This was a dream.

Most of the time, dreams are fragments of memory and sensation rewoven — spreading from one point to another, points that may have seemed unrelated in waking life, but when consciousness descends into the deep sea, these scattered nodes form a net at some depth. The net becomes a surface, then a sequence of absurd images, or a three-dimensional landscape you can walk inside. And consciousness wanders through it like a ghost.

Sensation, contact, conversation, listening — the insights that cannot be reached through waking effort seem to surface here, in the deep sea of the mind, as if something waits below.

After reaching adulthood, Ma En's days rarely began with a dream. He seldom dreamed; the environment that had shaped and trained him discouraged it, because the mind's fragmentary reconstructions tended to drain energy uselessly, preventing true rest. But that didn't mean he never dreamed.

Sometimes he dreamed the absurd dreams ordinary people dream. And sometimes his dreams were memories of childhood.

Ma En was dreaming. He knew it. He had no thoughts — he simply floated, like a ghost, in a vast, dark, weightless space. Because there was nothing to see except himself, the darkness pressed in from every direction. He could feel an enormous pressure bearing down on his mind, and found himself thinking: Enough. I just want to sleep.

Yes — he felt exhausted. He needed rest. He hadn't wanted to dream, but something inside him refused to let go, hauling him into this dream whether he chose it or not.

— All right, all right.

Ma En the ghost — he felt exactly like one — sat down in that dark, borderless, weightless space. He was dreaming. None of this was difficult or strange.

Then he heard a voice. At first he couldn't make it out, but something beneath his conscious mind recognized it immediately: it was saying his name. Ma En, Ma En, Ma En...

"MA EN!" — the low, resonant voice sharpened abruptly, and Ma En felt his heart seize. Something in him — his hands, perhaps — trembled. He was a little afraid of this voice, even though it was so familiar.

Then the darkness split. Light came through and struck his eyes, contracting his pupils. A grey sky pressed close; accumulated snow had dissolved the tree line and the horizon into a single pale smear; nearer, a lake floated with drifting pieces of ice. The water was mirror-flat, the ice shifting in slow silence. Ma En felt the cold — his body nearly locked with it — needles of pain driving into muscle and nerve and all the way through to his brain, the sensation searingly distinct.

He felt he might sink at any moment.

He kicked hard, threw his arms wide, worked his body to generate whatever heat remained, to keep himself at the surface.

"MA EN! Keep going — one more minute!" The low, resonant voice boomed behind him, and Ma En came half-awake in the dream, suddenly remembering whose voice this belonged to.

His father's.

He didn't turn around. He didn't dare lose hold of that voice — it rarely called his name in his memory; but when it did, something important was happening.

"Forty seconds! Good — keep going!" The shout came from behind, and Ma En remembered now what he was doing.

Something he had done since childhood: winter swimming.

He remembered it clearly, because this was one of the things branded deepest in him — not through warmth or happiness, but through pain. Until the age of ten, he had run and kicked balls and taken physical education classes and done everything every ordinary child was expected to do. On the day he turned ten, his father had taken him to this lake — already beginning to thaw, ice retreating at the edges — to celebrate his birthday.

The two of them had driven out in a military jeep, the road rough and jolting. His father spoke in his characteristic steady rhythm, his tone even, narrating the landscape, the history of the people who'd lived there, explaining steel and machine production. These were things Ma En loved to listen to. At the time, he had never once thought about what was coming.

"Ma En — good son." His father stopped the car at the roadside. Below the embankment, the lake caught the light like a jewel; the day was clear, the snow-covered forest stretching out immense and indefinite beyond it, a view that resisted description. "You're already a little man now. I'm proud of you."

"Thank you, Father."

"Now it's time to teach you what it means to become a real man." His father picked up a large bag and led Ma En to the lake's edge, where a broken-down wooden dock extended out over the water. The planks flexed and groaned underfoot, the kind of wood that felt ready to give way at any moment. A small boat was tied to one of the posts — though Ma En thought even without the rope it wouldn't go anywhere; the lake's surface was entirely still.

Then he heard his father say: "But becoming a real man still takes learning. Ma En — do you remember how steel is made?"

"Of course, Father." Ma En recited: "Mining, sorting, sintering, melting, smelting, refining, rolling..."

"Good." His father cut him off — he clearly hadn't been waiting for the full breakdown. "A person is like steel — no, a person wants to become steel — no, that's not quite it—" His father frowned and thought. After a moment: "When a person comes to carry a responsibility they cannot refuse, they must become steel. Ma En — in your view, what is the similarity between a person becoming steel and iron ore becoming steel?"

"...The... the process?"

"Wrong!" His father's voice was full and certain, not the slightest hesitation: "Pain!"

"Iron ore is blasted out of the earth, excavated, crushed, sintered, melted — melted again and again — impurities stripped out, other elements added, shaped and molded, until it becomes a replaceable part. For the iron ore — is that process not pain?" his father asked.

"...I don't know. Father, I'm not iron ore — iron ore probably doesn't feel anything." Ma En answered with complete sincerity, glancing sideways at his father and finding the question baffling — and was immediately smacked on the back of the head.

"What are you looking at? Do you think I'm an idiot?"

"No. No."

"Pain! Iron ore suffers greatly — before it can become steel, it must bear pain." His father stated this with total conviction.

Well. Father's word was law.

"Yes. Iron ore suffers greatly," Ma En said — with a distinct premonition of disaster.

