I'm looking forward to Chapter 160.

It's 11:30 p.m.

The snow in Huizhou showed no signs of stopping; on the contrary, it fell even more heavily.

The corridor was quiet; most of the dormitories had already turned off their lights.

The pressure of final exams was like an invisible net, enveloping this building full of geniuses, making even breathing feel tense. Dormitory 216.

Lu Jia sat at his desk, his glasses slightly fogged up by the heat in the room.

Holding a black ballpoint pen, he wrote rapidly on a thick notebook.

The notebook was filled with densely packed calculus formulas and probability derivations.

The whiteboard that had previously been covered with drawings of the route from the library to the third canteen was now wiped clean, without a single mark. Lu Jia finished writing a line of calculations, then pressed the pen tip heavily on the paper and stopped.

He stared at the result for two seconds, seemingly displeased, and then, in a fit of pique, drew two heavy black circles on it, turning the formula into a black blob. Chu Ge sat in the swivel chair opposite him by the window, a lollipop dangling from his mouth.

Rows of green characters were flashing on the computer screen as hands flew across the keyboard.

After typing the last line and pressing Enter, Chu Ge stopped, leaned back in his chair with a creak, and turned to look at Lu Jia. "Lu Jia, you really aren't going to look?"

Chu Ge, biting on a candy stick, asked a question indistinctly.

Lu Jia didn't even raise her head, her back ramrod straight, her pen scribbling unconsciously on the paper.

"I spent a lot of time and effort writing this packet capture script."

Chu Ge slid the swivel chair forward half a meter, getting closer.

"That crappy server in the logistics center doesn't even have a proper firewall. My senior's card-swiping records from the past month are all hanging on my back. She ate rice bowls on the first floor twelve times and porridge in the second floor four times. I even dug out the tomato and egg stir-fry she ordered for lunch today."

Chu Ge reached out and tapped the edge of the computer screen.

"With this set of underlying consumer data, you can build a model and then go to the second floor to ambush her tomorrow at noon. Those Markov chains you drew on the whiteboard before are perfect for this. Do you want to take a look?" Lu Jia stopped writing.

He didn't turn around, but his shoulders shrugged slightly, like a sullen person who had suffered a great injustice.

"I won't look."

Lu Jia's voice was muffled.

"Why are you so stubborn? The data is practically on your lips."

Chu Ge raised an eyebrow in confusion.

"Isn't this better than you guessing blindly?"

Lu Jia finally turned her head.

He pushed up his glasses, which had slipped down his nose, and stared intently at the advanced mathematics workbook on the table, his tone a mix of resentment and neurotic muttering. "Your meal card data has a physical blind spot..."

Lu Jia's voice wasn't loud; it sounded like she was arguing with Chu Ge, or perhaps she was struggling with herself.

"You can hack into the cafeteria's card reader, can you hack into the convenience store downstairs from the girls' dormitory? Do you know how many packs of Master Kong braised beef noodles she's hoarded in her drawer? Do you know if her roommate just bought a case of sausages today?"

Lu Jia muttered incessantly, her voice growing more and more aggrieved with each word.

"You haven't even found all the core hidden variables, so the calculated probability is just a piece of paper... Do you hackers even know what force majeure is? Instant noodles are force majeure..." Chu Ge was stunned for two seconds after listening to Lu Jia's mouthful of instant noodle PTSD, and almost fell off his swivel chair laughing.

"Hahaha, no, Lu Jia, did Zhuo Ge's previous comment make you feel depressed?"

Chu Ge laughed so hard he slapped his thigh.

"Did a bowl of instant noodles destroy your academic beliefs?"

Lu Jia ignored Chu Ge's mockery.

In a fit of pique, he flipped the draft paper over, making a rustling sound.

He lowered his head even further, his pen flying across the paper as he wrote new integral equations, muttering under his breath with a pitiful expression. "Human behavior is so illogical... I'll just stick to my advanced calculus; at least the ball's trajectory in this problem won't hide under the covers during a heavy snowfall..." "Alright, Professor Lu, you've come to your senses."

Chu Ge smiled and turned back to his computer.

"If you won't look, I will. I want to see what these logistics guys eat all day long."

Just then, footsteps echoed down the corridor.

The footsteps stopped at the door of room 216.

