24: Chapter 24, Fourth Time

Having made the study plan for the fourth trip to the Wasteland, Jiang Lin began preparing his survival checklist.

Last time, he stayed for nearly ten years.

He fully experienced that as long as he didn't touch the death line, as long as the camp didn't collapse, and as long as he still wanted to continue, he could stay in the Wasteland indefinitely.

But being able to didn't mean he definitely would.

The Wasteland was not a safe house.

There was acid rain there.

There was polluted water.

There were heavy metals.

There was mineralized soil that still remained after the radiation decay period.

There was lingering loneliness.

And there was a more realistic problem: his equipment couldn't last that long.

Therefore, he needed to prepare according to the longest-case scenario he could think of.

Afterwards, he divided the supplies into several major categories.

First, data.

Second, electricity.

Third, writing.

Fourth, experiments.

Fifth, maintenance.

Sixth, medical protection.

Seventh, mental anchors.

Eighth, a large amount of table salt, and a small amount of seeds.

By the end of the third trip to the Wasteland, there was already about two hundred square meters of arable land in the camp. Although the rotation system of potatoes, Soybean, and Pumpkin was crude, it was already enough to keep him well-fed all day by himself.

The water source treatment process had also been worked out long ago.

What was truly in short supply this fourth time wasn't food and water,

but civilization.

The first item was electronic equipment.

He didn't look at those pretty new products.

New products were too expensive.

He opened Xianyu and searched for used ThinkPad.

T480.

T470.

X270.

X280.

He clicked into them one by one, checking the condition, ports, keyboard, battery, and the seller's historical reviews.

In the end, he chose two.

One was a T480 in relatively good condition, to be used as the main study machine.

One was an old X270 with obvious casing dents but still functioning normally, to be used as a backup.

The second item was tablets and old phones.

The tablet was used to watch video lectures, and the phone was used as a dictionary, data machine, and backup reader.

He didn't buy a very expensive one.

As long as it could read PDFs, play videos, insert a memory card, had an unbroken screen, and the battery wasn't swollen, it was enough.

He even acquired an old phone with cracks on the corners of the screen.

The seller specifically explained: "It doesn't affect use, it just doesn't look good."

Jiang Lin didn't care at all.

The Wasteland didn't care about looks.

The third item was e-ink devices and erasable boards.

He hesitated for a long time over the Boox e-ink writing tablet.

Its price was much higher than an ordinary used phone.

But it could view PDFs, write handwritten annotations, make semi-formal notes, and had low power consumption.

More importantly, it was like a piece of paper that could be used repeatedly.

In the late stage of the third trip to the Wasteland, paper was completely exhausted, and he could only write on the ground with tree branches.

Only then did he know that scratch paper was not a cheap thing.

In a world without paper mills, stationery stores, or courier services, paper was civilization itself.

He gritted his teeth and placed an order for a used e-ink writing tablet.

He also bought 20 LCD erasable boards.

This thing didn't save content, had a one-key screen clear, and was like a drawing board used by children.

But it was cheap, lightweight, and very practical.

Low-value calculations should be completed on it.

Matrix row operations, integration by substitution, differential equation trial calculations, and circuit simplification.

If it was wrong the first time, erase it and do it again.

It didn't consume paper, and there was no heartache.

Next were storage devices.

Mobile hard drives, USB flash drives, TF cards.

Storage boxes, desiccants, shockproof bags.

Jiang Lin listed them on paper, and wrote next to them: All core data, at least four copies.

No electronic device could work forever.

But if the same data was scattered in four or five places, the probability of all of them breaking down at the same time would be much smaller.

Then came the power system.

Foldable solar panels, used outdoor power supplies, lithium iron phosphate battery packs, solar charge controllers.

Various wires, adapters, fuses.

Multimeter, soldering iron, solder wire, heat shrink tubing, electrical tape, wire strippers.

This category cost a lot of money.

But it was also indispensable.

In the last few years of the third trip to the Wasteland, he watched with his own eyes as those electronic devices died little by little.

Phone batteries swelled, power bank capacities plummeted, and solar lights flickered.

When a certain wire had a bad contact, he could only tie the interface with a cloth strip, pose it at an extremely awkward angle, and pray that it could charge a little more electricity.

There were no repair shops, no after-sales service, no spare parts, and no "I'll go buy one tomorrow".

In the Wasteland, a broken interface could mean a device would remain silent forever.

So this time, what he bought wasn't just equipment, but a chance for the equipment to live a few more years.

Next was the paper and stationery system.

A4 printer paper, notebooks, refills, mechanical pencils, erasers, rulers, set squares, compasses.

Label paper, file bags.

Over the next few days, Jiang Lin entered an urgent state.

School was already on vacation.

