That day, Lin Chaoxi returned home at early morning.

She opened the door, checked as usual to see if Lao Lin was still home, and returned to her room.

All the materials for the modeling competition were still spread out on the table. She put away the books and notes and put the postgraduate entrance examination books in the center.

She stayed up all night the day before yesterday, played all night yesterday, and also played badminton. She should be extremely sleepy, but now she is very awake.

She felt sorry for what happened to Zhang Liang, but she thought more about Lao Lin.

Anne said that only the luckiest people can find what they love to do, but there are also people who find the love of their life but cannot continue along this path.

She walked over to the living room bookshelf.

When she was in primary school, she saw a letter that Lao Lin had collected. There was no envelope, only a folded page of paper with a very beautiful English cursive font, which was tucked into her 100-day photo album.

She opened the letter out of curiosity and found that the date on the letter was exactly her first birthday.

As a girl from a single-parent family, her first reaction was that the letter was from her mother. So when she secretly opened the letter and found that she couldn't read a word of English in it, she did something that now seems very strange to her.

She copied the letter and spent about a week looking up each word in the dictionary, understanding the meaning of the sentences, and then roughly understanding the entire letter.

This letter was not from her mother, but from Professor Paul Gee of Chu University in the United States. The professor said that he was very busy in the recent period, and he missed Lao Lin when he had some free time. He knew that Lao Lin loved mathematics and was very talented, so he wrote a letter to ask Lao Lin the real reason why he did not come to study. If Lao Lin was willing, he could apply to be his student again.

Although the professor didn't know why Lao Lin didn't go to school, Lin Chaoxi knew.

It was not honorable to secretly read her father's letters, so the first time she quarreled with Lao Lin and mentioned the letter was when she was in the first grade of junior high school.

She asked Lao Lin if he felt that her daughter was a burden to him.

Lao Lin’s reaction was rather odd.

Lao Lin asked her to learn some law, because if she abandoned the baby, she would be punished by the state law.

Of course, Lin Chaoxi only realized later that if Old Lin went abroad, how could Chinese law punish him?

A small table light was turned on in the living room. Lin Chaoxi opened the bookcase, squatted down again, and began to look for the small photo album.

Little white flower on the foundation, the album is still there.

Because of the long time, the plastic sheets of the album were stuck together, and Lin Chaoxi took some effort to gently separate them.

Inside is her hundred-day photo, she is chubby and looks like a little piglet.

She turned two pages and saw the yellowed letter paper.

Lao Lin is very stubborn. After so many years, the letter is still where it was originally. Lao Lin would not move the letter just because she peeked, which makes his attitude more calm.

Lin Chaoxi yawned, and the sound of Old Lin's snoring rang out, lingering in the entire living room in stereo.

She closed the album and went back to bed.

——

After the modeling competition, the only thing in life is the postgraduate entrance examination. I need to focus and cherish the present moment. This is Lin Chaoxi's life experience when he squatted in front of the bookshelf and read the letter this morning.

This realization lasted only 1 minute and 15 seconds.

She sleepily turned a page of her calendar and saw that tomorrow was the day for her thesis defense.

She had made the annotation a long time ago, but she had been going through so many ups and downs in her life recently that she had long forgotten about it.

Life is full of variables, so don't set goals casually. Lin Chaoxi warned himself as he turned on his computer.

Her thesis was on Heidegger's "Ontological Difference".

She thought she had plenty of time and had not thought carefully about the defense of her thesis.

Now she immediately opened the document and was overwhelmed by a strong sense of being in another world. The "Heidegger", "existence" and "reality" in the document seemed like things from a lifetime ago.

Although it was less than two months ago, it had been more than a year since she wrote the paper. Many contents in the paper had become very unfamiliar to her. Lin Chaoxi took a deep breath and forced herself to read it from the beginning, gradually regaining the state she had when she wrote the paper.

——

The class notified that the gathering time for the thesis defense was 8 a.m., and at 7:30 a.m., Lin Chaoxi had already arrived in the classroom.

The classroom was noisy, with classmates who hadn't seen each other for a long time chatting with each other.

The debate will be divided into groups A and B, and will proceed in the order of the draw.

Most of the seats in the class were arranged by dormitory, and people from the same dormitory were huddled together. She looked around and found that her former roommate was with Chen Bei. Chen Bei was of course going to hold a grudge because Liu Zhiyuan betrayed her.

So she quietly found a corner and listened to her classmates start discussing where to take graduation photos, what weird angles to use, and where to go for dinner later.

Everyone was excited, but those questions made her feel for the first time that college graduation was approaching and everyone would go their separate ways. She had graduated from junior high school and high school before (twice), but college seemed very different.

