My IQ Increases Year by Year

The pipes had been baking in the sun all day, so the tap water came out warm. He let it run for a moment until it turned icy cold.

Chen Zhuo closed his eyes, feeling the stream of water slide down his spine.

The abstract concepts of group theory and homological algebra that had been swirling in his mind all day actually became sharper under the shock of the cold water.

After his shower, Chen Zhuo changed into a clean, loose-fitting cotton T-shirt and knee-length shorts. He gave his dripping hair a quick rub with a towel and stepped out of the bathroom.

It was completely dark outside.

Outside the window, the campus streetlights flickered on one by one, their dim yellow halos casting dappled shadows through the leaves.

Chen Zhuo pulled out his chair, sat down, and switched on the desk lamp.

A warm yellow circle of light fell upon the stack of scratch paper.

He picked up his pen, his gaze landing on a set of homomorphic mappings he had derived the day before.

The vast amount of reading he’d done recently had made his mental framework for the fundamentals of discrete algebra increasingly solid.

People were accustomed to describing many of the world’s physics and mathematics problems with continuous calculus, pursuing a kind of smooth, seamless theoretical elegance.

But after reading so many manuscripts from his predecessors, Chen Zhuo was beginning to feel that when faced with extremely complex, multi-dimensional problems, continuity was often a beautiful trap.

’The more you tried to find a precise, continuous solution, the more entangled you became in the infinitesimals.’

’Conversely, if you could look at it from an algebraic perspective—slicing up those continuous spaces and extracting their discrete eigenvalues—many seemingly impossible knots would simply unravel.’

He stared at the paper, and the gears in his mind began to turn, slowly and silently.

Just then, an ear-splitting ring suddenly erupted from the hallway.

RRRRRRRRRRING—

It was the old-fashioned, red, wall-mounted IC card payphone. The sound was deafening.

The tip of Chen Zhuo’s pen froze for a second.

’It’s the middle of summer break. This whole building is probably empty, not even a mouse stirring.’

’Usually, when this phone rang, it was for one of the neighboring dorm rooms, but no one was around now.’

The phone rang stubbornly, again and again.

Chen Zhuo set down his pen, pushed back his chair, and went out. He walked to the phone and picked up the receiver.

"Hello? Who’s this?"

The other end of the line erupted with a burst of harsh static, like someone was smacking the mouthpiece, followed by a cacophony of background noise.

He could hear someone in the distance shouting that a partial derivative was wrong, the faint hum of an air conditioner, and the THUD of something heavy hitting the floor.

"Hello, hello? Is this the Keda Junior Class dorm? Is anyone there? Hello?"

A rapid-fire voice shot through the receiver, tinged with impatience, exhaustion, and an excitement he couldn’t suppress.

Leaning against the wall, Chen Zhuo heard the voice, and a faint smile touched his otherwise calm eyes.

"It’s the middle of the night. If no one answered, would you be talking to a ghost right now, Wang Huashao?"

The other end of the line went dead silent for a second.

Then, a deafening roar exploded through the line.

"Holy shit! Captain! It’s really you! I thought your school was on break and the dorms would be locked up!"

Wang Huashao’s voice was so loud that Chen Zhuo had to pull the receiver slightly away from his ear.

"See? I told you my memory was good! I memorized the dorm extension you gave us back then, I know it by heart! They didn’t believe me, said it wouldn’t go through!"

"Your memory is pretty good."

Chen Zhuo switched the receiver to his other hand, his voice calm and measured.

"Calling so late? What, does the national team not feed you enough? Are you calling to borrow money for instant noodles?"

"I wish it were just about being hungry!"

Wang Huashao let out a long, mournful sigh, his voice filled with sorrow and indignation.

"Captain, you have no idea. This place is hell! The coaches on the national team... they’re a bunch of heartless calculus machines!"

"How so?"

"From seven-thirty in the morning until ten at night! Nothing but high-intensity theory lessons and insane derivation problems!"

Wang Huashao unleashed a rapid-fire torrent of complaints, as if trying to vent all the misery he’d endured over the past few days.

"This afternoon, they threw a continuity model for plasma fluid dynamics at us, all non-linear partial differential equations! And they expected us to find the analytical solutions under all sorts of insane boundary conditions."

He swallowed hard, his voice on the verge of tears.

"Captain, in my entire life—I mean my *entire life*—I have never seen so many tangled integral signs. I feel like if I close my eyes right now, all I’ll see are infinitesimals holding hands and playing jump rope."

Chen Zhuo listened to his vivid complaints.

He could almost picture the short, perpetually chattering Wang Huashao forced to face a blackboard full of partial differential equations, scratching his head in frustration, the will to live draining from his face.

"Playing jump rope is good. It’ll exercise your cerebral cortex."

Chen Zhuo leaned against the wall, his tone flat.

"Just don’t let those infinitesimals tie themselves into knots in your brain."

"Captain, you’ve changed. Back on the provincial team, you’d at least pretend to feel sorry for us."

Wang Huashao complained with a whimper.

"You must be having the time of your life at Keda, right? I hear college is a cakewalk. Is it true nobody bothers you as long as you don’t fail your classes? You can go out whenever you want, sleep whenever you want?"

"I haven’t been sleeping. I’ve been in the library reading these past few days."

"Damn, that’s still the good life!"

Wang Huashao sighed.