by The Red Fox
6 - Dead Loop
Upon understanding Lin Xun's intention, Jia Gou laughed and said, "You should feel guilty."
Lin Xun replied, "Guilt won't help me understand it. You know me well, so can you understand it?"
Zhao Jiagou sat down beside Lin Xun, took the book, flipped through a few pages, and after a moment, adjusted his posture to sit upright.
He then said, "Algorithm, even if you can code the Goddess of the Luo River, even if you're called 'Lord Xun'—so what? You have no chance of understanding this, but I might. There's a saying in your Chinese language: 'Every foot has its shortcomings, every inch has its strengths.' That means..."
He quickly corrected himself, "No, I shouldn't say that. That would be insulting myself. I'm not the inch."
Lin Xun remarked, "Now I'm starting to doubt your proficiency in Chinese."
Zhao Jiagou looked him in the eye and said, "Your reverse psychology worked."
He closed the book and told Lin Xun, "Give me four hours."
With that, he took the book away and opened his own computer.
Wang Anquan reached over and took the copy of Thousand-Day Foundation Establishment, flipped through a few pages, and eyed Zhao Jiagou skeptically. "Can you really do it?"
"Learning a language is like deciphering a code, Anquan. That's your field," Zhao Jiagou replied.
Wang Anquan said, "Sorry, I can't."
Zhao Jiagou shrugged and began working on his computer.
Lin Xun and Wang Anquan leaned in from either side, observing his actions.
—Zhao Jiagou possessed an astonishing talent for languages. He had a unique sensitivity to linguistic structures, as evident from his fluent Chinese.
Zhao Jiagou opened a search engine, looked up classic ancient texts, selected a few with strong classical Chinese characteristics, glanced at the cover of Thousand-Day Foundation Establishment, and pulled up a copy of the Tao Te Ching.
He began comparing these ancient texts with their modern Chinese translations one by one.
After watching for five minutes, Lin Xun and Wang Anquan gave up and went about their own tasks.
Zhao Jiagou hummed a tune and glanced at them. "First, I need to familiarize myself with their grammatical structures."
Wang Anquan remarked, "If our company goes bankrupt in the future, you could still become a linguist."
Zhao Jiagou replied, "I'm afraid not. I have no artistic sensibility whatsoever. I'm looking at them as if I'm deciphering a code."
Two hours later, Zhao Jiagou closed the browser, picked up the blue book again, and began flipping through it.
His reading speed was not slow, as if he were reading in his native language.
After turning about five pages, he looked at Lin Xun.
"My dear Algorithm," he said, "although I don't know why you're interested in this, it's all nonsense."
"Even though I also think it's nonsense," Lin Xun replied, "the content inside might be helpful to me—I'll give you a raise."
Zhao Jiagou said, "Good, then I'll try my best to summarize this book in a way you can understand."
Another hour passed, and it was time for lunch. Zhao Jiagou closed the blue book and announced, "I'm done."
Then, he extorted a lavish takeout meal from Lin Xun and began explaining.
"This is a Cultivation textbook. Its purpose is to guide a person to achieve a state called 'Foundation Establishment.' It's utterly absurd. Do you know what it says?" Zhao Jiagou tapped the book cover. "It says people can absorb the air from the outside world into their bodies—the original text calls it 'Qi,' or perhaps something else."
"Once you have Qi inside your body, it enters your abdomen—the book calls it the 'Dantian,' but it's essentially just your belly. Your belly connects to the blood vessels and nerves in your body—it refers to these as 'Meridians.' So, what do you do next?—You must control this Qi, guiding it to flow through your Meridians, forming a cycle that circulates day and night within your body."
Cycle—Lin Xun keenly grasped this term. He asked, "What comes next?"
"The following content has absolutely no scientific basis; it's utter nonsense," Zhao Jiagou said rapidly. "This book claims that people fall ill because pathogenic Qi 'Stagnates' in their Meridians, creating blockages. When you control the 'Qi' to circulate within your body, this 'Qi' gradually breaks through all the blockages, making your entire... body's Meridians smooth and unobstructed. When all the sources of illness disappear, your body reaches a state of 'complete health.' This process takes about three years, hence the title 'Thousand-Day Foundation Establishment.'"
Wang Anquan: "Complete health? No sickness, no weight gain, no baldness?"
"No sickness, no baldness, but weight gain isn't necessarily ruled out," Zhao Jiagou said coolly. "Once your body reaches a state of complete health, it's considered 'Foundation Establishment successful.' You can then use your completely healthy body to engage in other forms of cultivation. That's the entirety of this book."
Lin Xun: "The whole book only says this much?"
"The first third discusses this," Zhao Jiagou replied, flipping to the latter half of the book and pointing to a diagram of the human body. "The latter two-thirds teach you how to implement it, such as the specific path this cycle should take—which Meridian to start from and which to end at. Or it teaches you what posture to use for meditation—meditation, algorithms... I don't think this is a normal book. The person who wrote it has mental issues."
Lin Xun took the book from Jia Gou's hands, deep in thought.
Zhao Jiagou and Wang Anquan looked at him with concern, like two old fathers worried their son might fall into the vortex of a cult.
Lin Xun said, "I'm going back to my room for a while. I need to verify something."
Zhao Jiagou: "You're not actually going to cultivate, are you?"
