367: Chapter 367 Temporary Adjustment

Song Yuan's words bounced through the underground parking lot passage,

hitting the concrete wall before folding back.

Lin Que did not stop walking.

He could hear the weight behind the question.

Forty-eight hours, the threshold for cognitive decline, the physical folding cycle—

concepts from three different disciplines were precisely threaded together, pointing directly at the underlying structural logic of "folding beijing."

This was a graduate student from the Qingbei School of Literature using his best weapon to test the limits of a high schooler.

Lin Que let out a soft internal chuckle.

In his past life, after "Folding Beijing" won the Hugo Award,

he had flipped through at least hundreds of academic analysis papers from around the world.

From MIT's Social Physics Lab to Oxford's literary criticism journals,

top scholars of every stripe had dismantled this work into molecular fragments for repeated study.

Song Yuan's angle of entry was indeed good, but compared to those piles of papers, it was only mediocre.

He didn't stop or turn his head, his tone as steady as his walking pace.

"Senior Song, your entry point from biology is very precise."

Song Yuan's pace slowed by half a beat, and the gaze behind his lenses sharpened.

"But you only went halfway."

The sound of the rolling suitcase spread through the empty passage with moderate weight.

"Forty-eight hours isn't just the upper limit for wakefulness;

it's the 'optimal extraction scale' precisely calculated by the superiors to maintain absolute stability."

Song Yuan stopped walking.

Lin Que stopped too.

He turned around and leaned against the passage wall,

resting his crossed hands on the suitcase handle in a relaxed posture.

"One second more, and the lower class would breed the sparks of resistance due to excessive wakefulness.

One second less, and the absolute efficiency of the labor machine would decrease."

He paused.

"Forty-eight is not a physiological limit, but an economic optimum."

The passage was silent.

Song Yuan's grip on the handle of Lin Que's suitcase tightened, the tendons on his knuckles bulging slightly.

He didn't back down.

"But the premise of your interpretation is that your so-called 'superiors' possess perfect information processing capabilities."

Song Yuan pushed up his glasses, his speaking speed increasing by a notch.

"But you must know that human tolerance is a variable.

In the same forty-eight hours, the decline curves of different individuals vary greatly.

If the scale is this rigid, it will inevitably lead to structural fatigue."

He took a step forward, his lenses reflecting the cold white light overhead.

"So how does your 'folding' mechanism solve the sociological entropy increase of accumulating resentment from the lower class?"

Tang He stood slightly behind the two, understanding what Song Yuan was doing.

Pressurizing.

Layer upon layer of heavy academic pressure, forcing the opponent to reveal the ceiling of their thinking.

Graduate students from the Qingbei School of Literature communicated this way, like boxers using jabs to test for gaps in an opponent's defense.

But Lin Que leaned against the wall, wearing the exact same expression he had in front of the whiteboard in the ten-thousand-person venue.

"Entropy increase?" Lin Que repeated the words with a tone of almost cruel indifference.

"Senior Song, you think too poorly of the superiors."

His voice dropped half a pitch in the passage.

"The superiors never fear entropy increase; they only commodify it."

Song Yuan's brow furrowed.

"The forced hibernation brought by physical folding is like a pressure relief valve.

The lower class isn't resting during the flipping intervals; they are being formatted.

All the emotions, all the dissatisfaction, all the faint thoughts of resistance accumulated during the forty-eight hours of wakefulness—"

"—are systematically cleared at the moment of forced hibernation."

Lin Que straightened up from the wall.

"And every time they wake up, they think they are 'new'.

But the superiors know they've just been rebooted.

The cost of resistance was never a variable; it was accounted for long ago as operational loss within these forty-eight hours."

"Just as a factory factors machine depreciation into production costs."

He looked Song Yuan in the eye.

"You asked how the resentment is handled.

The answer is, the superiors never intended to handle it from the start.

They only need to ensure that resentment never accumulates to the threshold.

And the forty-eight-hour formatting cycle is that safety line, precise to infinite decimal places."

The passage fell silent.

