My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Chapter 138 I Killed Someone

In August, the dormitories at USTC were so empty they could hold all the echoes.

In the water room at the end of the corridor, there was a faucet that wasn't turned on properly.

"Tick-tock".

"Tick-tock".

The water droplets hitting the sink didn't make a loud noise, but they traveled far in the empty building.

The cicadas outside the window hadn't fully recovered from last night's sweltering heat, and their chirping was sparse and intermittent.

Sunlight streamed into dormitory 215 through the gap in the curtains that weren't fully drawn, falling obliquely on the desk.

Fine dust particles are slowly suspended, drifting, and swirling.

Chen Zhuo leaned back in his chair, one leg bent and resting on the edge of the chair, the other leg casually stretched out.

He doesn't want to move today.

Over the past period of time, his mind has been filled with too many things.

Derivation of discrete mathematics, dimensionality reduction of matrices, and the boundary of continuous probability.

All of that is over now.

The paper has been published, the foundation in this area has been laid, and the summer vacation is almost over. Everything is proceeding according to plan.

He was wearing a T-shirt with a slightly wrinkled collar and a pair of baggy beach shorts.

He slumped into the chair without any proper posture, like a puddle of melted water.

On the desk was a cup of soy milk that I had just bought from the cafeteria.

He was holding a book in his hands.

It's still a martial arts novel that Wang Dayong left behind.

He left in a hurry and didn't take anything with him. Chen Zhuo was bored in the morning, so he took it out and flipped through a couple of pages, and then started reading.

The story in the book is very simple.

A young swordsman carrying a sword passed by an inn besieged by bandits. He drew his sword and, in a few words, distinguished between good and evil, and within a few moves, he decided life and death.

Good people are saved, and bad people are punished.

The cause-and-effect relationship is as clear and unambiguous as one plus one equals two.

Chen Zhuo lowered his head, bit the straw on the soy milk cup, and took a sip.

Warm.

Very sweet.

The aroma of soybeans flowed into my mouth through the plastic straw, spreading from the back of my tongue and warming me all the way down to my stomach.

He squinted, turned a page, and the paper made a slight rustling sound.

On a peaceful summer morning, life is as simple as this cup of sweet soy milk in my hand.

There's no need to guard against anything, nor to think about complicated cause and effect. Good people will be rewarded, bad people will be punished, math problems will always have solutions, and generators will turn as long as they have oil.

"bell-

'

The phone in the hallway rang without warning.

Chen Zhuo's gaze did not leave the pages of the book.

I'm a little reluctant to move. What if it's a salesperson? What if it's a parent who dialed the wrong number?

The bell rang persistently.

Bumping around in the empty concrete corridor, it created a buzzing echo.

"Ring—Ring one—"

Chen Zhuo sighed.

Deceiving myself is useless; I should just look for what I need to do. I don't want to do anything.

He put his leg down from the edge of the chair, picked up the half-finished cup of soy milk on the table with one hand, and still held the martial arts novel in the other, his index finger between the pages he had just read to prevent it from closing.

A pair of sandals were dangling down.

He slowly walked out of the dormitory and reluctantly pushed open the door.

A cool breeze swept through the corridor, brushing against my calves and taking away some of the summer heat.

The telephone casing stood out starkly in the shadows of the corridor.

Chen Zhuo walked over, and with his left hand, which was holding the martial arts novel, he awkwardly pried off the receiver and casually tucked it between his neck and shoulder.

He was still biting the straw in his soy milk cup, and gave a muffled reply.

"Feed?"

No one speaks.

Chen Zhuo thought it was a problem with the line and was about to move closer to feed him again.

Suddenly, a burst of static came through the receiver.

That wasn't the faint hissing sound you hear when making a phone call.

It sounded like two rough pieces of sandpaper rubbing against each other, accompanied by sharp electromagnetic interference.

Then came a two-second silence.

Then, the background noise faded away.

Instead, there was the howling of a gale carrying sand and gravel, and a dull, oppressive, rhythmic rumble of machinery.

Chen Zhuo frowned.

He released the straw from his mouth.

