Chapter 3: The Library is a Weapon
The sun was barely beginning to drift west when Elias stepped out of the engineering building. His classmates spilled out ahead of him, voices light, laughing about getting dismissed early after his unexpected answer in Dumlao's class.
Some were heading to the cafeteria. Others to dorms. A few stayed behind under the acacia trees, chatting and tapping through their phones. But Elias had somewhere else in mind.
He walked alone, the same beat-up backpack over his shoulder. The early afternoon heat clung to the pavement, but Elias barely noticed. Something stirred under his skin—a simmering pressure, not unlike the minutes before a storm. Not stress. Not anxiety. Focus.
His feet carried him past the social science building, past the rusting bike racks, past the vending machines with faded stickers. He turned into a shaded path tucked behind the main hall and approached the old library.
It wasn't sleek. It wasn't modern. But it was quiet. Solid. And most importantly—it had everything he needed.
He stepped through the double doors and into cool, dry silence. The scent of old paper and aging wood shelves settled around him like a cloak. His pace slowed.
This place was going to be his forge.
Elias chose a table tucked into the far corner of the second floor—just far enough from the stairs to be ignored, close enough to the socket for his laptop charger. He plugged in, booted up Visual Studio, and opened a new project. The screen glowed quietly in the dim light of the library's fluorescent fixtures.
Then he stood, walked to the programming section, and carefully selected a stack of books:
"Practical C# Algorithms"
"CLR via C#"
"Clean Code" by Robert C. Martin
"Data Structures in Practice"
He sat back down and flipped open the first book.
He didn't rush.
He read line by line, reviewing material he vaguely remembered from his first college run—arrays, lists, reference types, value types.
This time, something felt different.
The moment he reread the explanation of how List
Ding.[Concept Tagged: List
His pulse didn't race, but a faint smile curved at the corner of his lips.
It's working.
A few minutes later, he was comparing Dictionary
[Concept Tagged: Dictionary
He kept reading.
The next hour passed in silence. Page after page, test after test. He took down notes—real ones, not frantic half-scribbles. He didn't highlight whole paragraphs. He understood them.
Then, he paused at a section titled:
"Stack vs Heap – Performance and Pitfalls"
A topic that had once eluded him.
Now, it felt graspable.
He reviewed how value types live on the stack (unless boxed), how reference types point to heap-allocated memory, how garbage collection triggers, what pinned memory meant, how ref and out keywords interacted under the hood.
[Concept Deepened: Stack vs Heap][+1 Intelligence]Your understanding of memory management has grown.
He blinked. That was the first core stat gain he'd seen in days. Not through luck. Not through grinding.
Through clarity.
Practice Makes Pattern
He opened a blank file and began experimenting.
First, a quick test:Create a list. Add values. Pass it into a method. Modify it. Print results before and after.
He already knew what should happen—but now he understood why it happened. Reference semantics. The method changed the original object, not a copy.
[+1 Debugging Intuition]
He created a Stack
And then, Fibonacci.
The infamous trap.
He coded it first the naive way:
int Fib(int n)
{
if (n <= 1) return n;
return Fib(n - 1) + Fib(n - 2);
}
Then timed it. It was slow. O(n^2) slow.
He rewrote it with a dictionary cache.
Dictionary
int FibMemo(int n)
{
if (n <= 1) return n;
if (cache.ContainsKey(n)) return cache[n];
return cache[n] = FibMemo(n - 1) + FibMemo(n - 2);
}
The difference was immediate. Cleaner, faster, scalable.
[Concept Tagged: Memoization][Algorithmic Thinking has progressed.][+1 Programming Skill (C#)] → Level 2[Debugging Intuition: Level 2]
He ran a few more stress tests: edge inputs, large inputs, recursion depth. No errors.
Another Hour, Another Step
Elias took a short break. Closed his eyes. Sipped from the lukewarm bottle of water he brought with him.
The system wasn't feeding him answers. It was responding—each time he truly understood a concept, it reacted.
He returned to his books. This time: Clean Code.
He reviewed best practices—meaningful naming, function purity, avoiding magic numbers, single responsibility principle.
When he reached a section explaining why nested loops beyond two levels often meant your logic was off, something shifted in his memory.
Last time, he had written bloated methods. He'd debugged things the hard way. Patching instead of fixing.
Not again.
[+1 Problem Solving][Trait Reinforced: Pattern Recognition I – Stable]
It wasn't just code he was learning. It was how to see patterns—how to step back and spot design flaws before they became bugs.
He leaned back in his chair and called up the status panel.
SYSTEM STATUS — ELIAS ANGELES
Core Attributes
Intelligence: 2
Focus: 1
Expression: 0
Physical Dexterity: 0
Willpower: 0
Skills
Programming (C#): 2
Problem Solving: 2
Algorithmic Thinking: 2
Debugging Intuition: 2
Traits
Pattern Recognition I (Stable)
Tagged Concepts
Stack vs Heap
List
Memoization
Recursion Base Case
Index Out of Range Handling
Clean Code Naming
Loop Complexity Markers
By the time the library lights flickered—warning of its impending closing—Elias had filled nearly four pages of notes and two console projects worth of tests.
He packed slowly, careful not to fold his references. Slid the books back into their shelves. Unplugged his charger.
As he stepped outside, dusk had spread across the sky like a blue curtain. A soft breeze rustled the acacia trees. The courtyard was nearly empty.
He didn't rush home.
His mind walked beside him, looping quietly through what he'd learned:
Arrays that break when passed by reference carelessly.
Memoization as a pattern, not just a trick.
How naming things properly reduced future bugs.
And, above all, the realization that clarity of thought was the real superpower the system amplified.
Not brute memorization.
Not XP grinding.
Just understanding.
In the silence of the evening, Elias Navarro felt something he hadn't in years:
Momentum.