Classes, study, breaks, study. Alongside the problem-solving came memorization — no path forward except to fill his mind with what he could understand and what he couldn't.

This was painful. Ma En knew exactly how painful it was.

Before he went to university, his father always sat beside him like this — a long stainless steel ruler in hand — and whenever Ma En lapsed, it came down, introducing another kind of pain.

"Of course it's painful." His father said it as a matter of fact. "People are soft. To become steel, there is no method except pain."

"But why does a person need to become steel?" Ma En had asked this many times.

"To survive. To be a man."

"Can't a person survive without becoming steel? Can't they be a man without it?"

"That depends on how much you can take. The stronger your endurance before that great crisis arrives, the better your odds of surviving through it — of surviving like a man."

"But there might not be such a big crisis. Aren't people all just... living?" Ma En said.

"No." His father looked at him steadily. In these moments, Ma En could always see something rare — a warmth in those eyes — and understood from it that his father loved him. "They're not all living the same."

"I can't tell you what dangers you'll face. You'll leave eventually — a bird leaving the nest — and that's why I need you to become steel, Ma En." His father's answer was firm. "This is a kind of transformation. Self-transformation. Study is self-transformation. Can you imagine a self-transformation without pain, son?"

"...Could you use anesthetic?"

"Anesthetic still hurts afterward." His father answered calmly, without scolding. "The human body is that fragile."

"Surely there's painless surgery." Ma En thought about it.

"I have no interest in outcomes; whether painless surgery exists, I honestly don't know. What I need is for you to understand this process — to know how to carry out self-transformation, to be able to bear its pain. Son, I'm not smarter than you — not remotely. Which is why I'm a technician and not an engineer, why my knowledge has limits. But I'll teach you what I know: the method that even a dumbass can use — let pain engrave this process into your body and your spirit." His father extended his palm. Ma En knew what that callused, scarred hand was capable of: distinguishing tolerances smaller than a tenth of a millimeter by feel alone. Everyone called his father gifted, and his father had never publicly disputed it. Only at home, only to Ma En, did he ever say: "It isn't like that."

"This is what pain built." His father said it quietly. "In my memory, I never knew how gifted I was. Gifted people were everywhere in my life — compared to them, I was just a dumbass. In my experience, all skill is illusory; only pain is real. Every accomplishment I've had came from pain. So pain is all I know. Your mother may know otherwise — she's smarter than me. What I'm teaching you is what I have. Since the only thing I know is that pain made me, pain is the only thing I can pass on to you."

—Pain!

—Only pain!

—The pain only a dumbass can truly understand.

—The pain of study. The pain of training. The pain of remaking yourself.

"Ma En — whether you feel pain or pleasure doing these things is the line between a dumbass and a genius." His father had said this, and long, long afterward, Ma En couldn't find fault with it. "A genius learns anything with pleasure, because their ceiling is high. A dumbass finds everything painful, because they can feel that low ceiling pressing down on them. A dumbass is like someone being crushed by that ceiling, unable to lift their head. But fortunately, study is something both dumbasses and geniuses can do — which means a dumbass can use study to build thick pillars, one by one, that hold the ceiling up, so their head can finally rise."

Pain was not frightening. For a dumbass, pain was especially not something to fear.

"From a scientific standpoint, if the world is materialist, then pain is the deepest way the physical body can record anything — the most primitive capacity, the foundation of evolution. Every creature, in experiencing pain, in accumulating pain, has adapted and grown." His father said. "Pain allows a person to remember what matters most — and that remembering sinks into the body's depths: genes, cells, muscles, nerves, brain. It is a blurred body of information, but when it is triggered, a person can act without thinking. That action is fast and direct — stripping out every unnecessary step, going straight to a result."

—In the process of experiencing pain, what matters most to a person is recorded — more durably than through any other form of recording, and when triggered, more completely than through any other means.

"When you feel pain, the pain connects — and begins drawing things you'd long forgotten back out from your genes, your cells, your nerves, your brain." His father pointed at his own skull. That finger rotated slowly, like a wrench turning. Ma En stared at it, and gradually began to recall—

—Those dim half-forgotten memories that seemed lost and yet seemed still to be present.

—Pain.

"Father, I've forgotten." Young Ma En, weeping.

"Forgotten what?"

"The things I memorized — texts I recited, problems I'd solved... am I that stupid? I remember what came later and forget what came before."

"Yes, son — that is proof that you're a dumbass. But it's all right. You don't actually need to remember that content."

"Why? Father — what's the use of memorizing and studying then? I worked so hard to learn it!"

"When you were trying to remember it — did you feel pain?"

"Yes. It was very painful. And forgetting was painful too — all that effort, and it was just gone!"

"Then good. Pain is good. You don't need to remember the specific content. Ma En, my son, what you should remember is the pain you felt while doing these things."

—Pleasure may last. But when you can no longer grow through pleasure, when you can no longer overcome difficulty and danger through pleasure — seek out pain. Because when you fail, pain will find you before pleasure ever does.

—What you've forgotten doesn't matter. What you've lost through forgetting doesn't matter either. Not even what you might call your "self."

—A person's character is the interplay of memory, the accumulation of experience and knowledge. In a lifetime, it must change several times.

