Chen Zhuo dragged out the cardboard box and slid it over to Lu Jia’s feet.
"If I leave this in the dorm over the New Year, it’ll probably attract a nest of mice. Since you’re staying on campus anyway, help me take this and use some of it up. The cafeteria food will probably be so-so during the holiday, so you can have something to tide you over if you get hungry studying late at night."
Chen Zhuo’s tone was very casual; he didn’t bother with any unnecessary pleasantries.
Lu Jia looked down at the cardboard box, and his shoulders relaxed just a little.
He didn’t refuse, just nodded lightly.
"Okay, thanks."
He picked up the cardboard box and turned back to room 216 across the hall.
The door closed.
Chu Ge sighed.
"That kid... he’s living like an ascetic monk."
"Everyone has their own path." Chen Zhuo turned back to his desk. "Maybe he feels more at ease here at school than at home."
He had cleared off most of his desk.
He pulled open a drawer. Inside lay the twenty-some-page Princeton preprint paper.
For the past month or so, this document had been sitting here.
Chen Zhuo took it out and dusted it off.
He flipped to the fourth page.
The question mark, drawn in pencil, still hovered next to the bloated and complex renormalization formula.
Over the past few months, he had dismantled this formula in his mind countless times and tried many different approaches.
But every time he reached the Singularity that led to infinity, it was like hitting an invisible wall.
A dead end.
He didn’t bang his head against the wall.
Chen Zhuo planned to put the paper into a folder, take it back to Zeyang, and look at it again when he had free time over the New Year.
He reached for a stack of class notes on the corner of his desk.
These were drafts from an algebraic geometry class he’d been auditing this semester, covered in all sorts of discrete matrix models and topological structure diagrams.
The moment he picked up the notes,
a loose-leaf sheet of scratch paper that wasn’t securely bound slipped out from between the pages.
It fluttered down,
and landed right on the fourth page of the Princeton preprint.
The two sheets of paper overlapped.
The scratch paper was the thin, translucent kind.
On it, drawn with a black water-based pen, was a diagram of a step function from discrete algebra.
It was a fault model, one that was instantly severed at a certain critical point and then restarted from another value.
Through this translucent sheet of scratch paper,
the continuous calculus formula on the preprint below was faintly visible.
The Singularity leading to infinity landed exactly in the center of the step function’s fault line on the scratch paper.
Chen Zhuo’s hand froze in mid-air.
In the room, Dayong was still bragging to Chu Ge about how he was going to feast on pork and vermicelli stew when he got home, with Chu Ge offering half-hearted replies.
But Chen Zhuo couldn’t hear them anymore.
His gaze was fixed, glued to the two overlapping sheets of paper.
It was like two puzzle pieces, floating in different oceans, had been blown by a sudden gust of wind to the exact same coordinate.
A perfect fit.
CLICK.
The machine in his mind, stalled for over a month, emitted a crisp, clean sound as its gears engaged.
The gears clicked into place.
’If a continuous flow of water is destined to destroy the dam,’
’...then place an invisible barrier in front of it.’
’Forcefully shatter the originally continuous space-time at the very instant the Singularity is approached, turning it into a series of discontinuous, discrete points.’
’Without continuity, infinity ceases to exist.’
’That bloated renormalization patch... it’s completely unnecessary.’
Chen Zhuo
He yanked out his chair and sat down.
He unzipped the pencil case he had just closed, pulling out his usual pen.
He uncapped it.
He found a fresh, large-format sheet of scratch paper on his desk and spread it out.
"Chen Zhuo, what are you doing? Aren’t you going to finish packing?"
Dayong turned his head, looking at the reseated Chen Zhuo with some confusion.
"Give me a minute."
Chen Zhuo didn’t look up, his eyes fixed on the paper.
"I found the tool. I’m going to fix it."
Dayong scratched his head, not understanding the metaphor. But seeing Chen Zhuo’s focused expression, he didn’t ask any more questions and turned back to check his train ticket.
Chu Ge, however, sensed something was different.
He stood up, walked over to stand behind Chen Zhuo, and glanced down.
On the scratch paper, the tip of Chen Zhuo’s pen was moving at high speed.
He wasn’t copying the original derivation from the Princeton paper.
He started writing directly from the beginning of step four.
He wrote out an extremely obscure algebraic geometry matrix.
Then, he decisively crossed out the limit symbol that originally represented continuous integration.
In its place, he wrote a discrete summation symbol.
One step.
Two steps.
Three steps.
The complex compensation parameters, which had originally taken up half a page, began to dissolve and cancel out on a massive scale after the introduction of this new algebraic transformation, as if they were impurities meeting a strong acid.
Positive and negative terms devoured each other.
Redundant constants were stripped away.
That path, once overgrown with thorns and bloated, was forcefully hacked into a straight shortcut with a cold, mathematical machete.
There were no obstacles.
「Five minutes later.」
Chen Zhuo wrote down the final line of the equation.
To the right of the equals sign,
the infinity Singularity, once baring its fangs and claws, had vanished.
All that remained was an extremely clean, concise, constant convergent value.
It all fell into place.
Neat and orderly.
Chen Zhuo stopped writing.
He looked at the dozen or so lines of derivation on the paper.
From the logical starting point to the final result, it was a perfect fit, with no forced, patched-on additions.
It was like a precision mechanical clock, stripped of its superfluous outer frame, revealing the purest meshing of gears within.

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