32: Chapter 32 The Invisible Thread

In those first few years after coming to the Wasteland, Jiang Lin wrote with great force.

Every title had to pierce through the paper, sharp and uncompromising, bursting forth with relentless edge.

Back then, there was still a kind of youthful defiance burning in his heart.

Every time he conquered a piece of knowledge, it was like planting a small flag on the barrens, desperate for his future self to see it.

"I was here, I conquered it, I am no good-for-nothing."

But after the fifteenth year, his handwriting gradually grew smaller.

It wasn't because paper was scarcer.

Of course, paper had always been scarce.

The real reason was that he was no longer in such a rush to prove anything.

After the page on entropy increase, Jiang Lin grew cautious about using the word complete.

A Stone House wasn't done just because it was built, farmland wasn't finished just because it matured once, and a solar panel wasn't completely maintained just because it was wiped clean once.

A page of notes that had once seemed thoroughly clear, when flipped through years later, might be full of undefined variables, formulas lacking conditions of applicability, and conclusions without sources of error indicated.

Therefore, after the fifteenth year, Jiang Lin's concept notebooks had far fewer exclamation marks.

And many more short sentences.

[This is open to question.]

[Review in ten years.]

[Do not mistake models for the Real World.]

[A formula holding true does not mean the scenario applies.]

[Ask about boundary conditions first.]

[Do not rush to explain.]

These words were written very small, often crammed into the margins, like someone from later on whispering to someone from the past.

In the sixteenth year, the output of the first solar panel began to noticeably decay.

This, of course, did not happen suddenly.

There wasn't a specific day when a catastrophic number suddenly popped up on the controller screen to tell him:

"It's over!"

The decay was slow—terrifyingly slow.

On the same sunny days, at the same angles, with the same degree of panel cleanliness, the peaks of the P(t) curve gradually lowered bit by bit.

At first, it was just a few percentage points.

Jiang Lin thought it was dust.

Wipe.

Ineffective.

He thought it was the angle.

Adjust.

Limited improvement.

He thought it was the wiring.

He took apart the connectors, scraped off the oxide layer, pressed them tight again, and rewrapped the moisture barrier.

Still, it couldn't return to the original state.

Finally, he saw the truth on a comparison chart.

That solar panel had grown old.

It was long past being the healthy panel it was in the first year of the fourth Wasteland.

Sandstorms, temperature differences, collisions, ultraviolet rays, micro-cracks on the panel surface, junction box aging, moisture in the backsheet—none of these were fatal on their own, but every single one was slowly eating away at it.

Jiang Lin sat before the stone table, looking at the power curve that dropped lower year by year, and stayed silent for a long time.

In his sixteenth year, he no longer flew into a rage over such things.

Rage was useless; entropy increase did not care about human cursing.

He simply took down the [Solar System Maintenance Regulations] originally pasted by the door and rewrote a new version.

The old version read:

[Wipe the panel surface every morning.]

[Adjust the angle in three tiers on sunny days.]

[Check the connectors every seven days.]

A new line was added in the new version.

[Acknowledge equipment degradation.]

The line right below it:

[Design a low-power survival mode.]

From then on, Jiang Lin began to compress high-power-consumption tasks even more severely.

Video lectures were not re-watched unless necessary, and essential clips were screenshotted in advance.

PDF textbooks were split by chapters and prioritized for the E-ink screen.

Export files from the E-ink tablet were organized collectively at regular intervals rather than being saved immediately as he wrote.

The computer was only turned on during strong light periods, and at night, he tried his best to return to paper and his own brain.

He used to rely heavily on computers.

Now, he began to consciously train himself to continue studying without a computer.

It wasn't because he didn't need modern tools.

It was because he finally understood that all tools have a lifespan.

For a person to bet their entire future on a single piece of equipment was a very naive high-stakes gamble.

In the seventeenth year, the second hard drive experienced its first bad sector.

That afternoon, Jiang Lin was opening an Electrodynamics reference file when the screen suddenly froze.

The cursor didn't move, and the hard drive light flickered faintly, like a tiny insect struggling to breathe.

Jiang Lin's heart skipped a beat in that instant.

He didn't thrash around or restart repeatedly.

Instead, he shut down and cut the power, waited a moment, and reconnected to the backup power supply.

Boot up.

The backup could still be read.

But a section of the files was corrupted.

It was a few pages of derivations from an open-course lecture note.

Strictly speaking, it wasn't a disaster.