—Character is a personality type. When character changes, personality changes too. A change in personality isn't frightening. It happens almost everywhere.

—When a person confronts trauma, people say they seem like "a completely different person" — that is a turning of character, a change of personality, the product of both conscious will and unconscious passivity working together. A real-world example of pain transforming a person.

—Pain acts on both conscious and unconscious mind. So pain is a core foundation for motivation and personality.

—Pain. Pain.

His mother's voice drifted in through the dream: "Ma En, don't be afraid of your 'self' changing. Don't be afraid of memories being distorted or going missing. Don't worry about becoming a different person. Don't deny your past self, and don't think your present self is the final form. Everything changes. Everything is in motion."

His father's voice echoed in his ears: "The more pain your body and mind have remembered, and the more clearly they remember what kind of pain it was, the broader your foundation becomes. All those pains, from every direction, will ultimately become the steel and concrete with which the self is rebuilt. As long as pain remains, doing its work in the subconscious, nothing has truly been forgotten. So forget the content. Remember the pain."

—Forgotten your schoolwork and knowledge? Lost your self? Don't worry. You don't even need to build some mental self-treatment method. The pain you've endured has already built a mechanism. That mechanism is always at work in your body and your mind; it is itself the strongest, most solid form of self-rescue. It is also a guidepost, letting you know that you have never truly lost your "self." Ma En, my dear son, no god will protect you — but pain will shelter you.

He was sitting in the living room of his childhood home, facing an ordinary color television. He knew what was about to come. This was still a dream — a dream about pain.

His father had gone to work, but his mother was home.

In many ways, she was gentler than his father — much gentler — though she never spoke over him when his father was talking, and never tried to stop his father's strict methods of teaching. But in Ma En's memory, there were things about her that resembled his father.

That day, she brought out some videocassettes to play for him.

He remembered clearly: this was a documentary about killers — something produced by the organization she worked for.

In the dream, the documentary was not sharply rendered, but the blurred sounds and images were enough to bring more back — because this was a comparison of pain.

In that documentary, the killers also lived painful lives. They had been trained from a young age, were made to absorb a great quantity of knowledge, struggled through life and death. All their skill and method existed to kill others better — not to protect themselves. Though killing enemies often also protected oneself, the two were not always the same.

"You see — they suffer too, Ma En," his mother said.

"Then what's the difference between me and them?" Ma En asked. "Are they dumbasses too?"

"Yes, they are. Perhaps they weren't originally — but they become dumbasses in time." She said this, though it only confused him further.

"They also endure suffering."

"But, Ma En — you should understand: the pain they endure is so that more people will suffer. And the pain you endure, my dear one, is so that more people will suffer less." His mother said it simply. "And their pain is less complete than yours. Their pain produced a deviation — something people come to hate. But the pain you've endured makes us proud. Ma En, you are truly our proudest son."

He remembered hearing those words and feeling happy — and even now, remembering them, he still felt that happiness. His mother's words had told him that his pain had value, and was right.

"Ma En — do you still think pain is only pain? That it's something unbearable?" his mother asked.

Ma En thought for a moment, then answered honestly: "No. I don't."

—Pain.

—Unceasing pain, and beautiful pain.

—The pain that makes a person into steel.

—The pain that makes a person into themselves.

...

Ma En kept studying, kept training, kept growing — all of it painful. In the end he was admitted to a provincial key university and taken on at the postal service.

"How is the work?" his father asked.

"Fine. The usual." Ma En answered.

That was his answer in the first year, and in the second, and the third, and the fourth.

His father said nothing. Ma En knew why: because he was not in pain. The work couldn't be called simple, but it wasn't that difficult either; everything he'd learned through pain had quietly resolved every challenge the job presented. But in his father's view, a job that his dumbass of a son could handle without strain was surely a job of no great consequence — regardless of how important anyone claimed it was.

And his father had never once found his own work easy. There had always been pain, always tension. He believed that was what made work valuable.

So Ma En could only answer: "Fine."

Beyond "fine," what else was there? Nothing. The work didn't make him feel pain. No more than that.

Yet, for some reason he couldn't quite explain, he noticed that his subordinates seemed a little afraid of him.

The dream began to dissolve, darkness gathering again — vast and wide, pressing in from every direction. Ma En lay still. He could feel it now: he was lying in a bed. He was about to open his eyes.

But before he could, he caught the last sound of the dream. He remembered it now: this voice had come from the day he was promoted to supervisor at the postal service. Among the new subordinates transferred to him was a fifteen-year-old prodigy who had already graduated from university.

That child had taken one look at him and retreated behind the older members of the team, wearing a guarded expression. Ma En had smiled at him, hoping to ease the tension — he was not a strict person the way his father was, and he didn't want to become the kind of adult his father had been. He intended to be different.

But the child said something to him. At the time, Ma En had paid it no mind and forgotten it quickly. He still paid it no mind now — children said things.

The child whispered to the older man standing beside him: "That supervisor is a monster."

"No," Ma En remembered saying. "I'm just a dumbass."

—A dumbass who turned pain into cogwheels.

Ma En forced his eyes open and sat up, one clean motion, the same as always.

July. The curtains swayed. A gentle breeze. Birds outside.

A new day had begun.