Classmates discussed in the group chat what to do for the New Year, whose relatives started asking about grades again, and who grabbed a few yuan in red envelopes.

Sun Ming posted a meme in the group chat: "On the first day of winter vacation, I'm already done for."

Jiang Lin didn't reply.

To rush to buy back everything he could before various shops closed, he woke up at six every morning.

Computer mall.

Stationery wholesale store.

Hardware store.

Pharmacy.

Outdoor goods store.

Print shop.

Second-hand market.

He rode his bicycle through Jiangcheng before the New Year.

Red lanterns started hanging along the streets.

Boxes upon boxes of milk, cookies, and New Year gift boxes were piled up at the supermarket entrance.

Sugar oranges were piled into small mountains in fruit shops.

People were lining up at the entrance of the barbershop.

There were stalls selling Spring Festival couplets at the entrance of the residential community, and the red paper rustled in the wind.

The entire city was sliding toward the direction of the Spring Festival.

Only Jiang Lin went against this atmosphere, collecting piece by piece something that completely didn't fit the Spring Festival atmosphere.

N95 masks, goggles, nitrile gloves, labor protection gloves, gauze, bandages, iodophor, painkillers, fever reducers, anti-diarrhea drugs, vitamins...

Toothbrushes, toothpaste, dental floss...

Especially dental floss.

Jiang Lin took several boxes in one breath.

In fact, on ordinary days at home, his mother usually didn't use dental floss, and his father generally used toothpicks.

This was prepared for himself in the Wasteland.

In the late stage of the third trip to the Wasteland, he had watched with his own eyes as his teeth loosened one by one.

At first, it was just bleeding gums, then a sore ache when biting potatoes, and later, one of his teeth loosened a bit when he was chewing overcooked Soybean.

That kind of fear was hard to explain to others.

When a person grew old in the Wasteland, it wasn't a sudden collapse on a certain day.

But started from a tooth, a wisp of hair, a cough, and a burst of blurred vision.

He wasn't afraid of aging, only of losing the ability to learn too early.

If his eyes broke, he wouldn't be able to read books.

If his hands shook, he wouldn't be able to write words.

If his teeth hurt, he wouldn't even be able to eat.

If his lungs were worn out by dust, breathing would become a burden.

...

These things wouldn't pounce like monsters.

They would only drag a person away from the desk day by day, little by little.

Therefore, for the fourth time, he had to prepare more meticulously.

On the twenty-fourth day of the twelfth lunar month, many courier points began posting notices of suspension of operations.

Jiang Lin's room was almost filled with supplies.

His mother, Zhang Xiufen, finally noticed something was wrong.

She stood at the bedroom doorway, looking at the laptops, solar panels, printer paper, protective equipment, and various wires piled on the ground, the expression on her face changing from confusion to shock.

"Jiang Lin, why did you buy so many things?"

Jiang Lin was labeling a pack of DuPont wires.

His hand paused for a moment.

He said: "They're for use after school starts."

Zhang Xiufen frowned: "Would solar panels be needed after school starts?"

Jiang Lin was silent for a second.

This question was hard to gloss over.

So he changed his perspective: "Mom, I want to learn some college stuff in advance, and Physics might be useful. Some things are not easy to buy after the New Year, so I'm preparing them in advance."

Zhang Xiufen obviously didn't completely believe it.

But she didn't continue to question.

Because Jiang Lin's recent grades were too convincing.

Because she saw something in her son's eyes that was hard to stop.

That wasn't the excitement of a child buying toys, nor was it the guilty conscience after impulse consumption.

It was more like a person who had figured out where he was going, but it was impossible to spread out the map for others to see.

Zhang Xiufen finally only said: "Be safe."

"Mhm."

"Don't take medicine randomly."

"Mhm."

"Don't stay up too late at night."

"Got it."

She took another look at the things on the ground, sighed, and turned away.

Jiang Lin lowered his head and continued labeling.

A-01 Main laptop.

A-02 Backup laptop.

A-03 Tablet one.

A-04 Tablet two.

A-05 E-ink writing tablet.

A-06 E-book reader.

B-01 Main disk for all data.

B-02 Backup for all data.

B-03 Sealed backup.

B-04 Sealed backup.

C-01 Advanced Mathematics One.

C-02 Advanced Mathematics Two.

C-03 Linear Algebra.

C-04 Ordinary differential equations.

C-05 Complex functions.

C-06 Mathematical Physics methods.

C-07 General Physics · Mechanics.

C-08 General Physics · Thermal Physics.

C Electromagnetism.

C-10 General Physics · Optics.

C-11 Theoretical mechanics.

C-12 Electrodynamics.

C-13 Quantum Mechanics.

C-14 Thermodynamics and statistical Physics.

