Journey

This page is called Journey, but most of it is really my own black history. Some parts may feel bleak or heavy. So I want to say this up front: my life is not made only of bad things. I am only selecting a part of it here to remind myself.

Junior High

If I were being strict, this story should begin with my five-year vocational track. But I still want to tell it in chronological order, so I will start with a small story from junior high.

I went to a fairly well-known complete secondary school in Fuzhou. Its advancement rate was good, though I did not realize just how good my school was until after I had already left it. I barely remember what happened in seventh or eighth grade. What I do remember is that I loved making everyone laugh, and that is probably why I still think I have some people-pleasing tendencies. Whenever a teacher criticized me or yelled at me, I would instinctively laugh along first. Even now I cannot quite correct that habit. I smiled too hard, too stiffly. Thinking about my past self makes me laugh and annoys me at the same time.

Why was I like that? Maybe because smiling was the only thing I felt I could do. But it also trained another skill in me: I became unusually sensitive to other people's emotions, micro-expressions, silence, even the mood behind text chats online. Anyway, ever since I entered junior high, my ranking stayed around 650 out of 1000, almost at the bottom. So there is no need to imagine me as some tragic hero who failed the entrance exam and made a glorious comeback. Honestly, I was pretty mixed up back then. Luckily, I was also a rather harmless and funny kid. My classmates probably remembered me as someone a bit silly. Other than that, maybe I was "good with computers," though nobody really knew what that meant.

September 2020, ninth grade. My English teacher became our homeroom teacher, we got a new physics teacher, and a new chemistry teacher arrived too. My deskmate was the physics class representative, which somehow made me the representative's assistant, a little helper. He was extremely capable, truly the kind of student I considered the peak of a problem-solver from my own frame of reference. But he was busy, and he even had a relationship to maintain, so in practice I often performed the representative's duties for him. That was how I gradually became familiar with the physics teacher, who treated me very well. Our English teacher had taught our class all the way from seventh grade to ninth grade. Maybe because I was decent at English and seemed like a good kid, she also treated me very well.

That chemistry teacher was... abstract. She loved saying bizarre and unintentionally hilarious things in class. After only a month, almost nobody wanted to listen to her anymore. How could the hot-blooded version of me possibly tolerate that? The student in front of me handled the recordings, while I edited videos, bought a domain and hosting, set up WordPress, and uploaded the clips. We hit it off immediately and turned the chemistry teacher's "classic lines" into a viral product. The name "Voice of XX" spread through the entire grade like wildfire.

My own name spread through class too. My deskmate was in charge of classroom computers, which meant he could use that role to help us gather information. He also loved watching chaos unfold, and he helped us make plenty of derivative jokes. The few of us formed an iron alliance. Later, we made even more content, turning the chemistry teacher's quotes into a whole "discipline," complete with books, worksheets, and textbooks.

At one parent meeting in ninth grade, parents used my videos as evidence when they raised concerns with the school. They even signed a joint letter in a private group chat, hoping the school would replace the chemistry teacher. After the grade director and vice principal took turns negotiating with parent representatives, the only temporary outcome was that other teachers would sit in on her classes. Nothing more happened for the moment. The whole thing stayed deadlocked until the next semester, when several parents reported it to the education bureau. Only then was it finally resolved, and the teacher was replaced two months before the entrance exam.

That whole incident was one of the few sources of positive feedback I had back then. At least it let me feel that I had value. People are always trying to establish that value. I suddenly realized that the website I built, the videos I edited, the way I spread them, could actually draw classmates in, become material for parents, and even make reality start to change. The dopamine hit was absurd.

The story after the entrance exam is the story of how I entered the five-year vocational track. Even now I still feel guilty. I am not even sure what exactly I feel guilty about. Maybe it was the care my English and physics teachers had for me, which I did not really understand back then. My guilt is not only toward those teachers, but even more toward myself. The admission result was the thing that finally slapped me awake.

You might say: disappointing people hurts, sure. But what does that have to do with the chemistry-teacher incident?

It has everything to do with it. By the later stages, that incident had gone completely beyond control. It went from material for parents at the meeting, to students making more and more derivative jokes, to the name "Voice of XX" becoming infamous. Everything kept moving in a direction I could no longer control. By the time it reached the education bureau, the whole thing had already exploded. The hot-blooded version of me thought we had taken down a teacher who was not doing her job. It felt righteous. But what was the cost of that righteousness?

On January 17, 2026, my junior-high deskmate had just come back to Fuzhou for winter break. At ten at night he rushed to my apartment building and told me to go out with him for a walk. We talked all the way from Wusi Road to the school gate. I was literally wearing pajamas while chatting with him. We had not seen each other in a long time. In the middle of laughing and talking, he casually asked whether we should call our English and physics teachers to greet them. I said yes. But it was too late and they did not pick up. So we recorded a greeting video instead and sent it through my deskmate's WeChat. A while later, the physics teacher replied and invited us to visit on the 20th, and to help her mark physics homework while we were there. That was how it got arranged.

On January 20, my deskmate and I arrived at the school gate on time. After meeting the teacher, we started talking slowly. During the conversation, the topic came up that several teachers who had taught our class, including the English and physics teachers, had been transferred to a branch campus after our entrance exam. I got curious and asked why. The physics teacher was the kind of person who was funny in an offbeat way. With a half-smiling and deeply helpless expression, she said, "Wasn't it because of that mess you all made?" The moment I heard that sentence, my mind was thrown straight back to that winter six years earlier.

I froze for a long time. After that I could only respond with a few perfunctory words. When my deskmate and I started marking homework, I could not settle down at all. So it really had been my fault. I felt awful. Once I realized that I had caused a large part of it, it felt even worse. The way the whole thing grew was inseparable from me. I asked my deskmate, "If you saw the chemistry teacher now, what would you say to her?" He said, "Idiot." I felt the same, even now. But I had taken it way too far.

If I could go back to ninth grade, at the very least I would not blow it up so recklessly. But could I really have talked my past self out of it? I do not know. That incident has stayed with me ever since. Even now. I am still a little afraid to face those two teachers. After I got my transfer-exam admission result, I still asked my junior-high deskmate to pass a message to them for me. I am not even sure whether he did. But at least I know that after we sent the greeting video on January 17, my English teacher said, "Hahaha, of course absurd friends will keep playing together. Please wish Lemon all the best for me."

Let me say one more thing about my deskmate. He is seriously impressive. In the 2024 college entrance exam, he got into a popular major at a 985 university in Northeast China. He has had a very entertaining romantic history, the kind someone like me, completely insulated from romance, could never experience. He also carries his own regrets. After the entrance exam, his result did not meet his own expectations. It was not the very top school, though it was still a very good high school in Fuzhou. The gap between him and me may be huge, but I can still understand that feeling a little. Maybe it is like expecting TOP2 and ending up at C9 instead. Fortunately, he made his comeback at a 985 university.

He entered new environments in both high school and university and met new people and new friends. But for him, junior high remains the most unforgettable period. High school and university classmates are not as simple as that anymore. He also told the physics teacher the story of how he got his college-entrance-exam result. But that is his story. For me, junior high was where I met many people with shared interests, and many of them I am still in touch with. Sadly, it was also the first and last time I entered that kind of high-standard frame of reference. Everything that came after felt a bit rougher. The strongest impression I had when I went back to the school was that "the atmosphere for studying was so strong." I have forgotten what we talked about during that city walk, but I still remember that on the night of January 17, we stood at the school gate talking about everything under the sun.

He even told me recently that I absolutely have to come to his wedding someday. I said yes.

Five-Year Vocational Track

OK. From this point on, I had officially left that high-standard frame of reference behind, namely my junior high. I entered a place with an enormous sample size of people. Every kind of person existed there. If I have to talk about where I came from, the period that shaped me the most probably began right after the entrance exam, not after entering college or preparing for the transfer exam. My regular college entrance exam score was Undefined. My spring exam score was also Undefined. I entered the five-year vocational track almost by lying flat. Even a three-year technical secondary program still carries pressure to continue studying, but the five-year track does not.

The College Entrance Exam Guy

The five-year vocational track actually comes in two forms: the "3+2 segmented model" and the continuous five-year model. The difference is simple. In the 3+2 model, you spend three years in technical secondary school and two years in junior college. In the continuous model, you stay in junior college for all five years. Mine was the former, the 3+2 route, so I really did have a technical-secondary-school period. When I entered that new environment, what position did I think I occupied? What did my classmates think of me? Honestly, probably not a good one at first.

After everything that happened in ninth grade, my confidence in my overall computer ability had reached a peak. In September 2021, once I entered technical secondary school, I had all the buffs stacked: I had "built a website for a teacher" in junior high, I had "been using computers since childhood," I "ran an MC server," and I even came from a "good junior high." I felt I should not have fallen to this level. Some classmates who scored twenty points lower than me had even gone to another school in Fuzhou as borrowed students. So how was I supposed to preserve my self-confidence and prove my value in a lower-standard frame of reference? No way. Why should I accept this? I refused to lose. I wanted to rewrite my fate. I found what felt like an astonishing path: I wanted to take the college entrance exam, whether the spring exam or the summer one.

Where did that confidence come from? When I had just entered technical secondary school, I was already "killing it" everywhere with just a bit of computer knowledge picked up from years around PC DIY communities and maintaining an MC server. Scoring 90 without even preparing felt like total victory. In December 2021, during my first year there, I even passed the NCRE Level 1 MS Office exam and Level 2 C exam. I basically crammed my way through in three months. My homeroom teacher at the time was very pleased with me. Lemon, your foundation is solid! Looking back now, those certificates are worth almost nothing. But at the time, they were the limit of what I could achieve.