"Feed? Who?"

He raised his voice slightly.

The booming sound from the receiver continued, like the panting of a huge wild beast.

A few seconds passed.

..team leader."

The sound came through the telephone line.

Chen Zhuo was taken aback.

He racked his brains for a moment and quickly made up his mind.

Miao Shi'an.

But he subconsciously felt something was off.

In Chen Zhuo's memory, Miao Shi'an was a sixteen-year-old boy who wore a spotless white shirt, thin-rimmed gold-rimmed glasses, sat upright across from him eating, and spoke gently even when faced with difficult physics problems.

But now, the voice coming from the receiver is trembling.

It's not the kind of shivering caused by the cold.

It was a chaotic breath, uncontrollable, each inhale like pulling a broken bellows, short, labored, with a slight clicking of teeth. "Shi'an?"

Chen Zhuo straightened up and tightened his grip on the receiver slightly.

"Is that you?"

Another two-second signal delay.

The roar of the machine in the background seemed to grow louder.

Why is it so noisy over there?

Chen Zhuo thought he was at some noisy summer camp or an airport under construction.

"The signal is terrible, where are you?"

"team leader....

'

Miao Shi'an's voice crept over the radio waves, coming from nowhere.

"I killed someone."

The draft in the corridor has stopped.

Chen Zhuo's body suddenly stiffened.

The sweet soy milk I had just drunk suddenly turned into a cold stone in my esophagus, stuck there, I couldn't swallow it down or spit it out.

He felt a momentary blankness in his mind.

"What did you say?"

Chen Zhuo blurted it out.

He even thought he had misheard, or that Miao Shi'an was making some kind of malicious joke.

Miao Shi'an is usually very well-behaved. As far as I know, his current progress is at most participating in the preparation of some of his own activities and projects. How could this be related to killing someone?

"Don't talk nonsense, where are you?"

Chen Zhuo's tone became a little serious, and he couldn't help but tighten his grip on the soy milk.

All I could hear in the receiver was the sound of the wind.

I got a telephone...

'

Miao Shi'an did not answer where he was.

His thoughts seemed to have scattered; he could only mechanically replay the images weighing on his mind.

"I left those... maritime satellite phones that can make international calls at the camp."

Camp?

What camp?

Chen Zhuo's brows were furrowed so tightly they were almost knotted together.

There was a man...

'

Miao Shi'an's voice was strained.

"He borrowed my phone to call home; his wife and three children were at their home in Baghdad."

Baghdad.

Chen Zhuo's pupils contracted slightly.

He occasionally watches the news, so he knows what that place name means.

"The call went through."

Miao Shi'an took a deep breath, his voice breaking.

"His neighbor answered the phone and told him... Last night, a bomb fell, the house was flattened, they couldn't dig it out, not even bones were left."

Chen Zhuo unconsciously tightened his grip on the plastic cup, squeezing the transparent cup out of shape, causing the white soy milk to overflow from the rim and drip onto the ground.

"He hung up the phone, stood up, bowed to me, and said thank you."

Miao Shi'an's voice carried a chilling, deathly stillness.

"At 5:30 this morning, he used a rope that I took off a tent to hang himself from the generator frame that I had just repaired. I stood below him and watched him for three hours."

At the end of the corridor, the window that wasn't closed properly creaked in the wind.

Chen Zhuo's breathing stopped.

He stared at a patch of white plaster peeling off the wall of the corridor, and a tremendous sense of absurdity overwhelmed him like a tidal wave.

Just ten minutes ago, he was reading about chivalrous heroes drawing their swords to help others in a martial arts novel.

Now, in a place separated by countless time zones, a satellite phone call that was meant to connect hope has become a noose.

Chen Zhuo remained silent; he didn't know what to say.

On the receiver, Miao Shi'an's breathing became increasingly rapid.

He seemed afraid to stop, for if he did, he would be swallowed up by those images.

I thought I could help them...

'

"I brought a water purifier, I arranged numbers for them, and I even drew lines for how the water-carrying lines should be."

Miao Shi'an spoke incoherently.

