Chapter 179: Diagnosis and Backup Exam Room

The corridor of the campus hospital hung heavy with the mingled scent of peracetic acid and old newspapers. Lin Chen stood in line outside the orthopedics clinic, bearing his weight on his right foot while his left toe barely grazed the floor. The digital clock on the wall ticked over: 8:40 AM. The queue inched forward, mostly students with sprains from basketball, their complaints and laughter bouncing off the tiled walls. He leaned against the edge of a bench, pulling his medical record and X-ray envelope from his backpack, his fingertips tracing the sealed plastic edges. The county hospital’s diagnosis simply read “left ankle ligament injury with localized hematoma.” To apply for a backup exam room through the Academic Affairs Office, he needed a “recent injury follow-up certificate” stamped by the campus hospital, along with a doctor’s note advising against long-distance travel.

When his turn came, a middle-aged doctor wearing reading glasses was on duty. Lin Chen handed over the documents and explained his purpose. The doctor flipped through the file, then told him to take off his shoe for an examination. As fingers pressed against the outer ankle, a sharp pain shot up his tibia like fine needles. Lin Chen clenched his molars, his facial muscles remaining still, though his breath hitched for half a beat. “The ligament isn’t torn, but the soft tissue contusion is severe, and there’s periostitis as well.” The doctor took off his glasses and tapped a few keys on the keyboard. “You need a certificate to apply for a deferred exam or a backup room through Academic Affairs?” Lin Chen nodded. “Those people in Academic Affairs only recognize the stamp, not the person.” The printer spat out three A4 sheets with a dull grinding sound. “Follow-up record, injury description, medical advice. Go to the information desk on the first floor to get the campus hospital’s official seal, then head to the Exam Affairs Section in the Administration Building. It’s Friday; they stop public service after 3 PM.”

Lin Chen took the papers, thanked him, and turned away. Descending the stairs, he had to turn sideways, gripping the stainless steel handrail with his right hand while keeping his left foot suspended, his right foot probing down step by step. The anti-slip strips on the edges were worn down, exposing the gray-white concrete beneath. With every step, his knees absorbed extra shear force. He counted the steps: twenty-four in total. Reaching the first floor, he found the nurse at the information desk bent over a medication inventory list. He handed her the forms. She glanced at them, pulled the official seal from a drawer, breathed on it, and pressed it down firmly. The red ink of the “Campus Hospital Outpatient Department” seal bled slightly at the edges, but the characters were clear.

The Administration Building stood on the east side of the sports field. Lin Chen stepped out of the clinic building into the early autumn wind, which swept fallen leaves across the ground. He opened his phone’s map app to calculate the route: a twelve-minute walk at a normal pace. At his current speed, it would take at least twenty-five minutes. He opened the academic affairs system and navigated to the “Special Candidate Exam Room Adjustment Application” page. The attachment upload box was already open. He photographed the three stamped pages, adjusted the lighting to ensure the official seal and the doctor’s signature were fully visible, then uploaded and submitted them. The system prompted: “Application received. Review period: 24–48 hours.”

Forty-eight hours. The technical interview at 2 PM Friday wouldn’t wait for the results. He couldn’t gamble on the system. Sitting on the stone steps outside the Administration Building, he pulled out his notebook from his bag. The pages already outlined Plan D: If the backup exam room application was rejected or the review timed out, he would have to forfeit the practical exam. The cost of forfeiting was delayed graduation, but if he passed the technical interview, the internship salary in Shenzhen would immediately cover his younger brother’s medication costs for the next month. In the ledger of reality, delayed graduation was merely a time cost; running out of medicine was a survival cost. He crossed out “delayed graduation” and wrote beside it: “Consequence: 120 RMB makeup exam fee, degree certificate delayed by six months.” The numbers were light on paper, but heavy in life. He closed the notebook and snapped the pen cap shut. His phone screen lit up: bank balance 7,135.30. He stared at the string of digits, automatically breaking it down in his head: hard seat to Shenzhen 186, urban village deposit plus three months’ rent roughly 2,400, first month’s living expenses 1,500, follow-up registration plus medication 300. The margin was compressed to its absolute limit. He couldn’t afford a mistake.

His phone vibrated. Not the academic system, but an email notification. He unlocked the screen and opened the automated reply from the preliminary screening system. The subject line had changed: [Technical Screening Result] Lin Chen - Passed. Please arrive at Room 302, Building B, Provincial Institute of Technology Experimental Building, to sign in by 13:30 Friday. Bring ID card, student ID, and a printed copy of the algorithm report. Passed. Two words. No extra commentary, just a time and a place. He stared at the screen, his thumb hovering over the keyboard. Sign-in at 13:30, interview at 14:00. The practical exam also started at 14:00. The time window was compressed to the breaking point. If Academic Affairs approved the backup exam room and scheduled it at the north campus computer lab, he would have to submit his paper by 12:30 and then sprint to the south campus. If it wasn’t approved, he would go straight to the south campus.

He stood up. The pain in his foot had settled into a dull, heavy background hum, like the low-frequency drone of a server fan. He stopped thinking about “what ifs” and only calculated “paths.” He opened his backpack and checked his items: ID card, student ID, printed algorithm report, half a bottle of mineral water, a pack of compressed biscuits. He sealed the USB drive and the report in a waterproof bag and tucked it into an inner pocket. The sound of the zipper closing was crisp.

Back in his dorm, he powered on his computer and logged into the academic affairs system. The status bar read: “Under Review.” He refreshed once. No change. He closed the page and began organizing his technical notes for the interview: boundary conditions for sliding windows, memory optimization logic, edge cases for test cases. He arranged the notes in logical order and highlighted core parameters with a fluorescent pen. At 4 PM, his phone vibrated again. This time, it was a WeChat message from Professor Zhou: “The review results are out. The backup exam room is approved, located in the old campus computer lab in the north. But the invigilator has been changed, and they require you to arrive 40 minutes early for identity verification. Will you have enough time?”

Lin Chen read the message. The old campus lab was at least an hour and twenty minutes away from the Provincial Institute of Technology in the south, counting subway and walking time. Arriving 40 minutes early meant he had to submit his exam by 12:20. The practical problem involving 8,000 data entries had a standard time limit of two hours. He had less than one.

He replied: “Enough.”

Putting the phone down, he reopened his code editor. He created a new file and began writing the preprocessing module for an automated script. Since time was compressed, he had to save every second on repetitive operations. The computers in the old campus lab were from a 2006 batch: single-core CPUs, 2GB of RAM, slow hard drive read/write speeds. He couldn’t rely on heavy libraries; he had to write low-level logic in native syntax. He replaced the data reading module with the standard csv library to avoid the memory overhead of pandas; fixed the output format to plain text to reduce I/O wait times; and added sys.setrecursionlimit and exception handling at the start of the script to prevent crashes from environmental configuration differences. The screen’s glow reflected on his face as the sky outside gradually darkened. He knew that tomorrow’s exam wouldn’t be about who wrote the fastest, but who made the fewest mistakes. He typed the first line of comments: # Fault-tolerance strategy under time compression. The rhythmic tapping of the keyboard echoed through the empty dorm, like a ticking second hand, like a heartbeat. He adjusted his breathing, syncing the rhythm of his fingertips with the throbbing pain. Tomorrow at 2 PM, two parallel lines had to intersect in reality. He couldn’t stop, and he couldn’t err.