Reality Programming Association

Chapter 17: Chapter 8: ”Life of Subtraction

By the time he returned to the university from PIC, the sky had already grown quite dark. The incandescent lights in the main building’s classroom occasionally let out a faint electric buzz.

The evening class was Introduction to Condensed Matter Physics. The course name sounded quite complicated, and in reality, it wasn’t simple at all. In layman’s terms, it was the study of how a massive amount of microscopic particles came together to form the various materials of the macroscopic world.

If basic particles like atoms and electrons were treated as individual building blocks, why did different arrangements and combinations result in completely different properties? For example, copper could conduct electricity, but copper oxide was an insulator. Using the Arcana system in the game King as an analogy, this course studied why the combination of ”10 Concealment, 10 Eagle Eye, and 10 Calamity” suited Sun Shangxiang, while ”10 Concealment, 10 Eagle Eye, and 10 Unparalleled” suited Sun Wukong.

Dozens of umbrellas were piled at the classroom door. On the podium, Professor Ning was deriving the Bragg diffraction equation. Yu Xian rested his chin on one hand, listening on and off. The rain outside the window was too loud, sounding as if it was going to submerge the entire academic building.

Beside him, Shi Zuozhou was staring at his computer screen, tapping away at the keyboard with a CLACK CLACK sound. From time to time, Professor Ning cast approving glances his way.

During the ten-minute break, the professor went to get some water, and the students in the back rows woke up to stretch their limbs.

”What are you busy with? Still not done?” Yu Xian wasn’t a gossipy person, but Shi Zuozhou was being overly serious today.

”Almost, almost. It’s the final promotional material.” Shi Zuozhou tilted the screen slightly toward Yu Xian. ”What do you think? Does this poster design have that premium, ’soul-cleansing’ vibe?”

The poster’s composition leaned into a minimalist style. Against a grayish-white background, a pair of suspended silver scissors was trimming a lush tree. Beneath the tree trunk was a bolded title in an elegant font: ”Life of Subtraction”, Mr. Su Mingyuan’s Reading Sharing Session · JCU Stop.

Yu Xian’s hand, which was holding a pen, paused. ”Why is it this book again?” he wondered. In just a few short days, he had heard and seen it multiple times. Staring at Shi Zuozhou’s screen, Yu Xian asked in confusion, ”Why is this book everywhere?”

”The higher-ups like it. Everyone is under a lot of pressure right now, and this book focuses on ’mental decluttering.’ It’s quite mysterious.” Shi Zuozhou curled his lips and went back to working on his poster.

His phone vibrated gently on the desk. The screen lit up with a WeChat message. It had a pixel art cat avatar, and the sender was Uncertainty Robot.

”I’m really sorry about this afternoon. I didn’t scare you, did I?”

It was followed by a crying kitten emoji.

It was the messy bun salesperson he had met at PIC this afternoon. Yu Xian was a bit surprised. This account was actually being used by her personally? He had thought it was just an advertising account and that she would toss him into a customer pool right after adding him.

Later that evening, in a two-person girls’ dorm room, Wen Xiao sat cross-legged on her chair, cradling an unknown beverage in her hands.

On the computer screen in front of her, strings of complex data code were running.

As an artificial intelligence major, she didn’t believe in metaphysics. However, her best friend, Shao Yiyi, was a fanatic about metaphysics and had even taken on a master who supposedly knew a lot about Zhou Yi. Unable to withstand her best friend’s pleading, she had developed this ”fortune-telling system based on large language models.”

According to that girl Shao Chacha, this was definitely a great startup project, and she even planned to pull in some investment from her master.

Wen Xiao stared at the analysis report on the screen with a frown, chewing on her straw until it was deformed. After running regression algorithms for the entire afternoon on the test sample of the guy from earlier, the results were finally out:

Target subject’s emotional coupling degree with Wen Yu: 0.01%

Target subject’s kinship probability with Wen Yu: 85%

”What’s going on here?” she wondered. This guy and her sister had no romantic luck but had a probability of kinship? These two people had no blood relations and no social intersections, so how could they possibly become relatives? Unless...

Wen Xiao’s face suddenly flushed, and an absurd thought uncontrollably popped up. Unless she married that guy and he became her sister’s brother-in-law. Wouldn’t Wen Yu then become his... sister-in-law?

”Pfft! What am I thinking?!” Wen Xiao shook her head vigorously, making her messy bun teeter precariously.

She didn’t even know what that guy’s name was. She had only met him once and had almost been treated like a crazy salesperson. How could she possibly have that kind of relationship with him!

The model must have overfitted again, assigning too much weight to certain weakly correlated data. No, she should say that this kind of metaphysical stuff was unreliable to begin with. It was all that girl Shao Chacha’s fault for leading her astray.

”However...” She looked at the nickname ”Cos” on her phone screen. ”Since he’s not a blind date, what was he doing looking for my sister this afternoon?”

Curiosity scratched at her heart like a kitten’s claws. After a moment of hesitation, she poked at the screen with two fingers, typing and sending a message: ”Um, I wanted to ask, how did you end up with my sister today?”

At the same time, Yu Xian looked at the word ”sister” in the chat box and seemed to understand something.

The messy bun corporate slave who had stopped him in the PIC lobby this afternoon was actually Wen Yu’s younger sister. Thinking about how she had stared at him, sizing him up from head to toe, and the ”Exclusive Edition for Yu’s Syndrome” in the name of the test link, it all made sense.

She probably thought he was Wen Yu’s friend, which was why she had been so unbridled.

Yu Xian thought for a moment, then his fingers tapped rapidly on the screen as he replied: