When Chang Dou was little, his teacher made the following embarrassing assessment—You know, this child, he’s pretty clever, learns things faster than other children, but…he’s a little…how should I say this? All right, to put it nicely, he’s a little straightforward. Whenever he does anything, he has a one-track mind. To put it less nicely, he’s a little dim-witted.

In first grade, the teacher taught: “Students should behave like this: go to class and sit up straight with both feet on the ground, look at the teacher and listen carefully, raise your hand if you want to speak… Classmate Chang Dou, what is it?” 

Little Chang Dou put down his raised hand and said, “Teacher, I’m hungry. When can I go home to eat?” 

The teacher: “…” 

“You can’t speak about subjects unrelated to the class!” 

From then on, these words became little Chang Dou’s golden rule. So one day, when he wanted to pee, Chang Dou held back and held back and held back. When he couldn’t hold back anymore, what was there to do? 

He really wanted to go to the bathroom…but the teacher had said that if he wanted to speak, he had to raise his hand, and he couldn’t speak about subjects unrelated to the class. 

Ah, he really couldn’t hold back…

The child sharing his table looked curiously at Classmate Chang Dou. He had never dared to speak to Classmate Chang Dou, because he thought he was an alien—the evidence was that Chang Dou’s head was bigger than all the other kids’. 

Later… Later, little Chang Dou gloriously peed his pants. 

In his first year of middle school, his math teacher once got drunk and showed up in class to ramble. Everyone looked at each other blankly. The teacher, with a flourish of his pen, assigned them a homework problem and said that anyone who solved the problem would get full marks at the end of the term, no need to take the exam. 

The teacher was so drunk he wouldn’t have known his own mother. While the children were still learning how to prove congruency in triangles, he wrote down a four-axis mathematical physics equation…in other words, a partial differential equation. 

Of course this couldn’t be solved, but everyone knew that while the math teacher was all right, he sometimes got drunk and ran at the mouth. Only little Chang Dou took him seriously. 

He thought about it when he was eating, thought about it when he was walking, even thought about it in his dreams. When class ended, he went to the neighborhood library to consult reference materials. When he couldn’t find anything, he begged his dad to take him to the central library. He thought so hard that he became obsessed. In plain sight, he walked into an electricity pole and had a big bump on his forehead for three days. 

But in the end, he still couldn’t solve it. Chang Dou was extremely aggrieved, thinking that he was very stupid. He felt too embarrassed even to cry. In the end, he actually got sick from holding himself back. 

When his parents went to school to ask for a leave of absence, the math teacher was astonished. The child had been doing fine, how had he gotten sick?—It was clear that in the whole world, only Chang Dou was still hung up on this problem. 

In short, he was the sort of person who would bash his head against a wall without looking back—he’d either knock the wall down or break his own head. 

Strictly speaking, Chang Dou wasn’t a genius in the traditional sense. He didn’t attend a gifted class, and he hadn’t even been able to solve the problem the teacher had assigned while drunk. At best, he was only a talented individual who had to rely on his own hard work. 

Working very, very hard, he tested into a key high school. Working very, very hard again, he tested into a key university. Finally, working very, very hard, he continued his studies and at last joined the legendary RZ Unit, realizing his childhood dream—study hard and be a useful person, like the heroes on TV—taking down bad guys with a “ha!” and “hi-ya!” 

Though it strains the understanding to imagine what logical relationship there is between “taking down bad guys with a ‘ha!’ and ‘hi-ya!’” and “study hard”…

Ahem…getting back to the point, after joining the RZ Unit, Chang Dou became a fully qualified technician. He worked extremely hard, and his achievements were excellent. He slowly became important—but he still wasn’t a core member. In the whole technical department, there was only one core member. This was a genuine article genius. Chang Dou had always worshipped the technical department’s core member Dr. Xu, feeling that he could to anything, that he was so amazing, had invented so many things. 

Every time he saw the core members fighting shoulder to shoulder like a family, joking and fooling around, Chang Dou was extremely envious, especially of one of the field agents. His name was Fang Xiu. Seeing him, Chang Dou felt that he was seeing his whole life’s ideal—he thought that this was just what a true man should be. He didn’t care about anything; when others were celebrating victory, he would silently open a bottle of beer beside them and put on a cynical smile. Even if he got injured, he could still laugh and jeer. He was so cool. 

Chang Dou worked very hard and thought that it would be good if he could one day be like Dr. Xu. 

But one day, he really did take Dr. Xu’s place, becoming the technical department’s core member as he had yearned for even in his dreams, but he found that he wasn’t happy at all—because Dr. Xu was dead. 

No one accepted him. Though everyone was very nice and very polite to him, Chang Dou still felt excluded—perhaps in their hearts, Dr. Xu was part of their family, while Chang Dou was only an inferior replacement. All he could do was keep working very, very hard, let everyone see his efforts, and hope that at least…he could get a bit of approval from everyone, get the approval of…that person he had always silently watched. 

This fool with his bird’s nest hair was once again taking things to heart and starting to bash his head against a wall.