"Ah Zhi! Ah Zhi!"
At 7:30 in the evening, Cheng Jinyang returned home with excitement in his heart, eager to share today's events with Miss Ah Zhi:
"Do you know? There was an attack in the Qinhuai District!"
"Here's your chance, change the way you address me within 3 seconds." Xing Yuanzhi was sitting on the sofa cutting her nails, and upon hearing this, she immediately squinted and looked over, the nail clipper in her hand emitting a sharp light.
"Uh, Yuanzhi." Cheng Jinyang coughed and said, "Did you know?"
"I know." Xing Yuanzhi glanced at the TV screen, "The news just reported urgently, and Liu Shanmen(The Six Bureaus) offered a reward of 300,000 yuan for the culprit."
"Is that so?" Cheng Jinyang felt a bit embarrassed.
It was like being excited to share a racy picture in a group chat, only to be mocked by everyone saying they had seen it hundreds of times before.
"There's a math problem I want you to solve." He took out the Cheng family version of "Numerical Methods" from his bag, flipped to the first question in the second chapter "Time Functions," and said, "Can you figure this out? No calculators."
Xing Yuanzhi glanced at it, "1.393 seconds."
Cheng Jinyang: ???
"Is there a problem?" Seeing his look of confusion, Xing Yuanzhi asked in surprise, "What's the answer?"
"The answer is correct." Cheng Jinyang smiled bitterly, "How did you figure it out?"
"Equilateral right-angled triangle, huh?" Xing Yuanzhi's expression seemed to say, "'This should be easy enough even without a calculator,'"
"Did you not figure it out?"
"I did figure it out," Cheng Jinyang said, "but I used a calculator and it took a few minutes..."
"That's fine too," Xing Yuanzhi said calmly, "those who haven't undergone brain domain development are like this."
"What's brain domain development like?" Cheng Jinyang immediately asked when he saw Ah Zhi was indeed led to this topic.
"Brain domain development..." Xing Yuanzhi pondered slightly before explaining it to him:
"The traditional human thinking is instinct-based, untrained, understand?"
"Let me give you an analogy, your brain is like a big library, memories are like books piled inside, randomly scattered without any order."
"When you need to solve a problem, you see the question, have a rough idea, know that you need to use knowledge points A, B, C, D to connect to come up with a solution."
"So you're in the big library of your mind, looking for the four books representing A, B, C, D... you spend some effort digging these books out from the pile, repeatedly confirming to prevent mistakes, and finally come up with a solution. So why did it take so long?"
"Because it took time to search," Cheng Jinyang said.
"Exactly," Xing Yuanzhi said, "the human brain is not a computer, it can't quickly extract information from memory, it can only obtain data from fragmented memory elements one by one."
"If you practice a certain type of exercise a lot, it's like memorizing the positions of books A, B, C, and D in your brain library. This increases efficiency when doing exercises. However, it doesn't change the fact that the 'books are still scattered' inefficiently. Also, if you switch to a different type of exercise or a different set of knowledge points, the efficiency you've accumulated from practice will reset."
"The so-called brain domain development is about transforming your brain library from a disorganized layout to an organized and categorized arrangement. There are many things to elaborate on, such as the serial and parallel placement of knowledge units, optimization of paths for addition, deletion, modification, and retrieval, as well as modeling frameworks that can be scanned frequently."
"Stop!" Seeing that Miss Ah Zhi was beginning to discuss academic matters, Cheng Jinyang quickly interrupted, "How exactly do you develop brain domains? Is it something only the Cheng family can do?"
"What I just said is the method of brain domain development!" Interrupted rudely by him, Xing Yuanzhi was somewhat annoyed.
"Of course, to put it in terms you can understand, it's like attaching a bunch of electrodes to your forehead and then using external sensory factors such as drugs, animations, sounds, smells, and currents to stimulate your brain and help it reconstruct thinking patterns."
"Of course, each family's inherited abilities and bloodlines are different, so the most suitable thinking patterns are also different. The algorithms of the Cheng and Xing families are relatively similar, so it's not impossible for you to undergo brain domain development at the Xing family, but the thinking patterns established in this way... definitely won't be as good as those from the Cheng family, understand? For you, the best brain domain development still lies with the Cheng family."
"After all, their bloodline runs through me," Cheng Jinyang said solemnly.
"Exactly," Xing Yuanzhi nodded, "that's the meaning of family."
"Ah, I see," Cheng Jinyang sighed.
It's time to contact sister Xinnan... Hmm, I seem to not have her contact information?
Ah! She forgot to leave it before leaving last time!
He took out his phone and searched for it, indeed not finding Cheng Xinnan's information, but instead saw a message from the previous job's manager asking if he had recovered from his illness.
So Cheng Jinyang typed a reply, tactfully indicating that his health had improved quite a bit, but he wasn't in great need of money lately, and also had a lot of things going on, so he wanted to resign from the job.
The manager's reply came quickly: "No problem, I hired someone new last Friday, the day you took leave. But, kid, you're not being kept by a rich woman, are you?"
"Cough! Cough!" Cheng Jinyang was drinking water, and almost choked on it, instead coughing himself.
He coughed violently as he stood up and walked towards the living room balcony.
Xing Yuanzhi, sitting on the sofa, suddenly turned her head to look at his back, widened her eyes, showing an incredulous expression.
She hesitated for a moment, picked up the tissue box from the coffee table, put it down after a few seconds, then got up and walked quickly into the bathroom, taking out a clean mop.
She carefully mopped up the few drops of water he had coughed out onto the floor.
On the balcony, Cheng Jinyang sent a message to the manager:
"Why would you say that?"
The manager replied: "Frequent sick leave due to poor health, suddenly not in need of money, what else could it be if not being kept by a rich woman? Young people should exercise restraint, after all, money belongs to others, but health belongs to you."
"Why am I suddenly speechless..." Cheng Jinyang looked up at the night sky outside, engulfed in infinite melancholy.
The sky was already dark, but the main city across the river was still brightly lit, with even a faint halo covering the city's airspace, obscuring the moon and stars' brilliance.
"...If the aristocrats are the stars and moon, when will I become the sleepless city that suppresses their radiance?" With such thoughts flashing through his mind, Cheng Jinyang suddenly recalled a story about Qin Shihuang touring the country, where two common youths watched the emperor's procession among the crowd.
Xiang Yu said: "I can replace him!"
Liu Bang said: "Alas, a true hero should be like this."
In the end, the Chu-Han contention occurred, and as we all know, Liu Bang defeated Xiang Yu and gained control of the world. So, this story tells us that we must never easily assume...
Cheng Jinyang suddenly shivered, then quickly resumed gazing at the stars, praying: "Becoming the sleepless city is impossible. Being like them, the stars, and having the chance to shine my own light is good enough."
Quickly reprimanding himself, he switched from Xiang Yu's path to Liu Bang's path. Hurry, hurry, hurry!
Meanwhile, Xing Yuanzhi finished cleaning the mop in the bathroom, came out to inspect the floor again, and found no "saliva stains" left, finally heaved a sigh of relief.
Although the household robot Xiao Yun would come to clean at 8 p.m., she couldn't stand the thought of the stain lingering on the floor for so long.
Suddenly, there was another knocking sound from outside.
"Who is it?" Xing Yuanzhi called out, wondering if the household robot had come early today? Did the program have a bug?
"It's me, Sister Yuanzhi," came Wang Wanrou's voice from outside, with a hint of a smile. "I've come to apologize to Senior."