Summer came. I keep telling myself that words and records are part of what makes me distinctive, but every time I try to retell a story I become clumsy. I scroll through my phone album, weigh a few words, and manage only a shaky reconstruction of a handful of moments. The best ideas rarely arrive while I am sitting at a keyboard. They come while I am reading, listening to music, watching something, or staring at nothing. By the time I remember to write down what moved me, most of it is gone.
Maybe that urge to express is itself a kind of fantasy. I keep chasing a true steady state, and in that chase I place my present self in a permanently suspended, uneasy inner life. At the same time, the chase gives me a thread of hope. Seen from that angle, it is a little masochistic. People who destroy themselves are not only in pain; while in pain they also avoid something important and collect certain psychological benefits. Once I notice that, I seem to be back in the same loop.
There is always an impulse to throw so-called free will, or the self, into the big frame of hallucinations produced by brain biology: fantasy is not hallucination because consciousness itself is a hallucination. Our thoughts, emotions, the things we love and hate—none of them can leave the planet, and none of them can leave the brain. This sounds like mechanical determinism and nihilism, but it really does let me skip many doubts. Perhaps it is this: no ability, no responsibility. I would not say I believe it, but it reminds me of something real, and often that reminder reduces the pressure.
The sun goes down and comes back up tomorrow
The flowers fade and bloom the same tomorrow
A beautiful bird disappears without a trace
My youth, that bird, will not come back
Too much happened this month. Information overload felt like a dream, and looking back at three years of RM feels even more like one. The Beginning of Autumn semimonthly never got written, so I am merging two solar terms. If I leave out the summer after graduation, this is the last summer of my undergraduate life.
I keep explaining. I know I do not need to. It may be part of my personality. This sentence is an explanation of an explanation. I am an awkward person.
Before That
Every Chaoshan person's coming-of-age ceremony is said to be a solo high-speed rail ticket to Shenzhen. Every Guangdong person, maybe every person in South China, has heard some version of that sentence. I went to university in the north instead of staying in the province, so I missed it. This summer's national competition trip made up for it. A modern coming-of-age, a Chu Huayuan.
At last I stood in the Spring Cocoon, the gym every RMer dreams about. In winter I had seen it from Shenzhen Bay Talent Park: steel lattice flashing in the distance like a reflective eggshell. Inside, the tilted intersecting steel wraps the space like a large net. The smell of disinfectant was strong and stayed in my chest for days. That smell belongs to a more realistic summer: chlorine mixed into hot air-conditioned wind, an isolated island containing a small world where dreams can come true.
At last, the Spring Cocoon. That was probably the largest meaning of the trip. A dream-fulfillment tour—what else could I ask for? I knew I was lucky. Reaching the national finals already felt like something to be grateful for. But once inside the Spring Cocoon, I could not stop imagining beyond reality: winning a match, maybe more. Is human greed endless? I thought of Shi Tiesheng: man's real name is desire. Yet there was no preset judgment here. It was desire without desire.
Only later did I learn the swimming pool next door was still open; that was where the disinfectant came from. It rained a lot during the first days in Shenzhen. The preparation area still had the flame-retardant carpet, but the plastic banner at its edge now said THE FINALS. I have already written too much, perhaps because I am afraid of failing to restore it fully.
Like every other competition: registration, team leader meeting, draw, field testing, prop training. Beyond that, a strange idleness. Before the national finals came the repechage. I watched some matches; the intensity was high, the sound of projectiles echoing in my head. During the days after we arrived, before the national schedule began, alumni from the 24 season and earlier came to the test field every evening to catch up. Everyone was happy. Many seniors exist only in the 24 season, my first season, but that season and those people mattered to me and I will not forget them. People like to say the first stirring. That was probably it. They seemed unchanged. I always felt that in some ways I could never catch up with them. Their qualities influenced me anyway. They said, I hardly know anyone here anymore.
Then the draw. Group B looked weaker, but our first match was Northeastern University. We had not yet realized the seriousness. We had prepared to face strong teams; as a new non-seed team, our first round would naturally be against regional champions, runners-up, or third-place teams. Still, drawing TDT felt somewhat overpowered. The next day we were unsurprisingly rushed in three minutes. My first national match with VGD ended like that. I did not feel much. I mostly placed vague hope on the next match.