"Regardless," Lin Xun narrowed his eyes, "at least for now, I'm still a materialist."
Zhao Jiagou: "Then please hold onto that."
Lin Xun: "Alright."
He lay down on his bed, holding the book "Thousand-Day Foundation Establishment," and replayed Zhao Jiagou's words in his mind. Then, he closed his eyes and focused on recalling the mysterious space from last night.
Sure enough, the next moment, he found himself there again, facing the massive, blue C language input interface.
The core principle of "Thousand-Day Foundation Establishment" was to have "Qi" form a cycle within the body.
And the loop structure is one of the fundamental structures in programming languages, used to repeatedly execute a certain algorithm.
Lin Xun placed his hands on the keyboard and wrote a simple loop program.
It was a single loop, very straightforward, designed to multiply from one to seven.
First, set a loop variable i with an initial value of 1. Each time the loop executes, the machine checks whether i is less than 8, using the statement while (i < 8).
If the statement in parentheses is true, meaning when i is less than 8, execute the multiplication, store the result, then increment i by one, and continue the evaluation. This loop will only stop when i equals 8.
Soon, the result was computed: 5040.
The progress bar did not increase.
Lin Xun expressionlessly modified this loop.
He typed on the keyboard extremely fast—and the size of this keyboard fit his habits perfectly, allowing him to type completely blind.
He changed a single loop into a double loop, writing a multiplication table.
A double loop nests another larger loop over the original single loop. Simple multiplication of natural numbers can be done with an ordinary single loop, but if there are other requirements, the number of loop layers may need to increase.
The program finished running, and the output interface displayed a perfect nine-times-nine multiplication table. He saw the progress bar beside it slowly move forward, its value changing from eighty-five percent to eighty-eight percent.
Next, he created a new file and wrote a triple loop.
The progress bar moved again, changing from eighty-eight percent to ninety percent.
Indeed, the key was loops!
What next?
Continue increasing the number of loop layers?
Lin Xun felt this wasn’t right. Loops beyond three layers are rarely used in programming—they require massive computational power, are inelegant, and ultimately serve little purpose.
Yet the key to Thousand-Day Foundation Establishment—"Qi" flowing through the meridians, day and night, in an endless cycle—
Day and night, ceaseless and unending…
Lin Xun’s fingers resting on the keyboard trembled slightly, his heartbeat suddenly racing as if he had just grasped the solution to the problem!
He pressed... the delete key, removing the first conditional statement of the triple loop!
In its original position, he typed a simple command:
while (1)
The meaning of the while statement is: when the expression in parentheses evaluates to true, execute the loop.
—And in C language, the value 1 is always true.
Thus, this statement means that this loop will execute forever, endlessly.
In a sense, this is an erroneous program because there is no condition to terminate the loop—the computer will execute the instructions infinitely until external intervention forcibly stops it.
But sometimes, errors have meaning too.
Lin Xun pressed the run key and called up the execution result.
A pure black interface popped up, yet no output appeared—this loop would never stop, so the result would never be output.
This was an infinite loop.
Lin Xun let out a soft sigh and closed his eyes.
He realized that this cultivation might not be as simple as he had thought—after all, it was easy for Lin Xun to write a correct program, but writing an erroneous one was somewhat more challenging.
As he expected, the next moment, a mechanical voice echoed throughout the space: "Loop initiated. Beginning Foundation Establishment. Estimated time: ten days."
Lin Xun opened his eyes and saw the task progress slowly, slowly moving toward the endpoint.
In other words, ten days later, when the progress bar reached the end, his Foundation Establishment would be complete. Then, he would receive the rewards: 50 Sect Funds and 30 Spiritual Power.
Sect Funds most likely represented the company’s assets, though it was unclear how they converted to real-world units.
And what exactly is "Spiritual Power"? For now, it remains unknown.
Lin Xun refocused his attention, returning to the real world as he opened his eyes in bed.
The midday sun streamed through the window, bathing him in its light.
The room was well-lit, and over a decade ago, the elderly man on the first floor had planted two hawthorn trees in the empty space in front of the building. Now, the trees had grown to the height of the third floor, perfectly blocking Lin Xun’s window and filtering the sunlight to just the right intensity.
Lin Xun gazed out the window.
Suddenly, he froze.
He had been working with computers since he learned to read, spending long hours in front of screens. Although he later developed healthier habits and maintained his eyesight, he still ended up with a slight case of nearsightedness.
The degree was negligible—he didn’t need glasses, and it didn’t affect his daily life at all. However, when looking at distant objects, things would inevitably appear slightly blurry.
Yet, at this very moment, he could clearly see the very tips of the hawthorn tree branches, down to the two newly sprouted green leaves!
He had never seen so clearly before!
Lin Xun rubbed his eyes and looked again, only to find that his vision remained just as sharp.
Startled, he got out of bed and went to the window, carefully examining the hawthorn tree from top to bottom. Then, he shifted his gaze to the various buildings in the distance.
His vision was as clear as if it had been washed clean, with every detail vividly apparent.
A gentle breeze rustled the leaves, and the sound of every two leaves brushing against each other softly resonated in his eardrums.
Reflecting on everything that had just happened, a thought slowly formed in Lin Xun’s mind.
I’m sorry, Jia Gou.
My materialist worldview may no longer hold.