2: Chapter 2 Zeroing Out

The countdown was still ticking down, second by second.

Jiang Lin sat on the edge of the bed, without screaming or immediately suspecting he had gone crazy.

As a senior high school science student of two years, his first reaction was to conduct a variable control experiment.

This wasn't some innate talent; it was purely a conditioned reflex.

That phrase, the control variable method, which the Physics teacher had repeated countless times in class—Have you remembered it?—was already engraved in his marrow.

First, he closed his left eye and kept only his right eye open.

The numbers were still there.

There was no shift in position either.

No matter how he turned his right eyeball, that string of numbers remained nailed to the same relative position, moving synchronously with the rotation of his eyeball, as if it had been welded onto his retina.

Next, he closed his right eye and opened his left eye.

The exact same result.

The numbers were still there, unchanged in brightness and position, and even the slightly blurry texture at the edges of the font was identical.

The images seen by the left and right eyes were completely identical, with no parallax or ghosting.

"Binocular imaging is consistent; it is not a localized lesion of the cornea or lens."

If it were a problem with the eyeball itself, such as foreign matter sticking to the cornea or opacity in some part of the lens, then closing a single eye should result in differences in the image.

The viewing angles of the left and right eyes were different, the lesion locations were different, and the positions of the foreign objects seen should also be different.

But now, the countdown seen by both eyes was in the same position, with the same brightness and clarity.

What did this indicate?

Jiang Lin's palms began to sweat.

He took a deep breath and performed a more thorough test.

He pulled the quilt over, crawled right inside, and buried his head deep between the pillow and the bedding.

The cotton quilt was thick—it was the autumn-winter quilt his mother had just dug out from the cabinet last month, carrying a mixed scent of mothballs and intense sunlight exposure.

In an absolute dark environment, his vision should be pure darkness, at most accompanied by the chaotic optical noise spontaneously generated by the optic nerve after closing his eyes.

But that string of translucent characters was still there.

Counting down unhurriedly.

Jiang Lin crawled out from under the quilt, a layer of cold sweat already oozing from his forehead.

"It is not the refraction of external light sources, nor is it an optical residual caused by corneal or lens lesions."

His gaze fell on the biology textbook on the desk, opened to the chapter on eyes and vision.

The cover of the textbook was curled at the edges, and the margins of the pages were densely marked with different colored highlighters.

Retina, optic nerve, visual center, cerebral cortex occipital lobe...

These terms flashed through his mind in a queue.

The propagation of light requires a medium, and the formation of vision requires photons to pass through the cornea, aqueous humor, lens, and vitreous body, finally projecting onto the retina, where they are converted into electrical signals by photosensitive cells, and then transmitted to the brain via the optic nerve.

This was a complete, repeatedly verifiable physical and physiological process.

But now, something had bypassed this entire process.

"This thing bypassed my eyeball's optical system and acted directly on the optic nerve, or some area of the visual center in the cerebral cortex."

A countdown that wrote visual signals directly into the brain completely violated any Physics and biology common sense he had ever learned.

No photons, no retinal photoreception, no optic nerve conduction.

Or rather, it simulated all of this, making his brain think it saw something.

Jiang Lin instinctively reached behind his head with the back of his hand.

His fingers passed through his hair, pressing against the scalp above the occipital bone, groping bit by bit.

There were no intubations, no metal interfaces, no stitched wounds, not even a slightly raised or sunken abnormal tactile sensation.

"Jiang Lin, are you up?"

Suddenly, his mother's voice came from outside the door. Separated by a bedroom door pasted with soundproofing cotton strips, the volume was weakened quite a bit, but the urging tone hadn't diminished at all.

Immediately following was the pattering sound of slippers stepping on the tile floor, extending all the way from the direction of the master bedroom to the kitchen, followed by the sound of the faucet being turned on and off, and the clicking sound emitted by the electronic lighter when the gas stove was ignited.

Jiang Lin's body reacted before his brain, springing up from the edge of the bed almost by conditioned reflex.

"I'm up, coming right out."

Regarding this string of countdowns...

On the first day, Jiang Lin tried to convince himself that this was a hallucination caused by too much pressure.

In senior high school, who didn't have a few hallucinations?

