17: Chapter 17: Memorizing the Complete Collection of Classical Chinese Prose in Eight Years

In the autumn of the eighth year, Jiang Lin felt that his Chinese had a breakthrough.

It wasn't a breakthrough in test-taking.

It was a breakthrough in reading.

The catalyst was memorizing "Letter to Ren An".

He had memorized this piece countless times; whether reciting it forwards or starting from any random sentence in the middle, he knew it backwards and forwards.

But that evening, sitting beneath the broken wall, as he recited it with his lips, a sudden thought flashed through his mind.

What was Sima Qian feeling when he wrote this letter?

He stopped.

Whenever he memorized texts in the past, he only focused on the words.

How a certain character was pronounced, what a specific sentence meant, or what rhetorical devices were used in a given paragraph.

But today, he suddenly began to focus on the person.

The person who wrote the letter.

Sima Qian, who was subjected to castration simply for speaking a few fair words for Li Ling.

Sima Qian, who survived in humiliation solely to finish a work of history.

"My ancestors possessed no merits of receiving tallied warrants and vermilion books; their duties in literature, history, and astronomy were close to those of diviners and ritualists, naturally treated as playthings by the sovereign, kept like jesters and actors, and looked down upon by the vulgar customs."

What must it have felt like in the heart of the person who wrote these words?

His ancestors were not founding heroes, and his own position was merely managing literature, history, and the calendar—in the eyes of Emperor Wu of Han, it was probably no different from being a musician or an actor.

A despised person spoke up for another despised person, and was consequently subjected to the most humiliating punishment.

When he recited to the part about the castrating punishment being the lowest of all, his voice dropped.

It wasn't deliberately lowered; that sentence had grown heavy on its own.

Leaning against the broken wall, he recited the entire "Letter to Ren An" from beginning to end.

When he recited up to "I also wished to examine all that is between heaven and humanity, comprehend the changes of past and present, and complete a work of my own," he stopped.

In the past, when reciting this sentence, he only felt it was a historian expressing his ambitions.

Today, reciting it again, he suddenly heard something else in it.

It wasn't ambition.

It was a reason to keep living.

When a person lost everything—dignity, status, friends, and even a complete human body—what was left?

Only one thing remained.

Finishing that book.

It wasn't for everlasting fame, but to give meaning to all the suffering he had endured.

He leaned against the broken wall as the dark red sun sank below the horizon, and the wind blew across the Wasteland, carrying that endless, unyielding scent of sulfur.

"To complete a work of my own," he said.

His voice was swept away by the wind.

But he felt that Sima Qian had heard it.

That night, he wrote in his diary: "Having memorized 'Letter to Ren An' for four years, I finally truly read it today. Not reading the words, but reading the person. Sima Qian wrote it in a prison cell, and I read it in the Wasteland. Over two thousand years apart, separated by a single sheet of paper, the words are still warm."

From then on, his method of memorizing the Guwen Guanzhi changed.

No longer just memorizing words, but memorizing people.

When reciting Zuo Qiuming, he imagined him compiling the Zuo Zhuan even while blind.

When reciting Qu Yuan, he imagined him looking haggard and emaciated by the Miluo River.

When reciting Tao Yuanming, he imagined him resigning from office, returning home, and planting Soybean beneath the southern mountains.

Yes, Soybean.

He also planted Soybean in the Wasteland.

Every single person stepped off the paper.

Not ancient figures, but real people.

People who, just like him, struggled to survive within their respective eras and dilemmas.

On the Mid-Autumn Festival of the eighth year, he finished reciting all the passages about the moon in the Guwen Guanzhi, and then wrote a diary entry in classical Chinese.

"The Mid-Autumn Festival of the fifth year, sitting alone beneath the broken wall. The moon of the Wasteland is as dark red as ashes. Lacking wine, I replace it with water. Lacking friends, I replace them with shadows. Lacking poetry, I replace it with silence. Five years have passed; I know not the date of my return, yet I know when I return, the moon at that time will shine bright over my hometown."

After writing it, he read it once.