Yet as Jiang Lin sat before the stone table, cold sweat still broke out along his spine.

He suddenly recalled that when he had first arrived in the fourth Wasteland, looking at several moisture-proof boxes and hard drives filled with knowledge, he had once felt a nearly foolish sense of security.

It was as if as long as human civilization was packed into hard drives, the future would be guaranteed.

Now, the Wasteland was reminding him with a single bad sector that civilization could also rot and break.

If knowledge merely lay inside a hard drive, it would also experience entropy increase.

What truly resisted this kind of damage was not the hard drive itself, but transfer.

Transferring from files to notes, from notes to understanding, from understanding to habits, and from habits to action.

That night, Jiang Lin wrote on the flyleaf of the eighth volume of his concept notebook:

[Knowledge cannot merely be stored; it must be internalized.]

[Civilization in a hard drive is not my civilization.]

[What can continue to exist after a power outage truly belongs to me.]

After finishing, he reorganized the most core course catalogs and knowledge trees into a minimalist index.

Not the complete content.

There wasn't enough paper, nor enough electricity.

He could only write the skeleton.

Like leaving a map of the barrens for his future self who might lose the hard drives.

In the eighteenth year, he re-studied Electrodynamics.

Not the electromagnetism from the General Physics stage.

Back then, when he looked at Maxwells Equations, he was more struck by their elegance, by how changing electric and magnetic fields excited each other and became light.

Now, he had more mathematical tools and more Wasteland experience.

He knew that equations were not just beautiful.

Equations were boundaries, conditions, and the structure of fields in space.

One evening at the end of summer that year, Jiang Lin sat at the entrance of the Stone House, with the solar panel facing low toward the west.

The efficiency of the old panel was far below what it used to be, and the newly connected small folding panel could only supplement a pitiful amount of output.

On the controller screen, the input power flickered very slowly.

He was looking at the differential form of Maxwells Equations.

Divergence, curl, flux, circulation.

These words used to make his scalp tingle in his early years.

They were still not easy now, but they were no longer unfamiliar.

He repeatedly read the word field.

Electric field, magnetic field, electromagnetic field.

In the past, he had always treated fields as computational aids.

Place a unit charge at a point, see what the force on it was, and thus define the electric field.

It felt like a layer of virtual grid added to space by humans for the convenience of calculation.

But the deeper he went into Electrodynamics, the more he felt this idea was wrong.

A field was not an accounting tool; the field itself was right there.

Energy propagated within the field, and momentum flowed within the field.

Light was not some small bright spot tossed over from the sun, but disturbances of the electromagnetic field passing through space, reaching this barren land, and falling onto his solar panel.

At that moment, Jiang Lin looked toward the solar panel.

The dark red light fell obliquely across the panel surface.

Inside the semiconductor, electrons and holes separated.

A tiny electric current followed the wiring into the controller, then into the storage battery, and finally turned into a line of text on the computer screen, the faint glow inside the camping light, or the preservation of a certain formula on the E-ink tablet.

The sun, the clouds.

Suspended particulate matter in the Wasteland air.

Solar panels, wires, storage batteries.

Computers, his eyes, his brain.

These things were connected together by an invisible electromagnetic chain.

An immense and boundless loneliness suddenly welled up in Jiang Lin's heart.

He was connected to the entire universe by countless invisible field lines.

The sun's light energy could travel here, electromagnetic waves could cross the barrens, and the wiring could deliver energy into the storage battery.

Hard drives could bring human voices and words to this dead, silent planet.

Yet, not a single line connected to another human being.

The entire world was like an infinitely large empty classroom, with only one student left, still copying answers onto the blackboard that no teacher would ever check.

Jiang Lin sat for a long time, then suddenly stood up, walked to the innermost part of the Stone House, and opened the moisture-proof box.

Inside the moisture-proof box lay some of the least practical yet most indispensable things.

A few photos, a small number of paper indexes, a time capsule, and a few books.

Three of them were "The Three-Body Problem".

This was one of the things he had forcefully stuffed into his supply pack in the Real World before entering the fourth Wasteland.

At the time, this choice was actually a luxury.

Paper books were heavy, took up space, didn't save space like electronic versions, and couldn't directly improve survival efficiency like textbooks.

Yet Jiang Lin had brought them anyway.

Having undergone over nine years of seclusion in the Wasteland by then, he had already realized that on this fourth trip to the Wasteland, what he would lack the most would not be knowledge.

