The "Workaholic" Attribute

The "Workaholic" Attribute

After being excited for a few minutes, the same question surfaced in his mind.

"7812378*7812378=..."

???

??

He still couldn't solve it within a second. What was going on?

As... ahem, a genius, he shouldn't be stumped by a question like this!

Zhang Yuan furrowed his brows. A multiplication problem appeared in his mind, and after struggling through it for half a minute, he finally came up with the answer.

"61033250014884."

Not bad. He'd still managed to solve it.

After thinking it over carefully, a look of realization appeared on his face.

"So that's how it is... The old me would have just used a calculator to solve this kind of problem, and my calculation skills had deteriorated as a result. If I didn't use my brain, even a genius couldn't come up with the answer right away..."

"I'm slow at calculating now only because I'm out of practice and haven't mastered the relevant techniques. If I keep doing mental arithmetic, I'll definitely get better over time."

The next day...

Zhang Yuan woke up bleary-eyed and rubbed his groggy head.

Maybe because he'd been too excited last night and kept testing his IQ, he hadn't been able to fall asleep for a long time. By the time he finally did, it had almost been dawn.

He looked at the time. It was already ten.

"Oh no!"

Zhang Yuan sprang out of bed, washed up quickly, then hurried out of the house.

"I hope I'm not late, or my aunt will nag me for ages..."

His thirty-day vacation was packed, with a clear schedule for every day. He'd already made plans to have lunch at his aunt's house today.

Donghua City in July was like a furnace, heat rolling through the streets while the roadside plants suffered in the blazing sun.

Zhang Yuan hurried to the subway station, where the air-conditioning was always nice and cool.

This was an age of abundant energy. Every large-scale fusion power plant generated as much electricity as the Three Gorges Dam used to, and electricity in the country cost as little as three cents per kilowatt-hour.

Thanks to this, while petroleum-derived products such as plastic remained expensive, energy-intensive industrial products like steel and cement had become exceptionally cheap.

In particular, the rapid development of nanotechnology meant that building materials were being upgraded generation after generation. For example, adding nanosilica equal to six percent of the cement used could double compressive strength and improve the workability of concrete in every respect.

The widespread use of inexpensive new materials had allowed cities to build ever taller. Thousand-meter skyscrapers were everywhere.

Two hundred years ago, the 828-meter Burj Khalifa was the tallest building in the world. Nowadays, it could only claim to be the tallest building in the village.

And... for the same cost, you could build at least five of them!

Some transit tracks were even built more than a thousand meters above the ground, with skyscrapers serving as their supporting pillars.

They were popular in almost every major city. Elevated railways had become the face of the big city.

"There are so many people."

Donghua City was one of Xia Kingdom's five first-tier cities. Even though the morning rush hour had already passed, the subway station was still packed.

"Passengers, please give priority to the elderly and children."

"Please do not smoke or beg inside the train cars."

There was no way to completely solve the traffic problem.

The complainers could always find the most convenient angle from which to criticize the government. If public transport was too crowded, the government would get flak; but if there were too many subway trains and lots of empty seats, people would say it was "a waste of taxpayers' money." No matter what, someone would complain, so they might as well make do.

Zhang Yuan stood at the back of the line. He heard someone constantly complaining that they weren't increasing the number of trains and smiled to himself. He didn't have much to say about it. Instead, he took out his phone and started working on some problems.

It was a very popular app called Super Brain, which tested a person's memory, arithmetic, and reasoning skills. He had nothing else to do, so solving a few problems sounded nice. He could test his IQ at the same time.

IQ was what he cared about most right now.

Whenever he found out his IQ was high, the sheer delight he felt was beyond words.

It was noisy in the subway station, making it hard to concentrate. But for some reason, solving problems gave him a peculiar sense of accomplishment, like eating chocolate chips.

Could that drug have given him an attribute called "workaholic"?

"I finally understand why some people are willing to work all day. It turns out it feels unbelievably good. Using my brain has actually become fun!"

Ding-dong...

The subway arrived, and the crowd surged in like a tide, clearing the area where people had been waiting in line.

Zhang Yuan boarded the train, found a spot to stand, and kept working through one problem after another.

With practice, he'd gone from taking half a minute to solve a seven-digit arithmetic problem to taking just ten seconds, and he was getting faster still.

That feeling of having the answer right on the tip of his tongue was finally beginning to emerge.

The more he used his brain, the sharper it became. He was very pleased with the result.

Soon, ordinary arithmetic no longer satisfied him, and he moved on to square roots.

"Let's start with an easy one. √7812, rounded to four significant figures."

Zhang Yuan raised the difficulty.

There were many ways to manually find the square root of an integer. The most common was trial division, which was a bit like long division. With enough mental arithmetic skill, you could indeed work it out directly.

Other methods were a little more complicated, such as continued fractions, the bisection method, and Newton's method.

Fifteen seconds later, he had the answer.

"√7812=88.38..."

Correct!

"√444"

"21.07"

Correct!

Haha!

So this was... what it felt like to be a genius?

It felt... great!

The subway car was quiet. Aside from the electronic announcements, everyone was absorbed in their own world.

Every so often, a few people would laugh despite themselves, apparently reaching a climactic part of a novel or video. They were like a bunch of idiots...

"People should use their spare time on the subway to improve themselves, not for entertainment!"

A "public intellectual" who had returned from studying abroad frowned as he lamented this unhealthy social trend.

The "heads-down crowd" was often criticized by the media, but the criticism did little good. People still did whatever they wanted and kept their heads down. It wasn't as if the government could pass a law banning phone use in public places, right?

The man's name was Ye Fan. In his mind, everyone on subways abroad read newspapers instead of playing on their phones, and the atmosphere was a hundred times better than in Xia Kingdom (in reality, there was no internet).

No matter what, in his view, young people abroad lived much healthier lives than young people in Xia Kingdom!

"No wonder this bunch can't make it into space. They spend their study time on entertainment... It'd be a miracle if they ever made it into space!" Ye Fan thought to himself.

"What's that saying again? I just use all the time other people spend drinking coffee for work..."

Especially the young man standing next to him in a short-sleeved shirt. He even had a mysterious smile on his face.

Tsk, tsk. He must be dating a two-dimensional girl, right?

What a loser!

(First, a quick explanation of this book's title. I originally wanted to call it Deep Space Era, but that sounded too serious, and the click-through rate would be very low.)

(It's science fiction, after all. Everyone knows that even though The Wandering Earth was a hit, that doesn't mean other science fiction novels will be hits too. Most people who see a title like Deep Space Era probably won't want to read it at all, and won't even click on it.)

(After thinking it over, I'd better change it to this: Deep Space Chief. It sounds kind of silly, but the click-through rate should be higher...)