Returning to university felt like booting up a corrupted operating system. The familiar campus, once a landscape of predictable routines, now seemed laced with latent chaos. The peace Xiaoyang had meticulously cultivated over the break evaporated within hours, replaced by the low-grade hum of impending social collisions. He was a system that had been patched with new, unsettling code, and it was causing compatibility issues with his old environment.
The source of the corruption was a single, persistent data stream: memories of Shen Qinghe. Her words played on a loop in his mind, a quiet but insistent background process. "The accumulation of insignificant details... The noise is the signal." It was a virus attacking the very core of his Energy-Saving Principle.
He found himself staring at his "EfficientHeart" app mockup with a sense of profound absurdity. It was a monument to everything Shen Qinghe had argued against. He was trying to build a cathedral to efficiency, and she had gently informed him he was worshiping the wrong god.
This internal conflict manifested in strange ways. When Chen Yuexi ambushed him outside his dorm, launching into an elaborate theory about a new "Childhood Friend Route" she'd discovered in a visual novel, he didn't just mentally calculate the energy drain. He noticed, against his will, the way a stray strand of her hair caught the morning light, and the specific, slightly floral scent of her shampoo. Useless data. Consume storage. But... recorded.
When Tang Youyou presented him with a new "aura-cleansing" amethyst cluster, citing a rare alignment of Mercury and Venus, he didn't just sigh internally. He observed the genuine, hopeful sparkle in her eyes, and the way she carefully polished the stone with her sleeve before handing it to him. Inefficient gesture. High energy cost for zero tangible gain. Yet... the memory is stored.
It was maddening. Shen Qinghe had given him a new, and deeply inefficient, directive: Record Everything.
The breaking point came two days after his return. He was in the library, attempting to refactor the "EfficientHeart" core for the eighth time, when Su Yuning located him. She sat down opposite him without a word, placing a single sheet of paper on the table between them. It was a complex graph, plotting "Social Interaction Energy Expenditure" against "Perceived Intimacy Gain."
"I have been modeling your stated 'Energy Crisis'," she announced, her voice cutting through his fugue state. "My initial 'firewall' hypothesis was incomplete. It treated all social inputs as threats. A more nuanced model accounts for potential long-term benefits."
Xiaoyang stared at the graph. It was beautiful. Cold, hard, logical proof of his suffering. The data points for interactions with her, Yuexi, and Youyou were all clustered in the high-expenditure, low-to-mid intimacy quadrant. It was a visual representation of his hell.
"However," Yuning continued, pointing to a lone, theoretical point floating in the high-intimacy, low-expenditure quadrant. "This outlier suggests the existence of a social variable that defies the standard model. A connection that provides high relational output for minimal energy input. My calculations cannot identify this variable without more data."
Xiaoyang's throat went dry. She was modeling Shen Qinghe. She had deduced the existence of the "Hometown Variable" through pure data analysis.
"What is its source?" she asked, her gaze intense, analytical. "Is it a person? A state of being? This anomalous data point could revolutionize the entire premise of your 'EfficientHeart' application."
He couldn't speak. Admitting the source would be to make Shen Qinghe a target for her analysis, to subject his one peaceful connection to the relentless scrutiny of logic. The energy required to explain, to defend, felt infinite.
"Your non-response is a data point in itself," she noted, making a mark on her mental clipboard. "It indicates a high emotional valence associated with the variable. Intriguing."
Just as Xiaoyang felt his system about to crash completely, a distraction arrived in the form of a frantic, vibrating phone. It was Chen Yuexi. He picked up, desperate for an escape.
"Xiaoyang! Code Red! A narrative emergency!" her voice was a panicked whisper.
"What now?" he asked, wearily.
"It's Youyou! She's done something terrible! You have to come to the cafe, now! It's about... the notebook!"
A cold dread, entirely different from the one Su Yuning inspired, washed over him. The notebook. The one Shen Qinghe had given him before he left. A simple, elegant moleskine. He'd been using it to jot down random thoughts, fragments of code, and... other things. Things he didn't want to think about.
He mumbled an excuse to a visibly fascinated Su Yuning and practically ran to The Roasted Bean.
The scene inside was one of pure theatrical despair. Chen Yuexi was wringing her hands, her face pale. Tang Youyou was sitting at a table, looking utterly devastated, surrounded by a small arsenal of crystals, burnt sage, and scattered tarot cards. In the center of the table lay the notebook, open to a specific, damning page.
"Youyou was trying to perform a 'cognitive clarity' ritual for you," Yuexi explained, her voice trembling. "She needed a personal object to focus on. She found the notebook in your open backpack. She... she read it."
Xiaoyang's heart stopped. He approached the table slowly, like a man approaching his own execution.
On the page, in his own handwriting, were not lines of code, nor to-do lists. It was a series of disjointed, terrifyingly inefficient observations.
· - S.Y.: Logic as a defense mechanism. Also, a language. Finds beauty in optimization. Contradiction?
· - C.Y.: Energy drain is predictable. Almost comfortable. Like a noisy but familiar system process.
· - T.Y.: Intentions pure, methodology absurd. The effort itself is... notable.
· - S.Q.H.: The silence is not empty. It is full of data. The most efficient communication I have ever experienced.
He had been unconsciously compiling his own database. And now, it had been compromised.
"You... you think we're just... data points?" Chen Yuexi whispered, her voice cracking with betrayal. "System processes? Energy drains?"
"And the last one..." Tang Youyou looked up, her eyes red-rimmed. "Who is S.Q.H.? Their energy signature... it's so stable. So... optimal." She said the word like a curse. "My cards have been screaming about a 'Shadow Rival' for weeks! This is her, isn't it? The one from your hometown!"
Xiaoyang stood there, exposed. His internal, inefficient musings were now public record. The firewall was not just breached; his entire internal drive had been hacked and dumped onto the public server.
Chen Yuexi, the master of narratives, was faced with a plot twist she couldn't dramatize: the hero saw her as a background process. Tang Youyou, the seeker of cosmic truth, had found a cold, hard data point that shattered her mystical world.
In trying, and failing, to adopt Shen Qinghe's philosophy of "recording everything," he had managed to do the one thing his Energy-Saving Principle had always sought to avoid: he had caused maximum emotional damage with a single, careless action.
The notebook wasn't just a collection of thoughts. It was a corrupted save file, and loading it had crashed the entire system. The comfortable, if chaotic, dynamic he had with Yuexi and Youyou was gone, replaced by something brittle, broken, and immeasurably more energy-intensive to fix.
He had thought the ultimate inefficiency was social interaction. He was wrong. The ultimate inefficiency was the catastrophic cleanup required after a system crash caused by emotional negligence.
Su Yuning would have been fascinated by the data.