The Alchemist sat at the head of the table, his back to the window.
His brow was furrowed. He held a half-smoked cigarette between his fingers, its ash grown long and precarious, but he seemed completely unaware.
Zhang Yuan stood by the large blackboard at the front of the conference room.
He looked much more haggard than he had the previous week.
His hair was a messy bird’s nest that hadn’t been touched in days. Dark circles spread from under his eyes, and his white lab coat was wrinkled.
The other graduate students sitting along the long table all had their heads bowed.
Some spun pens in their hands unconsciously. Others stared blankly at the data reports in front of them, filled with empty tables.
An oppressive atmosphere of desperation, of a total system failure, felt like a heavy, waterlogged sponge pressed firmly against every face.
Chen Zhuo made no sound.
He slipped past a few chairs to an out-of-the-way seat at the far end of the long table and sat down quietly.
He placed his backpack on his lap but didn’t take out a pen or paper.
Shortly after Chen Zhuo sat down, Zhang Yuan, still standing before the blackboard, finally broke the suffocating silence.
"Dean Fang, we’re really stuck."
Zhang Yuan’s voice was unusually hoarse, tinged with a deep sense of helplessness.
He turned and pointed with the chalk stub in his hand at the long string of complex partial differential equations on the blackboard.
It was the aerodynamic model describing the violent air compression that occurs the instant a high-speed train enters a tunnel.
"At the 0.01-second mark after the train enters the tunnel, the slope of the pressure spike is nearly a vertical line."
Zhang Yuan looked at the Alchemist, the bitter expression on his face so thick it was almost tangible.
"This past week, to ensure the absolute physical continuity of our fluid model, I’ve refined the spatial grid down to the absolute finest resolution our system can handle."
Zhang Yuan tossed the chalk stub aside and dusted the white powder from his hands.
"But we’ve hit the limits of our hardware. The variables explode exponentially. The moment the simulation reaches that 0.01-second critical point, the memory’s data stack is instantly overwhelmed."
He took a deep breath, a hint of despair creeping into his voice.
"This week alone, we’ve burned out two memory sticks just trying to push past that point. If we keep forcing it like this, we’ll fry the motherboard next."
Zhang Yuan’s words struck everyone like a hammer to the chest.
A few suppressed sighs echoed in the conference room.
A female graduate student with short hair, sitting on the left, looked up, her eyes filled with anxiety.
She was in charge of the model for the train body’s lateral flutter.
"Dean Fang, the first draft for our project’s mid-term review is due at the end of next month."
The student flipped through the empty notebook in front of her.
"Now that we can’t generate the micro-shockwave data for the nose of the train, all the lateral force parameters on my end are a complete mess. We can’t just submit a report with fabricated data, can we?"
A male student across the table chimed in, his tone resigned.
"My simulation of the wake vortex street effect is completely stalled too. The source flow is blocked, so I can’t run any downstream calculations."
All eyes finally fell upon the Alchemist.
Everyone knew this wasn’t because Zhang Yuan was slacking off, nor was it a matter of incompetence.
They had hit a dead end—a path that was theoretically sound but impossible to execute with their current hardware.
The Alchemist pressed the cigarette, which had nearly burned down to his fingers, into the ashtray, grinding it out forcefully.
He looked up at the equations on the blackboard.
"I called the supercomputing center yesterday."
The Alchemist’s voice was heavy.
"Their schedule is completely booked for the rest of the year. Even if we apply now, it’ll be at least three months before we get approved. It’s too little, too late."
The Alchemist looked at Zhang Yuan, making one last attempt.
"Zhang Yuan, can we compromise on the physical boundary conditions? Or, mathematically, can we smooth out that extremely steep curve a little? Stop the computer from having to brute-force such an extreme grid?"
"No, Dean Fang."
Zhang Yuan shook his head, his tone firm, bordering on instinctual stubbornness.
"The micro-shockwave is a real physical phenomenon. The air compression process is absolutely continuous. If we forcibly smooth out that pressure peak or coarsen the grid just to accommodate the processing power of these crappy computers..."
Zhang Yuan pointed at the blackboard, his voice resolute.
"...then we’d be violating the most fundamental principle of continuity in fluid dynamics! Once the model is no longer continuous, it ceases to be an objective reflection of physics. The data it generates would be completely wrong. And if the downstream teams use that garbage data for stress testing, the resulting high-speed train will kill people!"
A dead end.
A dead end, with the exit sealed by the prospect of human lives.
The Alchemist said no more.
