Chapter 179: Diagnosis and Backup Exam Room

The corridor of the school hospital was thick with the mingled scent of peracetic acid and old newspapers. Lin Chen stood in line outside the orthopedics clinic, his right foot bearing his weight while his left toe barely grazed the floor. The digital clock on the wall ticked over: 8:40 AM. The queue inched forward, mostly students nursing sprains from sports, their complaints and laughter bouncing off the tiled walls. He leaned against the edge of a bench, pulled his medical record and X-ray envelope from his backpack, and rubbed the plastic seal with his fingertips. The county hospital’s diagnosis read simply: “Left ankle ligament injury with localized hematoma.” To apply for a backup exam room through the Academic Affairs Office, he needed a stamped “Recent Injury Re-examination Certificate” and a doctor’s note stating “long-distance travel is not recommended.”

When his turn came, the attending physician was a middle-aged man wearing reading glasses. Lin Chen handed over his documents and explained his purpose. The doctor flipped through the file, then told him to take off his shoe for an examination. As fingers pressed against the outside of his ankle, pain shot up his tibia like fine needles. Lin Chen clenched his back teeth, his facial muscles remaining still, though his breath hitched for half a beat. “The ligament isn’t torn, but the soft tissue contusion is severe, and there’s periosteal inflammation.” The doctor took off his glasses and tapped a few keys on the keyboard. “You need a certificate to apply for a deferred exam or a backup room through Academic Affairs?” Lin Chen nodded. “Those people only recognize the stamp, not the person.” The printer spat out three A4 sheets with a dull, grinding friction. “Re-examination record, injury description, and medical advice. Go to the information desk on the first floor to get the school hospital’s official seal, then head to the Exam Section of the Academic Affairs Office in the Administration Building. It’s Thursday. They stop serving the public after 3 PM tomorrow, so you have to submit the materials today.”

Lin Chen took the papers, thanked him, and turned away. Descending the stairs, he had to angle his body sideways, his right hand gripping the stainless steel railing, his left foot suspended in the air as his right foot probed down step by step. The edges of the anti-slip strips were worn down, exposing the gray-white concrete beneath. With every step, his knee absorbed an extra shearing force. He counted them: twenty-four in total. Reaching the first floor, he found the nurse at the information desk bent over a medication inventory list. He handed her the form. She glanced at it, pulled the official seal from a drawer, breathed on it, and stamped it down with a heavy thud. The red ink of the “School Hospital Outpatient Department” seal bled slightly at the edges, but the characters were crisp.

The Administration Building stood on the east side of the sports field. Lin Chen stepped out of the clinic building, and the early autumn wind swept fallen leaves across the pavement. He opened his phone’s map app and calculated the route: about a twelve-minute walk at a normal pace. At his current speed, it would take at least twenty-five. He opened the academic affairs portal and navigated to the “Special Candidate Exam Room Adjustment Application” page. The attachment upload box was already open. He photographed the three stamped documents, adjusted the lighting to ensure the official seal and the doctor’s signature were fully visible, then uploaded and submitted them. A system prompt appeared: “Application received. Review cycle: 24–48 hours.”

Forty-eight hours. The technical interview at 2 PM on Friday couldn’t wait for the review to finish. He couldn’t gamble on the system. Sitting on the stone steps outside the Administration Building, he pulled his notebook from his bag. The page already outlined Plan D: If the backup room application was rejected or the review timed out, he would have to abandon the practical exam. The cost of abandoning it was delayed graduation, but if he passed the technical interview, his internship salary in Shenzhen would immediately cover his younger brother’s medication for the next month. In the ledger of reality, delayed graduation was merely a time cost; stopping the medication was a survival cost. He crossed out “delayed graduation” and wrote beside it: “Consequence: make-up exam fee 120 RMB, degree certificate issuance delayed by six months.” The numbers were light on paper, but heavy in life. He closed the notebook and snapped the pen cap shut. His phone screen lit up: bank balance 7,135.30. He stared at the string of digits, automatically breaking it down in his head: hard-seat train to Shenzhen 186, urban village deposit plus three months’ rent roughly 2,400, first month’s living expenses 1,500, re-examination registration plus medication 300. The margin was compressed to its absolute limit. He couldn’t afford a single mistake.

His phone vibrated. Not the academic system—an email notification. He unlocked the screen and opened the automated reply from the preliminary screening system. The subject line had changed: 【Technical Preliminary Screening Result】Lin Chen - Passed. Please arrive at Room 302, Building B, Experimental Building, Provincial Institute of Technology for check-in before Friday 13:30. Bring ID card, student ID, and a printed copy of the algorithm report. Passed. Two words. No additional comments, just a time and a location. He stared at the screen, his thumb hovering over the keyboard. Check-in at 13:30, interview at 14:00. The practical exam also started at 14:00. The time window was squeezed to the breaking point. If Academic Affairs approved the backup room and assigned him to the computer lab in the northern district, he would have to submit his exam by 12:30 and then sprint to the southern district. If it wasn’t approved, he would head straight south.

He stood up. The pain in his foot had faded into a dull, heavy background hum, like the low-frequency drone of server fans. He stopped thinking in “what ifs” and focused only on calculating the “path.” He opened his backpack and checked his inventory: ID card, student ID, printed algorithm report, half a bottle of water, a pack of compressed biscuits. He sealed the USB drive and the report inside a waterproof pouch and tucked it into his inner pocket. The zipper closed with a crisp sound.

Back in his dorm, he powered on his computer and logged into the academic portal. The status bar read: “Under Review.” He refreshed the page once. Nothing changed. He closed the tab and began organizing his technical notes for the interview. Boundary conditions for sliding windows, memory optimization logic, edge cases for test scenarios. He arranged the notes in logical order and highlighted the core parameters with a fluorescent marker. At 4 PM, his phone vibrated again. This time, it was a WeChat message from Professor Zhou: “The review results are out. The backup room is approved, located in the old campus computer lab in the north. But the invigilator has been changed, and they require candidates to arrive 40 minutes early for identity verification. Do you have enough time?”

Lin Chen stared at the message. The old campus computer lab was at least an hour and twenty minutes away from the Provincial Institute of Technology in the south, counting subway and walking time. Arriving forty minutes early meant he had to submit his exam by 12:20. The practical problem involved 8,000 data entries, with a standard time limit of three hours. It sounded sufficient, but once you factored in the buffer for verification, submission, walking, and transfers, he had to compress every repetitive step to its absolute minimum.

He replied: “Enough.”

Setting the phone down, he reopened his code editor. He created a new file and began writing the preprocessing module for his automation script. Since time was compressed, he had to save every second on repetitive operations. The computers in the old campus lab were from a 2006 batch: single-core CPUs, 2GB of RAM, and sluggish hard drives. He couldn’t rely on heavy libraries; he had to write low-level logic using native syntax. He replaced the data-reading module with Python’s built-in csv library to avoid the memory overhead of pandas; he fixed the output format to plain text to minimize I/O wait times; and at the top of the script, he added sys.setrecursionlimit along with robust exception handling to prevent crashes from environmental configuration differences. The glow of the screen washed over his face as the sky outside darkened. He knew tomorrow’s exam wouldn’t be about who coded the fastest, but who made the fewest mistakes. He typed the first line of comments: # Fault-tolerance strategy under time compression. The rhythmic tapping of the keyboard echoed through the empty dorm, steady as a second hand, steady as a heartbeat. He adjusted his breathing, syncing the rhythm of his fingertips with the throbbing in his ankle. Tomorrow at 2 PM, two parallel lines had to intersect in reality. He couldn’t stop. He couldn’t afford to be wrong.