Lin Chaoxi sighed. Then she opened the thesis introduction that she had written in an emergency yesterday and began to recite it again. She read over and over again the questions that the teacher might ask and her corresponding answers, until the class monitor sat down in the seat in front of her.

"What have you been doing recently? You haven't spoken in the class group. We have agreed on graduation souvenirs. You owe me 15.6 yuan." asked the monitor.

Lin Chaoxi was stunned for a moment, then looked up and said, "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know about this."

"Blocked the group?"

"Uh...I seem to have forgotten to look at it."

"I said, you didn't submit your application when we were calculating your graduation destination. I asked Chen Bei and she said she didn't know. I wrote 'self-employed' for you."

"Sorry sorry, self-employment is great."

"What are you busy with recently? Teacher qualification exam or preparing for postgraduate entrance exam?"

"Let's take the postgraduate entrance examination. I suddenly don't want to work anymore."

"So you feel the cruelty of society? Come on, I'll wait for you to be my junior in our graduate school."

The monitor made a joke.

Lin Chaoxi was silent for a moment and did not say anything about the other department of the school she was planning to visit.

——

Lin Chaoxi had never experienced defending a thesis before.

She felt like she had already failed the exam, but when she stood at the classroom door and watched her classmates come in and out one by one with solemn faces, as if they had lost their parents, her heart still beat faster and her mouth became dry.

After the first student came out, the students behind him started to ask frantically what the teacher had asked.

The philosophy students were particularly interesting. The girl was silent for a long time and then said, "The teacher has some suggestions for my reference books."

"What do you think?"

"Teacher Shen felt that the second edition translation by Mr. Li Chongguang that I had referred to was not as good as Mr. Zhang Lingxian's, but Teacher Wang disagreed, and then they started arguing."

The corridor was quiet for a moment, and the voices of teachers arguing in the classroom could be heard faintly.

I don’t know who brought up the theory of monads, but the three teachers started criticizing Leibniz together. It was 10 minutes later before they started calling “next person”. Lin Chaoxi was delighted to hear this.

When it was her turn, many people in the class had already finished their defense and were drinking wine together.

She walked into the small classroom hungry and recited the thesis introduction verbatim.

The three teachers who hosted the debate expressed their opinions, and then Teacher Shen, who really liked to express his opinions, smacked his lips and said, "You know it very well."

"It took me quite a long time to carry it on my back." Lin Chaoxi laughed.

After asking two professional questions, the teacher was tired of chatting and started chatting with her: "Where are you going after graduation?"

"Take the postgraduate entrance examination."

"Student Lin, your word 'bar' is very meaningful. Which teaching and research department are you going to apply for?"

"Preparing for an exam..." Lin Chaoxi wanted to make up a story, but looking at the three teachers, he suddenly said, "Preparing to learn math."

"Oh, I see." The three teachers were also people who had seen the world, and they were very calm. "Then tell me how philosophy helps you learn mathematics?"

"I think philosophy taught me, as I was learning mathematics, that it is incredible that people are trying to understand the world."

"That sentence seems to sound familiar, Einstein?"

Lin Chaoxi's old face turned red.

"Be more sincere," said the teacher.

"It's not helpful. These are two independent disciplines that do not and should not affect each other."

"Wittgenstein." The teachers looked at each other for a few seconds. Teacher Shen smacked his lips and asked, "Then how do you explain the fact that Leibniz is both a philosopher and a mathematician?"

"Teacher Shen's question is wrong." A teacher next to him said directly.

Then, the three teachers started to argue with each other again. From the third mathematical crisis to Gödel's incompleteness theorem, they would occasionally interrupt her and ask her some questions about set theory. She would answer if she could, and say "I don't know" if she couldn't.

The three teachers discussed happily in their own world, and Lin Chaoxi felt that they were just about to ask her to go downstairs to the office to get some wine and snacks.

Standing on the stage, she felt that lovely people are always very similar, and philosophy is also an interesting and wonderful subject. If she chooses to take the postgraduate entrance examination, she may also wander in this subject and find a lot of fun.

So how do you decide what you like?

It's really hard to judge.

Forty minutes passed, an hour passed...

Finally, the student who was waiting for the answer outside couldn't help but go downstairs and knocked on the door.

The teachers stopped, looked at her and asked, "Why haven't you left yet?"

Lin Chaoxi bowed with a smile, left the classroom, and felt relieved that he had completed his studies.

She put the paper into her schoolbag and took out her cell phone, which showed a bunch of notification messages on WeChat.

Someone in the modeling competition group asked her - let's play billiard together tomorrow, do you want to come?

Lin Chaoxi——I won’t go.

——Will you come on the 27th of this month to Dongming Lake in Nanshan? Pei Zhi said he will be going abroad after that day. Let’s celebrate together?