So from winter break in my first year through the following semester, around the start of 2022, I began telling my family what I wanted and informing my homeroom teacher as well. My mother was very kind to me. She did not dismiss the idea, probably because I had already passed NCRE, and she even helped me ask around about repeat-study schools. Policy-wise, if I wanted to go the regular college-entrance-exam route, the only available path at the time was to drop out and register as an independent candidate, and even then I could only take the summer exam.

I still wanted a fallback. Since I was in a 3+2 program, could I switch into a three-year class and take the qualification exam route for higher vocational admission? In theory, yes. The provincial education department had left a narrow opening: students who wanted to seek employment after the first three years, with approval from both the higher-vocational institution and the partnered technical-secondary school, and after filing with the education authority, could register for the same qualification exam as students in that grade, though not the level-based exam. With my homeroom teacher coordinating, my mother and I found the academic affairs office. The technical-secondary school's office said it would be difficult. At best, we could write an application to the partner higher-vocational school and see whether they would approve it.

Fine. Then we would write one. But what reason were we supposed to give? After struggling for ages, all we could come up with was basically, "The child wants to take the college entrance exam, and if you do not let him, he is going to jump off a building!" Of course it was rejected. By the time we reached that point, it was already May. I was exhausted. After running from the college admissions office to the qualification exam office and then to the school's academic affairs office, I was simply tired. One teacher there even told me, "Kid, do not gamble with your life. Finish the five-year program and you will still have chances." People around me did not understand. I spent every day writing depressive little essays into my social feed. I had no idea what I was doing. I bought a pile of high-school textbooks and kept fantasizing about my subject choices, fantasizing that in three years everyone would look at me differently.

Those memories are painful to revisit. Now if I dig out those old little essays, I cringe so hard my toes curl. What exactly was I doing? I kept dumping my anxiety onto other people, and they could not actually hold it. They could only comfort me a little and talk with me about how terrible technical secondary school was. None of it helped. After all that, my classmates started seeing me as "the college-exam guy." And yes, my resolve was not strong enough. If I had truly been determined, I would have dropped out and gone all-in. But the college entrance exam back then was only a life raft to me, a sign that maybe I could still be saved. It was not something I genuinely meant to do, so how could my will have been firm? Given what I understood at the time, even if I had gone through with it, I probably would still have ended up at a junior college or a private institution.

So I really had landed in technical secondary school. I could not learn anything. I was useless. In May 2022, at the midterm of that semester, sixteen-year-old me finally accepted the fact that I was a technical-secondary-school student.

Stationery Tycoon

Once I accepted that identity, a lot of things actually got easier, because I no longer had to think about so many things. Right around then, one of my junior-high classmates wanted to do stationery reselling on a certain platform. I will not name the brand, but it was a famous Japanese stationery brand, mostly selling pens. He wanted to bring me in. At the time he was studying as a borrowed student at a high school in Fuzhou. I thought it sounded fun. Without even asking clearly what I was supposed to do, I agreed in a fog. Maybe I needed something to confirm my value. I mean, at sixteen, doing business and making money sounds mature, does it not?

But how exactly was I supposed to do it? I did not really know. He handled marketing and poster design on the platform, and he was genuinely good at it. So what was left for me? He told me to take care of logistics. And what did logistics mean? Simple: my home became the warehouse, and I handled packing and customer service. Packing itself was easy. You gave the package to the courier. Everything else was the messy part. He would order the goods to a courier point near my house, I would run over to pick them up, and then I would store the pens in my room.

He sold in batches rather than holding stock all the time. Once a batch sold out, it was gone. He was basically acting like a group-buy organizer, except he had built a whole Brand around it. As the person at the end of the chain doing the packing, my job was only to care whether the wrong pen had been packed, whether anything was damaged in transit, how many layers of foam to use, and what size of bag or box to choose.

That did not mean I did it well. The first shipment was full of holes. Several packages contained the wrong pens, and because of the pandemic, many regions could not even receive shipments. Customers went straight at customer service. I had no idea what to say. I could only explain the situation and ask for their understanding. We also handled the courier side terribly. At first, I used a merchant version of a delivery app. After placing orders and printing labels, one courier clearly looked unhappy and privately told me that next time I should contact them directly, because very little of the fee I paid through the app actually reached them. So my classmate and I talked to the owner of the courier station, and in the end we negotiated a price of five yuan per order.

But after a while, my classmate asked whether I could get the price even lower. I told him that was impossible, since we had already agreed on it. But I could not argue him out of it. So I went back to ask the courier-station owner, and she replied, "Did we not already settle this?" Later, my classmate found another courier near my home and asked me to contact them instead. I do not quite remember the final price, but it was one or two yuan cheaper per package.

All of this exhausted me. My classmate even wanted me to draw posters for the shop, but I had no way to do that. I was not a designer. He cared deeply about his Brand. He held regular meetings, issued annual reports, and wrote his thoughts on the company and the industry like he was operating a real business. But I found it difficult to feel any identification with it. I did not even know where the Brand's name came from, or who had discussed it with him. I did not know who else was involved besides me. What exactly was I responsible for? Was I some underground operative with only a single contact? This Brand was not something I had followed from beginning to end. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. It began vaguely and ended vaguely. The world is one giant improvised stage troupe.

The boundaries were blurred beyond recognition. I did not know why I was there, why I had joined, or what I was doing. Every time he sent me tracking numbers, I felt tired. The courier never arrived immediately, so I always had to wait for the delivery guy before I could hand things over. I remember taping packages with clear tape until midnight, and the thought that I still had to pass them off to the courier the next day made me even more tired. I had my own life too. It was not as if there was no compensation at all. He did talk about profit-sharing, though I forgot the exact ratio. From February 2022 to August 2022, I received about 1000 yuan total.

My classmate was like a happy puppy: bright, generous, enthusiastic, confident. He had the aura of a leader. I, on the other hand, was clumsy and not suited to work that required both communication and physical effort. We were only in our first time working together. He seemed to be operating a brand; I seemed to be executing an order system I did not fully understand. This is not to say he was bad, nor that I was especially capable. Quite the opposite: he was passionate, and he really did treat it like a brand. I had simply assumed that once I joined, I would naturally know what to do.

By August, I had already started thinking about leaving. After that there were no more group-buy events anyway. In December, I finally decided to quit and returned all the materials and goods to him.

Technical Secondary School Life

In February 2023, the second semester of my second year, the first semester after the pandemic had ended, plus everything I had already gone through, I finally pulled myself together. Not in the sense of studying especially hard. I had the "effort," but not yet the "study." I had drive, the urge to perform, the urge to prove myself, but I still did not know how to learn. Honestly, even now I am not sure I fully do.

Still, I gradually found things I genuinely liked doing. The grading in technical secondary school worked a bit like university, with regular performance counting toward the final score. On top of that, we were in a five-year program, meaning we stayed for three full years in technical secondary school and had no advancement pressure. Our class seemed to be the one with the highest admission score in the whole school at the time. During easier classes, teachers loved praising us with lines like, "I heard so-and-so is going to transfer into a bachelor's program. Once you all get there, it will be easy," or "The atmosphere in your class is much better than those technical-secondary classes," even though hardly anyone in class was actually listening.

But there were always some classes that tried fun little activities: each person talking about a favorite book, sharing something they found beautiful, doing a small group project, introducing themselves, and so on. At the time I really liked those moments where I could go up front, express a viewpoint, and present something. Maybe it was because doing that eased my inner friction. In any case, with a bit of information asymmetry and the PPT skills I had built in junior high, I ended up getting pretty high scores in those classes.

I was not exactly at the top of my class, but at least my professional-course skills and PPT ability were recognized. Oh, and my English too. But that still does not mean I had particularly strong stage control or public-speaking ability. The classroom was simply small, and I was far too good at going off on tangents. I was nervous when I first got on stage, and I stumbled over words too. Speaking in a small room full of familiar faces is not the same as speaking to strangers. Unsurprisingly, I interpreted those abilities as "I am really good at public speaking" until I reached junior college and discovered it had mostly been an illusion, but that comes later.

That same semester in February 2023, the school stuffed a CSS course into the program. That was when I really stepped into frontend development, and it was also the course that made me take off in class. Before that course even started, I had just finished writing a homepage for my MC server's Wiki. During the process of maintaining it, aside from S3 storage, the most disgusting part had been the frontend. I had spent two months being tormented by CSS while building that homepage: $backdrop-filter$ bugs, $inline-block$ alignment issues, margin collapsing, Safari compatibility. Those were much worse than anything in class.

And compared with plain CSS, design was even harder. How do you tune a shadow without making it too obvious? How do you set rounded corners without making them too round? How much spacing feels right? Are the text and cards actually aligned? Every one of those questions was tricky. In JavaScript, handling callbacks, async flows, and even inaccurate timer timing was equally painful. So when I came back to class, what we were learning barely even entered my field of view. It all felt too simple. I felt omnipotent. I was already a god. I can do everything!

