16: I spent four years memorizing Chapter 16.

On the mud walls of the dugout, the scratch marks carved with stones had densely connected into a large area, looking from afar like a jungle overgrown with black weeds.

The one thousand four hundred and sixtieth scratch mark.

Four years.

In the classrooms of Jiangcheng No. 7 High School, four years were enough to turn crop after crop of green freshmen into seasoned veterans, and enough for his deskmate Sun Ming to experience countless seasons of ups and downs in the King's Canyon.

But in the Wasteland, time was like a pool of viscous stagnant water, without any ripples or any scale.

There was no alternation of spring, summer, autumn, and winter, no hints of flowers blooming and falling, only that forever dusty sun, like a makeshift worker, clocking in and out on time at the edge of the Wasteland every day.

Jiang Lin's plot of land went from eighty square meters in the first year to one hundred and twenty square meters in the second year, and two hundred square meters in the third year.

And in the time it took to expand from eighty to two hundred square meters, the handle of the engineering shovel had broken nine times.

Starting from the third year, he no longer needed to calculate calories; food was so abundant that sometimes he would slice and dry excess potatoes for storage, forming an increasingly large food reserve.

The soil was improving year by year, its pH value slowly approaching 6.5, and the scent mixed with grayish-black humus when turning the soil became increasingly like the vegetable plots he had seen in the Real World.

In the third year, Moss spread from the vicinity of the camp to most areas of the riverbed, and in the fourth year, he discovered the first true vascular plant on the damp pebbles of the riverbed.

It was extremely short with grayish-green leaves, resembling some kind of fern on Earth, but thicker and harder, with its stems creeping close to the ground as if afraid to stand straight.

The Wasteland was slowly walking back at its own speed.

Jiang Lin's appearance had also undergone tremendous changes over these four years.

That set of autumn uniforms from Jiangcheng No. 7 High School had long become dilapidated amidst the wind, sand, and toil.

The labor-protection military overcoat passed down by his grandfather had become an invaluable treasure; only on nights when the temperature dropped below ten degrees would he bear to wrap himself in it to sleep.

His skin had been dyed into a rough bronze color by the ultraviolet rays and red soil of the Wasteland, his cheeks, which originally carried a bit of high schooler's baby fat, were completely sunken, and his jawline was as sharp as if carved by a knife.

Those hands had large knuckles, and his palms and the web spaces between his thumbs and index fingers were covered with thick yellow calluses, with red mud that could never be washed clean permanently embedded in the gaps of his fingernails.

If he were thrown back onto the streets of the Real World now, absolutely no one would believe this was a high school senior who had just turned eighteen.

This was clearly an old farmer who had farmed in the Northwest for half his life.

But compared to his appearance, an even greater change was the farm that had been expanded to two hundred square meters.

This plot of land had been tended by Jiang Lin into a precision-running machine.

The crop rotation mechanism of potatoes and Soybeans had been meticulously executed by him over these four years.

After harvesting the Soybeans, he would bury all the bean stalks into the soil, rot them into green fertilizer, sprinkle a large amount of plant ash, and plant potatoes on this mature land the following year.

As for the barren plots originally planted with potatoes, they were replaced with Soybeans, slowly recovering vitality relying on rhizobia.

The Pumpkin, expanded to ten square meters, had practically turned into a spirit; its vines not only crawled all over the drainage ditch, but even climbed up along the ruined walls, covering half of the dugout under a patch of green shade.

Jiang Lin found a relatively flat, concave stone disk in the dried-up riverbed and polished a simple stone mortar himself.

Every evening, he would put the soaked Soybeans into it, add some treated rainwater, crush them bit by bit with a wooden stick, filter out the turbid but bean-scented juice, and boil it over the fire.

A bowl of rough, sugar-free soy milk, paired with soft and glutinous roasted potatoes, plus a small pinch of water-blanched Pumpkin vines.

On the Wasteland, this was a solid triple carnival of carbohydrates, protein, and vitamins.

The red line of survival had long since receded; the current Jiang Lin was a learning machine that could operate at full capacity at any time.

But his greatest enemy was no longer hunger, but the absolute loneliness that was enough to drive a person crazy.

Four years.

For a full one thousand four hundred and sixty days and nights, he had not heard a sound made by a second human.

There was no social feedback whatsoever, no input of emotional value.

For a period of time, looking at the connected scratch marks on the wall, Jiang Lin felt a sense of inexplicable panic.

