Zhang Yuan sat at the center computer, not typing. He clutched a crumpled, misshapen cigarette, his eyes fixed on a desk calendar.
On the calendar, for eleven consecutive days leading up to today, heavy red X’s were drawn.
Only nine days remained until the date the Alchemist had mentioned—the day to access the supercomputer.
Lin Fang was sitting in a nearby chair, her head leaned back, eyes closed. Hearing the door open, she sluggishly opened her eyes and turned her head.
"Chen Zhuo."
Lin Fang’s voice was so hoarse it was barely a whisper.
Zhang Yuan snapped back to reality as well. He rotated his stiff neck and looked toward the door.
Chen Zhuo casually closed the door behind him, slung the backpack off his shoulder, and walked to the desk. He pulled over a folding chair and sat down.
He didn’t speak immediately, his gaze sweeping over Zhang Yuan’s bloodshot eyes and the calendar on the desk.
"Senior."
Chen Zhuo spoke, his voice perfectly steady.
Zhang Yuan twisted the corner of his mouth into a smile that was uglier than crying and tossed the mangled cigarette onto the desk.
"You’re here."
Zhang Yuan rubbed his face tiredly.
"I already told you on the phone. It’s 3D transonic flow, and the continuity equation is completely diverging. We’re dealing with over forty million mesh cells. Our local machines can’t even run a sandbox simulation, and we have to use the supercomputer in nine days."
Zhang Yuan paused, his voice thick with a profound sense of powerlessness.
"Using the supercomputer now would be suicide. Is there really no way out of this?"
Chen Zhuo looked at him.
He knew what Zhang Yuan and Lin Fang had endured for the past eleven days.
The first five days were spent wrestling with the laws of physics. The next six were spent waiting in despair. For any researcher, this was mental torment akin to being skinned alive.
Chen Zhuo didn’t offer any comfort, nor did he spout any hollow words of encouragement.
He reached out, unzipped his backpack, and took out a black notebook.
Chen Zhuo laid the notebook flat on the desk and pushed it in front of Zhang Yuan.
"There is one path."
Chen Zhuo’s finger tapped the notebook.
"But I can’t make any guarantees."
Zhang Yuan’s eyes suddenly lit up. His slumped body shot upright. Lin Fang also leaped up from her chair and hurried to the desk.
Zhang Yuan reached out to flip open the notebook.
Chen Zhuo’s hand remained pressed on the cover, unmoving.
"Senior, don’t celebrate just yet."
Chen Zhuo looked at Zhang Yuan, his gaze frank and honest.
"I spent six days in the old library. What’s written in this notebook... it doesn’t even qualify as a complete mathematical theorem."
Zhang Yuan’s hand froze in mid-air.
"What do you mean?"
"It means this is a flawed prototype."
Chen Zhuo withdrew his hand and leaned back slightly.
"It’s extremely crude. There are gaps in the logic, and I haven’t fully stitched together the boundary conditions for the algebraic and geometric transformations. If this draft were sent for blind peer review in the pure mathematics community, it would be sent right back for a rewrite."
Zhang Yuan stared at the notebook and swallowed hard.
"But is the direction right?" Zhang Yuan asked.
"It should be."
Chen Zhuo nodded.
"Following this direction should let us bypass that bottomless pit of computational power you’re stuck in."
Zhang Yuan snatched the notebook and flipped to the first page.
Lin Fang leaned in to look as well.
After just one glance, Zhang Yuan’s brow furrowed tightly, and Lin Fang froze.
The pages, densely packed with writing, contained neither the fluid dynamics equations they were familiar with, nor the kind of Discrete Matrix algebraic expressions Chen Zhuo had used last year.
It was filled with unfamiliar symbols, tensors, group theory, and mapping relationships.
Zhang Yuan flipped through a couple more pages, growing more alarmed and more confused with each one.
"What is this?"
Zhang Yuan looked up, his face a mask of bewilderment.
"Where are the fluid pressure waves? The velocity fields? How are the nonlinear terms of the N-S equations handled? Why isn’t there a single physical quantity on here?"
"Because what’s written here isn’t physics."
Chen Zhuo stood up and walked over to the large chalkboard in the center of the room.
Still on the chalkboard were the lengthy expansions of the Navier-Stokes equations that Zhang Yuan and the others had written days ago, along with various mesh-partitioning boundary conditions.
Chen Zhuo picked up the eraser. Without a hint of hesitation, he raised his hand and began to wipe forcefully from the top-left corner downwards.
The sound of the eraser scraping against the board was harsh in the quiet lab.
"Hey, you..."
Zhang Yuan instinctively wanted to stop him. That board held the sandbox initial conditions they had spent days deriving.
But Chen Zhuo didn’t stop.
He moved quickly and decisively. In a few swipes, he wiped the board clean of everything related to continuous fluids, difference schemes, and mesh nodes.
The entire board became a pure, blank slate.
Chen Zhuo tossed the eraser back into its tray and dusted the chalk from his hands. He turned and picked up a new piece of chalk from the desk.
"Senior."
Chen Zhuo held up the chalk and pointed to the blank board.
"Our previous thinking was held hostage by inertia. We kept trying to simulate a gust of wind—to simulate the forces of that wind striking forty million mesh points on the front of the train."
Chen Zhuo turned, and with the chalk, wrote a symbol representing an algebraic variety on the board.
"The path of physics is blocked by the limits of computational power. So, we’ll abandon physics."
The chalk flew across the board.
Chen Zhuo began transferring the symbols from the notebook—the ones they couldn’t understand—onto the board, line by line.
"Abandon physics?"
Lin Fang stood by the desk, feeling her entire understanding of the world being turned upside down.
"We’re trying to calculate the aerodynamics of a high-speed train entering a tunnel. How can we do that without physics?"

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