The second group match was against Tongji University, a team rising fast in recent years. We lost. By coincidence, VGD's first match in 2018 was also against Tongji. I wonder how many of that team's members still watch VGD. The third match was against University of Emergency Management, a team that survived the repechage. Our ground was torn open. 0-3, out of the group stage. Three days, three matches. I thought there would be much to write, that this would be the main body of the story. It was not. The matches were continuous but similar; one after another, then it was over.
After the last match against Storm, I returned to the prep area and felt terrible. Why? It was over. Reluctance, sadness, release, relaxation—all together, maybe more. My brain could not distinguish them. Since 2023, the excitement around this competition had formed a taut string under great stress. Now time was up, and it loosened by itself. Nothing collapsed. It simply reached an end, and everything seemed suspended and floating. It was like a long-awaited moment, like playing a beloved song I had never heard and being unable to hear how it sings. I did not know what the next song should be. I wanted to say sorry. The sun had not set. We took a group photo.
Thank you, RoboMaster—and VGD—for adding a beam of light to a boring life.
After That
Now I am only a spectator at the national finals. Before it ended, my attention was fixed on the Spring Cocoon. Now it has melted and spread over all of Shenzhen and Nanshan. It was as if I woke up in the exact center of the city. Office buildings rise like spring bamboo, but their color is as cold as basalt. Latest fashion, greatest spectacle, elite people, spotless surfaces.
Time is money, efficiency is life.
Apart from the distant Languang Science Park and badminton hall, my route was basically a line between the hotel, Haide School, and the Spring Cocoon. I gradually became familiar with Haide Street. The novel things: driverless taxis—smooth, cheap, a little slow, overall good; at the McDonald's near Houhai station I was inexplicably given a mini ice cream; Shenzhen really has Chaoshan restaurants everywhere, but I kept thinking I would eat at home, so I did not try much. Talent Park is next to the Spring Cocoon but not on my route; I never went back this trip. Winter and summer, before and after the finals, felt as far apart as two shores.
I bought merchandise from Hefei University of Technology Xuancheng, Northeastern University, and South China Agricultural University. After the match against Emergency Management, someone gave me a bag of merch. After all the matches, I also scavenged a batch of official venue merch. Teams came and went; entering and leaving the Spring Cocoon still felt like an honor.
At last I could watch at the Spring Cocoon, with a participant credential that worked like an unlimited ticket. I watched the whole evening of the 7th and the whole finals day of the 9th. Being a spectator was great. Shenzhen's weather had cleared and turned very hot—southern characteristics, although my home is this hot too. The national arena without streaming visual effects looked unexpectedly clean, like a model, reminding me of a mirror-flat salt lake in Tibet. The intensity was beautiful. On the final afternoon, Northeastern won every championship of the season as expected. Every RMer's 2026 ended at that moment. Golden rain fell from the venue, filling the sky and floor, like ginkgo leaves falling by Xiuyuan Lake in autumn.
This year's all-star game had no life.
I do not know if this was my last time at the Spring Cocoon.
Perhaps echoing the RMers scattering in different directions, company campus recruitment open days came one after another. One night I went to DJI's Sky City headquarters and looked up at it for the first time. An intern senior happened to be free downstairs and took a few of us up for a walk. Maybe it was some KPI, but we explored Sky City. The style is distinctly futuristic gray metal. I wondered if it would feel oppressive after a long time because there are so few colors. I saw the 24th-floor skybridge, very light in design, with the whole urban area in view; the sky garden was interesting too. Apart from the monotone pressure, it seemed like a perfect work environment.
I went to the youth engineers' conference. I heard two hardware lectures and a management lecture by Tongji's Captain Ye; learned a lot. At the hardware lecture I seemed to see another worldline—the one where I did not stay for management this season. At noon I aggressively consumed the free buffet. In the afternoon I sat in the hall for hours: a long DJI promotion with three guys taking turns. Then the much-anticipated Yunhao rules session—yes, I came to the conference for this. Finally three unclear new-rule highlights were released, but they no longer concerned me. At night I aggressively consumed the free Cantonese banquet. The dinner was lively; everyone was saying goodbye. Later I went to KTV with teammates and sang You.