C-15 Solid-state Physics.

C-16 Computational Physics.

C-17 Modern Physics experimental theory.

[part:gemini-3.6-flash]

C-18 Excerpts of English Physics Literature.

C-19 Master Correction Notebook.

C-20 Master Formula Notebook.

C-21 Wasteland Study Log.

C-22 Wasteland Farming and Health Records.

...

He numbered every single item.

Not just for the sense of ritual,

but also because the chaos of the Wasteland could swallow many things.

Wind, sand, dark nights, exhaustion, solitude, and endless time—all of these would dull a person's mind.

If his supplies lacked order, it wouldn't take long before he fell into the disaster of having brought something but being unable to find it.

This time, he wouldn't allow himself to lose over something like this.

The twenty-sixth day of the twelfth lunar month.

Almost all the deliveries had arrived.

Only a set of spare cables was stuck at a transit hub because the seller shipped it late; it wouldn't move until after the Spring Festival.

Jiang Lin stared at the tracking page, remaining silent for a long time.

Then, he crossed that item off his list.

This was reality.

You can make plans,

but plans never completely follow your desires.

He didn't try to place another order online.

He went and bought some substitutes at a nearby hardware store.

Even if it was a bit pricier, there was no other choice.

The twenty-seventh day of the twelfth lunar month.

After downloading around the clock, all the study materials he could find that seemed useful were fully downloaded.

He began creating mirror backups.

Four hard drives were plugged in turn.

Copying, verifying, copying again, verifying again.

Every piece of material had at least three copies.

The most core course outlines, formula sheets, dictionaries, and textbook tables of contents were additionally backed up onto USB drives and TF cards.

He put the TF cards into small storage boxes, stuffed desiccant inside, and wrapped them in ziplock bags.

By the time he finished all this, it was past three in the morning.

Only the computer screen remained lit in the room.

Jiang Lin sat in his chair, his eyes feeling slightly sore.

He raised a hand to rub them, suddenly recalling a certain night in the seventh year in the Wasteland.

Back then, the phone screen could barely light up anymore.

Sitting in the Stone House, he had turned his phone's brightness down to minimum and dimmed the solar lantern to its lowest setting, all just to read a few more pages of cached solution explanations.

The characters on the screen were blurry, as if separated by a layer of mist.

As he watched, he suddenly felt terrified that it would go completely dark.

He wasn't afraid of the dark.

He was afraid that the modern civilization behind that screen would be severed from his hands just like that.

Now, looking at the row of hard drives in front of him, he didn't feel completely at ease.

Because he knew that they would break too.

It was just a matter of time.

Preparing extra copies was merely pushing fate back a bit further.

But most of the time, all a person could do was delay the moment of collapse just a little bit.

Push it back a year, push it back three years, push it back ten years...

The extra time was what he was trying to steal.

The twenty-ninth day of the twelfth lunar month.

The family began officially preparing for the New Year.

His mother fried meatballs and stewed meat.

His father put up Spring Festival couplets and cleaned the house.

Jiang Lin wiped tables, moved items, went downstairs to buy soy sauce and vinegar, and helped his father straighten the couplets.

But after finishing each task, he would head back to his room to continue organizing supplies.

His mother thought he was studying university courses in advance, while his father thought he was preparing for Qingbei.

Neither of them knew that these things would vanish from the room along with Jiang Lin on the morning of the second day of the Lunar New Year.

On the first day of the Lunar New Year, the home was lively and bustling.

Jiang Lin received quite a few red envelopes.

The relatives were exceptionally generous this year.

The title of "top scorer in the entire city" worked better than any small talk.

As someone handed him a red envelope, they patted his shoulder and said, "Qingbei is guaranteed for you now, right?"

"The Jiang family really produced a scholar."

Jiang Lin accepted them all with a smile.

These red envelopes would be used to pay off debts.

In the evening, the sound of fireworks rose and fell continuously.

Standing by the window, Jiang Lin looked out towards the sky over Dongjiang, where bursts of light bloomed one after another.

There were no fireworks in the Wasteland.

There, there was only a dark red sun, a murky gray sky, heavily weathered concrete load-bearing walls, and twisted steel rebar frameworks.

This Real World was mundane, crowded, and noisy, filled with small talk from relatives, the scent of red envelope paper, cooking fumes, candy, the Spring Festival Gala, and the cries of the neighbor's child.

But precisely because he had experienced the Wasteland, he knew just how precious these things were.

Then he began his final checks.

Solar panels were unfolded and tested.

Outdoor power banks were fully charged.

All phones were fully charged.

Hard drives were confirmed one by one.

E-ink boards were fully charged.

LCD rewriteable boards were tested for screen clearing.