The wheels of the suitcase stopped on the concrete floor, falling into silence after one last soft click.

Song Yuan stood in place, his knuckles white as he gripped the handle.

He opened his mouth, then closed it again.

His mind was racing at high speed, trying to find a gap to refute Lin Que's logic.

But he couldn't find one.

Biology, economics, sociology.

The logic of three disciplines had been stitched into a complete, seamless loop by this high schooler in a school uniform in just four sentences.

This wasn't just a flash of gifted insight.

This was someone who had stood outside the game for a long time, having already deduced the landing point of every piece on the board to the endgame.

Five seconds.

Five whole seconds of silence.

Song Yuan let out a long breath.

That thing he had been carrying since he walked out of the arrival gate—

the unconscious condescension of a top-tier elite facing a junior—

began to be stripped away layer by layer from the moment Lin Que said "optimal extraction scale."

Until that final sentence, "precise to infinite decimal places."

It finally blocked every path his mind tried to use to refute,

and that layer of pretense finally fell off him completely, shattering silently on the concrete floor of the passage.

He let go of the handle.

"Professor Liu was right."

Song Yuan's voice was very soft, as if he were talking to himself.

He gripped the handle again and pulled Lin Que's heavy suitcase forward two steps.

His pace returned to normal, but his posture was completely different from when he arrived.

Before, he walked at the front leading the way, his body language screaming, "I am the guide."

Now, he walked side-by-side with Lin Que, his shoulders turned slightly toward him.

Tang He followed behind, her fingers trembling unconsciously.

Ever since she heard Lin Que deconstruct the "Wall of Classes" at the Shanghai book signing, she knew he was extraordinary.

But back then, she thought Lin Que's strength lay in his expression and his sharp way of breaking down a topic.

Only now did she realize how wrong she had been.

Those techniques and that composure in the ten-thousand-person venue weren't his limit at all.

That was just the part he chose to show.

The cognitive system running in his head

was in a completely different dimension from hers, Song Yuan's, and all their peers'.

She remembered what Lin Que had said on the train:

"If a system can't withstand being dismantled, then it means it already has cracks."

At the time, she thought the statement was open-minded.

Now, she began to feel it was heavy.

Because someone who could say "it's not a pity to dismantle it" in that tone must have experienced a more thorough disintegration than anyone present, and then put the pieces back together alone.

To the point where he was no longer afraid of breaking.

Tang He's fingertips were ice-cold; she couldn't name this feeling.

It wasn't exactly fear, but more like looking down from the edge of a cliff and discovering the depth was far beyond her imagination.

...

The three of them walked out of the passage,

and the lighting in the Beijing South Station underground parking lot switched from dim yellow to bright incandescent.

A clean black business van with a Qingbei University pass was parked in a reserved spot.

Song Yuan opened the trunk and stacked the two suitcases.

Lin Que's large suitcase, filled with "strategic supplies," took up two-thirds of the space, pushing Tang He's to the corner.

The three got into the car.

Song Yuan sat in the passenger seat, while Lin Que and Tang He sat in the back.

As the car drove out of the parking lot, sunlight streamed through the windshield; the September light in Beijing was more than a shade harsher than in Jiangcheng.

The distant buildings had sharp silhouettes in the sunlight, and a few iconic rooftops were faintly visible in the direction of Chang'an Avenue.

The car was quiet for a while.

Song Yuan turned around, looking back at the two in the rear, a streak of sunlight cutting across his glasses.

His expression was worlds apart from before.

The restrained politeness from the arrival gate was still on his face, but the look in his eyes had changed.

It was no longer the distance of observing through glass, but a level, weighted seriousness.

The car was quiet for a while.

A row of neat plane trees flashed past the window, shadows alternating light and dark on his lenses three times.

He spoke, the layer of casualness in his tone stripped away and replaced with a businesslike formality.

"There's something I need to tell you in advance.

Regarding the first stage of the Qinglan Project, the 'Bone Dismantling' arrangement,

Professor Liu's side..."

"...has had a temporary adjustment."