"But a few days ago, there was blasting outside... Hundreds of people, stepping on other people's heads, were trying to grab the muddy water leaking from the generator."

"I tried to stop them, but they pushed me into a dirty puddle."

Miao Shi'an paused for a moment.

"Captain, a child has come to get water; he's only ten years old."

"He rushed at me and bit me; he bit through my arm like a mad dog."

Miao Shi'an's voice became completely hoarse.

His mouth was full of blood, my blood.

"He cursed at me... He said the bomb that killed his mother fell from one of these machines I brought because my clothes were too clean and my machine was too advanced."

"Captain...in their eyes, I'm the same kind of person as the pilots who drop bombs."

Chen Zhuo's Adam's apple bobbed up and down.

He felt a soreness in his neck, and his left shoulder, which was holding the receiver, relaxed slightly.

"Smack."

A muffled thud.

The martial arts novel he had been holding between his fingers fell to the floor of the corridor.

The book was turned upside down.

The swordsman on the cover was pinned to the rough ground.

Chen Zhuo did not bend down to pick it up.

He slowly raised his right hand and grasped the telephone receiver. The receiver felt slippery in his hand, and he was covered in cold sweat.

"Am I here to cause trouble?"

Miao Shi'an muttered to himself on the other end of the line, his voice filled with utter confusion and self-doubt.

"I thought that following the rules would be enough... I thought that providing clean water would be fine."

"Did I bring the wrong things? Captain...did I...mess everything up?"

A long silence fell over both ends of the phone call.

Only the hissing of the ionosphere and the dull roar of the generator assaulted Chen Zhuo's eardrums in waves.

Chen Zhuo opened his mouth.

My throat feels dry and tight.

He wanted to say something.

But he discovered that all the experience he had accumulated over his two lifetimes was useless at this moment.

He had never seen a bomb, never seen a person hang themselves, and never seen a child with a mouth full of blood biting someone.

He was just an ordinary person who grew up in peacetime.

The highest level of comfort he could offer was that it's okay if you failed the exam or that it doesn't matter if you were scolded by the teacher.

But now, on the other end of the phone is a living human life and a sixteen-year-old boy whose values ​​are being shattered.

Chen Zhuo took the receiver, turned around, and leaned against the cold wall of the corridor.

He looked up at the row of old incandescent light bulbs on the ceiling.

A full half minute passed.

He finally spoke.

His voice lacked its usual confidence; it was even somewhat hoarse and he stuttered a little.

"Shi'an".

Chen Zhuo slowed down his speech, as if he were testing a piece of thin ice that could crack at any moment.

"Take a breath first."

A distinct hissing sound came from the other end of the receiver.

Chen Zhuo frowned, piecing together the words in his mind as he stammered on.

"That man... his family died because of war, because of bombs."

Chen Zhuo paused for a moment, as if confirming the logic of his statement.

"You just...you just made a phone call."

"You didn't do anything wrong."

Chen Zhuo raised his voice slightly, trying to force the words into Miao Shi'an's mind.

"Don't blame yourself for the bombing."

Miao Shi'an didn't say anything on the other end.

"The child who bit you..."

'

Chen Zhuo felt a little powerless and sighed.

"He's only ten years old."

Chen Zhuo spoke very softly.

"He just lost his mother, he's so scared."

"When people are in despair, they can't distinguish right from wrong. If they see that your clothes are clean, or that you're doing better than them, they'll hate you..."

'

"It's not his fault."

Chen Zhuo spoke slowly.

"But it's not your fault, don't get hung up on this."

Chen Zhuo knew that these words were actually quite weak.

But he had to say that he first had to remove the responsibility for the dead man from Miao Shi'an's back.

Otherwise, he was afraid that Miao Shi'an might do something rash.

"But... I messed it up."

Miao Shi'an's voice remained hollow, as if he were spinning in a bottomless black hole.

"I thought that if I waited in line, I could get a drink of water... I thought that if I had a phone call, I could let people know I was safe."

"My rules are useless, absolutely useless."

Chen Zhuo tightened his grip on the receiver.

