Suddenly, the tip of his pen froze on the paper.
In that paper from Germany, they had used a non-linear compensation term when dealing with irregular tunnel walls.
’What if I reverse-engineered this compensation term and embedded it into my own Jacobian matrix? Could that forcibly rein in the divergent error?’
Chen Zhuo’s eyes lit up slightly.
He immediately lowered his head, the tip of his pen once again flying across the page.
Row after row of complex algebraic expressions spread across the blank paper. He didn’t need a computer; his brain was a precision-tuned logic machine.
Time ticked by.
The chirping of the cicadas outside gradually quieted, and from the dormitory, the occasional cough echoed from deep down the hallway.
Wang Dayong was long asleep, his breathing even and steady.
Chen Zhuo remained seated under the small desk lamp.
Sometime after two in the morning, Chen Zhuo wrote down the final line of the matrix transformation’s result.
He substituted the initial conditions and mentally ran through the convergence limit.
Seventeen ten-thousandths.
Far below two-thousandths.
At the two severed ends, the energy had achieved perfect macroscopic conservation.
Chen Zhuo stopped writing. He looked at the matrix logic on the paper—a system that, while appearing somewhat rigid and lacking in physical elegance, was mathematically indestructible—and let out a long breath.
He capped his pen with a soft CLICK.
’It’s done.’
’Tomorrow is Friday.’
’According to the Alchemist’s custom, the weekly group meeting would be held in the afternoon.’
「The next afternoon.」 In Huizhou, the weather was so oppressively hot and humid it was hard to breathe. A thick layer of cumulonimbus clouds hung in the sky, and there wasn’t a single stir of wind.
Inside the third-floor conference room of the Physics Building, the atmosphere was even more suffocating than the weather outside.
This was the third group meeting.
There were only three full days left until the deadline for the mid-term review report demanded by their superiors.
The Alchemist sat at the head of the long conference table.
He looked several years older than he had the week before. The corners of his eyes drooped, and the deep furrow between his brows seemed to have been carved with a knife.
The ashtray in front of him was overflowing with cigarette butts, and a suffocating stench of nicotine filled the conference room.
No one spoke.
The entire research group sat on either side of the long table, each one of them as dejected as a wilted plant.
Lin Fang’s eyes were red. She stared down at her empty notebook. A bespectacled young man anxiously gnawed on his pen, nearly biting through the plastic barrel.
Zhang Yuan stood before the blackboard, a piece of chalk in his hand.
The string of partial differential equations was still on the board, but the once-neat handwriting was now a mess of corrections and smudges, like a series of wounds that wouldn’t heal.
"It’s hopeless."
Zhang Yuan turned around, his voice terribly hoarse.
He had slept less than ten hours in total over the past few days, and he radiated an air of utter exhaustion, as if he were running on fumes.
"Dean Fang, we’ve tried every method we could think of. Grid partitioning, boundary micro-adjustments, even forcibly stripping the higher-order terms from the equation."
Zhang Yuan’s hand fell limply to his side. The chalk dropped to the floor and rolled into a corner.
"The laws of physics are a solid iron wall."
Zhang Yuan looked at the Alchemist, his face a mask of bitterness and helplessness.
"As long as we insist on simulating that 0.01 second of microscopic continuity, our current microcomputer hardware absolutely cannot handle it. That’s a computational limit, not something human effort can push past."
The conference room was terrifyingly silent.
This was the cruelest moment.
It wasn’t because they were lazy, nor was it because they lacked knowledge.
They were some of the nation’s top researchers in fluid dynamics, yet they were being choked by a few outdated machines, forced to watch a national key project slip into the abyss right in their hands.
The Alchemist reached out and pulled another cigarette from the pack.
He fumbled for his lighter, taking two tries to get it lit.
He took a deep drag, and the smoke slowly dissipated into the murky air of the conference room.
"Stop trying."
The Alchemist’s voice sounded old and weary.
The moment he said it, Zhang Yuan’s body went rigid. Lin Fang buried her head even lower, and a teardrop splattered onto her blank notebook.
