Chapter 19: Chapter 9: Bored to Death
April 2000, the rainy season in the south.
The walls, damp from the humid spring weather, felt slick and greasy to the touch, as if they were sweating a layer of oil.
The room was silent.
The only sound was the CLICK-CLACK of the wall clock.
Chen Zhuo sat at his desk, a mechanical pencil held loosely in his hand.
He was home alone.
Chen Jianguo had been called away early in the morning by an urgent message from the factory. Apparently, a new piece of equipment had broken down, and the workshop supervisor was so angry he was cursing up a storm over the phone.
Meanwhile, Liu Xiuying had taken her basket to the South Gate Market. According to her, vegetable vendors packed up early on rainy days, which made them easier to haggle with.
Spread open in front of Chen Zhuo was a book titled *Elementary Math Olympiad: Learning by Analogy*.
He stared at a variation of the classic "chicken and rabbit in a cage" problem on the page.
A few stick-figure rabbits and cages were drawn beneath the problem.
He didn’t move his pencil.
That morning, to comply with that damned "physical fitness plan," he had forced down two greasy salted duck eggs and chugged a huge mug of hot milk.
His stomach was now full and warm.
But his mind felt restless.
It felt like a high-displacement diesel engine that had just been broken in. The tank was full, the glow plugs were hot, but it was stuck in neutral with someone’s foot jammed on the brake.
The pistons pumped furiously in their cylinders, the crankshaft spinning uselessly.
These Math Olympiad problems were too boring.
A single glance was all it took. The numbers seemed to come to life, automatically deconstructing and reassembling themselves in his mind.
There was no need to set up equations or draw auxiliary lines; the answer simply materialized on his retinas.
There was no resistance at all.
This lack of resistance, this absence of damping, filled him with a strange sense of irritation.
It was like punching a pile of cotton. All the force was spent, but there was no impact.
"Tsk."
Chen Zhuo frowned, and his fingers loosened.
The mechanical pencil fell onto the desk, rolled twice, and its tip snapped off.
He didn’t bother picking it up.
He stood up and walked to the window.
The dreary, gray sky hung low. The rain was still falling, a steady drizzle.
This feeling of having nothing to do was unbearable.
His mind ached with it.
’If I don’t find something hard to grind it against, this machine is going to overheat from running at too high a speed.’
He glanced at the wall clock.
One-thirty in the afternoon.
Chen Zhuo turned and walked over to the shoe rack by the door.
He pulled on a pair of high-top rain boots.
They were something Chen Jianguo had gotten from the factory’s supply store. They had a strong rubbery smell, soles as hard as bricks, and made a CLOMP CLOMP sound when he walked.
Then he picked up the long, black-handled umbrella from behind the door.
When opened, it resembled a giant black mushroom, completely covering his small, one-point-two-meter frame.
He pushed open the iron door of the apartment building, and a damp, cold wind laced with fine rain rushed to meet him.
Chen Zhuo hunched his shoulders, burying his chin in his collar, and stepped into the puddles, disappearing into the curtain of rain.
The puddles in the street were deep and mixed with yellow mud.
Chen Zhuo trudged on, his steps uneven in the murky water.
As he passed the newsstand on the corner, the owner was huddled inside listening to the radio. One of Shan Tianfang’s storytelling programs was playing.
Hanging in the most prominent spots were copies of *Bosom Friend* and *Story Teller*, the fast food for the soul of that era.
Tucked in a corner was a damp copy of *Computer News*.
The front-page headline was printed in large, bold characters:
"Windows 2000 Released, NT Kernel Heralds a New Era."
The accompanying image was a blue Windows logo. It wasn’t high-resolution, but it looked strikingly bright against the gloomy, rainy day.
Chen Zhuo’s steps faltered.
He stared at the line of text for a few seconds.
The city library was in the center of the old district, about two kilometers from his home.
Being a rainy day, the library was nearly empty.
A familiar smell permeated the main hall.