Before that, I had only thought of myself as someone who knew a bit about computers, could fiddle with servers, and could put together websites. I had always been proud that I had touched computers from a young age, and adults would say things like, "This kid has understood computers since childhood," without realizing that was mostly because the adults at home were too busy to manage me, so I was left staring at 360 Security and VMware on my own. Now, finally, there was a direction. Of course I was still chaotic then, flailing from Web to backend to frontend to desktop clients to algorithms, and even touching embedded systems. Actually, I remember that when I was even younger, in around second or third grade, I used to fold paper phones and computers for fun, and I loved drawing imagined software UI on paper. I was also very fond of ASUS UEFI back then. It was not flashy, just good-looking.

And just like that, I found my comfort zone once again.

Still, I had a rebellious side. I would directly point out other people's problems, loudly argue with teachers I disliked, and throw sarcastic remarks at hostile student-union members in public. I would shove my phone right in their faces to take photos and record videos, then turn them into reaction images and post them somewhere only our class could see. I joined the boarding students in going after the dorm inspectors, and even though I was a commuting student, I attacked harder than some of the boarders did. I had not forgotten what happened in junior high and my first year, so I dismantled everything even more fiercely, in secret. The louder I got, the more thoroughly I tore things apart.

That continued all the way until the second semester of my third year. In April 2024, before entering the corresponding junior-college institution, I had to pass an exam called the transfer-track exam. The paper itself was fairly easy. The school sent us a practice website in advance. But that website could only generate one random paper at a time, not let you grind through them in bulk. I suddenly had an idea: as long as I scraped the paper often enough, and since the questions were different each time, eventually I could collect the whole question bank. Using that method, I built a practice site in PHP and jQuery for my classmates. Two months later, I rewrote it with Nest and Vue, and the following year my juniors used it too.

With all that, I spent another three years rebuilding my confidence. Instead of obsessing over escape, I first learned to make something real with my own hands.

The Junior College Training-Camp Guy

In September 2024, I entered the corresponding junior-college institution. There were still two years left in my five-year higher-vocational program. In the first semester, relying on the experience I had accumulated in technical secondary school, I tried to run for class committee member. But because I did not understand the difference between a temporary coordinator and an actual class committee member, a mysterious senior hit me back with the line, "Did you make that?" while I was introducing one of my projects, and I left in disappointment. That senior really was an idiot, but I will not write another angry mini-essay about him here.

After that, I chose to settle down. I posted an introduction video of my old question-practice system on Bilibili. In class, I used the skills I was already comfortable with and helped people with assignments everywhere. I wanted the things I had accumulated to be seen. I started trying to socialize, because I wanted to find people with similar interests. I had always envied those computer clubs or tech clubs. Now I wanted recognition. I even registered for the Lanqiao Cup at the time, though I ended up not going at all because I knew I had not practiced. But through the Lanqiao Cup API, I found another student from the same school. We added each other on QQ and talked a lot. Looking back now, I do not think we were really on the same road, but at the time I still chose to make contact.

At the start of the second semester in February 2025, our professional-course teacher X suddenly asked me, "Do you want to join the competition?" I froze. It was lunchtime. A classmate half-asleep beside me mumbled, "Just go." I spent an entire class period hesitating. Forty-five minutes later, I told the teacher, "I will give it a try." In the elevator, I asked him a little about where the training base was, and I learned that competition training could count as a class leave. He told me to simply tell the class committee member that I was "suspended from class for competition training." The next day, he and another teacher H chatted with me briefly, looked at my question-practice system, and immediately pulled me into the team. Teacher H was the leader of the team. Teacher X worked alongside him. Most of my later time was spent dealing with teacher H. So unless otherwise specified, "teacher" later in this article means teacher H, not teacher X, who first brought me in. In any case, my junior-college life changed a little from that moment. I gained yet another label: the competition guy.

But the competition did not start immediately. At that point I could only be considered newly added to the group. The actual competition was still far away, and the teacher had not finalized the participants. I stayed there for a while and roughly figured out that besides me, two other students from my grade had also been recruited. After spending some time with them, I did not form a particularly good impression. One was a repeat-year student: restless, hyper-merit-oriented, and arrogant. His goal was to transfer into a bachelor's program. He once showed me the notes app on his phone, packed full of algorithm names. He loved algorithms and the 408 postgraduate-computing subjects.

The other had been introduced to teacher H by a senior from another group. He had a very patriarchal vibe and liked to act as though he could direct everything. He was anxious too, and his goal was also to transfer into a bachelor's program. Both of them wanted to get into good schools. Whenever the three of us chatted, those two would secretly use their own channels to worry about who would get to go to the national competition. Strictly speaking, I did not care that much. At the time I was already happy just because competition training meant I could skip class. I did not like discussing technology with them, because one always tried to lecture me and the other kept begging me to teach him. In the end, our conversations would turn into pure low-quality socializing. That kind of situation is common online too, in all kinds of tech chat groups: people flattering each other or putting pressure on each other one-sidedly. Maybe programmers are arrogant by nature.

As for the national-competition spot, teacher H obviously held the power of life and death. By convention, there was probably only one place for the three of us. After a while, teacher X told me he would recommend that teacher H send me to nationals. In the end, he really did. But it was only April at that point. The competition was still far away. Meanwhile, the teachers had taken on several school-enterprise cooperative projects, and they outsourced some of the work to us. The part that landed on me was a meteorology-related project. But we were subcontractors of subcontractors. The client made requests to a company, and the company handed the work to our school.

An Improvised Stage Troupe

This project had something to do with short-term warnings and storm forecasting. The teacher showed me the documents, but I did not really understand them. I figured I only needed to produce the effect he asked for. When he said things like weekly reports and product managers, I did not really understand those either. It was not until he pulled me into the project group chat one day that I realized, wait, there are this many layers behind it? A product manager is actually there to watch over my work?

Teacher H was only a relay layer. He was just forwarding the product manager's requests to me. So was I supposed to listen to the product manager in the group chat, or to my teacher? I was very confused about that. The teacher told me I only needed to reply once the product manager started pushing. So I stopped overthinking it and just did whatever the teacher told me to do. From April to June, the project did not really pressure me much. I used that time to prepare for CET-4 instead. Back then, my trips between school and home were basically spent memorizing vocabulary. The meaning I discovered while preparing for CET-4 and CET-6 could probably be a chapter of its own, since it was my first systematic exam preparation, but it does not fit cleanly here, so I can only mention it in passing.

By the way, once a phone call from the teacher came in June, the pace of the project suddenly accelerated. Not just faster. Extremely fast. From that point on, as the frontend developer, I was directly facing the product manager, yet I had no idea how to coordinate that, and I knew nothing at all about the meteorology domain. During a Tencent Meeting one night in late June, the atmosphere became extremely tense. The product manager said they had to demo the project to the client the next day. Why were the precipitation grid map and hand-drawn region features still unfinished?

I had no choice. I burned money and spent $50 to open what was then the best Agent tool available, Augment Code. I repeatedly drove Claude Sonnet 4 with prompts, broke down emotionally again and again, pulled an all-nighter, and only got the thing running at six in the morning. In the end, the product manager still had to grit his teeth and introduce our "project" to the client. Before August, I lived under pressure the whole time. I became deeply afraid of WeChat notifications and incoming phone calls.

July was the period of greatest pressure for me. The project still was not making progress. In the whole team, the part that truly landed on frontend work was basically just me. But I had no UI design, no complete requirements, and no understanding of the scenario this system was ultimately supposed to serve. I had originally thought the teacher was simply bringing me in for some small projects. Only later did I realize that the complexity was far beyond what I had imagined. Worse, nobody really handed anything over properly. What exactly was I supposed to do? Who would accept the work? Was I supposed to listen to the teacher or the product manager? If something went wrong, who was I supposed to ask? All of those questions remained blurry. One time I asked whether there was any reference code, and the other side replied impatiently, "Isn't there? Wasn't the GitHub repo given to you ages ago?" But before that moment, I had not even known such a thing existed.

The architecture was sloppy too. The teacher had written a crude PHP backend for data processing, with no routing and no framework. The data the frontend needed to display was essentially processed by Python scripts on the server, dumped into some folder, and then output through PHP. It did not even feel like a complete project, let alone one with serious cross-language glue code or Git version management.

What left the deepest impression on me was this: one night, while I was staying up late at school fixing code with the teacher, the other side called him to push for progress. In the latter half of the call, the caller was already getting irritated and said, "Teacher H, I am not doubting you, but why is the project moving so slowly? Are your students just not capable enough?"

That was the first time I felt so directly that chaos inside a project does not disappear on its own. It does not become clear just because everyone is busy, and it does not suddenly turn into collaboration just because code already exists. That is only noise. If requirements, responsibilities, and acceptance standards are not set up at the beginning, then later everyone ends up wiping the mess together, and in the end it all lands on the person closest to delivery.

That person, at the time, was me.

By early to mid-August, the national competition was approaching. The teacher reassigned me to the competition project, so I no longer had time to care about the meteorology one. In the end, although that project contract was never signed, the teacher still gave me 5000 yuan from another project.

The project did have a real-world background. It was not pure fantasy. Teachers, the company, and students had all put time into it, and everyone wanted it to produce something presentable. But at the same time, the way it was pushed forward was rough in every sense. Requirements were often unclear, responsibility boundaries kept shifting, and one day someone was said to own a part while the next day it turned out nobody was really covering it.

That was also the first time I truly understood what "wage mule" meant, and the first time I really touched society. My helplessness at business dinners, my awkward forced smile, the other side's teasing, all of it is carved into my memory. Blurred boundaries, unclear states. An improvised stage troupe can only produce an improvised-stage project.

