The tranquility of the Alchemist’s lab was magnified into a dull monotony.
Pushing open the two heavy doors revealed over a dozen Pentium PCs and two workstations, running day and night. The low-frequency hum from the cooling fans in their cases was like a tireless lullaby.
Chen Zhuo sat at a remote workstation near the door.
It had originally been an empty desk piled with old peripherals. Zhang Yuan had cleared it off for him and added a rolling office chair.
At that moment, Chen Zhuo had his head down, looking at the copy of *Fundamentals of Aerodynamics* splayed open on his desk.
The book was very thick. Its cover was a deep, old-fashioned blue, and its pages were filled with complex partial differential equations and diagrams of fluid forces.
Zhang Yuan, holding an enamel mug printed with the words "Labor is Most Glorious," walked over from the main control computer, yawning.
He went to the water cooler and filled his mug more than halfway with hot water, then dumped in three packets of Nescafé and stirred it with a worn-out glass rod.
As he passed Chen Zhuo’s workstation, Zhang Yuan stopped.
He leaned over to glance at the book on Chen Zhuo’s desk, then at Chen Zhuo’s gentle, quiet face, and couldn’t help but smile.
"That book’s a real snoozefest, huh?"
Zhang Yuan blew on the steam rising from his mug.
"Back when I first started grad school, I spent two months on this *Fundamentals* book. Every night in the dorm, I’d be reading it and just pass out. The fluid dynamics formulas inside are just way too convoluted."
Chen Zhuo put down the black gel pen in his hand and looked up.
He glanced at the dark, bruised-looking circles under Zhang Yuan’s eyes, then back at the massive tome in front of him.
"It’s alright."
Chen Zhuo leaned back slightly in his chair, his tone mild.
"The logic is quite rigorous. It’s just a bit lacking in thickness. If I used it as a pillow, my neck would be left hanging."
Zhang Yuan froze for a second, then burst out laughing with a PFFT, nearly splashing his hot coffee.
"You kid. You look all gentle and scholarly, but you don’t hold back when you’re roasting someone."
Zhang Yuan pointed at him with the glass rod.
"This textbook was compiled by the old masters of fluid dynamics in our country, and you’re complaining it’s too thin?"
Chen Zhuo just smiled and didn’t reply.
"Alright, you keep at it. Don’t force yourself. This stuff isn’t something you can understand in a few days. Whenever you get stuck, just jot it down on a piece of paper, and I’ll go over it with you at lunch."
After giving his advice, Zhang Yuan carried his bitterly strong coffee back to the main control computer that was causing him so much grief.
Chen Zhuo withdrew his gaze, his eyes falling back onto the pages of the book.
Zhang Yuan thought he was forcing himself.
But he wasn’t.
Pure mathematics was about absolute rigor and logical self-consistency; it was like building a perfect castle in the air on a blank sheet of paper.
The mathematics in fluid dynamics, however, was more like wrestling in the mud. It constantly required introducing all sorts of crude coefficients, boundary conditions, and empirical formulas to compromise with reality.
He read extremely fast.
It wasn’t the kind of speed that came from skimming ten lines at a glance, but because his foundation in mathematics was more than decent.
The derivations of the partial differential equations that had given Zhang Yuan and the others such headaches back in the day were, in Chen Zhuo’s eyes, as straightforward as watching one plus one equal two.
He didn’t need to understand how the formulas were derived; he just had to connect them to their corresponding physical meanings in his mind.
On the afternoon of Chen Zhuo’s first Friday in the lab, the Alchemist held the project team’s usual weekly meeting.
The conference room was at the end of the hallway. The air conditioning was off, with just two windows opened for ventilation.
"Xiaozhuo, today you’re just here to listen."
The Alchemist sat at the head of the table and pointed to the seat at the very end of the long conference table.
"No pressure. Just think of it as a chance to get a feel for the real atmosphere of our research group."
Zhang Yuan even went out of his way to get a paper cup of warm water and place it by Chen Zhuo’s hand, treating him completely like a mascot who was just there to observe.
The moment the meeting began, the atmosphere turned oppressive.
As the progress reports for various sub-projects were given, Zhang Yuan and several other master’s and doctoral students responsible for downstream data quickly started arguing.
"We can’t get the baseline air pressure data for the head of the train, so I can’t even input the parameters for my side flutter model!"
A short-haired senior researcher flipped through her report, her brow deeply furrowed.
"What do you want me to do if the simulation can’t get past the critical point?"
Zhang Yuan ran a hand through his messy hair, his face a mask of helplessness.
"The adaptive mesh refinement is already maxed out! If we subdivide any further, the memory on the lab’s PCs will overflow. We’ll fry the motherboards!"
"But you can’t just ignore the peak of the micro-shockwave! Once the boundary layer separates, the calculations for the vortex street effect in the wake are complete garbage. They have no reference value whatsoever!"
The conference room was filled with anxious energy and a slew of esoteric, complex fluid dynamics terminology.
Chen Zhuo sat silently at the far end of the long table, not saying a word.
He simply held his black gel pen and, on a blank sheet of scratch paper, jotted down the frequently used terms and ideas that came up during his seniors’ arguments, one by one.
The meeting dragged on for over two hours and finally ended without resolution, punctuated by a sigh from the Alchemist.
「A few more days passed.」
「The morning passed quickly.」
As noon approached, people in the lab gradually got up to go to the cafeteria for lunch.
Chen Zhuo closed the book in his hands and pulled out a sheet of scratch paper that had been tucked between its pages.
A few words were written on the paper in neat script.

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