"Yeah, okay!" The default alternative is going back to his room to practice Mandarin, which is...fine...but he's getting pretty tired of it. 

"We have got to get you out of your room sometimes," he says, joining the cloud of seniors and juniors heading to the reading room.

"Do you think I'll be allowed to go to class next week? I'm getting better at Mandarin and it's boring to only practice and read textbooks all day." He's managed to obtain copies of all his class textbooks, at least. 

"We can talk to Lan Xichen. I think he's probably being a little overprotective, no one is going to kill you in Street-Fighting Mathematics."

"Yeah. ...Oh! Ayako told me a good math problem last night, and I tried to solve it with street fighting math but my guess was kind of wrong and I was trying to figure out what I assumed wrong - here, I drew a graph - there's a sequence of numbers and it starts with zero and then one and then you get the next number by adding the two before it and the question was when you get above 1000..." 

He digs out a crumpled scrap of paper and proudly shows Wei Wuxian his carefully drawn graph. 

"....I dunno that doing this really helped? The thing I did to make it easier was I looked at the start of the sequence and said that it doubles about every two steps forward. But it actually gets big a bit faster than that, so I said twenty-one steps but the real answer is eighteen steps." 

"Yeah, I think the Fibonacci sequence increases at a rate of, like, 1.4 or something? The golden ratio."

"....The what? ...Ohhhhhh I should do a graph of how fast it gets bigger. That's the actual thing I wanna know here." 

"Oh, I should show you something, this is cool." He pulls out a piece of graph paper from his bag and starts drawing using the wall. "Ta da!"

Masozi stares intently at it, going slightly cross-eyed. ".....Whoooooa." 

"The spiral this makes is called the golden spiral and it's all over the place in nature. Spiral galaxies, nautilus shells, some kinds of plant leaves--"

"Ooh. But - why? Do galaxies and plants and shells know how to do math?" 

"Everything is made of math, Zaizai."

Masozi stares at the graph with an expression of awe. 

"That - that's so beautiful...." 

"Science is beautiful," he says.

"It's so beautiful. ...Does that mean mals are made of math too?" 

"Magic seems to be weird and non-reductive and we don't understand it. Yet. I'm going to understand it."

"Yeah!" Masozi bounces a little. "...Oh right, I had a question for you. Ayako said I should ask you what 'evolution' is? Apparently it's got something to do with why people think sex is interesting." 

"Okay, so, you know how people are like their parents? They look like them and act like them and stuff?"

"...I don't think I act very much like my parents?" And Lan Xichen isn't like his parents at all but Masozi is not going to bring that up just now. "But - yeah, I guess I look more like them than I look like random people in Malawi." 

"So there's this code throughout all your body that tells your body what to do-- like, it says 'toe goes on your foot and not growing out of your ear' and it says 'Zaizai's skin should be darker than Wei Ying's skin' and it says 'when you're stressed produce this particular brain chemical,' all of that stuff. It's called genes."

Masozi frowns for thirty seconds, mulling this over, and then lifts his head and beams at Wei Wuxian. "Oh! That - so it's like a book in a different language? A language that whatever your body's made of can read? ...Can I learn to read the code, is it harder than Mandarin?" 

"It is much much harder than Mandarin. No one can read it."

"Aww. But - something has to be able to read the code, right? For it to make things happen the right way instead of just sitting there not doing anything? Like how if there are instructions in a book to make an artifact, someone has to follow them, if no one follows them then there's no artifact, just the book..." 

"Your body knows how to read the code, but people can't. --You get half your genes from your mom and half from your dad. That's what come is, there are a bunch of little copies of half of your code and then if it meets an egg inside the woman's body she gets pregnant."

This is going to earn him SUCH a baffled look from Masozi! "But - people don't make eggs? Chickens and stuff make eggs."