He found that his perception of time was losing.

What was the difference between one hundred days and one hundred and one days?

None.

Day after day of turning soil, watering, reading, and doing practice problems, he felt that he was turning into a crawler tractor on the Wasteland.

"I cannot go on like this; I have to treat myself like a human being."

One night, Jiang Lin stared at the scratch marks on the wall, and a thought suddenly popped into his mind.

How does human civilization fight against time?

It is the calendar, the solar terms, and a sense of ritual.

But the Wasteland had no alternation of four seasons, the sky was always gray, and that dark red sun rose and fell step by step every day, with even the temperature fluctuations being extremely minimal.

How was he supposed to determine the days?

Jiang Lin sat cross-legged in the dugout, flipping through the high school geography and Chinese language memories in his mind.

"Potatoes are cool-loving crops. In northern single-cropping regions, sowing is generally in spring, and the harvest period…"

He frowned, scribbling and drawing on the sandy ground with a tree branch.

"The harvest period is generally in late summer and early autumn, which is around Chushu in the Twenty-Four Solar Terms."

Chushu, exiting the heat.

Meaning the departure of the heat.

And in the common sense records of high school ancient poetry and prose, Chushu often falls in the early or mid-July of the lunar calendar.

Jiang Lin's eyes lit up.

The fifteenth day of the seventh month, the Ghost Festival.

He forcibly defined the day of the bumper harvest of potatoes in each season on the Wasteland as the Ghost Festival.

No matter what the true orbital period of the Wasteland planet was, he only recognized this calendar system he had set himself.

With the Ghost Festival as an anchor point, the remaining days were easy to calculate.

He took thirty days as a month.

The thirtieth day after the potato harvest was the Mid-Autumn Festival on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month.

About one hundred and sixty-five days after the harvest was New Year's Day.

From then on, besides the tally marks for recording the days on the wall of the dugout, there was an additional crude calendar drawn with charcoal.

The mechanical and rigid years on the Wasteland suddenly gained color.

On the day of the Ghost Festival, it was also the day to store potatoes in the cellar.

Jiang Lin would build a fire outside the dugout and burn a few withered Pumpkin vines.

He had no joss paper to burn, so he could only face that wisp of blue smoke and silently murmur the names of his ancestors in the Real World, considering it a memorial ceremony for his ancestors.

When the Mid-Autumn Festival arrived, he would specially pick out the roundest and yellowest potato from the cellar.

Instead of boiling it in water, he would bury it in the ashes of the hearth to roast slowly.

When the skin was crispy and the inside was sandy, he would hold this piping hot mooncake and sit on the threshold of the dugout.

While eating, he looked at the dark red Wasteland moon in the sky, softly reciting, "How long will the bright moon appear? Wine in hand, I ask the blue sky."

New Year's Eve was the most lavish.

He would extravagantly boil a pot of thick soy milk, cut Pumpkins into small pieces and mix them with bean dregs to make simple Pumpkin cakes, and even pause the problem-solving progress of all science test papers to give himself half a day of statutory holiday.

Even, he calculated his own birthday based on the number of days.

On his nineteenth birthday, he was turning the soil.

On his twentieth birthday, he was fighting against the flood.

On his twenty-third birthday, he used charcoal to draw a two-layer birthday cake for himself on the mud wall, and drew twenty-two candles on it.

"Jiang Lin, happy birthday, I wish you conquer the derivative finale problem soon." He said to the mud wall, speaking to himself.

This near-self-deceiving sense of ritual had become his strongest moat to maintain sanity on the Wasteland.

Every time a festival passed, it was reminding him.

You are a modern social person from Earth with a five-thousand-year civilization heritage; not only must you survive, but you must also carry on the ultimate learning of the sages of the past.

With this spiritual defense line, Jiang Lin poured his attention back into the long process of churning out practice problems.

But in terms of doing practice problems, Jiang Lin faced a crisis of material depletion.

The A4 draft paper brought in had almost been consumed.

To save paper, he began to constantly shrink the font size.

Previously, a single big question could fill more than half a page, but now he forcefully wrote the characters down to the size of ants, and both sides of a piece of paper, even the corner gaps, were filled with handwriting in three colors: red, blue, and black.

Later on, even the purchased ballpoint pen refills began to run low.

The red pen ran out first, followed by the blue pen.

In order to retain that last bit of black pen for taking the most critical notes, Jiang Lin began to adopt a large amount of paperless working methods.

