Chapter 9: A Chance Meeting at the Library

The tear-off calendar grew thinner day by day. The tail end of September slipped quietly away, leaving only a handful of days until the legendary first monthly exam of third grade.

A very particular kind of elementary-school panic gripped Xia Minghan Primary School.

“Oh no, there’s an exam!”

“If I get a zero, my butt’s getting a beating!”

Yet on this Saturday morning, when who knew how many children were cramming at the last minute, I wandered alone to the County Library.

I wasn’t there because I took the monthly exam seriously. Doing my homework every day lately had shown it enough respect—though the experience and coins had something to do with that too.

For a reborn person like me, third-grade arithmetic with parentheses and writing words from pinyin posed no challenge. I wouldn’t be able to face everyone if I didn’t get full marks.

I had a more practical reason for visiting the library.

It had been almost a month since I’d arrived in the year 2004 of this parallel world.

After the initial shock and helplessness, followed by the absurdity of my parents forcing me to eat bitter melon and my deskmate making me read in the morning, I’d burst into tears… No.

I’d come to terms with it.

Even if the Twin Towers were still standing and some details of history had changed, the great wheel of the times could never roll backward.

What would be the most profitable field over the next twenty years?

The internet, without a doubt.

Standing on the shoulders of giants, I knew where the future technology booms lay: web platforms, mobile platforms, big data, and recommendation algorithms.

I was only in third grade, but as the saying went, even a pig could fly in the right wind. I had plenty of time to study. By graduation, I could be an expert in my field!

In a few years, when the spring breeze of the internet swept across the country, that vast blue ocean would be my personal ATM.

Real estate… Never mind, better not write about that. I was so fond of consuming crap on Tomato Novel that I knew all too well it could bring down heaven’s punishment.

Still, wasn’t thinking about making money as an employee a little small-minded when I’d been reborn? But I was only in third grade. Anything besides studying would leave me with my hands tied.

Whatever. Extra skills never hurt. I might not become a programmer anyway; mostly, I just wanted something to do.

Studying makes you improve.

Library, here I come!

On the second floor, in the most secluded corner of the natural sciences shelves, I found the computer and programming section.

There were pitifully few books. Every one had curled edges from use, and some were coated in thick dust.

I pulled out a yellowed *Turbo C Fundamentals* and leafed through the neighboring *Getting Started with Visual Basic 6.0*, shaking my head.

At the start of the millennium, a home computer was still a luxury costing most ordinary families more than ten thousand yuan, something to be enshrined beneath a lace dust cover.

Unlicensed internet cafés with “Computer Room” signs had begun appearing on the streets, but most housed bulky CRT machines that took three minutes to start and produced blue screens at the slightest provocation.

It would take at least another two or three years before computers became as common in homes as appliances.

I carried several brick-sized books to a bench by the window in the quiet, spacious reading room. I was engrossed when a faint scent of jasmine drifted over.

“Fang Luo? What are you doing here?”

The familiar voice broke the silence. I looked up.

A pretty little girl stood before me.

Chu Hanya.

She wore an off-white knitted cardigan over a fine-checkered collared shirt, a navy pleated skirt, white knee-high cotton socks, and polished little leather shoes. Her smooth black hair was loose over her shoulders instead of tied in a ponytail, held with a delicate cat-shaped clip.

It really was Chu Hanya.

At school, everyone wore uniforms, so you couldn’t tell who came from money. But meeting her on a weekend, I saw that the usually cold-faced deskmate who scolded people in class looked every bit the eye-catching young lady of a wealthy family in the library sunlight.

She held a large-format study guide against her chest and eyed me suspiciously.

(Note: Her mother was getting her hair done nearby, so Chu Hanya had come to the library by herself.)

Her gaze fell on the dictionary-thick hardbacks stacked on my table. Their covers bore English titles like *Turbo C* and *Data Structures*, and a third-grader couldn’t understand such complex technical terms.

Chu Hanya glanced at them and took them for advanced foreign academic references. I could see her expression change from doubt to enormous relief, tinged with an indignant “I knew it.”

“I knew it!”

She gave a proud little huff. “Every day at school you pretend to be idle and daydream in class, and you won’t even do your homework… But on weekends you sneak off to the library alone and study like mad!

“Fang Luo, how can you be so hypocritical?”

At that moment, in Chu Hanya’s innocent view of the world, seeing me reading at the library had upgraded me from “hopeless egotist” to “scheming, hypocritical deskmate who secretly studies to outcompete everyone.”

