Chapter 6: Chapter 3: Caged Bird and Gear Diagram
September 1999.
Down south, the "autumn tiger" not only bit, but also sapped one’s very life force.
The main building of Yu Hong Primary School felt like it had been tossed into a steamer basket.
Inside the first-grade, Class 2 classroom, the old-fashioned ceiling fans overhead were whirring laboriously.
They spun so slowly that instead of bringing much of a breeze, they just churned the myriad smells of several dozen children into a suffocating, thick soup.
"Class, hands behind your backs, sit up straight!"
At the front of the class, their homeroom teacher, Teacher Wang, tapped the lectern with a blackboard eraser, raising a puff of white chalk dust.
"Repeat after me: a—o—e—"
"a—o—e—!"
Forty-five little mouths opened wide, letting out a unified shout.
The sound, brimming with a vitality yet uncorrupted by reality, was so powerful it made the classroom windows hum.
Chen Zhuo, sitting in the second-to-last row by the window, felt like the top of his skull was about to be blown off.
He frowned slightly, his unfocused gaze fixed on the ring of heat rash on the back of the chubby kid’s neck in front of him.
’This is a form of torture.’
For an adult soul with the mental age of a man in his thirties and a need for logical reasoning, being forced to sit in this classroom of less than forty square meters and repeat pinyin letters with zero informational value day after day was tantamount to death by a thousand cuts for the mind.
Chen Zhuo glanced down at the watch on his wrist.
It was an old pocket watch from his father. For convenience, his mother, Liu Xiuying, had specially sewn a cloth strap for it and tied it to his slender wrist.
2:15 PM.
Only ten minutes of this language arts class had passed.
Another thirty-five minutes to endure.
Thirty-five minutes. Enough time to memorize a set of formulas or mentally construct the cross-sectional diagram of a small workpiece.
But now, he could only sit here like a puppet, feeling his life slip away meaninglessly amid the waves of "open your mouths wide, a, a, a."
’I can’t go on like this.’
Chen Zhuo sighed internally.
His brain was starving.
As his seven-year-old body developed, the brain that had once frequently crashed was now entering a period of high activity.
It was like a computer that had just gotten a memory upgrade; if you didn’t feed it sufficiently complex data to process, it would just idle hot, creating an indescribable sense of anxiety and dizziness.
He needed logic, structure, complex geometric lines—not "little white bunny, white as can be."
Chen Zhuo glanced from side to side.
His deskmate, a little girl with pigtails, was chewing her eraser, covering it in teeth marks.
The chubby kid in front of him was secretly picking his nose, trying to wipe the booger under his desk.
Teacher Wang had turned to write on the blackboard, the chalk making a screeching sound as it scraped against the slate.
In that exact instant, Chen Zhuo’s hand slipped into his schoolbag.
He didn’t pull out the book he’d borrowed from the library; it was too conspicuous. Taking that out would have gotten him labeled a freak for reading gibberish.
He pulled out a sheet of scratch paper.
It was the back of a used, mimeographed test paper, the paper coarse and slightly yellowed.
Chen Zhuo slid the scratch paper under his language arts textbook, leaving only a blank section in the bottom-right corner exposed.
He then took out a sharply-honed Zhonghua pencil and a not-so-straight plastic ruler from his pencil case.
At that moment, the world fell silent.
The instant the tip of his pencil touched the paper, everything around him seemed to vanish, sealed off by an invisible barrier.
He was drawing a diagram.
Not the stick figures or cannons and airplanes a child would idly doodle, but a planetary gear reduction system.
He had seen it last weekend in his father’s workshop at the machine factory.
An imported German machine tool had broken down, and when it was taken apart, its precise interlocking structure had fascinated him for the entire day.
Although he hadn’t yet studied the specific principles of mechanics, his freakishly sharp observational skills and the spatial visualization abilities he had deliberately trained for years allowed him to perfectly replicate the structure on paper.
’Sun gear in the center... three planet gears orbiting... outer ring gear is fixed...’
Chen Zhuo’s hand was steady.
Though his seven-year-old fingers were still a bit soft, his grip on the pencil was extremely technical, using his wrist as a pivot to control the straightness of his lines.
A straight line, two arcs, a tangent point.
The pencil made a faint, scratching sound on the paper. To Chen Zhuo, this frictional sound, with its sense of resistance, was the most beautiful music in the world.
His brain began to whir at high speed.
He wasn’t just drawing; he was simulating.
In his mind’s eye, the flat drawing was three-dimensional and dynamic.
He could see the gears turning, feel the transfer of torque, and calculate the approximate reduction ratio.
’If the input speed is 1,500 RPM, after this stage of reduction, the output will be around 300 RPM... Efficiency loss is mainly due to gear face friction and the viscous drag of the lubricating oil...’
This high-intensity mental computation rapidly consumed his blood sugar, but it also dispelled the anxiety born from boredom.
He was completely immersed.
He forgot about Teacher Wang, still leading the pinyin drills at the front of the room. He forgot about the cicadas outside the window. He forgot that he was still just a seven-year-old primary school student.
Until—
A shadow abruptly fell over his desk.
The shadow blocked the light, bringing the spinning gears in his mind to a grinding halt.
Chen Zhuo’s fingers stiffened slightly.
As an adult, his first instinct wasn’t to frantically crumple the paper into a ball. That was the stupidest thing he could do—a dead giveaway of a guilty conscience.
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