Back in junior high, I was the one who started the loss of control. I lit the fire and watched it burn beyond the boundary. This time, I was the one forced to bear the loss of control. I had not started the fire. I was standing in the middle of a burning improvised-stage troupe, being told to put it out.

I was standing at the front, but I did not truly control the project. I was required to take responsibility for the result, yet I had not participated in all the key decisions.

By Accident

After the meteorology project ended in a sloppy way, I followed the teacher's instruction and put all my energy into the national competition project. The so-called national competition was really the vocational skills competition for junior colleges. It is called a competition, but in recent years it has basically turned into an innovation-and-entrepreneurship format. The content is simple: build a project, bring it there, and then perform for an hour with your mouth in front of the judges while they score you on site.

There were four people in the team. Nominally, I was the "backend engineer." In mid-August, I had Augment Code build the competition project in Rust. Because the competition was performative in nature, success depended on talking, not typing. So the team's real task was to rehearse the presentation over and over, controlling every movement, every look, every sentence.

Well, we did not rehearse.

We did not really start until late August, only two weeks before the competition. Before that, all of us worked separately. We had never seriously discussed rehearsal and did not really understand what each of us was doing. The teachers also took a very laissez-faire attitude, so we felt no pressure. We casually talked about what we would do after winning something and gossiped about teachers.

So why did we suddenly begin? Not because of the deadline. It was because during an internal rehearsal at the school, multiple teachers blasted us head-on. That was when the pressure finally appeared. It was the first time I had stood on stage and been told right to my face things like, "Have you actually rehearsed this at all?" "What kind of performance is this? What are the few of you even doing up there? I could walk up and say a few things better than this," and "The competition is only two weeks away. What exactly have you been doing?" Some teachers were speechless, some angry, some sneered, and some genuinely gave useful advice. I do not remember the exact scene very clearly anymore.

From then until September 10, 2025, every single day was torture and suffering to me. The competition somehow felt more painful than building the project itself. There were also plenty of conflicts among team members. I can barely remember what I felt or what I did. Every day we trained at school until late at night, and the teacher would drive me home directly. In the car, I would talk with him about the team, about conflicts among members, and sometimes even about work, family, and why he had become a teacher in Fuzhou. I remember there were lots of mosquitoes in the training room and we sprayed a lot of floral water. Even now, whenever I smell that scent, I think back to those days of preparing for the competition.

Through countless nights, I survived on Bohemian Rhapsody, Free Bird, and MyGO's "Shadow Color Dance." I was terrified of going on stage. I was incredibly nervous. Before every appearance, I kept trying to psych myself up. But my body would not obey. I even joined my teammates in verbally putting down the judges and the school, just to build some fake confidence for myself.

The venue was in Changzhou. On the high-speed train there, I stared out the window wondering what result awaited us. On the actual competition day, I was so nervous that I kept pacing around the waiting room, and a few volunteers even got amused by me. During the competition, they later poked their heads in out of curiosity to watch how I was doing. Fortunately, the result was not bad. Ten days of grinding brought us a respectable outcome: bronze. Later one volunteer asked which province we were from. After thinking for a moment, I replied in a roundabout way, "The province across from Taiwan." She looked completely confused and said, "Hainan?"

During the waiting period, we also got to know another team from Heilongjiang. How did that happen? The reason was a bit ridiculous. We wanted to gather intel on them and pressure each other psychologically. But while fishing for information, we somehow ended up playing Werewolf together in the waiting room. Before the formal competition, we all memorized each other's WeChat accounts and agreed to take photos together afterward. At the closing ceremony, we made a group chat and took turns posing with each other's medals.

That night we had a victory banquet in Changzhou. The next day, the teacher rented a car and took us around Nanjing. Nanjing is a city that feels a lot like Fuzhou. Nanjing was very, very good. I really like Nanjing. It was my second time there. We ate a lot, though I have already forgotten exactly what. We spent half a day at Qinhuai River and Nanjing Museum and took photos together. I shared the joy with my friends. On the third day, we went to Tianmu Lake, where the teacher and the team rode bikes all the way around the lake, and he even flew a drone for us to play with. That was probably the happiest period of my life.

At the moment I learned we had won something, I was happy.

At that moment, when I closed my eyes, there was only one sentence in my head: "I am an award-winning candidate now." I am an award-winning candidate now. I really am.

It felt as though all the unwillingness I had carried for five years had been washed away in that instant. I finally had an honor that could be written on paper, one recognized by the system instead of something I had to explain or comfort myself into believing. But did it really belong to me? It took me two months to realize that this competition had almost nothing to do with me. Even now I do not feel worthy of that award at all. Did I work hard? Apparently not that much. Did it change me? Not really. In that competition, the people who worked hardest were the school and the advising teachers.

At the time, of course, I was not capable of seeing that. Asking my past self to reflect on it immediately would be too harsh. The award was real. My name really was on that certificate, and I really had participated in that preparation and presentation. But it was not the thing I imagined would completely prove myself. That result contained the school's investment, the teachers' support, the team's coordination, the character of the competition itself, and also some accidental luck.

After returning home, I rested for a very long time. I do not know why. Maybe my cortisol levels finally dropped. From repression to joy, then back to flatness. I do not know what was wrong with me during that period. I just spent a month scrolling on my phone. Apart from short videos, I had no idea what else to do each day.

I did not start feeling better until October, when the teacher took me and a few senior students on a self-driving trip to Xiamen. We visited some other seniors, and even the seniors of those seniors. We also went to look at students from previous competition cohorts at the undergraduate schools, and walked around Xiamen University of Technology and Quanzhou Normal University. At the time, I imagined that getting admitted to Xiamen University of Technology was practically guaranteed. Back then, aside from Xiamen University of Technology, there seemed to be no other possible school in the computer direction. Who could have known that half a year later, a different option would appear?

By then it was already October 2025, and I was in my second year of junior college. As someone in a five-year program, I was going to graduate the next June. After settling my internship situation, I planned to return to school and prepare for CET-6. That was when I finally returned to reality. Transfer to a bachelor's program? I was already an award-winning candidate. I could start after CET-6. At that time I looked down on everyone. In junior college I was a god, and I was full of confidence. I felt unstoppable.

Returning to Reality

Starting on October 16, 2025, I began going back and forth between the school's competition-training base and home every day, as if I were attending school normally again. On the surface I said I was preparing for CET-6, and I really did go to the training-base workstation to do problems the way I had prepared for CET-4 earlier that year. But most of my time was actually spent chatting and bragging with a few seniors at the base. The teachers were preparing the next provincial competition and I would sometimes go help watch over them just because I had nothing else to do. At the time I thought, well, I am doing an internship and I have no classes, so I might as well treat the base as a study room. Looking back, I was simply killing time for no reason.

Why did I do that? It was not entirely because I wanted to hang around. Since I already had competition experience, the teacher had considered sending me to the provincial competition again as a more senior member, and I could also help guide some seniors who had never competed before. I would not be where I am today without the strong support of teachers H and X. But after those ten days of extreme competition prep, I truly did not want, and did not dare, to enter that kind of talk-based competition again. I was inherently afraid of situations where everyone stares at me. Back then, however, I did not know how to refuse people. I chose to stay near the teachers in that awkward way instead. It really did feel a bit like trauma bonding. I was probably dealing with some PTSD.

If I calculate it now, 70% to 80% of the time I spent at the training base was basically socializing. As for studying, maybe I would spend thirty minutes doing two quick problem sets or brushing words on an app and then stop after checking the answers. I chatted with all kinds of seniors, talking about technology in grand but vague terms. I tried using the UI skills I was proud of to make posters for the teachers' team to recruit freshmen. I even brought one of my own juniors from the 3+2 program into the team. At one point I even showed up in a club led by the teacher as a senior figure, using the label of "returning from competition with honors." I was a bit like the teacher's tag-along.

At the time I had a kind of confidence, a confidence that subconsciously looked down on everyone else. But people who pressure those below them usually fear those above them, and arrogance often hides inferiority. There were plenty of gold-medal winners in the college, and plenty of people around my level too, people with some small achievements who also seemed to know quite a bit. We were all people who had reached a local optimum inside a low-level environment, each with our own comfort zone. Precisely because we understood the reality of junior-college status so clearly, the more realistic the conversation became, the more it dragged us into endless emptiness. Casual chatter would slowly converge into lines like, "Nobody wants junior-college computer students anyway," "Even if you transfer into a bachelor's program, you still will not get a dev job," or "Do you know that guy next door? His Java internship pays 2000 a month and still works him from morning to night."

Everyone was anxious and restless. Under that pressure, silent rivalry, mutual belittling, and constant comparison became normal. Seniors asked me things like, "What is the point of your MC server? Can it make money?" "Teacher, if I had Lemon's AI, I could do that too. He only did it because his AI is good." "Honestly, I am curious. If your Rust was written by AI, can you even code it yourself?" The answer was no, not really. I was already satisfied if it ran. But even more common was one group judging another: "That guy next door has no idea how smug he became after winning something." "He had help. Is that really their own ability?" "Someone that cocky is definitely going to crash sooner or later." "How could someone like him ever find a job?" "He is only where he is because people behind him carried him."

The pressure from society pushed all of us into a kind of structural cynicism. We deconstructed everything, but built nothing new. Since jobs were so hard to find, people started saying there was no need to keep engaging with so-called technology at all. And yet everyone still measured each other's strength through all kinds of metrics. Everyone still got dragged into fresh rounds of anxiety by phrases like, "A Harness Agent is essentially..." "Frontend is not that meaningful anymore," "You only need algorithms and interview trivia," or "That guy next door has already started researching embedded systems." We argued every day in the base, but how many lines of shippable code did we actually write? None. How many things did we do that made us truly feel our own progress? None. The anxiety got spoken aloud, but the road did not become any clearer.

