Chapter 87: Redundancy and Thresholds

The whispering next door vanished completely. The corridor returned to dead silence. Only the faucet kept dripping, steady as the ticking of a second hand.

Lin Chen did not turn on the light. He sat in the dark for ten minutes. His breathing was even. His heartbeat did not quicken. Rule changes were normal. The exam room never promised fairness, only uniformity. Uniform power supply meant voltage fluctuations were out of his control. It meant the ten yuan he had spent on an external voltage stabilizer had gone to waste. It also meant that within two hours, he would have to finish every compilation and test case on what remained of an aging battery.

He stood up. The power strip was switched on. The screen lit. Blue light fell across his face. He did not hesitate. He opened Task Manager immediately and killed every background process. He pulled up the configuration file for TC2.0. The memory model was changed from medium to huge. Autosave off. Syntax highlighting off. Unnecessary header precompilation off. Every setting wrung a little more out of the machine. He created a blank project, wrote the most basic matrix multiplication loop, saved it, compiled it, ran it. The timer started.

The fan speed dropped. The hard drive grew quieter. In the bottom right corner of the screen, the battery icon showed 62 percent remaining. Estimated runtime: 110 minutes. Not enough. A two-hour practical exam required at least 130 minutes of safety margin.

His fingers hovered over the keyboard. He paused for three seconds, then opened the system power settings. Screen saver off. Screen brightness lowered to the minimum. Wireless network driver disabled. Mouse unplugged. Touchpad only. Every current path that could be cut was cut. He ran the test program again. The timer reset to zero. Restart. The fan hummed. The screen came back on. Battery display: 61 percent. Estimated runtime: 125 minutes. Still short by five minutes.

He closed the laptop and pulled out draft paper from his canvas bag. The tip of his pen moved quickly. He was not doing arithmetic. He was calculating code. He broke the three mandatory problem types down into their smallest executable units. Input and output would use the C standard library to avoid the overhead of C++ iostream. Dynamic memory allocation would be replaced by static arrays. Loops unrolled. Function-call depth reduced. Every line of code was saving battery. He wrote out three templates, stripped to the limit. No comments. No redundant variables. Only core logic. Pointer offsets accurate to the byte. Memory pool size fixed at 1.5 MB. Overflow checks moved up to compile time. He checked them again and again. When he was sure there was no mistake, he saved the templates as separate files: base_01, base_02, base_03.

Outside the window, the sky was beginning to pale. The rain had stopped. The air smelled of damp earth and asphalt. He glanced at his watch. 5:40 a.m. Forty minutes until departure.

He got up, walked to the bathroom, and turned on the faucet. Cold water hit his face. Awake. He dried himself, removed the bandage from his left foot. The dark red around the wound had faded to pale pink. The fluid had stopped seeping, but there was still hardness beneath the skin. He dusted it with drying powder, laid on fresh gauze, wrapped it, tied the knot. Even pressure. Neither tight nor loose. It would not chafe while walking, and it would bear weight while standing. He stood up and marched in place. Shifted his center of gravity. Left foot down. A slight pain. Manageable. He fixed his stride length at thirty centimeters. Then he went to the mirror and straightened his collar. The worn spot on the shoulder strap of his canvas bag had been reinforced with tape. It was not obvious. But it was solid.

Back at the desk, he checked his belongings. The voltage stabilizer was taken out and set on the bedside table. A sunk cost of ten yuan. No point dwelling on it. USB drive. Admission ticket. ID card. Cash. Enamel mug. Two cold steamed buns. A bottle of iodine. A roll of spare gauze. Everything went into the canvas bag. Zipper closed. Lighter now. Strap adjusted. He slung it over his shoulder, turned off the light, locked the door, and returned the key to the gatekeeper.

Outside the guesthouse, the early morning street lay empty. A watering truck had just passed. The road was slick. He kept to the edge of the sidewalk, avoiding puddles. His cadence stayed steady. Breath and footsteps synchronized. One. Two. Three. Four. Like a metronome. The gate of Provincial Institute of Technology emerged through the morning mist. The wrought-iron gates stood open. The security guard yawned. Lin Chen showed his admission ticket, signed in, and was let through.

The Information Building stood deep inside the campus. Red brick walls. Half of one side covered in ivy. He climbed the stairs. Third floor. Room 304. The door was ajar. There were already people inside. He pushed it open and entered.