The fire in the stove was very low, and the light flickered gently across the book covers.

In that instant, it felt as though a silent guest had been added to the Stone House.

The first time he read this set of books was in the Real World.

Back then, there were human beings around him.

Even if he didn't speak to them, humans were there.

He stood among the crowds, reading about the universe, civilization, darkness, survival, and those scales so distant they were almost unreal.

Back then, he found it shocking, grand, and awesome.

But that shock was separated by a layer of safe glass.

Because after closing the book, he could still return to the crowd.

The second time he read it was in the eighteenth year of the fourth Wasteland.

He had already lived alone on this barrens for eighteen years.

In the Real World, this number was enough for an infant to grow into an adult.

But in the Wasteland, it was simply eighteen years of Jiang Lin listening to the wind alone, lighting fires alone, farming alone, repairing houses alone, and talking to the empty air alone.

When he turned the pages, he suddenly discovered that he could no longer read it the way he used to.

In the past when he read "The Three-Body Problem", what he read was humanity's fear in the face of the universe.

Now what he read was humanity itself.

Those arguments, that madness, those choices.

Those signals sent out by civilization in the darkness.

Those human voices that were naive, proud, foolish, great, yet ultimately refused to fall silent.

He used to think that "The Three-Body Problem" was about how vast the universe was and how tiny humans were.

Now he finally knew that to someone thrown into an uninhabited Wasteland, the most shocking thing wasn't how big the universe was.

It was how noisy humanity used to be.

Noisy enough to be precious, noisy enough to make a person want to cry.

Some gazed up at the starry sky, some derived formulas, some quarreled, some betrayed, some saved.

Someone pressed all the fear, rationality, arrogance, pity, and despair of their lifetime into words, handing them over to another person they had never met.

And this person they had never met, separated by who knows how much time and space, sat inside a Wasteland Stone House, borrowing a lamp that was running out of electricity, to hear them once again.

Jiang Lin suddenly felt that these three books didn't look like books; they looked like a fossil of civilization.

Not recording the bones of some dead creature, but recording how humans once imagined their own destiny.

Textbooks told him how the world operated, formulas told him how energy flowed, and Maxwells Equations told him how fields unfolded in space.

Yet none of these told him why humans had to speak in the darkness.

"The Three-Body Problem" told him.

Humans speak not because someone will definitely answer.

Humans send signals not because the universe is necessarily benevolent.

Humans write stories not because stories can change the laws of Physics.

But because silence is too cold.

Because if a civilization completely stops telling its own stories, it is equivalent to admitting in advance that it never existed.

Jiang Lin lowered his head and looked at his Stone House.

Fifteen square meters, a stone table, a stove, a few clay pots, an aging solar power system, a two-hundred-square-meter farmland, a pile of conceptual notebooks.

Dozens of pieces of equipment on the verge of breaking.

This was his civilization.

Ridiculously small, pathetically fragile.

Yet at this moment, Jiang Lin felt that it was fundamentally no different from humanity's grand civilizations.

A civilization is never called a civilization just because it is powerful enough.

A civilization is a civilization because even knowing it will scatter, it still tidies up.

Even knowing it will die, it still records.

Even knowing the universe might not respond, it still sends out a beam of light.

Looking at those three books, he suddenly understood why he had brought them in.

Not for pastime, not for nostalgia, and not to find a bit of cheap comfort for loneliness.

But because they proved one thing: before he came to the Wasteland, humanity had already been lonely on his behalf.

They had already been afraid for him, already looked up at the stars for him.

They had already turned the question of whether a person should still make a sound in the dark into millions of words of echoes for him.

Outside the Stone House, the dark red night slowly settled, as if the entire Wasteland were silently eavesdropping.

He suddenly thought that if one day he died here, if the Stone House collapsed, the farmland re-hardened, the conceptual notebooks rotted, the solar panels shattered, and all traces were worn flat by the wind and sand, then these three books might look more like evidence that a human had been here than he did.

Not because they were sturdier.

But because they contained something greater than mere survival.

Humans do not merely live.

Humans also ask: Why do we live?

They ask: What is the universe?

They ask: What is civilization?

They ask: Between silence and response, is there ultimately a path?

Jiang Lin lowered his head and turned to the first page.

The pages made an extremely faint sound.

That sound was very small.

So small that it would almost be swallowed by the wind.

Yet in this Stone House without a second person, that sound of turning pages was like some distant civilization relighting a fire in the dark.

He read for a long time.