We can't continue this line of thought.

It's pointless to talk to someone facing life and death in a war zone about who's right and who's wrong, or whether rules are useful.

Chen Zhuo's brain began to work frantically.

He needed to find a concrete tool, something tangible and visible, to pull Miao Shi'an down from that empty void.

He pricked up his ears and listened carefully to the background noise coming through the receiver.

Aside from the sound of the wind, there was only that steady, mechanical sound.

"Shi'an".

Chen Zhuo suddenly changed the subject.

"Um?"

"I heard a really loud noise coming from your side."

Chen Zhuo stared at the window at the end of the corridor, where light was shining through.

"What's that rumbling sound?"

Miao Shi'an was taken aback.

About three or four seconds passed.

"It's a generator."

Miao Shi'an's voice gained a little more focus.

"Heavy-duty diesel generator with water pump."

"Is it still spinning?" Chen Zhuo asked.

"It's spinning."

"it is good."

Chen Zhuo nodded, and although the other person couldn't see him, he took a deep breath.

"Shi'an, listen to me."

Chen Zhuo's tone was no longer the cautious reassurance he had just given; he had regained some of the composure he used when leading everyone in problem-solving during the training camp.

Pragmatic and direct.

"Let's not worry about any rules, okay?"

"The queuing lines you drew are useless, so we don't need them. The things you brought are useless, so we put them away."

Chen Zhuo looked at the martial arts novel on the ground.

"Those things can't save lives."

"Don't think about those things."

Chen Zhuo's voice was incredibly clear, traveling along the telephone line and gradually reaching Miao Shi'an's ears.

"Just keep an eye on that generator."

"The child who bit you, he still needs water tomorrow, right?"

A very soft voice came from the other end of the receiver: "Yes."

"Then go and figure out that machine."

Chen Zhuo gave Miao Shi'an instructions using an extremely simple and unadorned logic.

"If the generator breaks down, you go and fix it."

"As long as the machines are running, as long as water is flowing from the pipes, even if they break the rules, even if they—'but they can survive by drinking water, right?'"

"Don't overthink it, okay?"

Chen Zhuo's tone finally settled on an extremely gentle request.

"Just think of yourself as a water pump repairman, and throw everything else away."

A long silence.

This time, the silence lacked the suffocating panic and self-doubt that had been felt earlier.

The sound of the diesel generator traveled clearly through the satellite signal into Chen Zhuo's ears.

The rumbling sound of mechanical meshing felt incredibly reassuring at that moment.

There is no good or evil.

There is no right or wrong.

Only the meshing of gears and the instinct to survive.

I don't know how much time has passed.

"dynamo...

'

Miao Shi'an's voice finally regained a semblance of calm; though soft, it was no longer trembling.

"The oil line is clogged, and there's a slight oil leak."

"Um."

Chen Zhuo responded.

"I'll go fix it."

"it is good."

Chen Zhuo said.

"Make sure you stay safe and come back alive."

"team leader."

"I am here."

"Um."

"Beep beep beep—"

The phone call was disconnected, and the busy tone echoed monotonously in the corridor.

Chen Zhuo did not immediately put down the receiver.

He remained in that position leaning against the wall for a long time.

At the end of the corridor, the sun had fully risen, and the bright sunlight shone in, casting long patches of light on the floor tiles.

Chen Zhuo slowly hung the receiver back on the landline.

He looked down at the cup of soy milk in his hand.

More than half of them were squeezed to the ground while they were making phone calls.

The remaining soy milk had gone completely cold.

He bent down, picked up the martial arts novel that had fallen to the ground, and patted the dust off the cover.

He suddenly felt that the stories of chivalry, revenge, and saving the world written in the book were so naive that they were unreadable.

In the real world, there are no heroes.

The hope of survival hung on a leaking diesel generator.

Chen Zhuo carried the cooled soy milk and his book, and slowly walked back to dormitory 215.

He threw the book on the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down.

Outside the window, the cicadas' chirping finally blended into a noisy, yet vibrant sound.

Chen Zhuo looked at the light and shadow on the table and closed his eyes.