The pages documented the dead ends they had explored, as well as that headache-inducing boundary oscillation term.
Chen Zhuo casually stuffed the stack of papers into his jacket pocket.
"Well, we’ll be heading out then."
Chen Zhuo looked at Li Jianming and smiled, his tone returning to its usual easygoing and relaxed state.
"Professor Li, you should head home and get some rest too. Remember to take your blood pressure medication on time. Even though we’re stuck on this problem, at least it didn’t send your blood pressure skyrocketing. I’d call that our biggest research achievement for the day."
Listening to Chen Zhuo’s impertinent teasing, Li Jianming’s heavy mood lightened a little.
He pointed at Chen Zhuo in exasperation.
"You little brat. You can’t say a single serious thing, can you? Now get out of here. And don’t let me see you in the School of Mathematics building for the next couple of days."
"You got it."
Chen Zhuo picked up the book he had borrowed and tapped it twice on Wu Tao’s desk.
"Let’s go, Senior Brother Wu. Stop staring. The more you look, the more confusing it gets. The No. 2 Cafeteria should have braised pork ribs today. If we’re late, there won’t even be any broth left."
Wu Tao gave a wry smile and slung his backpack over his shoulder.
"I don’t think I could stomach pork ribs right now. My head is just full of infinite oscillation. The thought of any food makes me sick."
The two said their goodbyes to Li Jianming and left the office, one after the other.
The door shut behind them with a dull thud.
The hallway was dimly lit.
Classes had just let out, and the academic building was bustling with students coming and going. Some were chatting and laughing, others were clutching lunch boxes as they rushed to the cafeteria. The air was filled with the lively, vibrant energy of everyday life.
Wu Tao walked beside him, still looking a little dazed.
He watched the carefree undergraduates and suddenly sighed.
"Chen Zhuo, do you think... we chose the wrong path from the start? Forcibly stitching together discrete and continuous... there aren’t many successful examples of that kind of cross-disciplinary approach in the history of mathematics. Maybe Professor Li’s initial idea was right. Maybe we should have just stuck to the fundamentals of algebraic geometry and worked our way down from there."
Wu Tao’s voice was low, as if he were asking Chen Zhuo, yet also asking himself.
Chen Zhuo slowed his pace.
He didn’t answer Wu Tao’s question directly.
He slid a hand into his jacket pocket. Through the thin fabric, he could feel the folded stack of scratch paper, its slightly rough texture transmitting to his fingertips.
"Senior Brother Wu."
Chen Zhuo’s gaze fell on a window at the turn of the staircase ahead.
Outside, a tree branch swayed in the wind.
"There are no right or wrong paths. If a path is blocked, it just means the tools we’re using aren’t right for the job."
Chen Zhuo’s voice was calm, offering neither comfort nor showing any sign of discouragement.
"Just because calculus in the continuous domain can’t untie this knot doesn’t mean something else can’t. It’s like fixing a circuit board. If a multimeter can’t find the fault, you switch to an oscilloscope. The tools are static, but we’re not."
He patted Wu Tao on the shoulder.
"Don’t dwell on it. The sweet and sour pork ribs are on me tonight. We’ll treat it as a memorial for our boundary that just refuses to converge."
Wu Tao was taken aback for a moment by his bizarre logic.
"Who’s ever heard of holding a memorial for a calculus problem with pork ribs...?"
Wu Tao shook his head, but the corners of his mouth finally lifted into a small smile.
"Alright, fine. If you’re buying, I’m getting a double portion of meat. I’ve lost way too many brain cells today, I need to replenish them."
The two headed down the stairs, merging into the bustling crowd.
A late spring breeze drifted in through the hallway window, carrying with it the faint scent of white magnolias.
Walking among the crowd, Chen Zhuo looked no different from any other guy around him—the ones discussing which internet cafe to pull an all-nighter at, or complaining about their calculus professor’s high failure rate.
But only he knew.
The ink on the scratch paper in his pocket still felt like it was burning.
That infinitely oscillating boundary error term was a tangled knot, stubbornly lodged in the depths of his mind.
’Calculus wouldn’t work.
Analysis wouldn’t work.
The Gauss-Bonnet Theorem was useless.
So, what could possibly lock down the global properties of a network’s topology amidst all that chaos and oscillation?
What is it that remains invariant under local deformation?’
Chen Zhuo descended the steps of the academic building.
The afterglow of the setting sun fell on his face.
He narrowed his eyes slightly.
’It’s okay,’ Chen Zhuo told himself.
’The most important lesson rebirth had taught him was patience.
In this vast labyrinth of logic and numbers, as long as you never stop searching, you will always find the end of the thread hidden in the darkness.’
’As for now...’
Chen Zhuo rubbed his somewhat empty stomach.
’First, pork ribs.’

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