Everyone knew what those two words meant.
"There’s no time."
The Alchemist leaned back in his chair, his gaze fixed on some point in the empty space before him, not looking at anyone.
"The higher-ups want to see results, not our crash reports."
The Alchemist turned his head to look at Zhang Yuan.
"Zhang Yuan, give up on the micro-shockwave’s peak."
The Alchemist’s tone was laced with a deep sense of helplessness and compromise.
"Force the grid parameters to be larger. Skip that most intense 0.01-second interval. Just take the stable data from before and after entering the tunnel, and create a smooth transition curve in the middle."
Zhang Yuan’s eyes instantly turned red. He took a step forward, his voice trembling.
"Dean Fang! That’s falsifying data! That curve doesn’t even exist in physics! We’ve dedicated our lives to rigorous academia, and now you want us to submit conventional data with gross errors? If there’s an accident later because of this, our entire research group will be nailed to the pillar of shame!"
"I said, increase the parameters."
The Alchemist’s tone grew heavy, cutting off Zhang Yuan’s impassioned speech. He viciously stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray.
"I’ll accept the shame! I’ll take the blame! Submitting a report with errors is better than handing in a blank sheet and telling the higher-ups we’ve accomplished nothing!"
The Alchemist closed his eyes, hiding the pain within them.
"Just do as I say. Go and change the underlying code immediately after the meeting. We must have the data run by the end of today."
The conference room was dead silent.
For everyone present, this was nothing short of a public execution of their academic careers.
Zhang Yuan closed his eyes in anguish, his hands gripping the edge of the lectern so tightly his knuckles turned white.
In the midst of this suffocating, dead silence,
Chen Zhuo, sitting at the far end of the long table, stopped his pen.
For the past half-hour, he had been sitting quietly in his corner. He hadn’t listened to Zhang Yuan’s despairing report, nor had he looked at the pained struggle on the Alchemist’s face.
He had simply been copying the final two lines of the convergence verification formula he’d derived in his dorm room last night, transcribing them neatly into his hardcover notebook.
He carefully checked the parameters on both sides of the equals sign one last time.
’Everything checks out.’
’The error is locked firmly at seventeen ten-thousandths.’
Chen Zhuo picked up the black gel pen—a pen that had already gone through three ink refills—and slowly capped it.
CLICK.
In the dead-silent conference room, the soft sound was exceptionally clear.
Then,
RIIIP—
The crisp sound of paper tearing rang out.
Zhang Yuan froze, turning his red-rimmed eyes. Lin Fang also looked up, her face streaked with tears. Even the Alchemist, at the head of the table, frowned and cast his gaze toward the far end of the long table.
Everyone’s eyes were fixed on Chen Zhuo.
He took the draft page he had just torn out—covered in discrete algebraic matrices—and gave it a gentle push across the smooth surface of the long conference table.
The paper slid more than a meter, stopping just beside Zhang Yuan’s hand.
Chen Zhuo looked up, his gaze calm and open as he met Zhang Yuan’s eyes.
His tone was as gentle and sincere as ever, just as it had been when they first met.
He was like a student who had just finished a tricky advanced math problem in the study hall and was now passing it to a classmate to check the answer.
"Senior."
Chen Zhuo looked at Zhang Yuan, his voice calm and even.
"Since the microcomputers really can’t run that continuity equation, and forcing it to skip a step creates such a large error..."
Chen Zhuo pointed to the paper.
"I’ve spent the last few days trying to sever it with an algebraic matrix."
The conference room was so quiet you could hear a pin drop.
Chen Zhuo spoke slowly, his enunciation perfectly clear.
"I created a Discrete Matrix black box and packed the 0.01-second microscopic process inside. I’ve verified it several times. As long as we constrain the energy states at the beginning and end, the error won’t exceed two-thousandths."
Chen Zhuo leaned back slightly in his chair, a hint of relief in his expression, like someone who had just finished a difficult problem.
"I just finished the final convergence verification. Take a look at this logic. Do you think you could plug it into your underlying program and give it a run?"

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