His father said: "By the same principle, to become a person of steel is necessarily a painful process. To become a real man, Ma En, you must experience pain. Pain is a process — a form of tempering, a phenomenon — it arises in the body and is reflected in the mind. When you accomplish something, and the process of accomplishing it caused you no pain, then that thing was of no consequence to you. Understand?"

"...I... I understand." He was too young to truly grasp it — too young to understand why his father spoke this way, too young to judge whether it was right or wrong. Even when he was grown, he couldn't quite judge it, because his father's words had become the mold itself, the cast that had shaped him. For Ma En, the words weren't a philosophy. They were just the beginning of a life, and life could not be avoided.

"Good." A smile crossed his father's otherwise stern face. Ma En felt pleased with his own answer, because his father had smiled.

"Then begin to feel pain. This is my birthday gift to you. It will stay with you for the rest of your life."

— What?

Before Ma En could process it — before he'd even finished turning the words over once — his father grabbed him by the collar and threw him into the lake.

Cold. Cold beyond any description. No warm-up, no preparation, nothing — straight down into water that still carried floating ice. That beautiful, mirror-flat lake bit into him like something alive, made his heart convulse, knocked the breath from his lungs.

He nearly forgot how to swim. His body locked up. He started to sink. He turned and saw his father crouched at the edge of the dock, watching calmly. Doing nothing.

I'm going to drown, Ma En thought.

"Save me! Father!" He screamed with everything he had. His face was streaming — lake water, or tears, he couldn't tell; his cheeks had gone white with cold.

"MA EN!" His father called out in that low, full voice, doing absolutely nothing. "If you don't want to die, float! Where are your hands? Where are your feet?"

"No — Father, it's so cold, too cold—" Ma En cried as he screamed.

"If you don't move, you will sink." His father looked at him with a steady, expectant gaze — and years later, Ma En would never forget that look. In that moment, he understood: only he could save himself.

Yes. This was a dream. Not a nightmare — but a painful dream. And yet not only pain.

This was the dream that had forged him into steel.

The lake churned as he fought — arms reaching, legs driving, crossing from one side to the other. His father's voice came from somewhere near the dock he could no longer see, measured and counted: "Thirty seconds" — then twenty — then ten — and when Ma En turned to look, the dock stood empty. Nothing there. Only the voice, as if frozen into time itself, frozen into his life:

"Keep moving. Don't stagnate, don't fix in place, don't fear going forward, don't run from pain — otherwise you will sink!"

"MA EN!"

Ma En lifted his head. His body was no longer cold. The air was warm and drowsy around him; he was slumped at a desk, head on his arms, as if he'd just dozed off. The next instant, the crack of something moving through air — and it came down hard across his back. His skin blazed. Sharp pain drove through it, straight from nerve to brain, sweeping out every trace of sleepiness.

"What are you doing, Ma En." His father's low voice came from beside him. Ma En lifted his head and found that exacting gaze — keen as a hunting eagle — and instinctively straightened up. From the living room, his mother's voice came softly: "Son — get back to your homework. Twenty minutes left. In bed by midnight. Understood?"

"Understood." Ma En answered as he always did. The pain in his back was already easing. He glanced at his father, who sat upright in the chair beside him, saying nothing, only continuing to watch with that same severe expression. Ma En lowered his eyes to the desk.

Math problems. Not school assignments. No elementary school homework looked like this. No middle school homework. No high school homework. These problems didn't ask him to plug numbers into a formula and solve for a specific answer — they asked him to derive the formulas themselves, step by step. Starting from simple arithmetic, building toward simple equations, then to complex ones.

He had to understand how these formulas had been arrived at, and how many derivation paths each one permitted. Some he had worked through many times before. Others contained formulas he didn't recognize, which meant consulting the reference materials on the desk himself — looking them up, understanding them — and his father almost never explained anything. Because for his father, whether the final answer was correct was not the point. What mattered was how he searched, how he arrived at understanding. That self-directed process was what counted.

Ma En had grown used to it. Pain had taught him a great deal.

He still remembered clearly: at four years old, a children's science book had introduced him to his first simple formula derivation. From that age onward, working through the problems in the back pages of science books had been one of his pleasures. At that age, reading those books was joy; working through the problems was joy. But after the age of ten, it became pain — because the problems grew too hard, and the harder they grew, the more plainly he saw how slow he was. Children around him were winning mathematics olympiad prizes, entering accelerated programs, going straight to university; he had done nothing, staying in the most ordinary class, his grades neither good nor bad. He genuinely could not solve olympiad problems.

His father never commented on his grades. He only had Ma En keep going — memorizing, drilling derivations repeatedly, reading science books that grew progressively harder to understand, working through the vast range of knowledge his school dismissed as supplementary reading: geography, history, culture, politics, language, religion — knowledge that appeared nowhere in the classroom curriculum. And within all of this, there were the three subjects his father valued most: mathematics, music, and literary composition. Even physics had been set aside.

Ma En remembered it clearly. His father had once said: "Son, you're too much of a dumbass, so for academic study, these three are all you need. Mathematics will make your thinking clear. Music will enrich your feeling. Literature will settle your inner life."

Yes — Ma En believed he was a dumbass. When he was small, the science books his father brought home were simple, and he'd felt capable. But they grew harder, and more problems surfaced from within them; the further he read, the less he understood. A solid ceiling pressed down on him, shattering the childhood illusion that he might be clever.

If you're a dumbass, the only path is the dumbass's path. Aside from working twice as hard, there is nothing else to think about — and nothing you should think about.