People would start by seriously discussing how to use AI properly. One person would say "prompt engineering," another would reply, "That is outdated. Multi-agent and Harness are the trend now." Someone else would say, "Doesn't AI use still depend on the user?" and another would counter, "No. Use more Skills and more Review, and the user stops mattering." Then a bystander would jump in with, "Exactly. Claude Code is so convenient now. You can plug in a domestic model cheaply too." Before long, the topic would mutate again into an argument over which model was best. You said your line, I said mine. The whole conversation felt like a turn-based game. In the end, none of us even knew what we had been talking about. Still, speaking the anxiety out loud at least felt better than suppressing it. "Restless" is the word that captures that whole atmosphere best.

And I was one of those people too. From October to December, I lived in that cycle every day.

That stretch after the competition was the most confused period. I had not started preparing for the transfer exam. I was just spinning in place after a flood of positive feedback.

On the evening of December 13, 2025, right after finishing CET-6 and walking out of the exam hall, I knew I was done for. It was a total crash. Completely. From listening to reading, every section had been a frantic mess. A few days later, an institution released answer keys. I checked the options I had copied onto the back of my exam admission ticket one by one, calculated my raw section scores, looked at the score-conversion table, and instantly felt my heart go cold: 426. Barely scraping the line. My once-proud 500+ CET-4 result meant nothing at CET-6 level. On the morning of February 27, 2026, at six o'clock, the official result came out: unsurprisingly, 414. Technically speaking, I had mischecked one answer. If I had gotten that one right, I really would have passed 425.

But by then it no longer mattered, because February 2026 me was already preparing for the transfer exam. From December 2025 to January 2026 was probably the stretch that left the deepest impression on me. CET-6 had slapped my face swollen, not because anyone mocked me, but because I could not swallow my own pride. I felt I should not have been like that. I vaguely sensed that the people at school were making me uncomfortable. I felt a lot of malice.

It was a group of unstable people testing one another. On the surface they were talking about technology, but what they were really asking was, "Are you stronger than me now?" "Did you get resources I did not?" "Are you actually not that impressive after all?" "Do I still have a chance?" I could not take it anymore. It was too suffocating. Starting on December 15, I began going to school only two or three times a week.

By the end of December, I decided to pack my things and go home to prepare for the transfer exam. At the same time, I turned down every invitation from my teachers to join new projects or new competitions, and I have kept doing that ever since. From meeting him in February 2025 to leaving in December 2025, I only stayed in his teaching career for two semesters, ten months in total.

Sorry, teacher.

Moving Up to a Bachelor's Program

On January 1, 2026, my QQ groups were filled with "Happy New Year," "Best wishes," and "Group owner, send a red envelope." A new year meant a new beginning. But my immediate task was the 2026 transfer exam. The 2026 general higher-education transfer exam. For someone like me, who had never studied systematically, how exactly was I supposed to prepare? Even though I was a so-called noble award-winning candidate, I still wanted to get some kind of result through my own ability. To be honest, I was twisted inside at the time. I looked down on other award-winning candidates while still having to rely on that identity as my safety net. I was obsessed with preserving my own purity. I did not want this whole upward-education story to boil down to a single sentence: "He got in by status."

I was deeply anxious then. Was it already too late to start preparing? Should I just grind questions directly? I tried to understand the situation first, but even after sorting everything out, I still had no real clue. The transfer exam would start on March 28. How should I arrange three months? Advanced math and the professional subject looked difficult. Political theory could depend on mood. English did not worry me. Since it was January, I decided to start with the hardest thing: math. As for everything afterward? I did not know. I would just try. I watched a few days of online classes and found I simply could not keep going. So I chose the most brutal, direct method: just do the problems and accept being wrong. The cost of that approach was intense pressure at the beginning. I remember staring wide-eyed at the answers AI gave me.

But halfway through planning, I got completely sucked into Adachi and Shimamura. I do not know why I became so obsessed with that work. Maybe it resonated with me. And it was not just before January 7. Even later during exam prep, I often regretted having wasted another day reading yuri. Maybe it was because Adachi felt a lot like me: sensitive, awkward, deeply in need of confirmation inside a relationship. One thing I especially liked about Adachi was that she was brave. Shimamura was brave too. She was willing to change herself.

Six days later, on January 7, I officially started preparing. Math was the hardest subject by far. I do not even remember all the questions I asked anymore. I only remember that I seemed to go from limits to derivatives all the way to integrals. What even is infinitesimal approach, and why is it so abstract? Why does the textbook introduce limits before teaching derivatives? What the hell is $\infty$? What the hell is an instantaneous rate of change? Why are equivalent infinitesimals only valid in multiplication and division? Why does higher math have so many rules? Why do some integrals refuse to work with integration by parts? Why is there no universal formula for integrals like there is for quadratic equations? Why are there so many methods? If I cannot think of substitution or differential matching, what am I supposed to do?

I even tried to look at a function and its derivative directly in Desmos. Why was the difference between two points on the original function not the same as the difference between two points on the derivative? Oh. Because $dx$ was too large. My advanced-math study continued until February 7, and after that it turned into doing practice papers. I cannot even say I gained some grand insight. Some problems I just mysteriously came to know how to do. Mid-to-late January was the most anxious period. On my worst days, I opened more than ten chats in a single day just to vent to AI. It was less "studying" and more wandering around inside anxiety every day. The 2026 Lunar New Year came late, so in the latter half of February I gave myself seven days off, which accidentally became ten. During that period, I only did math papers to keep my hands warm.

It was not until early March, when there was barely any time left, that I finally snapped back to reality. At that point, the most stressful subjects were the professional subject and political theory. I had already done several papers, and the pattern in those two subjects was clear: they involved a lot of text that had to be memorized. I am not good with text. So I bought a question bank, went through it two or three times, made a mistake notebook in Obsidian, and forcibly memorized it.

March 28 and 29 felt strangely ordinary. I walked into the exam room normally and solved questions normally. Unsurprisingly, I was nervous too. My brain blanked a little. But fortunately, nothing especially dramatic happened. On the afternoon of the 29th, after the last subject ended, my classmates and I wandered around for a bit and then went for barbecue together. I ate so much my throat got inflamed. Late that night on the way home, I looked out over the Min River bank and thought: so it just ends like this, in such a normal way? Maybe so. There was none of the imagined excitement. It was simply an exam, ordinary in the most ordinary way possible.

In the days afterward, I used Obsidian to review that period of exam prep. The biggest realization I had was that effective study time is limited. A person cannot effectively review several subjects at the same time in a single day. My time arrangement had been terrible. There is also such a thing as exam-day performance. Studying is not about filling every minute. It is about making limited attention return to the right place again and again. And whatever you actually do is what you actually have. Instead of expecting others to teach you, it is better to spend the time chewing through it yourself. Learning is your own business.

But the biggest pain point was still anxiety. I stared at the transfer-exam announcements from the examination authority for ages, flipped through last year's notices, and could almost predict what the next announcement would say. But I was still afraid. Could I really win? Could I make people think more highly of me? Could I do it through my own ability? Even now I still wonder whether I should fix my bad habit of staying up late and forcing work through low energy, only to produce average results. I had never done this before. I did not know whether I could. Would the outcome five years later be just as bad as five years earlier?

Most importantly, I could not expect to fully learn something after only looking at it once or twice. That only counts as fitting the problem pattern. I respect the other candidates. When other people cannot solve a question, I cannot laugh. When other people perform badly, I cannot laugh. I do not know whether I can bring my best state into the exam room. I do not know whether I will oversleep. I do not know whether I have really generalized the knowledge or merely overfit the problem types. I do not know. I do not know whether I can truly do what I say and really "win." I do not know. My goal shifted from "I want to prove myself" to "I just want to do my best."

On the afternoon of April 14, 2026, while I was walking around Kinmen with a classmate, I unexpectedly learned that the examination authority had opened score lookup. I stood by the roadside in Kinmen, tapped at my phone a few times, and then saw my score and ranking: 191st place, 503 points. It was close to the rank I had estimated for myself. For the transfer exam, I was already very satisfied with that outcome. I am grateful that I did not give up, grateful that I was willing to battle an AI until late at night over a single question, and grateful to my classmates and parents for their support.

Most importantly, I finally got rid of the identity of "award-winning candidate."

After that, I stayed nervous about filling in my choices for quite a while. On April 15, my classmate and I returned from Kinmen to Xiamen and continued our graduation trip. That night, while wandering along Zhongshan Road in Xiamen, we spent a long time talking about university choices. In the end, I still chose the Artificial Intelligence major at Fujian University of Technology rather than Software Engineering at Xiamen University of Technology. FJUT is simply too close to home, and the major was acceptable to me instead. Still, even though I had fought hard for this result, the situation at the time suggested that my rank might not be stable enough to get me in. If I failed, then in August I would have to go to Xiamen University of Technology as an award-winning candidate after all. Fortunately, two weeks later, on April 27, I finally found my own name on the admissions website of Fujian University of Technology.