He leveled a patch of red soil about two square meters at the entrance of the tent, smoothed it flat with a small hand hoe every noon, and then used a sharpened hard wooden stick to calculate on the ground.

This extreme calculation method with a punitive nature forcefully pushed his calculation speed to a terrifying level.

Previously, when doing an analytical geometry problem, he needed to repeatedly cross out and try and err on paper; now, just by glancing at the problem stem, the coordinate system of the ellipse and the skeleton of the simultaneous equations had already emerged in his mind.

Breakthroughs in science rely on logic and muscle memory, while stubbornly grinding away at the humanities is pure torture.

Especially English.

For a science student like Jiang Lin, who had a terribly poor innate sense of language and only knew how to rigidly dissect formulas, those more than one hundred high school English texts were simply a hundred-plus independent codebooks encrypted in alien writing.

During his first year, he spent an hour every morning and evening memorizing the texts.

That was an unbearable, pitch-dark period of time he couldn't look back on.

Facing long and difficult sentences, he felt like he was dissecting corpses.

Attributive clauses, adverbial clauses, non-finite verbs—he used a stick to draw structural trees of subjects, predicates, and objects on the ground, forcefully stuffing every single word into its corresponding syntactic grid.

The process of memorization was even more agonizing.

The Ebbinghaus forgetting curve showed not a shred of mercy on the Wasteland.

Often, he would stutteringly memorize a four-hundred-word reading text in the morning, only to go water the fields with a bucket of water at night, and when he tried to recite it again upon returning, only a few fragmented prepositions would be spinning around in his mind.

"Is this brain of mine made of a leaky sieve?"

Countless times in the dead of night, he would tug at his hair, which had grown as messy as a bird's nest, and curse furiously at the dark red sky.

After cursing, he would take a sip of the ice-cold rainwater and copy the parts he had memorized incorrectly ten times in the sand.

In the second year, this tug-of-war reached white heat.

He no longer demanded of himself to remember everything at once, but instead disassembled the memorization into every single action of Wasteland survival.

When turning the soil, he stipulated that a single shovel down must evoke the next word of a long and difficult sentence.

When watering, every time the bucket sloshed, a phrase had to tumble out of his mouth.

As time entered the third year, quantitative change began to slowly transform into qualitative change.

Those English sentences that he had disassembled, crushed, and chewed over tens of thousands of times finally began to take root and sprout in his cerebral cortex.

He found that he no longer needed to translate English into Chinese in his head and then re-translate it back into English.

Those words began to automatically arrange and combine, forming a vague yet definite sense of language.

And the true breakthrough occurred in this seemingly unremarkable fourth year.

It was an ordinary afternoon on the Wasteland.

Jiang Lin was in the potato field carrying out the hilling work for this season.

When potatoes grew to this stage, the red soil at the roots had to be piled high to give the underground stems enough space to expand, while also preventing the tubers growing above the surface from turning green and toxic due to exposure to light.

The entrenching tool fluttered up and down in Jiang Lin's hands.

Stepping on the soil, sinking the shovel, exerting force, prying up, and piling the earth.

The movements were smooth, carrying a wild and rugged rhythm.

He didn't think about how deep the next shovel would dig; muscle memory had already made all the plans for him.

His brain entered a state of flow that was completely emptied out.

There was only the howling of the wind sweeping across the Wasteland and the muffled sound of the shovel tip cutting through the hardened soil.

Right in this state of extreme concentration and emptiness, Jiang Lin's lips moved unconsciously.

At first, it was just an indistinct murmur, but gradually, the sound grew louder, appearing somewhat abrupt across the empty Wasteland.

"The Olympic Games are held every four years... Athletes from all over the world compete for medals..."

Wielding the entrenching tool in his hand, he steadily dumped a shovel of red soil onto the potato roots.

"Anne's best friend is her diary... She poured all her secrets into it..."

Moving his steps, he walked toward the next potato plant, and the shovel was raised once more.

"Earthquakes are natural disasters that can cause immense destruction..."

The speed of speech grew faster and faster, without pause or thought.

Those words poured out as smoothly as a breached flood, flowing down his trachea, vocal cords, and the tip of his tongue.

There was no Chindian-style stutter, no hesitation in searching for prepositional collocations in his mind, and even the liaison of those complex attributive clauses was as smooth as reciting his family's savings password.

Compulsory Book One, Compulsory Book Two, Compulsory Book Three...

