Chapter 134: The Margin of Two Yuan an Hour

At five-forty in the morning, dawn had not yet fully broken. Lin Chen pushed open the wooden door of the main room, and the dry hinge let out a rasping scrape. He paused, felt behind the door for the stub of a piece of chalk, and drew a vertical line on the inside of the threshold. Date: July 16. Margin: forty-six days.

His left foot was wrapped in fresh gauze. He had rinsed it with weak salt water the night before; the seepage had lessened, but the muscles were still stiff, like a clod of mud frozen solid. He tried shifting his weight onto it, and a stabbing pain climbed from his ankle upward. He adjusted his stride, moving the pressure to the outside of the sole. It hurt, but he could walk. He locked the courtyard gate and headed down the dirt road toward the edge of town. Dew soaked the legs of his trousers and clung cold against his skin.

At six-ten he caught the first farm truck heading into the county seat. Bamboo baskets and sacks of fertilizer were piled in the back. He chose a place along the side and sat down, holding his canvas bag against his chest. Inside were his notebook of wrong answers, scratch paper, half a compressed biscuit, and that thirty-yuan bill. The driver started the engine, and the smell of diesel mixed with the morning mist and poured in. Lin Chen closed his eyes and ran once through the syntax of C pointers in his mind. Addresses. Values. Dereferencing. The chain of logic was clear, with no break in it.

At seven-twenty he reached the county town. The streets were just waking up. Steam rose from breakfast stalls, and youtiao swelled in the oil. He did not stop. He went straight to the county library.

The library was an aging building from the 1990s, its outer walls faced in white ceramic tile, some of them already yellowing and peeling off. A notice was taped to the glass door: Computer Room Open During Summer Vacation. Reservation Required. Student ID Needed. Two Yuan Per Hour. He pushed the door open and cold air rushed at his face. Behind the front desk sat an administrator in sleeve covers, reading a newspaper with his head lowered.

"Reservation," Lin Chen said, handing over his student ID and identification card.

The man looked up at him, then at the documents. "Today's slots are full. There are still two openings at two this afternoon. Want to wait?"

"I'll wait," Lin Chen said.

He found a seat in the reading room, in a corner by the window. He set his canvas bag by his feet. He stretched out his left leg to avoid pressing on the wound. Then he opened C Programming Language Design and fixed his eyes on the chapter on file operations. The code on the page was static. He knew the real variables lived inside the machine. He needed to see the cursor blinking on a screen, to hear the echo of keys being struck, to know what prompt would jump out when the compiler reported an error.

Time passed second by second. Outside the window the cicadas grew denser and louder. Sunlight slanted in and landed on the desktop, where dust drifted slowly through the beam. He took out his notebook and began copying from memory the function prototypes for fopen, fclose, and fprintf. Parameter types. Return values. Error codes. The tip of his pen rasped over the paper. He calculated the cost of waiting. Two hours. If he used them for vocabulary, he could get through fifty words. If he used them for handwriting, he could fill three pages. But the computer room was a hard requirement. Without the environment, all the logic on paper would remain hypothetical forever.

At one-fifty in the afternoon he went to the front desk. The administrator handed him a computer-use card. "Third-floor computer room. Machine thirty-two. Two hours. Overtime is charged by the full hour. No USB drives. No downloading games. No messing with the system settings. Lose the card and it's fifty yuan."

"Understood," Lin Chen said, taking the card.

The third-floor computer room was quiet. There was only the humming of fans inside the towers and the occasional tapping of a keyboard. More than thirty old desktop machines stood in four rows. The monitors were heavy CRTs, their screens gray-white. He found machine thirty-two, sat down, set his student ID on the corner of the desk, inserted the card, and turned the machine on.

The screen lit up. The Windows XP startup image. The progress bar moved slowly across. He stared at the screen, breathing evenly. The system finished loading. The desktop icons were arranged neatly. My Computer. Recycle Bin. Text Document. He double-clicked My Computer. C drive. D drive. Remaining disk space. He opened the D drive and found several folders: Study Materials, Common Software. Then he found Turbo C 2.0 and double-clicked it.

A blue interface sprang onto the screen. The cursor blinked in the upper left corner. He placed his hands on the keyboard. His fingers hovered. For three years of high school, he had written code only on paper. Now the real keys were right under his fingertips. He pressed F. I. L. E. Space. *. f. p. Semicolon. Enter.

The screen showed: File *fp;

He kept typing. fp = fopen("test.txt", "w");. if(fp == NULL) { printf("Error"); }. fclose(fp);.

When he had finished the last line, he pressed Ctrl+F9 to compile.

A line appeared at the bottom of the screen: Linker Error: Undefined symbol _printf in module test.c.

An error. He stared at the line, but there was no panic. He opened the book and checked the syntax. He found the missing header file. He added #include <stdio.h> and compiled again.

Build successful.

He pressed Ctrl+F5 to run it. The screen flashed, and on a black background white letters appeared: Press any key to continue.