The door was pushed open halfway, and Wang Dayong stood in the doorway, carrying a canvas bag full of books and draft paper.

"Oh, still awake?"

Dayong stamped the snow off his feet and greeted them loudly.

Lu Jia put down her pen and turned around. Chu Ge also looked away from the computer screen.

"Dayong, is this how long you work in the lab?"

Chu Ge looked at Da Yong.

"It's almost midnight, and you're only just getting back?"

"Don't even mention it."

Da Yong walked in, casually placed his canvas bag next to Chu Ge's table, and stretched his somewhat stiff neck.

"This afternoon, I'll be in the lab downstairs watching some PhD students solve problems."

Upon hearing that it was a doctoral student solving a problem, Lu Jia's eyes behind his glasses lit up, his instinctive curiosity about the difficult problem overriding his previous resentment. "What kind of problem? Partial differential equations? Or the derivation of boundary conditions in quantum mechanics?" Lu Jia asked.

He always had an instinctive thirst for knowledge when it came to theoretical problems.

Da Yong leaned against Chu Ge's table and laughed.

"It was a partial differential equation, and I filled two large blank whiteboards with it."

Da Yong pointed to the corner of the wall.

"The whiteboard you usually use for solving math problems was completely covered with writing."

"What do you want?"

Lu Jia pressed for an answer.

"Why does a vacuum device exhibit a 50 Hz background noise spike at fixed intervals?" Da Yong asked. Lu Jia frowned, quickly starting to build a model in his mind.

"A fixed burr at 50 Hz?"

Lu Jia's fingers tapped unconsciously on the table.

"Electromagnetic interference? Or frequency leakage from the power supply ripple? This definitely requires using Fourier transform for window filtering. If using a Hamming window, the cutoff frequency should be... "Screw my ass."

Da Yong interrupted Lu Jia's deduction without any politeness.

Lu Jia was stunned.

Looking at Lu Jia's serious expression, Da Yong thought that she was exactly the same as the two senior students in the lab that afternoon.

"Lu Jia, don't bother calculating."

Da Yong patted Lu Jia on the shoulder.

"That thing doesn't even need to be calculated. The water pump is right next to it, the AC motor frequency is 50 Hz, and the cooling water pipes are tightly tied to the load-bearing iron frame. As soon as the water pump is turned on, it shakes along with the pump." Da Yong spread his hands.

"This is just the most common mechanical resonance. I found a shim, loosened the nut with a wrench, put it in, and the burr was gone. The curve is as straight as if it were drawn with a ruler." Dormitory 216 fell silent.

Lu Jia continued tapping the table, her mouth slightly open.

"Mechanical resonance?"

Lu Jia muttered to himself.

"yes."

Da Yong nodded as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

"The senior students have been calculating for several days, even taking quantum fluctuations into account, but they haven't calculated that the water pipe hit the iron frame."

Chu Ge snapped out of his daze, slapped his thigh, and laughed so hard he almost fell over.

"Hahahaha! Lu Jia, listen to this! You're building models on paper every day, and so are the doctoral students. And what happened? Da Yong used a single gasket to smash the doctoral student's partial differential equations to pieces!" Chu Ge pointed at Lu Jia.

"Your model was ruined by Zhuo Ge's bowl of instant noodles, and this afternoon someone else's algorithm was ruined by a piece of pad. You theoretical physicists, are you having a run of bad luck these past few days?" Lu Jia's expression wasn't very pleasant. He pushed up his glasses, trying to salvage some of the dignity of a theoretical physicist.

"That's because they didn't provide enough boundary conditions when they built the model."

Lu Jia muttered softly.

"They didn't treat the load-bearing support as a non-rigid body, and overlooked the shape and safety considerations..."

"Yes, yes, you're absolutely right."

Da Yong smiled and picked up his canvas bag.

"So Professor Liu asked me to pick up the machine's structural drawings tomorrow morning. The base's center of gravity design is flawed. I need to draw up a set of drawings, find channel steel and jacks to build a new chassis for it, and distribute the stress points. This job is much more interesting than calculating partial differential equations."

After Da Yong finished speaking, he waved to the two of them.

"Alright, you guys keep looking at the data and doing coding problems. I'm going back to my room to wash up; I smell terrible."