His deskmate, Sun Ming, even said last month that he heard the in-game kill sound effect during evening self-study, only to find out it was the classmate in front whose phone wasn't on mute.

Perhaps he also saw something at a certain moment, and then his brain solidified it, turning it into an unforgettable afterimage.

But on the second day, the countdown was still there.

The third day as well.

The fourth day as well.

He began to zone out in class.

Not the kind of zoning out where you think about what to eat for lunch, but a more passive and uncontrollable shift in attention.

That string of countdown numbers was like a lingering curse, depriving him of his attention every single moment.

In class, the Physics teacher was drawing the deflection trajectory of charged particles in a magnetic field on the blackboard, holding a large wooden compass in his left hand and pinching a piece of chalk with his right, chalk dust rustling down as he drew the arc.

Jiang Lin's eyes stared at the blackboard, but his pupils were not focused on those white lines.

His focus fell on the air at the upper right of the blackboard, on the numbers only he could see.

[22:14:05:33]

Left-hand rule.

Charged particles undergo uniform circular motion in a uniform magnetic field.

The Lorentz force provides the centripetal force; qvB equals mv squared divided by R.

He had memorized these formulas so well that his wrist didn't even need to go through his brain when writing them on the draft paper.

But when his line of sight was dragged away by that string of numbers, when his consciousness tore back and forth between the Lorentz force and the countdown for three or four rounds, that example problem on the blackboard had already been explained.

"Alright, everyone understands this problem, right? Next, let's look at a variant."

Jiang Lin lowered his head to look at his notebook.

There were only three lines written on it.

Charged particles enter the magnetic field

Radius formula R = mv / qB

And then there was nothing else.

He didn't know what the answer to that example problem was, didn't know what the teacher's problem-solving train of thought was, and didn't even know what the problem was asking.

Keeping it from everyone, he secretly went to the Second Municipal Hospital by himself.

Using the pocket money he had accumulated over usual days, he registered for an expert appointment in the neurology department, and even gritted his teeth to get a brain CT scan.

The result was completely normal.

Looking at his heavy dark circles, the doctor earnestly treated him as a neurasthenic patient suffering from visual hallucinations due to excessive gaokao pressure, and prescribed him two boxes of Oryzanol and Anshen Bunao Liquid.

Medicine declared that he was very healthy.

This conclusion, which should have brought a sigh of relief, plunged Jiang Lin into an even deeper despair.

If this were an illness, then there would be a cause, a lesion, and a treatment plan.

He could take medicine, have surgery, or do rehabilitation training.

Of course there were many illnesses modern medicine couldn't cure, but at least there was an explanation, a department you could register for, and a diagnostic name that could be written down in the medical record book.

But what if this wasn't an illness?

Then what on earth was that number ticking closer and closer to zero second by second?

What would happen on the day the timer reached zero?

This problem stuck in his throat like a fishbone, unable to be swallowed down or spat out.

It stuck there when he went to class during the day, it stuck there when he lay in bed at night, and it still stuck there when he woke up startled in the middle of the night staring at the ceiling.

Whenever he tried to ponder this question, his brain would act like a calculator inputted with an unsolvable equation, jumping back and forth among countless possibilities.

The end of the world?

This option was too grand—so grand that he instead didn't know how to fear it.

The end of human civilization, the destruction of the Earth, the heat death of the universe.

These things were scary when placed in news headlines, but placed in the daily life of a senior high school student, they lost their sense of reality because they were too distant.

Spiritual Qi revival?

That was a trope found only in web novels he had secretly read with his mobile phone under his desk when he was in the second year of junior high school.

But there were no signs of superpower awakening around him; his deskmate Sun Ming still couldn't solve a simple force analysis problem, Head Teacher Old Liu's hair was still decreasing day by day, and the food in the school cafeteria was still as unpalatable as ever.

Regardless of which possibility it was, he couldn't find evidence, nor could he find a reason to deny it.

Fear was such a thing.

When you knew who the enemy was, where it was, and when it would come, no matter how powerful the enemy was, you could at least prepare yourself and choose to fight or run away.

But when the enemy was a shapeless shadow and you didn't know what it was, where it was, or when it would strike, your fear had no outlet.

It wouldn't erupt, it wouldn't vent, it would only slowly infiltrate every corner of your life like chronic poisoning.