Reading until the stove fire dimmed, reading until the camping lamp's low battery warning lit up, reading until his eyes were sore and aching, he finally closed the book.

After closing the book, he pressed his palm against the book cover, feeling the faint tactile sensation of the paper coming through the plastic film.

Then, he opened his conceptual notebook and wrote in the margin.

[Paper books are also low-entropy structures.]

[Stories are the echoes left by civilization to loneliness.]

After writing those two lines of characters, he wrapped up "The Three-Body Problem" again.

Inside the Stone House, he was once again the only person left.

The stove fire faded lower, and the camping lamp dimmed.

The solar power system entered nighttime low-power mode.

The books returned to the box, and the universe retreated back beyond the Wasteland.

The next morning, Jiang Lin woke up as usual.

Wiping the solar panels, checking the water storage pit, replenishing water for the crops.

The vibration from last night, struck by the echoes of civilization, did not cause any dramatic changes in his life.

The Wasteland would not clog a drain less, drop a layer of dust less, or wear out a rope less just because he finished reading a great story.

Yet some things had indeed changed.

Ever since then, when Jiang Lin looked at those textbooks, hard drives, conceptual notebooks, and paper books, his mindset became a bit different.

Previously, he regarded them as knowledge.

Later, he regarded them as tools.

And after that night, he began to regard them as fragments of civilization.

Formulas were fragments, stories were fragments, Maxwells Equations were fragments, and "The Three-Body Problem" was also a fragment.

One told him how the world operated.

The other told him how humanity once faced the world.

Placing these two kinds of things in the same moisture-proof box did not conflict at all.

Together, they proved one thing.

Humanity had been here, humanity had thought, humanity had been afraid.

Humanity had made a sound in the dark.

And he happened to be the one who brought that sound into the Wasteland.

Between the nineteenth and twenty-second years, time began to become very difficult to distinguish.

It was not that the calendar was in chaos.

Jiang Lin still recorded the dates.

Every day's maintenance checklist was still written clearly.

It was just that when days repeated to a certain extent, one's sense of the years would become dulled.

Over these years, the courses were still progressing.

But Jiang Lin no longer wrote every single course into the time capsule.

Some things merely flashed by in folder names.

[Mathematical Physics Methods_Boundary Condition Index]

[Partial Differential Equations_Wave Heat Conduction Poisson]

[Complex Functions_Residue Method Pending Review]

[Numerical Methods_Finite Difference Experiments]

[Introduction to Modern Physics_Unreliable Understanding]

For many folders, he did not write grand summaries for himself.

Because there was no need.

The value of certain tools did not lie in some moment of epiphany, but in how they quietly changed the way he handled problems.

Previously, when he encountered a new problem, he would first ask for the formula.

Later, he would first ask about the variables.

Later still, he would first ask about the boundary conditions.

And even later, he would first ask whether the model was applicable.

This should be considered a kind of progress.

In the twentieth year, Jiang Lin organized up to the twelfth volume of conceptual notebooks.

This volume was the hardest to look at—not because the handwriting was ugly, but because the content was too crowded.

Every page was like a warehouse forced to hold too many things.

The margins had fine print, the middle had formulas, and the bottom had warnings.

In the corner were patches written by his future self from a dozen years later to his self from a few months prior.

[Boundary term omitted here.]

[Do not treat the steady-state solution as the entire process.]

[Pay attention to dimensions.]

[Use linear approximation here; do not extrapolate.]

[This conclusion only holds under small disturbances.]

[Do not be lazy.]

The three characters "Do not be lazy" appeared the most frequently.

Because many mistakes were not due to not knowing how.

But rather due to laziness.

Too lazy to check units, too lazy to label conditions, too lazy to write variables clearly, too lazy to recalculate.

Too lazy to admit that he did not know.

Laziness is not just lying down without moving.

Many behaviors that looked very diligent were essentially laziness as well.

Copying down the answers once was laziness.

Memorizing a definition one did not understand was laziness.

Force-fitting a pretty model onto reality was laziness.

Covering up the source of errors with a casual "close enough" was laziness.

The Wasteland hated this kind of laziness the most.

It would not punish you immediately.

Until some cold night, some power outage, some crop yield reduction, some equipment damage, or when a certain problem suddenly could no longer be derived, it would settle accounts with you all at once.

In the autumn of the twenty-first year, Jiang Lin took apart the second storage battery.

Not for repairs.

There was nothing left to repair.

That battery's capacity had decayed far too severely, its internal resistance had risen, its low-temperature performance was terrible, and carrying even a slight load at night caused its voltage to drop like a landslide.

He retired it from the system.

What could be disassembled was disassembled, what could be recycled was recycled.

What could not be used was sealed and kept far away from the living area.

When disassembling it, he did not feel much regret.

Over these years, he had seen off too many things.

A roll of nylon umbrella cord, two small solar panels, a thermo-hygrometer, a protective film for an e-ink handwriting tablet...

Equipment would die.

This was common sense.

Yet when he wiped the battery casing clean and placed it in the scrap materials area, he still attached a small slip of paper next to it.

[Fourth Wasteland, Year 1 to Year 21.]

[Mainly used for nighttime lighting, computer power supply, and low-power learning devices.]

[Retirement reason: Condition looks like an Iraq war-damaged edition, battery life relies entirely on faith. Old soldiers never die, they just run out of power.]

In the winter of the twenty-second year, a section of the wall of the attached storage room on the west side of the Stone House collapsed at a corner.

It was not a major collapse.

It was just that the lower part of the exterior wall had been loosened by years of wind erosion and freeze-thaw cycles, and then hollowed out by water seepage after a certain acid rain, finally causing a piece to fall off.

Jiang Lin spent two days repairing it.

Moving stones, mixing mud, adding chopped grass fibers, compacting it down.

Redoing the drainage ditch.

While repairing the wall, he suddenly realized that he no longer cursed while working as he did when he was young.

When he was young, he felt that all repairs were a waste of time, inferior to grinding through a few problems or reading a few pages of a book.

Now he knew that repair was part of learning.

Thermodynamics, materials, structures, drainage, wind erosion, freeze-thaw cycles, salt crystallization, and capillary action were all inside this collapsed wall.

The wall was not interrupting his study.

The wall was posing questions.

If he did not study, the wall would still collapse.

If he studied, the wall might still collapse.

But at least he would know why it collapsed, and how to make it collapse a little later.

This was all that a human could strive for.

In the twenty-third year, Jiang Lin turned back to eigenvalues in Linear Algebra.

[Eigenvectors: The system's own directions.]

[Eigenvalues: Whether the changes in this direction will be amplified or compressed.]

At that time, his understanding came more from bracket vibrations, Stone House heat conduction, and farmland state vectors.

Now, reading here again, he suddenly thought of the Wasteland's ecology.

This Wasteland was not completely dead and silent.

Moss would grow, acid rain would change the soil, and wind and sand would transport mineral powder.

By planting, harvesting, returning straw to the fields, applying ash, and composting every year, he was also pushing the system from one state to the next state.

If the farmland state were written as a vector, and each year's natural evolution and anthropogenic intervention were regarded as a transformation, then after many years, would the system tend toward certain directions?

Some directions would self-amplify.

For example, organic matter increased, water retention improved, crops grew better, leaving behind more crop residues, and organic matter continued to increase.

Some directions would self-destruct.

For example, acid rain worsened, pH dropped, root systems deteriorated, yields decreased, returning organic matter to fields decreased, and the soil became even worse.

Surviving did not mean controlling all variables.

He simply could not do that anyway.

Surviving meant finding the stable direction where the system would not self-destruct and could even weakly self-repair, and then pushing the state toward that direction time and time again.

This model was very crude.

So crude that it was not worthy of being used as a formal conclusion.

Jiang Lin also did not write it too absolutely.

He only wrote one sentence on the margin of his conceptual notebook.

[Surviving is not about suppressing all variables.]

[It is about finding the stable characteristic directions of the system.]

After writing, he circled this sentence.

In the twenty-fourth year, Jiang Lin began to noticeably detest speaking for long periods of time.

In his early years, to prevent his language skills from degenerating, he would deliberately lecture facing the stone wall.

Back then, he would still imitate teachers, answer his own questions, and talk about ε and δ as Party A and Party B.

Later, he gradually stopped doing that.

Not because it was unnecessary, but because it was too tiring.

A person speaking to the air for ten years, for twenty years—the most terrifying thing was not awkwardness, but that one day you suddenly discovered you no longer expected any response.

Thus he switched to silent dictation, writing down what he wanted to say.

Writing very briefly, writing like leaving a message for his future self.

[If you do not understand today, do not fake it.]

[This problem is not solved today.]

[Survive the cold season first.]

[Do not trust unannotated data.]

[If you forget, start over from the first page.]