And just like that, from 2021 to 2026, five full years had passed. Did those five humiliating years finally get washed away? Maybe. Or maybe not. If I change the coordinate system and change the evaluation criteria, I do not seem all that impressive after all. I accepted my own ordinariness. Beyond test-taking ability, there is still computer theory, project ability, social ability. I suddenly realized I could no longer keep treating myself like a child. I was about to enter society. I was going to work. I suddenly noticed many things I had never paid attention to before: my emotions, my ideas, myself. Maybe I need to do what Adachi and Shimamura do too: accept bravely, change bravely. If you never try, nothing changes.

Five years ago: "I refuse to lose. I want to rewrite my fate."

Five years later: "I accept that I am ordinary."

Is it over? No. No, not yet. This is not the finish line. It is only the starting point. I still have many things to do. Of course, doing them does not mean results will appear immediately, nor that everything will go smoothly. For example, my projects.

Vibe Coder

In early April 2026, right after the transfer exam, I finally had some free time and spent two weeks rewriting this site, yes, this very site, AurLemon Intro. I designed the UI myself, and instead of stuffing in a huge pile of features all at once, I started from one small feature at a time. Maybe the biggest thing the transfer-exam preparation changed in me was this: I tried to settle down. After finishing this project, I slowly began to reflect on how many projects I had made without even understanding their actual purpose.

Let us rewind to November 2025. While chatting with seniors at the time, I quietly opened a new pit for myself: I wanted to build an information aggregation platform for my own MC server, and I named it Hydroline. Empowered by advanced models, I felt fearless. Like everyone else, once I had AI at my side, I could produce a half-finished thing in any area, whether I was familiar with it or not, even things I had never done before.

Back then, I wanted to cram every feature of the server into it. I also wanted to build a low-code platform to benefit other servers. I designed the framework beautifully: NestJS plus Vue, deployed with GitHub Actions. Around it there were all kinds of proxy services made with Cloudflare Workers. I even used Better Auth with OAuth support. It could bind Minecraft accounts and support AuthMe and LuckPerms integration. I even added MTR and Create railway data ingestion. I also wrote a Bukkit plugin to pull data from the MC side, plus cross-platform Forge and Fabric mods. The mods and the NestJS framework worked together, using Socket.IO for transmission.

It sounded perfect. But was it really? From November 2025 to January 2026, I burned tokens like crazy for three whole months. I craved recognition too much. The real issue was that I did not even know what functions the site actually needed. The models had not stabilized, yet I had already made the architecture heavy. The complexity kept growing. Three or four layers of folders nested inside each other. Everything was slipping out of control. The question was no longer whether the project could run. It was whether it could be maintained over the long term. Relying entirely on vibe coding, I underestimated the maintenance burden. I thought I understood concepts like OAuth, proxies, and Socket.IO. But I did not. I only understood the surface. I had an overwhelming urge to add everything. I even used Agents to the point of obsession. And I stopped tuning the UI, the frontend that I used to be proudest of.

After finishing the transfer exam and rebuilding AurLemon Intro, I started reviewing all of this. Why had things turned out this way? I knew the answer: what I built had gone completely out of control. I had failed to contain the scope. I did not know what I was doing. I was just piling things up with architecture that looked formally "enterprise-grade." Eventually, the maintenance burden exceeded my execution bandwidth at the time. Even with advanced models, I still could not produce anything solid. I thought I was someone who knew everything. In reality I was only a clown wearing a mask.

Doesn't all of this sound simple when spoken aloud? I really did build it, and the principles really do sound simple. But knowing the concepts is not the same as knowing the implementation details. At that moment I finally realized that I was only a programmer who had not even truly entered the field yet. People who have just entered the field often carry a kind of arrogance and confidence. Mine was confident enough to deconstruct everything. I thought I could do everything. OAuth? Easy. Electron? Easy. Just Chrome in a shell. I used to look down on people who did not use standardized approaches and look down on people who just ran everything out of one file.

It is not that I was completely unaware of the problem back then. I did know something was wrong. I just did not know what to do about it. What else could I do? I did not know. So I tried not to think about it. I just kept pushing the thing forward.

In mid-April, I began my junior-college graduation project. By then I had completely lost hope in software development. I wanted to try another direction, so I wanted to see whether I could make something with embedded systems. My goal became building a "small car that can run." Later I added TinyML, visual recognition, sound output, and even a wearable endpoint. The requirements kept growing. I had GPT produce a procurement list according to my needs, and I bought the parts one by one. By the time I had slowly gathered everything, it was already early May. Then a more serious problem hit: I realized I did not know how to solder. Soldering also takes skill, and I kept swinging between using too much solder and too little. But my thesis and defense were about to start. If I stuck to the original plan and tried to build a car whose requirements I did not even clearly understand myself, it would take at least four or five months. Finishing it in two weeks was pure fantasy.

I spent three days thinking about whether to change direction. But I did not want to. I thought I should be able to do it, so why could I not? But reality was not that easy. In the end I compromised. Using the hardware I already had, I cobbled together a desktop sensing system on a breadboard. In plain terms, it detected whether something caused vibration on a desk. I used an ESP32S3, an IMU, and ToF modules to piece it together, then trained a simple event-classification model on the sensor data with Edge Impulse. Finally, I wrapped the whole thing in Electron. For the first time, I noticed that slowly building a small thing like this could also feel joyful. It was more solid to keep my feet on the ground than to fantasize in the air. After that, I finished my junior-college thesis. The defense came, the graduation ceremony came, and everything ended in the most natural way.

Fortunately, it seems I may have found something I can actually do. Maybe. In the past, I was deeply affected by my emotions and mental state. For a while, I even kept deconstructing my own brain, talking about the prefrontal cortex, cortisol, dopamine. I would ask myself why I thought the way I did, whether it had something to do with what I experienced as a child. In the middle of the night, when I briefly entered flow, my emotions would swing like a roller coaster. One moment I would feel confident, the next I would plant a flag for myself and swear I had to create a success that would satisfy other people.

So it turns out that making some small thing can also bring me a pure kind of joy. Maybe I no longer need to blindly chase grand technologies the way I used to. Maybe I no longer have to let other people manufacture anxiety for me. A lot of the time, you do not need to make something grand. You need to choose to give some things up. It is not that certain things cannot be done, only that I do not need to understand all of them right now. It is impossible to become fat in one bite.

AI gave me an illusion, the illusion that I could do everything. After the transfer exam, I began to doubt that whole illusion. Building projects depends on the field. The difference between doing something once and doing it countless times is huge. There are many things I had not even done once. I had only skimmed a few introductory concepts in forums and communities and started feeling smug. So why did having AI suddenly make me so confident that I knew how to do them? Hydroline was the first project of that scale I had ever made. It matters to me. It has milestone value. Learning subtraction is more important than learning addition. Stay restrained. Restraint.

Liz and the Blue Bird taught me that letting go is also a form of love. Maybe I need to learn to let go of some meaningless things as well. The old me worried about everything and felt anxious about everything. I was desperate to prove myself, and I wanted to cram everything in. Reality taught me that it is not that I should never do those things, only that their time has not come yet.

The Weight of Expectations

In early May 2026, after finishing the graduation project but before starting the thesis, I accidentally dug another embarrassing memory out of my email inbox. In July 2025, a senior I had never met became interested in me after seeing a Wiki.js CSS script I had written. After visiting my website, he wanted to bring me into a project and work with me. In his email he said it was a new project of medium scale. He had only reached out to me in a try-it-and-see way because he had asked many people and been rejected by all of them. But from my writing, he said, he could see my enthusiasm, my aesthetics, and my desire to build things, and he hoped I would join him. Looking at it now, maybe he saw a shadow of his past self in me.

But maybe I could not really catch what he handed me. I wanted to do everything well, including our collaboration. It was the first time anyone had actively invited me in. But I still had many other things unfinished. I accepted the work, yet told him I probably could not really start until after September. He said it was fine and even gave me some money to cover AI costs. By mid-September my competition had ended, but I had no energy to do the work. I finally began in October. But then I had to stay busy at school while also preparing for CET-6, so I simply had no extra time. It was not like now, where I can debug a feature step by step. Back then I could only rely on AI to slowly piece together the most basic functions bit by bit. I had no tests. Even for something that should take ten minutes, I wanted it finished as fast as possible. I polished the UI and built the most basic functionality for him.

And I was not putting time into the project every single week. Even though every time I thought about it, I got anxious. My time planning back then was terrible. I wanted everything and achieved none of it properly. It was not until the end of December that I finally sent him the work. He praised it by saying, "You did very well," and then gave me an even larger amount of money than before. I had already deployed it. He said he would look at it when he had time. Then there was no more news.

In early June 2026, after going through both the transfer exam and the graduation project, I decided to make things clear. I wanted this matter to have a proper ending. Whether that meant returning the money or simply leaving it as it was, I needed certainty. So I reached out again and asked about the state of the project, since it had shown no progress at all. He was not in a hurry, and I kept dragging my feet too. In that moment, I felt like I had somehow stepped back into that meteorology project. I explained the current state of the project and admitted that I no longer had the ability to keep carrying it. I said a lot. Thank you for choosing me. I am sorry I did not meet your expectations. He did not keep questioning me, and I received no further reply. The matter more or less stopped there.

He saw my enthusiasm and chose me, but back then I lacked the ability to keep things moving steadily, cut scope down, sync in time, and stop losses when things failed. It is true that people can see me, but that does not mean I can catch what that attention places in my hands. "Responding" is not the same thing as delivering perfectly. I had not understood how heavy a commitment really is.