Multimeters were used to measure battery voltage.

Electric soldering irons were powered on to confirm heating.

Every bag was re-numbered.

Every label was pressed firm again.

He placed the printed "Fourth Wasteland Study Outline" on top.

The cover had only one sentence:

"Learn for as long as I can stay."

Beneath the general outline were staged roadmaps.

On the second day of the Lunar New Year, before his five o'clock alarm went off, Jiang Lin woke up.

With the Fourth Wasteland Study and Farming Plan weighing on his mind, he couldn't fall back asleep, so he simply sat up.

He stared absently at the bookshelf at the foot of his bed for a few minutes.

On the shelf were newly purchased copies of records of the grand historian, Tang Poetry, Song Ci, and Yuan Qu, and Da Liu's Three-Body Problem trilogy...

Because during his third time in the Wasteland, Letter to Ren An had once helped him suddenly understand late one night how a person could endure prolonged humiliation and solitude just to establish a school of thought of his own.

So after returning, he bought records of the grand historian and some other books.

After sitting blankly for a few minutes, Jiang Lin suddenly scrambled up, reached for the bookshelf, and took down both records of the grand historian and The Three-Body Problem.

After packing the four books into the supply bag for his fourth trip to the Wasteland, he turned back and saw the photo on his desk.

He remembered how, in the seventh year of his third time in the Wasteland, he suddenly realized one day that he couldn't recall his mother's face when she was younger.

That panic felt like a block of ice stuffed in his chest.

He sat at the doorway of the Stone House thinking for a long time before barely piecing that face back together.

Thus, he pulled out all the photos in his bedroom, selected a few, and packed them into the supply bag.

It wasn't weakness.

It was calibration.

After staying in the Wasteland for too long, a person would be distorted by time.

He had to remember that he wasn't something that grew out of the wilderness.

He came from a place with parents, classmates, Spring Festival, city lights, and the warmth of human life.

The living room was quiet; his parents were still sleeping.

On the morning of the second day of the Lunar New Year, the city lacked the rush of a school day.

Occasional sporadic firecrackers sounded outside.

Moving as quietly as possible, Jiang Lin began washing up and eating breakfast.

Five forty.

He walked to the living room and grabbed a mandarin orange.

The orange peel was fresh; juice splattered into the crevices of his nails, carrying a faint, pleasantly sharp aroma.

He broke off a segment and popped it into his mouth.

The sweet and sour juice burst on the tip of his tongue.

Jiang Lin chewed slowly.

There were no oranges in the Wasteland.

At least none near his campsite.

He had grown potatoes, Soybeans, and Pumpkins.

He had eaten Moss.

He had drunk treated water.

He had chewed on rock-hard compressed biscuits.

But there were no oranges.

Many things in the Real World only seemed unreasonably luxurious when one was on the verge of leaving.

He finished eating the orange and tossed the peel into the trash bin.

Five fifty-five; in the upper right corner of his vision, five minutes remained on the countdown.

Jiang Lin returned to his bedroom.

Five fifty-eight.

Jiang Lin strapped all the organized packs onto his body.

A faint sound came from his parents' bedroom.

Jiang Lin pricked up his ears.

The house fell silent again.

He suddenly felt like going in to take a look at his parents.

But in the end, he didn't.

In reality, only one minute would pass.

At six o'one, he would return.

From his parents' perspective, their son had merely woken up a little early.

The countdown entered its final minute.

Jiang Lin went through all his preparations in his head once more.

Nothing was missed.

At least, nothing he could think of right now.

If he couldn't think of anything, he accepted it.

One cannot prepare for an entire lifetime.

One can only do their best.

The final ten seconds.

[00:00:00:10]

Jiang Lin looked down at the few works by Da Liu at his feet.

Starry sky, civilization, destruction, time.

Then he glanced at Guwen Guanzhi.

Origins, words, endurance, memory.

[00:00:00:09]

He recalled the dark red sun in the Wasteland.

[00:00:00:08]

He recalled the ground outside the Stone House, polished smooth by wind and sand.

[00:00:00:07]

He recalled writing formulas on slate with charcoal—writing one line, wiping away one line.

[00:00:00:06]

He recalled the fear of watching civilization dim like his phone screen, helpless to stop it.

[00:00:00:05]

He recalled the principal saying, "Stay steady, let's create glory again in June."

[00:00:00:04]

He recalled his mother saying, "Will you really need a solar panel after school starts?"

Jiang Lin suddenly felt like smiling.

But he didn't.

[00:00:00:03]

He said silently in his heart:

"I learn slowly."

[00:00:00:02]

"Then I'll study for a few more years."

[00:00:00:01]

"If a few years aren't enough, then a few more."

[00:00:00:00]

His vision went black.