Evening.
Stepping through the night, Dong Xuebin returned eagerly to the Family Compound with an English-Chinese Dictionary in his arms. As soon as he entered, he hurriedly threw together something to eat. He microwaved a bowl of steamed egg custard, added some soy sauce and sesame oil, and wolfed it down. After letting out a satisfied burp, Dong Xuebin did not even have time for a cigarette. He immediately rolled his shoulders, sat firmly on the sofa, and continued studying the commands.
menu!
A dial and several numbers appeared.
menu!
The dial and numbers disappeared again.
After testing it countless times and repeatedly pondering the string of numbers, Dong Xuebin suddenly seemed to understand what they meant. After considering it for a moment, he tentatively called up the menu first, then said, "Rewind one second." In a flash, the menu flickered, his vision blurred, and he confirmed that time had gone back one second. When he focused on the menu again, it was just as he had thought—the number of digits in that mysterious line had decreased by one!
It had changed from 4 to 3!
There was no mistake. Dong Xuebin understood now—the numbers represented his remaining rewind time!
By that logic, the time displayed by those numbers was... three minutes and forty-three seconds, which matched the amount of rewind time Dong Xuebin had only roughly estimated before.
Dong Xuebin grinned. This menu had helped him immensely. Whenever he had used rewind before, he sometimes needed to use it for a few seconds or over ten seconds at a time. Trying to calculate those numbers mentally was far too cumbersome, and he had never been able to figure out exactly how much rewind time he had left. Writing down every use and slowly calculating it afterward was even less