Moreover, compared to the fear itself, the most fatal part was that this countdown was simply too attention-grabbing.

The human brain's sensitivity to moving objects is naturally higher than to static objects.

This is an instinct carved into our genes, a survival mechanism used on ancient grasslands to spot stealthy predators.

Any tiny movement at the edge of your field of vision would trigger an automatic capture of attention, making you turn your head in that direction before you even realized what it was.

Yet in the upper right corner of Jiang Lin's field of vision, something was always moving.

"Hey, Old Jiang."

His seatmate, Sun Ming, gave him a hard nudge with his elbow.

Sun Ming was a round-faced chubby guy whose school uniform was always worn open, revealing a cartoon T-shirt underneath.

His grades steadily hovered at the bottom of the class, belonging to the type who weren't necessarily not studying, but just couldn't absorb the knowledge, and his attitude toward grades was enviably open-minded.

"Have you been possessed by evil spirits lately?" Sun Ming lowered his voice, the corners of his mouth splitting to both sides, "What are you spacing out for? Your drool is about to drip down."

Jiang Lin subconsciously raised a hand to wipe the corner of his mouth.

It was dry.

Sun Ming laughed out loud, but after being swept by Old Liu's gaze, he quickly reined it in.

He blocked his face with his textbook and passed over half a pack of fifty-cent spicy strips from under the desk, the packaging printed with a cartoon chicken wearing sunglasses.

Jiang Lin shook his head, and Sun Ming shrugged, tore open the package and chewed on them himself, his mouth full of red chili oil.

"Next class is Extinction Master's back-to-back English classes." Sun Ming said vaguely while chewing, the spicy scent of the spicy strips floating out of his mouth, "If you keep wandering off to the void like this, watch out for her blowing your head off with a piece of chalk. She just set a record last week, throwing seven pieces of chalk in a single class with a hundred percent hit rate."

"It's fine." Jiang Lin pinched the space between his eyebrows, his fingertips pressing hard against the upper brow bone, feeling a sour ache. "Just didn't sleep well last night."

As he spoke, he forcibly tore his gaze away from the countdown and raised his head to look at the blackboard.

But it was useless.

It was always running in the background.

Even if you deliberately avoided looking at it, some part of your brain was constantly monitoring its changes.

Just like a computer's background process, you couldn't close it or uninstall it; it always occupied a portion of memory, making any program you ran a bit more laggy than everyone else's.

In the following half month, Jiang Lin's state plummeted.

He forgot the back of the English vocabulary as soon as he memorized the front, and on math test papers, even the most basic questions began to crash on a large scale.

He got the inclusion relation of sets wrong, calculated the period of trigonometric functions incorrectly, and missed a negative sign in the coordinate operations of vectors.

Every time he opened the answer key to check and correct, the moment the red pen slashed down, he felt like he didn't know the person who wrote those answers.

A weekly test in mid-October.

The weekly test scores did not publicize rankings.

After school, the campus gradually quieted down.

The people in the classroom had all left, and the afterglow of the setting sun spilled onto the desks through the improperly closed windows, stretching Jiang Lin's shadow very long.

Sitting alone at his seat, looking at the math test paper in his hand out of a full score of one hundred and fifty where he only scored 79 points, he only felt his hands and feet turning cold.

He suddenly realized a very realistic problem.

Even if after this countdown hit zero, aliens really drove spaceships to blow up the Earth, spiritual energy truly revived, or the apocalypse really arrived, the entire humanity would be finished together.

Seventy billion people taking the road together with companions on the Netherworld road—no one would lose out compared to anyone else.

Maybe when they got over there, they could even form a class and continue listening to Old Liu talk about the eccentricity of ellipses.

But what if before the countdown hit zero, he ruined his own grades first?

What if on the day the countdown hit zero, nothing happened at all, and just that number disappeared, as sudden as when it appeared.

And then?

Then he would still have to take the college entrance examination more than two hundred days later.

Still have to take that report card to face his parents.

Still have to fill out college applications.

Still have to live out the rest of this lifetime.

In the future, was he really going to hold a high school diploma and screw bolts on an electronics factory assembly line for the rest of his life?

Jiang Lin took a deep breath.