Da Yong turned and walked out of room 216, closing the door behind him and shutting out Chu Ge's unrestrained laughter and Lu Jia's resentful back as she buried herself in advanced mathematics. Chen Zhuo sat at his desk, an all-English book on topology and geometric analysis spread out on it, and a clean Fuji apple in his hand, which he had just taken a bite of. "You're back."

Hearing the noise, Chen Zhuo turned his head and glanced at Dayong.

"Yeah, it's snowing quite heavily outside, and the wind is blowing right up to your collar."

Dayong placed the canvas bag on his chair.

He didn't sit down immediately, but went straight to the washbasin behind the door, grabbed a bar of soap, and started rubbing his hands.

The soap quickly foamed up.

"Xiao Zhuo, did you go and see what happened to Lu Jia across the street?"

While scrubbing the dirt off his hands, Da Yong chatted and laughed with Chen Zhuo.

"What's wrong?"

Chen Zhuo was biting into an apple.

"He's still sulking and doing practice problems. Chu Ge even embezzled the money from the logistics staff's meal card to show him the senior's meal data, but he refused." Da Yong turned the tap on the hot water setting, and a wisp of steam rose up.

"He said that your bowl of instant noodles upset him, and he feels that human behavior is too uncontrollable, so he's feeling down."

After listening, Chen Zhuo's lips curled up slightly.

He turned around, facing Da Yong, and leaned back in his chair.

"Lu Jia just can't wrap her head around things."

Chen Zhuo swallowed the apple in his mouth.

"Mathematical models are used to approximate reality, not to confine reality; they are just a bit too powerful."

Dayong rinsed the soap off his hands and grabbed a towel from the shelf to dry them.

"Indeed, my two doctoral students were the same tonight in the lab."

Dayong hung up the towel, walked back to the middle of the dormitory, pulled out the chair in front of his desk, and sat down.

"I spent the whole afternoon reading there."

Dayong pointed to his canvas bag.

"I was planning to study 'Materials Physics' for a while, but the two senior students next to me spent several days calculating a noise spike and wrote two whiteboards of Fourier transforms." Chen Zhuo didn't speak, but listened quietly, his fingers unconsciously turning the half apple in his hand.

"I heard them talking about 50 Hz and electromagnetic interference."

Da Yong leaned back in his chair with a carefree attitude.

"When I looked over, I saw a huge water-cooled pump running right next to it, with the pipes tightly strapped to the iron frame. It was like a direct collision, how could it not shudder along with the pump?" Dayong picked up the water glass on the table and took a sip.

"I grabbed a washer, used a wrench to loosen the cable tie and insert it, and the line immediately straightened out."

"Didn't they notice?" Chen Zhuo asked.

"I didn't think that way."

Da Yong put down his water glass and sighed.

"When they were doing the calculations, they must have imagined that big iron frame as an absolutely rigid body, thinking it was a solid sheet that wouldn't deform or conduct electricity," Da Yong shook his head.

"There is no such thing as a perfectly rigid body in this world. As long as it is metal, it will resist a temperature difference of one or two degrees."

Chen Zhu finished the last bite of the apple, threw the core into the paper pocket next to him, and took out a tissue to wipe his hands.

"That's normal."

Chen Zhuo threw away the crumpled paper, a faint smile playing on his lips.

Da Yong turned to look at him.

"People who do theoretical work have a common problem."

Chen Zhuo picked up a ballpoint pen from the table and twirled it in his hand.

"I always thought the world would operate obediently according to the formula I wrote down. Once an error occurs, my first reaction is that my formula is not complicated enough, rather than wondering if a pipe is tied too tightly." Chen Zhuo said to Da Yong with self-deprecation.

"I guess I would have done the same. I would have stared at the screen looking for loopholes in the algorithm, and I would never have thought to check if the water cooling pipes were properly secured." Dayong nodded repeatedly as he listened to Chen Zhuo's words.

"That's what Professor Liu said too."

Da Yong grinned.

"Professor Liu saw that I had found the problem, so he told me to go get the structural drawings of the machine tomorrow and calculate the stress myself. He also told me to use channel steel and jacks to rebuild the chassis of the machine and distribute the stress." Da Yong rubbed his hands together, his eyes shining with excitement.