It wasn't Su Shi, it wasn't Li Bai, it wasn't the tone of anyone else.

It was his own.

...

As the days and nights alternated through the changing of seasons, those six ten-thousand milliamp-hour power banks gradually broke down one by one.

First, their casings turned yellow and brittle, then the batteries swelled, and finally even the interfaces of the solar panels developed poor contact due to oxidation.

By the spring of the sixth year, only one power bank could barely store a tiny bit of electricity, and as for that phone, its battery had aged to the limit where even a full charge could only keep the screen on for ten minutes.

Ten minutes.

In the past, he could keep the phone screen on all night to slowly look at problems; now, this phone had become an extremely stingy dictator, granting him only ten minutes of audience time each day.

"When time is insufficient, memory must make up for it."

Jiang Lin was forced to train himself in the quantum speed-reading skill of taking in ten lines at a glance.

Every noon when the sunlight was best, he directly connected the last solar panel to his phone.

During the few seconds of startup, his nerves were taut to the limit.

As soon as the screen lit up, he immediately clicked open the question bank, frantically scanning it for five minutes.

Not to solve the problems, but like a human camera, imprinting dozens of science comprehensive final-exam questions from various provinces into his brain.

The aspect ratio of the graphics, every known condition in the prompt, even an inconspicuous coefficient of friction, were forcefully crammed into his brain's hippocampus.

As soon as five minutes were up, he immediately shut it down to conserve power.

The rest of the half-day belonged to his supercomputer moment.

He weeded the Soybean and heaped soil around the potatoes in the fields; his physical body labored mechanically, but his brain operated frantically.

"Question one: the motion of a charged particle in a composite field... The particle performs a helical motion, and the Lorentz force provides the centripetal force..."

He constructed a clear three-dimensional coordinate system in his mind, letting that non-existent charged particle precisely deflect and spin in his imagination.

No paper or pen was needed, no wooden sticks; all force analyses and geometric derivations were completed within the virtual sandbox of his brain.

By the ninth year, the tactic of practicing numerous exam questions lost its effect on him.

The three great mountains of mathematics, Physics, chemistry, and biology had been ground down into flat ground by him through the sheer force of time.

He practiced the exclusive techniques of college entrance exam final-exam questions—such as the scaling method, extreme point deviation, and implicit zero-point substitution in high school mathematics—into muscle memory as natural as breathing.

In the past, he needed to fill an entire sheet of scratch paper trying to construct auxiliary functions; now, a single glance allowed him to automatically match the smoothest deformation path.

Whatever divine positioning of charged particles in electromagnetic fields, whatever multi-process momentum and energy conservation—as long as he glanced at the initial conditions, his brain could instantly transform into a zero-latency Physics engine.

Those complex sliding blocks, wooden boards, conveyor belts, and spring oscillators were all disassembled in his eyes into slow-motion Lego blocks.

How the force analysis changed and how the Lorentz force turned all ran clearly within his internal three-dimensional sandbox.

The final-exam questions of chemistry and biology likewise became one-way transparent.

Taking a glance at the reaction conditions of the organic chemistry problems, the breaking and recombination of the carbon skeleton automatically calculated in his brain like a holographic projection.

Various anti-human complex redox reactions could be instantly balanced in terms of electron transfer in his mind with just a single look.

As for biology, those genetic maps that once made one's scalp tingle and the mating calculations of fruit flies' red and white eyes required no drafting whatsoever; the probability distributions of various genotypes directly formed a matrix on his retina.

The material cycles of photosynthesis and respiration, along with the release pathways of neurotransmitters—these complex dynamic processes had long been carved into his DNA.

While others were still bitterly and rote-memorizing secondary conclusions, he had already run through the positive and negative derivation processes of those conclusions tens of thousands of times in his mind, like analyzing a film frame by frame.

Those provincial final-exam questions couldn't fool him even if they changed their vests.

A glance at the question, and his brain didn't even need to write out equations before automatically popping out the four distractor options and the traps the question-setter wanted to dig.

He shattered the ceiling of the college entrance examination's knowledge system.