Reciting from sports events to Anne's diary, from natural disasters to technological development.

Just like that, while mechanically sweating profusely, he recited loudly across the red Wasteland like a broken repeater.

He did not know how much time had passed, until his shovel struck a piece of black stone at the edge of the field used to press down plastic film, sending a numb tingling sensation through the web of his thumb and index finger.

Jiang Lin abruptly stopped his movements.

Leaning on the entrenching tool, he breathed heavily in deep gasps.

Sweat streamed down his filthy forehead into his eyes, stinging with pain, but he didn't even bother to wipe it away.

He stood blankly in place, listening to the pounding heartbeat inside his chest.

Something in his brain made a crisp shattering sound.

What had he just done?

He recalled.

During those at least over an hour of hilling time just now, without any conscious control or even any deliberate recollection, he had rattled off dozens of core texts from the high school English compulsory courses word for word.

There was no text on A4 paper emerging in his mind, nor did he dwell on grammar structures.

Those sentences were like a part of his instinct, as natural as breathing and as uncontrollable as a heartbeat.

"Muscle memory?"

Jiang Lin murmured to himself, his dry, cracked lips trembling slightly.

This was clearly the result of neural synapses completely altering the topological structure of the brain after experiencing four years and tens of thousands of repeated electrical-like shocks.

This foreign language that had once tortured him like a heavenly book had been forcefully chewed to pieces by him, swallowed into his stomach, and melted into his blood.

The cold wind on the Wasteland blew past, pressing the sweat-soaked rags on Jiang Lin's back tightly against his spine, chilling him to the bone.

Jiang Lin suddenly burst into laughter.

At first, his shoulders only twitched slightly, but later the laughter grew louder and louder, finally turning into unbridled, wild laughter across the empty Wasteland.

The laughter carried all the pent-up grievances, despair, self-doubt of the past four years, as well as an indescribable exhilaration at this very moment.

"Fuck!"

He waved his hand fiercely, stabbing the entrenching tool ruthlessly into the red soil at the edge of the field.

"Who else?"

He roared at the top of his lungs toward that dark red sun.

There was no response, only the wind whipping up a burst of red sand and dust, spinning around not far away.

This first great mountain, and the great mountain that once made him feel most powerless, had finally been dug through shovel by shovel over four years by him, a not-so-clever Foolish Old Man.

After venting, Jiang Lin pulled out the entrenching tool, hoisted it onto his shoulder, and turned to walk toward the dugout.

His pace was lighter than ever before.

He knew that passing English was only a beginning.

In this Wasteland World where time cost didn't need to be considered, his transformation had only just begun.

Crawling into the dim dugout, Jiang Lin lit the solar camping lamp whose shell was already covered in scratches.

He walked over to the corner and looked at that pile of materials with curled edges and yellowing pages.

At the very bottom of that pile of science test papers lay pressed several stacks of handwritten manuscripts of 《Guwen Guanzhi》.

A colossal classical Chinese literary masterpiece consisting of exactly two hundred and twenty-two essays and over one hundred thousand characters.

Compared to English, this thing was true hellish difficulty.

With no context, no daily usage scenarios, it was entirely made up of interchangeable characters, archaic meanings, and extremely complex inverted sentences—an ancient code.

Jiang Lin bent down and pulled out the top stack.

The paper felt somewhat brittle in his hand, densely covered with translations and annotations he had made in previous years.

Over these four years, like a pedantic scholar, he had been scrutinizing words and building scaffolding.

Now, the scaffolding was built.

"Old fellows, it's your turn."

Sitting cross-legged on the moisture-proof mat, Jiang Lin opened the first page while washing it down with a bowl of warm rainwater.

"Duke Zheng Defeated Duan at Yan."

The handwriting appeared somewhat blurred under the warm white light.

Jiang Lin cleared his throat, which had gone a bit dry from his earlier roar; the timidity belonging to a poor student in his eyes had long since vanished, replaced by a coldness and greediness after seeing through the rules of time.

He was going to carve these one hundred thousand characters into his brain without missing a single radical or component.

Even if it took another three or five years.

Anyway, on this Wasteland, what he lacked least was time.

Jiang Lin took a deep breath, and with a piety bordering on spiritual cultivation, began his new round of stubborn struggle.

"In the beginning, Duke Wu of Zheng married a woman from Shen named Wujiang, who gave birth to Duke Zhuang and Gongshu Duan..."