I never thought an elementary schooler would call me hypocritical.

Sigh. And I was such an open, straightforward person.

I sighed, deciding she’d come looking for trouble. Too lazy to explain the difference between C programming and elementary Chinese, I closed the book, leaned back, and asked, “Chu Hanya, why did you come all the way to the library on a weekend instead of shopping or playing jump rope with your girlfriends?”

I didn’t mean anything by it. I just wanted to trade barbs with a child.

“Why aren’t you calling me Monitor?” Chu Hanya frowned. “And who wants to play jump rope? That’s childish.”

She put the two books she held across the table from me, pulled out a wooden chair, and sat down. “I’m here to read Olympiad math books.

“My parents just signed me up for an Olympiad math class at the Children’s Palace. Some problems are difficult, and I can’t even understand the methods the teacher explains, so I came to look up alternative solutions.”

She opened *Olympiad Mathematical Thinking for Primary School Students*. The pages were densely covered in neat little pencil notes.

Looking at her intent profile, my desire to needle her faded and was replaced by genuine admiration.

Maybe I really shouldn’t quarrel with a child.

Third grade.

While her peers were fighting over catching beetles and trading marbles, this girl already had a frightening capacity for independent study. She’d even given up weekend fun to sit on a hard chair and work on Olympiad math.

Leaving aside her rather unapproachable temper, that quality certainly justified her reputation as an academic genius.

Now that Chu Hanya had sat down, I couldn’t very well keep openly devouring programming books. I’d better find a chance to leave.

I got up, went to the children’s lending section, and pulled out several thick volumes of *Doraemon* and *Detective Conan*.

At the entertainment-starved start of the millennium, children’s inner lives were pitifully barren.

At home, you had to wait by the television until six thirty or seven in the evening for a half hour of cartoons on Golden Eagle Cartoon. Worse, at seven thirty sharp, Dad’s big hand would switch the channel to the evening news to watch the weather forecast.

As a result, my entertainment options were limited too. I had to find comics to read.

Since a library card allowed only two books at a time, I planned to finish the first volume that morning and borrow volumes two and three.

I returned to my seat. The reading room fell quiet again, leaving only the rustle of plane-tree leaves outside and the soft turning of pages.

Chu Hanya chewed on her pencil, sometimes frowning in thought, sometimes scribbling on scratch paper.

After a little over half an hour, an Olympiad problem seemed to stop her cold. Her delicate brows knotted together, and she’d erased the scratch paper who knew how many times.

She stole a glance at me. Seeing me absorbed in my comic—she thought I was reading some sophisticated story collection—her competitive spirit quietly resurfaced.

“Hey, Fang Luo.”

She tapped the table lightly. “Didn’t you say you were really good at math?

“Can you… understand this problem?”

She pushed her scratch paper toward me, chin slightly raised, even though she was the one asking for help.

I glanced down.

A classic chickens-and-rabbits problem.

A farm has 35 chickens and rabbits in total. The rabbits have 20 more legs altogether than the chickens. How many chickens and how many rabbits are there?

For a third-grader just starting Olympiad math, it was a significant hurdle. The traditional version gave the total number of legs; this one played with the wording and gave the difference. Without a clear grasp of substitution, a child could easily get tangled up.

For me, though, a pair of linear equations would do it.

On second thought, simultaneous equations were beyond elementary school. I couldn’t use algebra to overwhelm her. I’d have to think in elementary arithmetic.

After a moment, I tapped the table twice.

“Suppose they’re all rabbits. Thirty-five rabbits would have 140 rabbit legs in total, right?”

Chu Hanya blinked and nodded reflexively. “…Mm.”

Thirty-five times four was 140. Correct.

“But the problem says the rabbits actually have only twenty more legs than the chickens.

“So our leg difference is 120 too high.

“Every time we replace a rabbit with a chicken, there are four fewer rabbit legs and two more chicken legs. The difference shrinks by four plus two, or six.

“Now we work out how many chickens we need to substitute. Divide 120 by the change in the difference.

“That’s 120 divided by six, which is twenty.

“So we replace twenty rabbits with chickens.

“The rest is easier. We know there are twenty chickens and thirty-five animals altogether, so subtract to get fifteen rabbits.

“Then check the answer. Fifteen rabbits times four gives sixty legs. Twenty chickens times two gives forty legs.

“See? The rabbits have exactly twenty more legs than the chickens, and there are thirty-five animals altogether. Both the animals and the legs check out.