I remember that last year I was still in that excited beginner phase of technology. I naïvely believed that as long as I could break everything down and organize it in a way I approved of, every problem would solve itself and the other person would fully understand me. Back then I had no sense of boundaries. I was like a child desperate for recognition, spreading my emptiness and ambition out in front of others. He chose me at that time, but I really could not hold that choice. Wanting to do something, understanding it, even being able to build a demo, does not mean I can deliver it stably. A commitment cannot be supported by emotion and potential alone.

When someone handed me a real key, I discovered that all I had practiced before was only the gesture of unlocking, not what it means to take responsibility for the room after entering it. He saw me, but I could not answer that properly. And he had no obligation to wait for me to grow. It was another failure to live up to something. But at least now I have that lesson. I have my first dataset to train on. Back then, I was seen, but I was not yet capable of responding to that kind of being seen. Throughout the whole process, I was also under pressure, anxious, and unable to understand the project clearly, and then it all ended in a vague mess.

Maybe this is a regret for me. During the time after my graduation project was finished, I kept thinking about it. I used to feel confident that I had value that deserved to be seen. But being seen is one thing. Being able to carry that attention is another.

Is It Over?

On June 30, 2026, I received my junior-college graduation certificate, though not a degree certificate. I had dinner with classmates, came home, looked through my photo album, and felt unexpectedly calm. Over these five years, I have met many people. The past version of me was also very inflated. My social experience in junior college taught me that not every instance of being seen needs a response, and not every instance of being seen even carries meaning. I have met people with backgrounds similar to mine, people from business families who were good at planning for themselves, and people who were very introverted and deeply twisted inside. I often wonder: if I had gotten into a normal high school, would my road have been the same? What is my IF route? If I had not done a certain thing, would I have become like someone else?

In June, I finished CET-6 again. This time I did twenty days of last-minute preparation, went through the process and my mistakes, and although I did not produce any dramatic breakthrough or moment of revelation, the result seems at least fine. Judging by my estimated score, I almost certainly passed. In June, I also kept building projects for my MC server. But even without Hydroline, I would probably still have stepped into many of the same pits. At least I have already fallen into them once. I really have grown something through all this friction. Even now, I am still writing things with AI, and I am still constantly anxious about the future. What kind of people will I meet during my undergraduate years? Will there be restless people who manufacture anxiety for me? Will I still meet close friends? Everything keeps spiraling upward. Everything is still moving forward.

Keep moving. Keep moving matters more than anything else. Action comes before understanding. Do not be anxious about things you have never done before. If you do not even know how to do them yet, why be anxious? You should almost feel relieved instead. For the things you do choose to do, you should have a fairly solid grasp of them. "Think everything through before acting" is a false proposition. Reality is a black box. If you never press the button, you will never know what is inside. Since plans will always fail to keep up with change, you might as well treat change itself as part of the plan. Move first. Put the improvised stage together first, and patch the holes when something goes wrong. After doing it a few more times, reviewing it, and sorting out the experience, many things will suddenly become clear. Start moving with incomplete understanding, then adjust as you move.

In the process of action, realization and change often happen in a single instant. Quantitative change becomes qualitative change, but behind that lies day after day of change. If I had not chatted with AI every day and vented all my bitterness to it, I probably would not have been able to write these stories this calmly now. I would only have talked with AI about technology. I lacked logic. I would still only be dumping emotion frantically, trying to cram everything in and trying to make everyone understand how I felt. But very often, knowing how to give some things up and do subtraction matters more than addition.

If I had never built that question-practice system, then the teacher might never have noticed me. Everyone has their own life and their own road. The seniors who kept testing each other over small technical things, the person who contacted me about a project, the two teachers who brought me in and took me to competition, the senior who made me uncomfortable during the class-committee campaign, the online friends who were ecstatic after seeing my score, all of them have their own stories. I already feel very lucky to have made it this far. I do not regret the road I am on now.

Computers were never an inborn ability of mine. As a child, all I could do was play with computers. Why did I not go outside? Because I was timid. When I got a little older, I ended up choosing a computer-related major because circumstances pushed me there. But I do not regret it. Computers changed me. Maybe I have already found my place. I have my comfort zone now. I feel proud of the computer knowledge I do have, and I can still spend ages arguing with people over some tiny computer-related point. This road is one I chose for myself. I do not regret it.

If I do regret it someday, I can just choose another road.

Fuzhou in July is still blazing under the sun. Whenever I see the six o'clock morning sun, feel the summer heat and humidity, or notice the temperature of the air conditioner, I think of the version of myself who spent summer nights at school fixing meteorology-project code with the teacher. I think of the anxious, stumbling version of myself on competition day. I think of the desperate version of myself after seeing the junior-high admission result. I think of the version of myself that accepted being a technical-secondary-school student. I think of the version of myself in early spring staring blankly at the transfer-exam political-outline notes.

Everything is still proceeding in an orderly way. The sun rises as usual.

Undergraduate Years

What's Next? I do not know. I do not know what stories I will encounter during my undergraduate years, because they have not even started yet.

Adachi and Shimamura is my favorite work. Not only is its writing delicate, more importantly, it feels like a complete universe. It is still being updated even now. The main storyline, the confession, was actually finished long ago. What is being updated now is the mainline and side stories, the story of their everyday life. Maybe the most romantic thing in the world is long companionship. After all the grand drama comes an ordinary, quiet everyday life, like $x → \infty$.

Just like junior college, undergraduate study will only last two years. I hope that the version of me in 2028 can hand in an answer sheet he does not regret. The next story is the story of me and my MC server.

To keep the narrative coherent, I deliberately broke the main thread into pieces while writing this article. I suddenly realized that there is no need to pour everything out all at once.

My main story ends here for now. I have not even started undergraduate study yet, and I have not even received the admission letter.

Thank you for being willing to read this little essay of mine.

Server Owner Postscript

In 2018, I joined an MC multiplayer server run by an online friend. That server was the predecessor of what is now HydCraft. HydCraft has had a deep influence on me, from small-circle interpersonal relationships and management to technology and operations. In some ways, HydCraft has also shaped the kind of person I am now. For the sake of narrative coherence, I selectively omitted some HydCraft-related parts from the growth story above, for example the chapter on Technical Secondary School Life.

Of course, I know some readers may wonder why the "Technical Secondary School Life" chapter suddenly jumps from 2022 to 2024. It is not that I suddenly became capable of doing all those things that quickly. I simply moved the more scattered parts of that period into this chapter. The hidden line during that period was actually HydCraft. I did already understand a few of those things at a basic level, but the force that kept pushing me to put them into practice all the way until today was always HydCraft. In my low periods, HydCraft was my only psychological comfort and support. My community, my members, and my friends were all emotional nourishment when I was terribly lacking in a sense of security.

Face

I am proud that HydCraft is my MC server. At the beginning, that pride was mostly vanity. To some degree it still is. But more than that, it is because I built things that I personally consider valuable, or at least usable. Of course, I once tried to turn the server into a more "formal" organization. I studied how studios, commercial companies, and even state institutions organize themselves, and I copied those models straight into the server to make us look more "official." I even considered registering as a sole proprietorship or a company, but taxes and registration were too much trouble and I had no energy to deal with them, so I dropped the idea. The old me also gave the server many domains and many sites and created all kinds of flashy features, because I wanted to run the server well.

Of course, calling it "running a server" is not quite accurate. What I was really running was a community, and more precisely, a familiar-people community, a long-term community. If you are starting from zero by yourself, running a server usually means handling everything from publicity, recruiting, management, server maintenance, and community operations to technology. Is that not also a kind of full-stack? Reality is not quite as brutal as that makes it sound. It is not as though failing at one thing means instant death. Real life has a lot of tolerance. As long as someone has time, someone has initiative, and there is a group chat where people can talk, eventually some idea person will appear out of nowhere and something will get made.

That is more or less how HydCraft itself came into being, in a vague and accidental way. The span from 2018 to 2026 is even longer than the span from 2021 to 2026. Some people came, some left. The online friend who first invited me to play multiplayer is already in university now, and he quietly stepped back only two months after I took over the server. Not everyone stays with a community from beginning to end, and not everyone always has time forever.

From my perspective now, I want HydCraft to become part of my portfolio. I want to use it to try things that are actually within my field. I have also done many foolish technical things around HydCraft. I thought that if I built a GitHub organization, the members would automatically collaborate. I assumed that everyone in management shared a unified will with me. I never realized otherwise. I was too busy decorating the facade of the server. I even fantasized about code collaboration, but real team collaboration always requires clear division of labor. I overestimated other people's level and underestimated the complexity of projects.

Everyone has their own story. They have experienced things I have not, and I have experienced things they have not. There is no need to drag them forcibly into the perfect world I imagine. I was far too self-righteous. Strictly speaking, HydCraft is also an improvised stage troupe. At least from the angle of collaboration, everyone just does a little something and somehow gathers together. If one link in the chain breaks, everything can collapse immediately. What I can do is cover for the whole structure and at least make the impact of collapse less severe.

People Are Not Plugins

Whether in the past or now, the most difficult part of HydCraft has never been technology. Technology is only a hidden line. The truly complicated part is people. All kinds of people. The way I handle problems, work with others, and conduct myself all shapes the tone of HydCraft as a community.

HydCraft has never developed in isolation. It has its own circles too, usually the MC rail-transit circle, the MC MTR circle, and a bit of overlap with the building circle. Once there is a circle, there is no escaping human inertia. Testing one another, belittling, stepping on others to lift oneself up, excluding, attacking. The ugliest form is clique-building and exclusion. This exists both between servers and between individuals, and HydCraft has seen such issues internally as well.