Chen Zhuo closed his umbrella, placed it in the rusty metal bin by the entrance, and walked up the wooden staircase, its center steps worn smooth and shiny with age. He went straight to the third floor.
The third floor housed the Natural Sciences reading room.
It was very quiet here.
A few old-fashioned fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling, occasionally emitting a ZZZT of electricity due to the unstable voltage.
Rows of green metal bookshelves towered like a steel forest.
Chen Zhuo walked between the shelves.
He was so short that his head barely cleared the second shelf. He had to crane his neck to read the classification labels stuck to the shelves above.
O1 Mathematics.
O3 Mechanics.
O4 Physics.
His fingers traced along the spines of the books.
*Advanced Mathematics*, *Electrical Engineering*, *Mechanical Drawing*...
The texture under his fingertips was coarse, and some spines were even covered in a thin layer of dust.
Chen Zhuo didn’t take any of them.
He flipped one open and glanced inside. It had omitted most of the derivation processes, leaving only bare-bones conclusions and formulas.
’Too dry.’
’There’s nothing to chew on with stuff like this.’
He continued deeper into the stacks, toward the corner, into the dimmest part of the room.
Intuition told him that the truly heavy stuff usually sank to the bottom.
On the bottom shelf of the O1 section, he saw a row of black spines.
They had no fancy decorations—just black, hardcover bindings. The titles on the spines had been stamped in gold foil, but the gilt had all flaked away, leaving only uneven indentations.
Chen Zhuo squatted down and pulled one out with some effort.
It was extremely heavy in his hands.
It weighed at least a kilo and a half. The paper was thick and carried a strong, musty odor.
He brushed the dust off the cover and squinted to make out the line of text:
*Calculus Tutorial*.
Author: G.M. Fikhtengol’ts.
Volume One.
It was a photostat edition from the 1950s.
Opening the cover revealed a side-by-side Chinese-Russian layout.
Due to its age, the ink of the Chinese translation had bled, making some of the characters blurry and indistinct.
The original Russian sections, on the other hand, having been photostatted from negatives, were still as sharp as rows of black nails.
The pages were full of Cyrillic letters.
Д, Ж, Я, Щ...
Chen Zhuo stared at the letters.
He couldn’t understand them.
To him, these symbols with their barbs and sharp angles were no different from garbled text.
But when his gaze fell upon the long chain of formula derivations in the middle of the page, his eyes froze.
He couldn’t read the explanatory text beside them, but he understood the structure.
First, define the variables.
Second, introduce the infinitesimal.
Third, scale and approach the limit.
Fourth, converge.
It was a perfect fit.
Not a single wasted word, not a single skipped step.
The formulas were like a set of perfectly interlocking gears, spinning silently on the page, transmitting a cold, indisputable logical force.
Chen Zhuo’s fingers gently caressed the coarse page.
A strange sensation traveled from his fingertips to his cerebral cortex.
’Now this is something that can fill the empty spaces in my mind.’
Even though he couldn’t understand the words, he could feel the vast, intricate structure hidden within the book.
That sense of precision sparked a primal desire to possess it.
It was like a craftsman seeing an exquisitely detailed blueprint; even if he couldn’t read the annotations, he would still want to tuck it away and keep it for himself.
He did not put the book back.
He stood up again and walked over to the physics section.
’If I’m going to take them, I might as well take enough to last.’
On a shelf on the other side, he found the legendary red book.
*The Feynman Lectures on Physics*
The Feynman Physics Lectures.
An English photostat edition imported in the ’80s.
The black book in his left hand, the red book in his right.
And sandwiched between them, a seven-year-old boy in an oversized school uniform.
He then ran to the reference book section and lugged back two more hefty tomes:
a deep blue *Russian-Chinese Science and Technology Dictionary*,
and a red *Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary*.
He carried the four books, which weighed a good five kilos combined, over to a large oak table in the corner of the reading room.
He dropped the books onto the table with a loud THUD.
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