My IQ Increases Every Month

“If a person’s intelligence were forcibly boosted every month, could he use his underachiever’s hands to build the nation’s most powerful machines in the year 2000, when the country was being strangled at every turn? Could knowledge that leaves its opponents outclassed shatter Western technological dominance, until he became a scientific deity classified as the nation’s highest secret?”

[Top Student] + [Black Technology] + [Rise of a Great Nation]

Math: 23 points. Physics: 19 points. Dead last in his grade.

Everyone thought Lin Chen’s ceiling in life was going to a factory with his dad to work on an assembly line.

Until he used Laplace transforms in high school physics class to solve, in two minutes, a problem from the national training team’s selection exam.

Until a renowned mathematics scholar from the provincial capital bowed before the whole class to ask him for guidance.

Until military off-road vehicles pulled up outside the school gates.

His mother crouched at the end of the corridor in their apartment block, mending his uniform trousers by the light of a five-watt motion-sensor bulb.

When the light went out, she stamped her foot. When it came back on, she kept sewing.

When she finished, a tiny drop of blood clung to the tip of the needle.

The year 2000.

The Xia Kingdom was locked at the very bottom of the industrial chain.

Chips, lithography machines, aircraft engines: the country was being choked off from every core technology.

And the person who would change everything was sitting in the back row of a middle school in a third-tier city, fast asleep over his desk, breaking a chocolate bar in half

Eating only one half. He saved the other for the next problem.

Science knows no borders.

But the hand writing those formulas was raised on needle and thread beneath a five-watt light.