The conference room fell into a dead silence, broken only by the faint, occasional ringing of a bicycle bell from outside.
Chen Zhuo remained seated quietly at the far end of the long table.
In front of him sat a paper cup of water that Zhang Yuan had poured for him before the meeting. The water was no longer warm.
Unlike the previous week, he wasn’t jotting down the esoteric fluid dynamics terms that everyone was tossing around.
He just stared at the string of continuous partial differential equations on the blackboard.
’Combining the vast number of cutting-edge papers Su Wei had helped him find over the past two weeks with the theoretical framework he had painstakingly gleaned from *Fundamentals of Aerodynamics*, he had completed the translation in his mind: from a physical predicament to a mathematical deadlock.’
’The senior members were right.’
’The physical world is, of course, continuous. Air doesn’t just spontaneously rupture. The equations Zhang Yuan had written on the board were textbook-perfect.’
’But they were trying to make a 1990s-era microcomputer handle the computational load of a god.’
’In their quest to mathematically plot a perfectly smooth pressure-spike curve, they had pushed this poor machine to its breaking point.’
’The real world is messy. Engineering is even messier.’
Chen Zhuo lowered his head slightly.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a black gel pen.
He uncapped it, gently posting the cap on the end of the pen.
He opened the plain notebook in front of him to a clean, blank page.
The others in the conference room were still sighing over how to optimize the miserable boundary conditions, and the Alchemist was still chain-smoking.
No one noticed Chen Zhuo in his corner.
Chen Zhuo didn’t say a word. He was like a quiet watchmaker, undisturbed by the outside world.
The tip of his pen touched the paper without the slightest hesitation.
An extremely rigid, almost crude, discrete algebraic matrix began to take shape under his pen.
’If pursuing physical continuity would destroy the machine, then forget continuity.’
’Smash that fatal 0.01-second time slice to pieces.’
’Stop caring about the exact, infinitesimal flow of air within it. Instead, package it into a black box of fault-tolerant matrix nodes.’
’Not enough processing power? Then reduce the dimensionality.’
The group meeting eventually broke up, shrouded in a quiet, oppressive atmosphere.
No real progress had been made, and everyone’s steps were heavy as they filed out.
「Back in the lab.」
The somber atmosphere seemed to have grown even thicker.
Zhang Yuan walked over to his main workstation and pulled off the side panel of the computer case under his desk.
He sighed, reached in, and expertly removed a stick of RAM.
The edges of the RAM stick were slightly blackened. Up close, you could smell the faint, acrid scent of a scorched circuit board.
Zhang Yuan held the ruined stick of RAM and threw it onto the desk with a CLATTER.
He slumped back in his chair, completely drained, and turned his head.
Chen Zhuo, who had just returned to the lab with the others, was in his corner taking out several English-language research papers and stacking them neatly on the corner of his desk.
Looking at Chen Zhuo’s young, gentle face—one that had clearly not yet been brutalized by the harsh realities of research—Zhang Yuan gave a bitter smile and shook his head.
’He felt that, as the senior graduate student, he ought to give this newcomer a bit of a warning.’
"Scared you, didn’t it, junior?"
Zhang Yuan pointed to the stick of RAM on his desk, his voice full of the resigned sorrow of a seasoned veteran.
"This is what real research is like. It’s not all flashes of inspiration and changing the world. Nine days out of ten, you’re just dealing with crashes. You go down a path until you can’t see, beat your head against a wall until you’re bloody, only to find out it was a dead end all along."
Zhang Yuan heaved a long sigh.
"Working on a major project like ours... it’s just a bottomless pit."
Chen Zhuo finished aligning the corners of his papers and set them down.
Hearing the tragic grandeur in Zhang Yuan’s voice, Chen Zhuo paused.
He turned his head. His gaze fell on the blackened stick of RAM on Zhang Yuan’s desk, then shifted to Zhang Yuan’s heavy, dark circles. He offered a gentle smile.
"Look on the bright side, senior."
"At least it showed some mercy and only fried the RAM. If it had taken the motherboard with it, Dean Fang would probably smash the table to bits at tomorrow’s meeting."
Zhang Yuan, who had been wallowing in his tragic mood, was taken aback by the comment.
He opened his mouth, staring at Chen Zhuo’s placid face, which still held a hint of a polite smile. The breath caught in his throat, and he suddenly didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
’Right. If the motherboard fried, then they’d really be screwed.’
"You... kid..."
Zhang Yuan ran a hand through his messy hair and let out a long breath.

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