who saw a complex nine-linked ring on the roadside.

Every time he passed by, he would pick it up and fiddle with it for a bit.

If he finds a knot he can't untie, he puts it down and goes to do something else.

He is waiting.

When a certain path in your mind naturally connects with the right line at a certain moment.

Chen Zhuo gently tapped the table.

Outside the window, the snow in Huizhou has stopped.

Winter break is almost here.