...

In the winter of the ninth year, after lying dormant for three thousand days and nights, the Grim Reaper finally knocked on the thin wooden door of the dugout, preparing to collect the interest named toxins from Jiang Lin.

The first to issue a warning was his hair.

It was an extremely ordinary morning.

Jiang Lin crawled out of his sleeping bag, cupped a bit of cold filtered rainwater in his hands, and splashed it on his face.

When his fingers habitually ran through his shoulder-length, greasy hair to comb it backward, a sensation of effortless shedding came from the palm of his hand.

He spread his hand open.

In the palm of his hand were not a few fallen broken hairs, but a large handful of hair attached to shriveled hair follicles.

The mixed black and white strands of hair looked shocking under the dark red sky.

Yes, he was only twenty-seven years old, yet nearly a third of his hair had turned white.

Jiang Lin stared at the handful of hair in his palm for a long time; there was no panic on his face, only the peace of a boot finally dropping.

He casually threw that handful of hair into the ashes of the fire pit and turned to go to the cellar to get today's rations.

Half a month later, while gnawing on a baked potato, the tragedy played out once again.

The potato was baked a bit dry and hard, and the moment he bit down hard, a piercing, heart-wrenching pain came from his right lower jaw.

Covering his mouth, he spat the contents out into his palm.

Mixed within the chewed-up yellow mashed potato were a mouthful of bright red blood foam and half a bloody molar.

It wasn't scurvy.

Because his farming had been successful, he could guarantee sufficient vitamin intake every day.

This was the collapse of his bones.

Jiang Lin licked the empty tooth socket with his tongue, and his mouth was filled with a thick taste of rust.

As a science student, he knew all too well what was happening to his body.

Lead, cadmium, arsenic, and those radioactive isotopes accompanied by trace radiation.

Although the Geiger counter's readings were always within an acceptable range, although he wore an N95 mask, although the water he drank was filtered and neutralized, although he peeled the potato skins, and although he did every single thing he knew he should do.

Yet how many things he couldn't see floated in the air of the Wasteland—he never knew.

Time and again he walked beside the turned soil, time and again he smashed open the compacted layer with an entrenching tool, kicking up dirt mixed with mineral dust—how much he inhaled, he had no way of knowing.

Nine years of accumulation.

Heavy metal ions disguised themselves as calcium ions, grandly embedding themselves into his bones and teeth.

Radionuclides camped out in his thyroid and liver.

Jiang Lin lay on his side on the moisture-proof mat, staring at the mud seams of the brick hut's ceiling, listening to his own breathing.

A bit heavy, a bit weighed down, as if some corner of his lungs had filled with water.

"It's about time."

Jiang Lin did not curse heaven or blame others.

Having endured for nine years in the Wasteland, he had long regarded life and death as a Physics problem with known boundary conditions.

The current organ failure was simply the inevitable result of this problem being derived to its final step.

Jiang Lin had thinned out of all recognition.

The oversized military coat hung on him like an empty flour sack.

Jiang Lin could feel that certain organs inside his viscera were striking; his excreted urine carried a pungent bloody odor, and large patches of dark spots began to appear on his retina.

This mortal shell had reached the brink of exhaustion where the oil was spent and the lamp was dry.

His increasingly weak muscles could no longer support him in continuing to maintain the high-intensity operation of that eighty-square-meter farm.

There was no need to waste food and continue.

The Wasteland had given him enough things, but the Wasteland now had no way to give him anything to cure this illness.

It was time to go back.

Jiang Lin struggled to sit up, pulled out the last piece of blank scratch paper, and with a trembling charcoal pencil wrote down the final line of text.

[The tenth year, the first day, it's time to go back.]

Then he closed his eyes.

Extreme exhaustion, like rising black seawater, washed over his chest and finally submerged the top of his head.

His breathing became weaker and weaker, and the intervals between his heartbeats were stretched infinitely long.

Just at the moment when that fragile red line of vital signs was about to snap completely.

Darkness fell before his eyes.

A sensation of weightlessness, for a single instant.