The classroom was large. Fifty desks arranged in a U-shape. A number was pasted on each desk. Along the wall, every three desks shared one wall socket. The central aisle had no power supply. He walked to the first row by the window. Desk No. 7. Sat down. Set down his bag. Took out the power strip and plugged it into the wall outlet. The indicator light came on. The needle on the voltmeter trembled slightly. 218 volts. The fluctuation was within tolerance. But the danger of uniform power supply was peak load. The moment fifty computers booted at once, the voltage would inevitably plunge.

He opened the laptop and connected the power. Not to charge—only as a signal source. The screen lit up. Battery: 59 percent. He disconnected the power strip and stowed it at the bottom of his bag. Backup.

More people filed in. Most were students from the key high schools in the provincial capital. Clean athletic jackets. Brand-new backpacks. Some carried thick reference books. Some had expensive mechanical keyboards. They spoke in low, easy voices. Lin Chen did not look up. His gaze stayed on the desktop. His fingers tapped soundlessly over the keyboard, rehearsing the templates from memory. Input and output. Boundary conditions. Memory release. From the seat beside him came the crisp sound of keystrokes. A membrane keyboard—soft feel. He lowered his head to inspect his own. The edges of the keycaps were yellowed. The space bar rebounded with a faint lag. He pressed it twice, confirmed the travel. Good enough.

At 7:40, the proctors entered. One man, one woman, both in dark jackets. The man carried a loudspeaker. The woman held a sealed bag.

“Attention, examinees.” The man’s voice was steady. “Final confirmation of practical exam rules. The testing room uses uniform power supply. External voltage stabilizers, power banks, and wireless network cards are strictly prohibited. Anyone found using them will be treated as cheating. Exam duration: one hundred and twenty minutes. Those who hand in early may not take their draft paper with them. Now, check your equipment.”

Lin Chen’s fingers paused slightly. Power banks strictly prohibited. In last night’s Plan B, he had considered converting an old mobile phone battery into an emergency power source. That route was now completely sealed off. He could rely only on the laptop battery. One hundred and twenty-five minutes. Margin for error: zero.

The female proctor began making her rounds, checking desks and verifying admission tickets. She stopped at Desk No. 7. Her eyes swept over the power strip, then moved to Lin Chen. “Put it away,” she said. “The exam room does not provide extra sockets. Only wall power is allowed.”

Lin Chen nodded, shoved the strip back into the bottom of his bag, and zipped it shut.

“Self-check your equipment,” the male proctor announced. “The papers will be handed out in five minutes. During this time, you may not run any programs. Violators will be disqualified.”

Lin Chen pressed the power button. The screen lit up. Battery icon: 57 percent. He opened TC2.0, loaded the stripped-down template, compiled. Passed. Ran it. Memory usage: 1.2 MB. CPU usage: 3 percent. Everything was within threshold. He turned off the screen, leaving the background process alive, and waited for the papers.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. His chest expanded, contracted. The rhythm slowed. There were no opponents in his mind. No prize money. No neon lights of the provincial capital. Only code. Only logic. Only execution. He thought of his father bent over in the rice field transplanting seedlings. Thought of his mother tending the fire at the stove. Thought of the crooked stars in his younger brother’s picture book. Those images brought no emotion. Only weight. The weight steadied his breathing. His breathing steadied his fingers. His fingers were ready to strike.

At 7:45, the female proctor opened the sealed bag. Test papers were distributed. The sound of sheets brushing across desktops—rustle, rustle—like wind passing through a dry cornfield.

Lin Chen opened his eyes and took his paper. First page. Problem One: a real-time data filtering algorithm under limited memory. Requirement: implement in C. Runtime not to exceed two seconds. Peak memory usage not to exceed 2 MB.

He picked up his pen and wrote the first line on the draft paper. The tip halted. His gaze swept once across the classroom. Back row by the door—one examinee was hammering at the keyboard in a frenzy. The screen flickered. Voltage instability. The computer’s fan screamed like the breathing of something dying. In the front row, someone had already begun creating a new project. Mouse clicks came fast and dense. The air smelled of old wood, chalk dust, and heated plastic casing.

Lin Chen withdrew his gaze. His fingers settled on the keyboard. He pressed Enter.

The screen dimmed for an instant, then lit again. Battery: 56 percent.

The countdown began.