My IQ has been increasing year by year.

The university student activity center is located a little south of the school.

Because of the school lockdown, most club activities here have been suspended. The promotional posters in the lobby on the first floor were put up in March, and the corners are already curled up. Chen Zhuo went up the stairs to the third floor.

The second to last room at the end of the corridor has a printed sheet on the door with the words "String Society" written on it.

Chen Zhuo pushed open the door and went inside.

The rehearsal room was small, with two old sofas by the window and several music stands piled in the corner.

There were only two people in the room. A boy wearing black-rimmed glasses sat on the sofa, flipping through a copy of "Reader's Digest" from an unknown era. Next to him, a short-haired girl sat in a folding chair, her head bowed as she applied rosin to the bow of her violin.

Hearing the door open, the two looked up.

"You're here."

The bespectacled boy gave a casual greeting, then lowered his head to continue reading his magazine.

The short-haired girl simply nodded, her hands continuing their work.

They were already used to Chen Zhuo's arrival.

In the past month or two, Chen Zhuo would come over every few days with his violin case. He didn't chat with anyone or ask about club matters. Each time he came, he would quietly find a corner to play for a while, and then leave. "Senior, senior."

Chen Zhuo replied politely.

He walked to the innermost corner of the room, placed the violin case on an empty chair, and unlocked it.

He took out his violin, rested it on his shoulder, and gently pressed his chin against the chin rest. With his right hand, Chen Zhuo picked up the bow and plucked each of the four strings. The pitch was perfect; no tuning was needed.

He didn't turn the pages of the sheet music; he closed his eyes and pressed the bow steadily on the A string.

Pull.

There was no vibrato, no glissando, and no unnecessary movements.

The sound that came out was crisp and steady, like a straight line.

Next came scales, ascending and descending, followed by a polyphonic passage from Bach's unaccompanied pieces.

Chen Zhuo's violin playing style was different from everyone else in the room.

He doesn't care about emotional investment, nor does he try to understand the structure of the music.

For him, musical notes are frequencies.

The A string is 440 Hz and the C string is 130.8 Hz. They must be exactly the same; even a slight difference is unacceptable.

He played with such precision that it was almost mechanical.

The bespectacled boy on the sofa turned a page of the magazine, listening to the piano music in his ears, his initial surprise long gone.

When Chen Zhu first came to play the violin, he thought the child's basic skills were really good and his pitch was frightening. But after listening a few times, he found that the child's violin playing was like a human metronome. There was nothing wrong with it, but you could not hear any emotion in it.

But this is fine too, it can be used as background noise and won't bother anyone.

Chen Zhuo was immersed in his own rhythm.

He could clearly feel the vibrations of the strings traveling down his chin into his bones. This absolute, unchanging regularity, devoid of any approximations, slowly washed away the remnants of those tedious partial differential equations in his mind. Time passed, and the dim, setting sun cast its light into the string orchestra.

Chen Zhuo stopped playing the zither.

He took a soft cloth from the violin case and carefully wiped the powder off the strings and soundboard. His movements were meticulous but efficient. He then placed the violin back in its case and fastened the latch.

"I'm leaving, seniors." Chen Zhuo picked up his violin case.

"Okay, take care." The boy with glasses still didn't look up.

Chen Zhuo pushed open the door and stepped into the summer evening breeze.

Life was like the musical scale played by Chen Zhuo—stable, regular, and without a ripple.

I get up in the morning and go to the cafeteria to eat two steamed buns and a bowl of porridge.

In the morning, I sit at my desk and read "A Course in Theoretical Physics". At noon, I go back to the dormitory with Wang Dayong and the others to get lunch. In the afternoon, I continue to derive formulas or help Chu Ge look at the messy underlying logic he wrote. In the evening, I go to the activity center to play the violin for a while.

This methodical life divides time into very even segments.

The temperature is rising day by day.

The old ceiling fan above the dormitory was turned on its highest setting, spinning rapidly, but the air blowing down was hot.

I don't know when it started, but cicadas began to chirp in the trees outside my window.

At first, there were only one or two sporadic noises, but later they turned into a continuous cacophony of noise.

Summer has quietly and completely unfolded.

It was midday in mid-June.

