Annaka leaves.
...Masozi watches her go, dully, still sitting on his bed. He notices, vaguely, that he seems to be shaking again and that his chest still feels tight and locked-up. It doesn't seem very important, though.
What is he supposed to do now? Is he still a prisoner under guard?
Masozi looks pleadingly over at Lan Xichen.
"Yeah! This one is called Calculus for Everyone, it's supposed to teach you calculus without you having to know any other math first."
"Think about it! Before you cross the room, you have to cross half the room. And before you cross half the room, you have to cross a quarter of the room. And before you cross a quarter of the room, you have to cross an eighth of the room. And so on and so forth so you can't ever actually get anywhere."
Masozi squints at him.
“- Maybe there’s a shortest distance? And there can’t be anything shorter than that? So it’s - not half of it again and again forever, only down to the shortest distance?”
"Nope! Well, there is, but that's not how you solve the puzzle. --Do you want me to tell you the solution?"
"--oh, crap, you don't know what an infinity is. Um. So you know how there's no biggest number?"
“I need to think about it.”
Masozi scrunches up his face in visible intense concentration for thirty seconds.
And then lights up, bouncing again. “There isn’t! That makes sense, there wouldn’t be.” Awe in his eyes. “It’s…so beautiful…”
"That's called 'infinity.' Things that go on forever. And the one half plus one fourth plus one eighth plus one sixteenth and so on thing is called an 'infinite series' because it goes on forever. And it turns out infinite series can add up to finite numbers! That one adds up to one, which is exactly what you'd expect, because you're crossing one room."
"I know! Isn't it awesome! Anyway, that's calculus. It's all about using math to talk about motion and change over time and also cutting things up into infinite pieces."
"...probably you should read the book and I should not try to give you an entire introduction to calculus class in thirty minutes."
Wei Wuxian translates this and adds, "...do you have any idea what he's sorry for?"
Masozi is very absorbed in his math book and so it takes him a few moments to notice someone is talking to him.
“- What? No? Is he saying sorry to me - that makes no sense…”
"Lan Xichen assigned me to watch you to be comforting. I tried to be comforting and then the guards said confusing things."
Wei Wuxian's commentary on this translation is "Lan Wangji? Comforting? Really?"
"No. He thought you'd be more comfortable with someone you know in the room."
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