Chapter 41 - 18: Brother Yi, You Have to Be Happy the Next Time We Meet

Chapter 41: Chapter 18: Brother Yi, You Have to Be Happy the Next Time We Meet

On a Saturday, the hallway of the women’s dormitory was filled with the warm, fragrant scents of various body washes.

With a soft CLICK, the dorm room door was pushed open.

Shao Yiyi was slumped over her desk, binge-watching a show on her tablet while stuffing seaweed snacks into her mouth.

Hearing the door open, she instinctively turned her head. The half-chewed piece of seaweed froze in her mouth.

Wen Xiao stood at the doorway, her beige woolen coat dotted with a few still-damp raindrops. ℯℯ𝑙.

Shao Yiyi blinked, then blinked again.

She grabbed her phone from the desk. The screen lit up, clearly displaying: 5:48 PM.

Shao Yiyi managed to swallow the seaweed in her mouth, her expression one of utter disbelief as she glanced from her phone back to Wen Xiao.

"Why are you back already? It’s not even six, girl! Is your... date over already? Is Brother Cos really that quick?"

Wen Xiao changed into her slippers and hung her dripping umbrella on the back of the door.

She wasn’t glowing with happiness or blushing shyly, as Shao Yiyi had expected.

In the mirror, her expression was grim.

Yu Xian’s words from the coffee shop still echoed in her mind. ’Am I heading toward... the same end as them?’

She hung her bag on the back of her chair and gave a noncommittal reply:

"Yeah, we finished talking, so I came back."

"But..." Shao Yiyi hadn’t even paused her show, where the male and female leads were locked in a passionate kiss. She stared at Wen Xiao in disbelief.

"You didn’t go see a movie? You didn’t go to an amusement park? Don’t tell me... you didn’t even have dinner together?"

Her eyes were wide as saucers.

"On a cold day like this, with such a great atmosphere, what in the world were you two doing all afternoon? What did you talk about?"

Wen Xiao took off her coat, smoothed it out, and hung it in the wardrobe.

’What did we talk about all afternoon?’

They’d discussed large language models, personality vectorization, the eight trigrams and binary code, and also... how to steal her sister’s patient’s medical records.

"We talked about... academic stuff," Wen Xiao said, turning to face Shao Yiyi’s gossipy expression. "Large language models, vectorization mapping, binary algorithms, that sort of thing."

"So..."

Shao Yiyi’s jaw dropped, and it stayed that way for a long moment.

"So you two really just spent the whole time discussing academics? Good heavens! That’s nothing like what they write in romance novels! You turned a date into a research group meeting!"

"I told you it wasn’t a date. It was just a purely academic discussion. None of the romantic developments you’re imagining happened!"

"Trust me, last time the reading said Brother Cos and Sister Yuyu had a familial connection. Doesn’t that have to be about you two?"

"You’re overthinking it," Wen Xiao said, cutting off Shao Yiyi’s wild fantasy.

"He has a cousin who’s known my sister for a long time. That familial connection probably doesn’t mean him becoming my brother-in-law, but my sister becoming his sister-in-law."

Seeing the dumbstruck Shao Chacha, Wen Xiao picked up her cartoon-themed water bottle and poured herself a cup of hot water.

Shao Yiyi snapped out of it, still stubbornly unconvinced. She muttered about how Brother Cos must be a blockhead for not knowing how to seize the opportunity with someone as cute as Xiaoxiao.

"By the way, I asked him about that thing for you. He said he didn’t get the birth date wrong; what he told you at the time was accurate."

Shao Yiyi, who had just been complaining about Brother Cos being a blockhead, suddenly froze.

"He didn’t get it wrong?" Her expression turned serious, and she frowned.

"Could I have miscalculated? That shouldn’t be possible... I followed the procedure exactly."

Wen Xiao didn’t answer. She gazed at the streetlights gradually illuminating the world outside, her mind on the two lines of traditional characters in the book.

Brings misfortune to all kin, fated for separation from flesh and blood. The Celestial Killer Lone Star in one’s chart, destined for a life of solitude.

Lonely stars and solitary nights, the White Tiger at the door. Those who draw near face peril; those who love shall be hurt.

’Did Shao Yiyi... really get it wrong?’

Wen Xiao recalled the look in Yu Xian’s eyes at the coffee shop. It was the look of a drowning man, desperately trying to grab the last straw.

"Yiyi."

Wen Xiao spoke suddenly.

"What’s up?"

Shao Yiyi was flipping through her thread-bound copy of the Iron Plate Divine Number.

"I might not be staying in the dorm for the next couple of days."

"Are you going home this weekend?"

"Yeah, I’m going to stay at my sister’s place for a few days."

...

When Yu Xian got back to his cousin’s apartment, it was pitch black again.

He switched on a wall lamp. The living room was empty, and three plates were overturned on the table.

He hadn’t expected his cousin, as busy as he was, to have made him dinner before leaving.

Lifting the plates, Yu Xian was taken aback. Today’s meal was surprisingly innovative.

Under the three plates were some leftover roasted duck slices from lunch, a bowl of dark, black bean sauce, and a few pan-fried pancakes.

He never knew his cousin had this skill. Yu Xian dipped his chopsticks into the black bean sauce for a taste. Hmm, it was savory, but a little salty.

The pancakes seemed to be sprinkled with a lot of black sesame seeds. Yu Xian washed his hands, sat down at the dining table, and started recapping the afternoon’s discoveries as he ate.

Although the process had been a bit convoluted, his progress was actually smoother than he’d anticipated.

First, there was the theory of "personality vectorization."

According to Wen Xiao, with the current level of technology, the "vectorization" of a person is impossible.

The core bottleneck is the conflict between storage capacity and the sheer volume of data.

The structure of the human brain is too complex. Its neural connections form a dynamic, continuous, chaotic system.

If you were to forcibly digitize it, you would lose the vast majority of key information—"99.99% of the information," according to Wen Xiao.

But the title of his parents’ paper just so happened to be "Research on Storage Mechanisms."

Since their research focus was on "storage mechanisms," did that mean his parents had also been aware of this problem and its bottleneck back then?

Could they have made some kind of breakthrough on this problem of "not being able to store it all"?