“There. That’s how you solve it.”

When I finished, Chu Hanya’s pencil clattered onto the scratch paper.

Her rosy mouth opened and closed, and her clear eyes were full of shaken uncertainty.

Darn it…

This guy…

He’d glanced at it again and gotten the answer without even touching a pencil!

Something about her confidence seemed shaken, but I didn’t mind. I went back to my comic. Once I finished this volume, I planned to leave.

After a long moment, Chu Hanya took a deep breath, picked up her pencil, and worked through the assumption method I’d just explained.

Then, as if to prove herself, she quickly found a more complicated variation at the back of her exercise book. This one involved tricycles and bicycles with a difference in their wheel counts.

She drew a diagram rapidly, whispering the method I’d taught her.

In less than two minutes, her pencil flew across the page. She wrote the calculations, subtracted the difference, divided by the change in wheels, and solved it in one go.

The final answer appeared on the paper. She checked the reference answer at the back of the book: an exact match!

The little monitor let out a deep breath. A bright smile of pride and relief finally spread across her face, and she turned to raise an eyebrow at me.

“See? I can do it too!”

I’d still been reading my comic, but knowing she’d solved it in only two minutes made me sigh with admiration.

An elementary schooler’s thinking wasn’t as mature as a middle or high schooler’s, yet she’d heard me explain the idea aloud once, absorbed the method immediately, and applied it to a variation.

This little girl really was a first-rate academic genius.

By high school, I might not be able to compete with her. No, perhaps even middle school, when there were more subjects. I wondered how different this childhood version of her would be from the lively high schooler she’d become. She probably wouldn’t be urging her deskmate to study anymore.

Honestly, what was I thinking?

“Aren’t you going to thank me?” I said casually.

Chu Hanya hesitated, then actually thanked me, though reluctantly. She turned her face away, the tips of her ears red, looking thoroughly awkward.

Still, she was polite.

“Then…” She lowered her head and wrote, trying to sound fierce through clenched teeth. “If I teach you something later, you have to thank me too!”

“…” We’d discuss that when it happened.

We spent a harmonious morning in the quiet reading room. I got through most of *Detective Conan*, while Chu Hanya plowed through numerous Olympiad problems with an occasional word of guidance from me.

At noon, soft music sounded in the library.

Time to eat.

We packed our things and went down the steps together. The early-autumn midday sun was rather bright, shining across the wide road outside.

“How are you getting home?” I asked casually, hands in my pockets. She was a little girl, after all.

Chu Hanya pointed toward the road. “It’s fine. My dad’s picking me up. My mom’s getting her hair done nearby, and she should be finished.”

As soon as she spoke, a black Mercedes with a three-pointed star on its hood pulled up slowly beside the tree-lined road outside the library.

The door opened, and a middle-aged man in gold-rimmed glasses, scholarly yet authoritative, smiled and waved at us.

Whoa.

She really was a little rich girl.

Chu Hanya turned to leave, then tilted her head toward me, her long hair drifting in the breeze. “Fang Luo, are you coming to the library next Saturday?

“The monthly exam is almost here. I can help you review.”

I looked at the black Mercedes, then at the seemingly ordinary but actually wealthy class monitor, and turned my head helplessly. “Maybe. Depends on my mood.”

“Hmph, hmph.” She lifted her chin proudly again, as though convinced I was being hypocritical and would secretly study even after saying I might not come. But I really wasn’t like that.

“Fang Luo, keep studying hard. Don’t spend all your time playing, and keep yourself clean.”

Why did she sound like a teacher and a parent who’d run into me at the library?

She gave me a discreet wave goodbye. The car window slowly rose, and the black Mercedes drove away, leaving its exhaust to dissipate in the air.

I stood there, recalling Chu Hanya’s distinguished-looking father in the car. Her whole family seemed good-looking.

As the saying went, every man had entertained the thought of finding a wealthy woman to support him so he wouldn’t have to work. Now there seemed to be a little shortcut right in front of me. Chu Hanya was pretty and her family had money. Her personality was a bit proud, but while she was still a child it seemed cute. When she grew up, she might end up like Yukino Yukinoshita.

Anyway.

If I got on good terms with Chu Hanya, getting money should be easy. And we were all at the most sincere and innocent age of our lives, something we’d never have again.

But I still felt listless.

I shook my head and faced the warm autumn breeze, holding the borrowed comics over my head to shade myself from the midday sun.

…