In the past, I had no idea how to deal with these things.

My instinctive first reaction was to interpret conflict inside the server as damage to order. If people argued, spoke sarcastically, complained about rules, or questioned management, I usually did not first judge the matter itself. Instead, I would think: is the server about to have another incident again? Because for a long time HydCraft carried too much of my sense of security, whenever cracks appeared inside the community, I desperately wanted to seal them up. Ideally nobody would argue. Ideally every matter would get an immediate conclusion. Ideally the server could continue looking as if nothing had happened at all.

But reality is not like that. People are not plugins, and communities are not config files. If a plugin throws an error, you can check the logs. If a config is wrong, you can roll it back. But problems between people do not come with such clean inputs and outputs. A conflict between one player and another may look on the surface like only a few lines of argument, a few plots of land, a construction plan, or a permission issue. But inside a long-term community, it turns into questions like: who has more right to speak? Who is closer to whom? Which side is management actually standing on?

That is the hardest part about a familiar-people community. HydCraft is not a server made entirely of strangers. Many people have known each other for a long time. Many share common experiences. Some truly have contributed a lot to the server. Seniority, contribution, relationships, and personal ties all become factors. That gives the community warmth, but it also blurs boundaries, and blurred boundaries come at a cost. A veteran player's sentence may weigh more than a new player's. If someone in the management team expresses a position, others may automatically interpret it as the position of the server. When a familiar person makes a mistake, it also becomes harder to call it out directly.

I used to waver badly here. On one hand, familiar relationships cannot be allowed to override rules. On the other hand, I would still take past ties into account, and being too harsh could hurt people. If I handled it badly, I could even get cursed by both sides. I cannot forget what it felt like when players I had already become friends with deleted me, griefed things, or pointed at me and cursed at me. Yet I still had to grit my teeth, stay calm, and deal with the issue as best I could. I even gaslit myself sometimes, without knowing what exactly I had done wrong.

Only later did I slowly realize that familiar relationships are not immunity, and contribution is not proof of eternal correctness either. The old me also had muddy, awkward, twisted emotions and would avoid things like a normal person. To be honest, I still do a little. And being able to deconstruct these things thoroughly does not mean I now have the ability to solve them. The metric is different. It is like the competition in September 2025. I also tried to avoid going on stage and speaking, but it did not help. A long-term community can have feelings, but those feelings cannot be allowed to swallow the boundaries. Otherwise, what gets injured in the end is not only one person, but the whole community's trust in fairness.

Some people are more proactive, while others are quieter. The proactive ones gradually gain more voice, and the quieter ones gradually become marginalized.

People with shared experiences naturally form tighter relationships, while newcomers need time before they can really blend in. That is the embryonic form of a clique.

When resources are limited, whether map space, decision-making power, or attention, competition appears. That competition can be constructive, or it can become destructive.

When someone leaves or a conflict breaks out, the people who remain automatically readjust their positions and form a new balance.

These are common traits of all human communities. As soon as more than three people are together, these things start happening naturally. It is unavoidable. Relying only on systems or institutions does not really solve it either. The trust foundation of a small group is built on relationships, not process, unless the community becomes very large.

The Position of the Server Owner

Small-group problems are the same. Normal friendships and building teams are naturally part of a server's vitality. If every familiar relationship is treated as a clique, then what remains is only the manager's own obsession with purity. But if you ignore everything completely, then some relationships slowly turn into exclusion, factional alignment, step-on culture, and pressure from public opinion. The hardest part is not deciding whether "they are friends." It is judging whether that relationship has started to affect other people's normal participation, whether it has made some people afraid to speak, afraid to build, afraid to enter a certain circle.

I used to hate these things. But hate itself solves nothing. A server owner cannot simply say, "I do not like you all acting this way," because that sounds too much like emotion and too easily turns into personal preference. Reality forced me to judge whether something was ordinary friction or a boundary issue, whether some harsh wording was only bad expression or actual exclusion, whether it was just a difference in building philosophy or someone using relationships to pressure others. If a small conflict is blown up into a line struggle, everybody becomes tense. If a real boundary problem is treated as ordinary friction, the affected person feels nobody is protecting them. I had no choice but to make those judgments.

Many times, conflicts between one faction and another turn into an endless turn-based game. One side throws a sarcastic remark, the other side starts openly cursing, and the fire spreads. I have no choice but to deal with everybody's emotions. I even have to calm down managers who leave the group and then come back, or managers who themselves start clique behavior. Worse still, I have to take responsibility for what managers do. The people I selected, the systems I built, those are also my responsibility.

I also have to face all kinds of people. One side is upset from a quarrel, then the other side notices later and comes to vent to me, sometimes even cursing me in aggressive language. I can only soothe them. But often there is no neat right or wrong to be separated out, so all I can do is act as a neutral mediator. Even now, what I mostly do is use a tough tone to demand that everyone calm down. If you really asked me to create rules, I would also struggle to enforce them. If rules are written, will people truly follow them? No. Many rules, once made, are not even followed by old players themselves. If I enforced them strictly, things could become even worse. Rules are only a last-resort safeguard when a situation becomes impossible to reconcile.

There was a moment when I wished I had depression too. I even wished I could go insane.

In the past, I cared very much about how others saw me. I wanted the server to look formal. I wanted the management structure to look complete. I wanted everyone to recognize me as someone capable of leading the server well. Back then I studied all kinds of organizational forms and gave the server many titles, processes, and systems, as if the moment those things became complete enough, HydCraft would naturally mature. But the authority of a server owner is not upheld by titles, nor by how beautifully the charter is written.

What truly convinces people is whether I listened to both sides fully, whether I separated facts from emotions, whether I kept boundaries even in front of familiar people, and whether I pulled things back toward the actual issue when everyone wanted to watch drama. The server owner is not the person with the loudest voice. The server owner is the person who can stop a situation from fermenting further.

Many times, I personally jump into arguments too. Sometimes I want so badly to preserve surface stability that I ignore the issue itself. Sometimes I am too eager to give a conclusion, and the matter has not had enough time to settle. Sometimes I clearly know certain relationships have already become unhealthy, yet because I take seniority, contribution, or old ties into account, I fail to draw the line in time. Sometimes I project my own insecurity onto the server, as if making the server stable enough would make me stable too.

Technical problems are actually easier than that. When technology goes wrong, at least there are logs, reproduction, rollback, monitoring, and a repair path. Even if you cannot find the cause immediately, technology usually does not hold grudges, care about pride, or drag one misunderstanding into the next discussion. Human problems are different. Human states accumulate. Grievances accumulate. Distrust accumulates. A small issue mishandled today may become the background noise of a different issue months later.

That is why I increasingly feel that managing a community is like maintaining a system with no clear documentation. This system has state, inputs and outputs, thresholds, misjudgments, and failure paths. Rules are necessary, but they are not omnipotent. Rules can tell everyone where the bottom line is, but they cannot make judgments on behalf of the manager.

HydCraft is not only about how to run a server, write code, or build a website. In the past, I had a hard time accepting departures too, the departure of friends, the departure of players. But people grow closer because of relationships, and they get hurt because of relationships too. Groups generate enthusiasm, but also inertia. Systems can protect people, but they can also be turned into weapons. And the more a manager wants to satisfy everyone, the more likely it becomes that in the end they protect nobody at all.

Restraint

These things gradually taught me restraint. Not coldness, and not smooth social polish, but a clearer sense of what should be answered immediately and what should be left alone for a while; what can be said as a friend and what, once spoken by the server owner, becomes a formal judgment; what can be solved through communication and what continuing to communicate only delays the drawing of boundaries. You have to know the effect your position creates. You have to list out the state and the boundaries clearly.

I am still proud of HydCraft now, but that pride is different from the beginning. Back then it was "this is my server," tinged with vanity and with the urge to prove myself. Now it is more like, "I have handled many problems here, and I have made some things that were at least useful."

HydCraft is not a perfect community, and I am not a perfect server owner either. It is only a small online community with fewer than 200 people in the group and fewer than 50 active members. Regardless of scale, this is simply what the position of server owner involves. At least, this is what I know. If there is a next time, I would rather be second-in-command. I am not good enough to be number one.

Thank you to everyone who once came. Thank you to those who are still here now. And thank you to the people who have stayed with me for so long.

Sincerely.

Appendix

I only just realized that I have written twenty thousand words. Anyone who has made it this far is honestly incredible. I wrote this article over the course of about three days. At first I did not intend to write that much. I had originally only planned to write about my MC server. Somehow I accidentally poured out my whole past along with it. The overall tone may feel heavy, so I want to remind readers that many things were not as crushing as they may sound here. I think people can still sense my humor through the writing.

Because I knew the overall tone could get heavy, I inserted some images here and there to lighten the atmosphere. Reading nothing but text is tiring too. It is true that technical secondary school and junior college could feel oppressive, but they were not all bad either. Junior college actually had fun moments and happy moments too. I only noticed the oppressive side in hindsight. Back then I could not even describe what felt wrong, nor did I know where the problem was. After writing everything out this time, it all became much clearer.

This whole article was revised little by little, so there may still be typos or awkward sentences. The awkward parts mostly come from places where I merged or edited sentences and accidentally left something out. Feel free to point them out directly in the guestbook. I will reply when I see them. The guestbook has no way to notify me, though, so it may take a while before I notice.