On the morning of the 10th I went to Bambu Lab's open day and met senior Yang again. In the afternoon I went to Wuji Technology's open day. They make dexterous hands; the event was a bit inexperienced but the products were cool. I gained a lot at both tech open days, not only material things, though they also gave plenty of merch. I met two online friends who work at Wuji, including @Neomelt. In the evening I took the high-speed rail back to Chao.
I have been consuming a lot of works lately. Books: Camus's The Stranger and Summer—both still influence me; Memories of Peking: South Side Stories, which I reread as a child, sincere; The Old Man and the Sea, a classic I had never read, so I started; the Bloom Into You spinoff novel About Saeki Sayaka—delicious, not finished.
Anime I am following: 尼古喵喵—if I do not watch an episode every week I feel ants under my skin; 梦限大—I do not know what to say, but I liked episode 10; 与你相恋到生命尽头—good, delicious, carrying a knife; 再见菈菈—rich, interesting original, watched with a little yuri expectation, will it win?; 描绘直到生命尽头—you also die? Average art but an okay original.
Manga, all yuri: 徒然日和 (Tsurezure Biyori)—a masterpiece of everyday yuri, strong art, quiet beauty, why is it so short; 向笨蛋告白—sweet, short, about to end; 即使只有一次也会后悔—is this really not a doujinshi? also short, high intensity, do not ask what intensity; 于泳池边—a twenty-page short with beautiful art; 飞野同学是笨蛋—read during the national finals, many fake cars, some real ones, plenty of sugar, large servings, art I like.
Things and works as beautiful as foam. Summer should be like that.
Summer is ending too.
If I had ten minutes to meet the self before this summer, or an earlier self, what could I say? Our lives have been wrecked by reckless deconstruction, including our spiritual lives. That is a fact. What is deconstruction? Maybe it is something mentioned more and more often in philosophy, life, and conversation over the last decades or century. When anything happens, we have a thousand ways to think about it, analyze it, criticize it, and at a higher scale question and destroy the validity of all narratives—question metanarratives. For a thousand years we had glorious theories and countless paths with shadows guiding us; postmodernity has its own destructive charm, placing apples over the faces of signposts on every path, attacking all our meaning, refusing everything—which is itself a path. But this infinite richness of futures puts an unbearable spiritual burden on my brain. The more rational, the more analytical, the harder, the more absurd.
All models are wrong, but some are useful.
This saying from machine learning taught me something. All problems are equally important, all futures exist with equal probability, all predictions are equally perfect and equally clumsy. Any theory of love and pursuit—or destruction—that we build with our clever brains faces one perfectly predictable future and countless disastrously wrong futures, and they are equivalent. You can call this absurd, contradiction, the final problem, or something else; those are names constructed by theory. All models are wrong.
The moment for sorry comes again. Is this what we built over thousands of years with reason and feeling, logic and love—a ruin? On this ruin, at least for these few hours, I think I have the newest, maybe final antidote.
The trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; and there, soft and loud, the noise began. I shook off sweat and sunlight. I knew I had shattered the balance of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I had been happy.
No thinking ends before the shot. Everything begins after the shot. In a shooting case like Meursault's, what matters is not law, sentencing, motive, or testimony. What matters is the fucking shot. We have hands; we can shoot. That is all the logic required. To welcome daylight, I have to say goodbye to countless past nights of thinking. In those nights I kept thinking about how to leave the night, but the way to say goodbye is not another night spent thinking about how to leave or how to say goodbye. It is to pull the trigger and go to sleep. Explanations of life or the world can be ignored. Sensory experience, biological hallucination, great ideals, social morality, the meaning of action—whatever keeps me in the night deserves to die. I must shoot. It is the only thing I can do. Even if it is a death sentence, I must shoot; the endpoint of life is a death sentence anyway. After the shot, there is life—our life, my own life. Now I am speaking, I am living, and I am shooting. Bang. Bang. Bang.
The past nights were not useless. At the very least they have scrap value. Or, from a more fitting and romantic angle: this past summer left its shadow and my remembrance. What else can it do? Everyone, every ideology, believes it once had a golden age. Rebelling against life is not escaping the past. With a gaze that will look back in countless summers and winters, I think I can say this: I believe in this summer.
August 29, 2026