He hit Enter. The program ended. There was no output file, because he had not written fprintf, but he knew the path was open. From paper to machine, from logic to execution, only a header file and a single compilation had stood in between. He leaned back in the chair and let out a long breath. Sweat had already soaked through the T-shirt on his back. His left foot was going slightly numb under the desk, but he did not move.

He opened Notepad and began recording everything: the Turbo C 2.0 environment, the compile shortcut keys, common error types, header-file dependencies, pointer memory-allocation limits. He wrote each point as an entry that could be searched later. Two hours were enough to run through only one basic workflow. But he needed to break that workflow down into its smallest units. Next time he could skip the environment setup and go straight to the core logic.

At four o'clock, the system chime sounded. He saved the file to the D drive, exited, pulled out the card, and stood up.

When he reached the front desk, the administrator glanced at the card. "Two hours. Four yuan. Twenty yuan student-ID deposit. You'll get it back next time."

Lin Chen handed over a twenty-yuan bill and took the receipt. Balance: twenty-six yuan. Minus four yuan for the round-trip fare, minus two yuan for lunch. Actual spending: six yuan. Twenty yuan remaining. Number of days he could still reserve: four. Silently he updated the ledger in his head. Numbers did not lie. The margin was shrinking, but the path was widening.

He walked out of the library. The evening sun dyed the street orange-red. The heat still hung in the air. He followed the sidewalk back. His pace was steady. When he passed a computer repair shop, he stopped. Taped to the glass display window was a sheet of A4 paper: Part-Time Data Entry Clerk Wanted. Requirements: typing speed of 60 characters per minute. Familiarity with basic Excel functions. Three-day trial period. Thirty yuan paid daily. Contact: Manager Wang.

He stared at the page for ten seconds. Typing speed. He had no idea what his own speed was. Excel functions. He had never learned them. But the rules were explicit. Testable. Quantifiable.

He pushed the door open. The shop smelled of rosin and dust. Behind the counter sat a middle-aged man in a polo shirt, typing at a screen.

"Are you hiring?" Lin Chen asked.

The man looked up and gave him a quick once-over. "Can you type? Let's test it."

Lin Chen nodded. The man pointed to an old computer at the side. "Open Notepad. Type this." He handed over a printed sheet. It held a passage from a product manual.

Lin Chen sat down. He placed his hands on the keyboard. His left foot touched the floor lightly. Then he started typing. At first he was slow. His fingers searched for the keys. The error rate was high. He deleted and started again. He adjusted his breathing. He stopped looking at the keyboard and looked only at the screen. After ten minutes his speed gradually steadied. Fewer typos. Twenty minutes later, he finished.

The man glanced at the screen. "Forty-two characters. Too slow. We need sixty. Do you know Excel?"

"No," Lin Chen said.

"Then no good. Go back and practice."

The man lowered his head and returned to his own typing.

Lin Chen stood up. "Thank you." He walked out of the shop. There was no discouragement in him. Only data. Forty-two characters. Eighteen short. Excel functions. Need to add. Thirty yuan a day. The target was clear.

He went back to the bus stop and waited. The evening wind brought the smell of distant exhaust. He took out his notebook and wrote in a blank space: Typing practice. Touch typing. Two hours every day. Excel basics. VLOOKUP. SUM. IF. Goal: 60 characters/minute. Period: seven days. Budget: four yuan a day for the computer room. Part-time income: zero. Net spending: twenty-eight yuan per week.

The bus arrived. He got on, dropped in his fare, and found a seat. He placed his left foot along the edge of the aisle to avoid having it squeezed.

By the time he got home it was fully dark. The light in the main room was on. Wang Guiying was mending clothes. Lin Jianguo was smoking. Xiaoman ran up and handed him a new drawing. It showed a computer. On the screen were the words: Hello World. Next to it was a smiling face.

Lin Chen took it and slipped it into his folder.

"How did it go today?" Wang Guiying asked.

"I got it running," he said.

He sat down, switched on the desk lamp, and opened his notebook. He organized today's notes into a table. Variables. Constraints. Execution path. Margin calculations. He marked "typing speed" and "Excel functions" in red. These were the new bottlenecks. If he didn't solve them, part-time income would stay at zero. The margin would keep being consumed.

He closed the notebook and blew out the lamp. Darkness settled over the main room again.

Tomorrow. Six in the morning. Computer room. Typing practice. Self-study in Excel. Ledger update.

He lay down and closed his eyes. His heartbeat was steady.

The screen had already lit up. The code had already run. But the speed was still not enough. The tools were still incomplete. The margin was still shrinking.

The road ahead was long. But every step landed on solid ground.

The night wind passed through the window lattice and stirred the draft papers on the table. A page turned, revealing the line written at the very top: // TODO: Improve input efficiency. Complete the toolchain.

A comment. Not an ending. An instruction for the next step.

He turned over. The gauze on his left foot rubbed against the bedsheet. The pain was once again classified as a manageable parameter.

Tomorrow. Six o'clock. Computer room. Keyboard. Functions. Margin.

The scale was still there. And the pen had not stopped.