He turned his head, looking at the dejected Zhang Yuan and Lin Fang sitting there, and lifted his chin slightly.
"But this is the School of Physics."
Chen Zhuo touched the chalk to the whiteboard.
He didn’t try to write that illusory, rigorous proof again. Instead, he drew a slash right through the broken logical chain.
Then, next to it, he added an approximate polynomial with a first-order truncation.
"Senior, I have a question for you."
Chen Zhuo asked without turning his head, still writing.
"Do you guys need absolute cosmic truth?"
Zhang Yuan was stunned.
"In your eyes, for building a train, does it make a difference if pi is 3.14159 or an irrational number calculated to ten thousand decimal places?"
Chen Zhuo stopped writing.
He turned around, pointing to the new line of the formula he had added to the whiteboard.
"Since we can’t deduce a perfect algebraic mapping here, I’ll just force a penalty term onto it. I’m truncating it."
Chen Zhuo looked at Zhang Yuan, his eyes filled with pragmatism.
"Mathematically, this patch is completely unreasonable. If I tried to publish a paper with this, the blind reviewers would think I was insane."
Chen Zhuo paused.
"But in terms of physics, the computational error it produces is in the sixth decimal place."
Chen Zhuo held the chalk and tapped it lightly against the whiteboard.
"An error of one in one hundred thousand—does that affect your measurement of the wind resistance?"
Zhang Yuan sat in his chair, staring blankly at Chen Zhuo, then at the forcibly stitched-together formula on the whiteboard.
The common sense of an engineer quickly returned to him.
’That’s right.’
Engineering has never been a science that pursues absolute perfection. It is the art of compromise.
As long as the error was within the acceptable tolerance range, the theory was a useful tool, no matter how un-rigorous it was.
Zhang Yuan’s eyes slowly lit up.
He shot up from his chair and strode to the computer.
"It doesn’t."
Zhang Yuan’s voice was still hoarse, but the despair and helplessness had been swept away.
He pulled Lin Fang aside and sat down at the main keyboard himself.
"An error of one in one hundred thousand, on a train over two hundred meters long, doesn’t even amount to the resistance of a single strand of hair. It’s enough."
Zhang Yuan placed his hands on the keyboard and turned to look at Chen Zhuo, a fire burning in his eyes.
"Let’s code. We’ll bypass it."
Seeing Zhang Yuan back in form, Chen Zhuo gave a slight nod.
He turned back around and continued to complete the rest of the formula.
「For the next three days, the sound of keyboards in the lab never stopped.」
The patch Chen Zhuo had forced in, while not logically elegant, perfectly circumvented the risk of memory overflow at the code level.
There was no longer a need to partition forty million mesh grids.
All the fluid boundaries were converted into sets of large systems of equations at the base level, composed of polynomial coefficients.
「On the ninth day.」
「11:40 PM.」
Twenty minutes remained until their scheduled time on the Chinese Academy of Sciences Supercomputing Center’s machines.
The air in the lab was as oppressive as the muggy sky before a summer storm.
Zhang Yuan typed the last semicolon.
His finger hovered over the Enter key, hesitating to press down.
Lin Fang stood behind him, her hands clenched tightly around the hem of her shirt, her palms drenched in sweat.
Chen Zhuo sat on a folding chair to the side. The notebook in front of him was open, recording all the key points derived on the whiteboard over the past nine days.
He screwed the cap back onto his mineral water bottle and quieted his breathing.
"It’s all written."
Zhang Yuan stared at the code window—green text on a black background—his voice soft, as if afraid of startling something.
"Run it," Chen Zhuo said.
Zhang Yuan swallowed, his finger pressing down hard on the Enter key.
CLICK.
The fans of the four servers whirred to a higher pitch in the same second.
A low, humming noise reverberated through the lab.
Zhang Yuan’s eyes were glued to a monitoring window in the bottom-right corner of the screen, which showed a line graph of the memory usage.
Before, whenever it reached the transonic phase, that line would shoot up vertically like a rocket until it smashed through the 100% red line, followed by a blue screen of death.
A minute passed.