"This job suits my taste; I'm good at laying foundations."

"Good."

Chen Zhuo smiled.

He tapped his pen lightly twice on the table.

"If there are any more of these ridiculous errors in the lab in the future, just take a wrench and tap that metal frame to show them that friction exists in the real world." Chen Zhuo turned his head slightly, his tone carrying a hint of friendly banter.

"You are now the physical patch in their theory."

Da Yong was about to grab the basin when he heard the word, and he paused, his hand holding the basin still.

"Physical patch..."

Dayong pulled out the basin, casually tossed the foot towel draped over the back of the chair into it, and chuckled to himself with his head down.

"It has to be you guys who read English books every day, you can come up with all sorts of new words."

He stood up, dusted off his hands, and naturally accepted the joke.

"Alright, from now on you can build houses on paper, and I'll lay bricks underneath for you. It'll be perfect for dealing with all sorts of stubborn lumps of iron."

He turned and went into the bathroom.

Chen Zhuo turned around and faced his desk again.

Instead of opening the topology journal, he reached out and pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk.

Chen Zhuo took out a very thick, black hardcover notebook from the deepest part of the drawer.

The edges of the notebook are slightly worn and whitish from frequent use.

This is something he has painstakingly accumulated over the past half semester, using spare moments in the library or dormitory.

Chen Zhuo opened his notebook.

A foolproof, easy-to-use study guide specifically tailored to my childhood friend Zhang Qiang's brain capacity, designed to help him pass the high school entrance exam.

Chen Zhuo knew Zhang Qiang all too well.

That fat guy gets sleepy at the sight of complex force diagrams and is completely lost when faced with geometry proofs. Explaining physical laws and mathematical logic to him is like casting pearls before swine. Therefore, in this notebook, Chen Zhuo completely abandons conventional teaching methods and uses only pure brute-force solutions.

This wasn't meant to cultivate Zhang Qiang's love for science; it was just a crude and simplistic instruction manual designed purely to prepare for the upcoming high school entrance exam. Chen Zhuo picked up a pen from the table and flipped to the first blank page of the notebook.

He didn't write anything sentimental; he simply wrote four large characters in the center:

"I'll break off all ties if I don't read this."

A small arrow pointing to the page turn was drawn next to it.

After finishing writing, he capped his pen and closed the heavy black notebook.

Winter break was just a few days away. Chen Zhuo turned around, opened the wardrobe door, and pulled out his backpack.

He folded his change of clothes and put them inside, then neatly placed the black notebook at the bottom of his backpack and zipped it up. An image began to involuntarily appear in his mind.

It was probably the morning of the second day of the Lunar New Year.

The neighborhood must be littered with red firecracker debris, and the air must be thick with the smell of gunpowder.

Zhang Qiang's house was warm and cozy, with the coffee table piled high with melon seeds and tangerines.

That fat guy is definitely wearing his new coat, with the New Year's money he just received in his pocket, and he's probably planning which arcade to take him to play King of Fighters in the afternoon. Then, he'll be there with New Year's gifts.

As Zhang Qiang's parents warmly greeted him and served him tea and water, he would smile and unzip his backpack, taking out the thick black notebook in front of his elders and placing it steadily on the coffee table. "Uncle and Aunt, this is a middle school entrance exam notebook I compiled for Qiangzi during my spare time at USTC. As long as he memorizes it during the winter break, getting into the top high school in the city will definitely be no problem." Chen Zhuo could even clearly predict every step that would follow.

Zhang Qiang's parents would be so moved their eyes would light up, treating the notebook like some kind of martial arts manual, and then they'd give Zhang Qiang a good beating. "Look at Xiao Zhuo! He's still thinking about you even after he's in college! Qiangzi, hurry up and thank him! This winter break, you're not going anywhere, just stay home and thoroughly study this notebook!" As for the fat guy, facing his parents' combined beating and this huge gift he'd presented, he wouldn't even have the right to refuse.

Amidst the festive and peaceful atmosphere of the Lunar New Year, I could only awkwardly accept the notebook with trembling hands, forcing a smile that looked more like a grimace. There was no escaping it, no way to escape it at all.

Thinking of this, Chen Zhuo leaned back in his chair and chuckled softly in the quiet dormitory.