Chapter 11: Chapter 4: The Invisible River and the Tongue’s Numbness
It was like a fourth-grader watching a first-grade pipsqueak.
Chen Zhuo walked up to the sandpit.
To him, the sandpit looked like a desert.
He took a deep breath and quickly calculated the parabolic trajectory in his head.
’A 45-degree takeoff angle is the optimal solution... Swing my arms to shift my center of gravity forward... Use the explosive power of my gastrocnemius muscle at the moment of liftoff...’
The theory was perfect.
In his mind, he’d already managed an excellent jump of two meters.
"Jump!" The teacher’s whistle blew.
Chen Zhuo pushed off the ground hard and swung his arms with all his might—
Reality, however, was cruel.
His brain issued the command to "explode," but his calf muscles, as thin as reeds, simply couldn’t respond to an order of that magnitude.
His body left the ground... for about ten centimeters.
Then, like a kite with a snapped string, he dropped straight down.
PLOP.
He landed on his butt in the sandpit.
Distance from the takeoff line: 1.1 meters.
Failure.
He hadn’t even met the passing mark for the girls.
A burst of good-natured laughter erupted from the crowd.
"Hahahaha! Chen Zhuo, are you trying to be a frog?"
"That was so funny! For a second there, his form looked like he was about to fly, but then he just dropped!"
"Aw, give him a break, he’s just a little kid. 1.1 meters isn’t bad!"
Zhang Qiang, standing nearby, laughed the loudest. "Hey, prodigy! Looks like you’ve got the brains, but not the brawn!"
Chen Zhuo sat in the cold sandpit, patted the sand off his butt, and stood up with a blank expression.
He didn’t feel ashamed.
As an adult, he wouldn’t feel ashamed for not being able to jump far in front of a group of children.
What he felt was a sense of helplessness.
This was the hardware limiting the software.
These were the laws of physics.
No matter how powerful your soul was, you couldn’t violate the fundamental laws of biology.
The muscle fibers of a seven-year-old simply couldn’t produce enough kinetic energy.
"Chen Zhuo, you..."
The PE teacher looked at the kid, who barely came up to his waist, and was at a bit of a loss.
"Never mind. You don’t have to run laps. Go play over there."
Special treatment.
More special treatment.
Chen Zhuo nodded and silently walked out of the line.
He walked to the parallel bars in the corner of the playground and struggled to climb up. He sat on the cold iron bar, watching the energetic ten-year-olds in the distance as they sprinted around the track.
They were panting, their faces flushed, their sweat glistening as it flew in the sunlight.
That was vitality.
It was the reckless, hot-blooded passion of youth—something Chen Zhuo lacked.
He pulled a dog-eared copy of *Junior High Physics* from inside his jacket.
’If my body can’t fly, then I’ll let my mind soar.’
He opened the book and flipped to the sixth Chapter.
Ohm’s Law.
This was the tough nut he’d been trying to crack for the past few days.
It wasn’t that the formula was difficult.
I = U / R. The formula was so simple even a kindergartener could memorize it.
The hard part was imagining it.
Chen Zhuo stared at the simple circuit diagram in the book: a battery, a switch, and a small light bulb.
The book said: "Current is the directional movement of electric charge."
The book said: "Voltage is the cause of the directional movement of free charges, which forms an electric current."
The book said: "The essence of a nerve impulse is also a form of bioelectrical conduction."
He recognized every word, but when put together, his mind drew a complete blank.
For his current, seven-year-old brain, concrete thinking was a strength, but abstract thinking was a weakness.
He couldn’t see electrons.
He couldn’t form a mental picture of the "moving charge."
’Is it like a current of water?’
’Is it like the nerve impulses from the biology book?’
’Or is it like the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers from the geography book?’
’What exactly *is* voltage?’
’Is it pressure?’
’Or a difference in elevation?’
He tried to force a mental model.
’Let’s assume the wire is a river... and the battery is a water pump...’
HUMMM—
That familiar, sickening wave of dizziness washed over him again.
His brain was overheating.
Chen Zhuo closed his eyes in pain, cold sweat beading on his forehead.
He found he had hit a wall.
This was the first real wall he had encountered since his rebirth.
The wall wasn’t the difficulty of the subject matter, but a limitation of his cognitive abilities.
He was trapped in this seven-year-old body, confined to a world where he could only understand what was tangible—what he could see and touch.
"Damn it..."
Chen Zhuo cursed under his breath and closed the book.
「8:00 PM, the Chen family home.」
Chen Jianguo was in the living room watching the evening news, and Liu Xiuying was in the kitchen washing dishes.
Chen Zhuo had shut himself away in the small study on the balcony.
This small balcony, originally used for storing miscellaneous items, had now become his private territory.
The desk was piled high with all sorts of books, and in the corner was a box of scrap parts Chen Jianguo had brought back from the factory.
The desk lamp gave off a dim yellow light.
Chen Zhuo sat at the desk, staring intently at the pile of things in front of him.
A large D-cell battery (taken from a flashlight).
A length of thin copper wire (stripped from an old electrical cord).
A small light bulb (also from the flashlight).
’If my brain can’t figure it out, I’ll use my hands.’
This was the essence of "Great skill appears clumsy."
When intellect can’t break through, fall back on the most primitive sensory experiences.
’If I don’t understand what "electricity" is, then I’ll have to experience it.’
Chen Zhuo picked up the battery.
It was heavy and cold to the touch.
It was labeled 1.5V.
The book called this voltage.
He wound one end of the copper wire around the screw threads of the small bulb and pressed the other end against the negative terminal of the battery.
Then, holding the other end of the copper wire, he carefully touched it to the positive terminal of the battery.
CLICK.
The bulb lit up.
It was a faint, orange-yellow glow.
Chen Zhuo stared at the glow.
’So this is electric current.’
In this closed circuit, countless electrons, invisible to the naked eye, surged from the negative terminal like a mighty army. They tore along the copper wire, squeezed through the bulb’s thin tungsten filament—colliding with atoms to produce light and heat—and finally returned to the positive terminal.
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