The line held steady at 45%, with only minor fluctuations.
"It didn’t crash..."
Lin Fang murmured, her voice trembling.
A progress bar appeared in the center of the screen.
This time, it didn’t get stuck at that despair-inducing 1%.
The green band advanced slowly but surely across the black interface.
Each jump was accompanied by the real-time solving of a massive number of underlying algebraic equation systems. There was no interference between mesh nodes, only pure coefficient computation.
Time passed, second by second.
「Half an hour later.」
The sound of the fans gradually subsided.
The progress bar reached 100%.
The black code window vanished instantly, replaced by a rough but well-defined 3D model of the train’s head.
Around this model, several parabolic curves representing changes in fluid pressure extended smoothly and gracefully.
No breaks.
No "NaN" invalid data points indicating a crash.
Even though its precision still looked a bit crude on the current servers, its logic was a completely closed loop.
The sandbox test passed.
Staring at the parabolas on the screen, Zhang Yuan’s hands slid off the keyboard.
He didn’t cheer, nor did he jump up and weep with his head in his hands like in the movies.
He just slumped bonelessly against the back of his swivel chair, as if all the strength had been drained from his body.
He tilted his head back, staring at the fluorescent light on the ceiling that was always buzzing. His chest heaved once, and he let out a long, long exhale, releasing the tension he’d held for over ten days.
Lin Fang was slumped over the edge of the desk, her face buried in her arms. She made no sound, but her shoulders trembled slightly.
’We made it.’
With only twenty minutes left before their execution, they had forcibly smashed open the iron gate named "computational power."
Chen Zhuo sat on the folding chair, watching the two collapsed figures, his expression still gentle.
He didn’t disturb them.
He lowered his head and pulled a black gel pen from his pocket.
He flipped to the newest page in his notebook. On it was the first-order truncated approximation term he had forcibly added to the whiteboard on the sixth day.
Chen Zhuo looked at the formula.
In the eyes of Zhang Yuan and Lin Fang, it was the antidote that had saved the project. But in Chen Zhuo’s eyes, it was an unsightly scar.
’It’s correct, physically.’
’But mathematically, it isn’t.’
A sense of regret, born from pure intellectual curiosity, pricked his heart gently like a very fine needle.
It didn’t hurt, but the empty feeling of a missing puzzle piece made him uncomfortable.
’Algebraic geometry.’
’Where is the absolute boundary of an isomorphic mapping?’
Chen Zhuo drew a small question mark next to the formula.
Then, he gently closed the notebook.
RING—
The landline on Zhang Yuan’s desk suddenly rang, the sound exceptionally jarring in the quiet room.
Zhang Yuan shot up as if electrocuted and snatched the receiver.
"Hello, Professor."
Zhang Yuan’s voice was terribly hoarse, but it carried an unprecedented sense of confidence and conviction.
On the other end of the line, Alchemist was probably sitting in some lounge at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Supercomputing Center, pulling an all-nighter while waiting for the final verdict.
"It ran."
Zhang Yuan’s eyes reddened as he looked at the waveform graph on the screen.
"We deleted the mesh. The underlying logic didn’t diverge. The sandbox ran successfully."
Zhang Yuan’s voice grew steadier.
"Professor, the code is already packaged. You can run it on the supercomputer anytime."
Chen Zhuo stuffed the notebook into his backpack.
He zipped it up and slung the bag over one shoulder.
Zhang Yuan was still on the phone with Alchemist, reporting the data file paths and compiling environment, his voice trembling with excitement.
Chen Zhuo didn’t make a sound to interrupt him.
He walked to the desk and met the eyes of Lin Fang, who had lifted her head.
Chen Zhuo gestured toward the door, smiled slightly, and nodded.
Lin Fang looked at him, her eyes filled with gratitude. She opened her mouth, wanting to say thank you.
Chen Zhuo waved his hand, signaling that it was nothing.
He turned and pushed open the heavy, soundproof door.
A draft blew in from the corridor, carrying away the musty smell that clung to him from being cooped up for so long.
Chen Zhuo stepped out and gently pulled the door closed behind him.

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