As Chen Zhuo and Wang Dayong carried their lunchboxes to the dormitory building, they heard a deafening cheer coming from the second floor.

Then, with a loud bang, someone threw a stainless steel basin out of the window, which landed on the lawn below with a loud crash. "What the hell? Has someone gone mad?"

Wang Dayong was startled and quickly steadied the lunchbox in his hand.

A series of chaotic footsteps and shouts came from the stairwell.

Chu Ge flew down the stairs and nearly crashed into Wang Dayong.

"The lockdown is over! The lockdown is over!"

Chu Ge was so excited that his face turned red, and he grabbed Wang Dayong's arm and shook it hard.

"The school just announced over the loudspeaker that the situation is finally under control, the lockdown has been lifted, and students can freely enter and leave the school!"

Wang Dayong's eyes lit up, and he almost dropped his lunchbox.

"Really? We can go to the backstreet for barbecue now?"

"eat!"

Chu Ge waved his hand.

"It's all on me this afternoon, I'm going to have a good meal."

The news of the lifting of the lockdown was like a gust of wind, instantly dispelling the oppressive atmosphere that had been hanging over the campus for months.

Although final exam week is just around the corner, everyone's spirits are noticeably different.

For Chen Zhuo, exam week was simply a change of scenery when he was writing.

During the advanced mathematics exam, the proctor was an elderly professor wearing reading glasses. He strolled leisurely around the exam hall, stopping beside Chen Zhuo. Chen Zhuo was working on the last major problem. Instead of using the tedious proofs taught in the textbook, he simply drew a simple algebraic structure next to the problem, transformed it into two lines of equations, and wrote down the result directly. The old professor stood beside him watching for a long time, his brow furrowing slightly, but quickly relaxing. He didn't say anything, and slowly walked away with his hands behind his back. After finishing the last problem, Chen Zhuo put down his pen, checked the multiple-choice questions to make sure he had filled in the correct answers, then flipped the paper over and placed it face down on the table, leaning back in his chair to wait for the bell to ring. The last exam was over on July 2nd.

As Wang Dayong finished handing in his paper and walked out of the teaching building, he looked up and sighed deeply at the somewhat glaring sun.

"We're finally free!"

Wang Dayong stretched out a big yawn.

"I feel like I've lost half my life in this exam room. I don't care anymore, I'll just take whatever score I want."

Chu Ge caught up from behind and put his arm around Wang Dayong's shoulder.

"Let's go, let's pack our things and buy tickets. I can't stand this godforsaken place for another day. I want to go home and eat my mom's cooking." Chu Ge's words, "I want to go home and eat my mom's cooking," still seemed to echo in Chen Zhuo's ears.

The noisy farewells, along with the dust kicked up by luggage being moved in the stairwell, turned the sweltering heat of early summer into a boiling pot of water.

Chen Zhuo stood up, turned around, and walked into the bathroom.

Turn on the tap.

"Splash!"

Chen Zhuo lowered his head, scooped up a handful of cold water with both hands, and splashed it forcefully on his face.

He grabbed a towel from the washstand and wiped his face haphazardly a couple of times.

Then he reached out and turned the tap off.

The instant the water flow was cut off, it was as if an invisible knife had abruptly severed all sound from the world. Chen Zhuo draped a towel around his neck and walked out of the bathroom.

Without the sound of water to mask it, the slight scraping sound of him pulling out the chair was amplified several times in the room.

He sat down.

A large area was left empty next to it.

Only a yellowed old bamboo mat remained on Wang Dayong's bed. The desk, usually piled high with various advanced mathematics study guides, was now bare, reflecting the light from the window. Chen Zhuo's gaze returned to what was directly in front of him.

The bulky monitor, the quiet laser printer, and the Russian edition of "A Course in Theoretical Physics" in the upper left corner remained in their usual places. My gaze passed over the slightly ajar door; the door opposite, 216, which always let in light and echoed with the sound of a keyboard, was tightly shut, a lock hanging on the handle. The old-fashioned ceiling fan overhead emitted a monotonous clatter.

Outside the window, the cicadas' chirping, which had been suppressed by the clamor of people, burst in like waves through the open window after a brief pause.