This breath was taken very deeply, so deeply that his chest felt a bit bloated.

Then he abruptly raised both hands and slapped them hard against his cheeks with a sharp snap.

It stung with burning pain, hurting so much that a layer of physiological mist welled up in his eye sockets.

But it also made his mind unprecedentedly clear.

Not the kind of clarity where he thought of a way out.

The countdown was still there; he still didn't know what it was, and still didn't know what would happen fifteen days later.

He had no way to make that number disappear, just as he had no way to make his own shadow disappear.

But he could make a choice.

Whether to be dragged down by this countdown from who-knows-where, or else, screw it all.

"Fuck your mother's countdown, I'm going to get into a tier-one university!"

From that day on, Jiang Lin began forcing himself to ignore the countdown in the upper right corner.

It wasn't about not looking at it.

It was that even if he looked, he wouldn't let it linger in his mind.

The weapon was the willpower he had honed from countless exams and problem-solving drills, and the ammunition was the copies of "Five Years of College Entrance Examination and Three Years of Simulation" piled on his desk along with the breakfast his mom got up at five every morning to make.

Once he found himself zoning out to look at the time, he would reach out without hesitation and fiercely pinch the soft flesh on the inner side of his thigh.

The inner thigh was one of the thinnest skin areas on the entire body, dense with pain nerves.

The moment his nails sank in, the pain pierced straight in from the skin surface like a needle, darted all the way up the spinal cord along the nerve pathways, and exploded a clear signal in the cerebral cortex.

This signal was strong enough, strong enough to briefly cover up the existence of that countdown.

The price was that his thighs quickly became bruised and purple in patches.

Habit was a terrifying thing.

Not because it was so powerful, but because it was unreasonable.

You didn't need to believe it, didn't need to understand it, and didn't even need to like it.

You only needed to repeat. Repeat over and over again, day after day, until the neural circuits of the brain underwent physical changes, and until a certain behavior changed from being driven by willpower into an instinct that required no thought.

When you forcefully smashed all your concentration and obsession with survival onto "Five Years of College Entrance Examination and Three Years of Simulation", even if an atomic bomb about to explode was suspended right before your eyes, the brain would activate a self-protection mechanism and automatically judge the countdown of that atomic bomb as invalid information that didn't need to be processed.

Days passed by one by one; he attended classes as usual, queued up for meals in the cafeteria, did practice problems, and slept.

Occasionally, during recess, Sun Ming would pass over half a pack of fifty-cent spicy strips, and he could chew on them with a mouth full of red chili oil while explaining a most basic force analysis problem to Sun Ming on the scratch paper.

Life was calm and tranquil; nothing happened at all.

The people around him were busy as usual; there were no superpowers, no systems, and no windfall wealth dropping from the heavens.

Except that that number was getting smaller and smaller.

November 4th.

Before dawn broke, Jiang Lin was already awake.

Looking at the time, it was four-fifty-seven in the early morning.

Unable to sleep anymore, he simply climbed out of bed, took out a math test paper, and started working on it.

As he worked on it, he forgot the time.

Until he encountered a major math problem.

This was a major sequence problem, whose difficulty was actually just a tiny bit higher than basic questions.

For Jiang Lin, it belonged to the mid-range problem that he had to conquer if he wanted to stabilize his grades.

The scratch paper was filled with recursive formulas, but he still got stuck on the telescoping sum in the final step.

His brain felt like it had a lump of thick paste; no matter what, he couldn't find the term that could be successfully canceled out, nor could he sort out that thread of logic.

"Still not working?"

Jiang Lin felt somewhat annoyed.

Just as he was prepared to change his train of thought and recalculate, his gaze inevitably swept across the upper right corner.

Then he froze for a moment.

[00:00:00:30]

The thirty-day countdown was about to end.

Jiang Lin's heartbeat suddenly skipped a beat, and an inexplicable chill surged up from the soles of his feet, causing him to spring up from his chair all at once.

No matter how much he had pretended not to care over the past half month, treating this thing as background scenery, when this moment truly arrived, the fear of the unknown still surged into his heart like a tide.

[00:00:00:02]

[00:00:00:01]

[00:00:00:00]

At the exact moment the translucent numbers hit zero, Jiang Lin felt his vision go dark.