Li Jianming’s gaze flickered.
Chen Zhuo straightened up, his tone taking on a hint of pure inquiry.
"The real world doesn’t lie, and nature certainly won’t evolve to accommodate a flawed formula."
Chen Zhuo pointed at the paper.
"Since it converges in reality, that proves it. Beneath this crude cut I made, behind this ugly truncation, there absolutely has to be a beautiful, symmetrical algebraic geometry structure—one so rigorous it has no flaws."
Chen Zhuo gave a slight smile.
"It must have a legitimate homology proof. It’s just that my own foundation is too weak. I can’t see its true form, much less unearth its roots."
Chen Zhuo took a step back and stood before the desk.
"The School of Physics has already paid. I could very well take the money and leave, but my conscience won’t let me."
Chen Zhuo looked at Li Jianming.
"That’s why I came back. I want to ask you to help me see what’s really buried under all this."
The office instantly fell silent.
The only sound was the soft bubbling of the water cooler as it heated up.
Li Jianming stood behind his desk, the heaving of his chest slowly subsiding.
He didn’t curse him out again.
He lowered his head, staring intently through his reading glasses at the first-order truncation formula on his desk—the very one he had just cursed as a hooligan’s trick.
The mathematician’s purism in him made him utterly detest such a brutish approach.
But at that moment, the mathematician’s curiosity and competitive spirit were thoroughly ignited by Chen Zhuo’s words.
’An utterly illogical truncation, yet it perfectly matched the real-world convergence.’
It was like a bizarre, foul-smelling building block that nonetheless fit seamlessly, forcibly wedged into the exquisite edifice of theory.
’How did it get wedged in there?’
’On what grounds could it possibly fit?’
Li Jianming’s eyes began to light up, bit by bit. The anxiety and fatigue born from waiting for an email were swept away in an instant, replaced by a sense of pure excitement.
He slowly reached out and picked up the paper.
He read it very slowly. This was no longer the cursory inspection from before; instead, he followed the logic of Chen Zhuo’s truncation, trying to reverse-engineer it in his mind.
One minute.
Two minutes.
Li Jianming’s brow furrowed deeper and deeper, but his eyes only grew brighter.
He found that he couldn’t immediately falsify the truncation in his head.
There was an extremely hidden and complex mapping pathway within, one that this truncation had forcibly concealed.
SLAP.
Li Jianming abruptly slapped the paper back down on the desk.
He snatched off his reading glasses and tossed them beside the keyboard.
Then, he reached up to unbutton his collar, shucked off the gray knit vest he wore over his shirt, and casually slung it over the back of his executive chair.
The old professor’s movements were crisp and efficient, carrying the air of a man heading into battle.
He rounded the desk and strode over to the enormous blackboard mounted on the wall.
The blackboard was still densely covered with the homology group formulas Wu Tao had used for his thesis derivations two days prior.
Without a second glance, Li Jianming snatched the eraser from the lectern.
With a few forceful swipes and a cloud of billowing chalk dust, the conventional formulas that Wu Tao had pulled two all-nighters to derive were ruthlessly erased by Li Jianming, leaving no trace behind.
"Professor!"
Wu Tao shot to his feet in alarm.
"That was my—"
"Shut up!"
Li Jianming didn’t even turn around, his voice laced with an undeniable authority.
"Those useless homology groups of yours are already saved on the hard drive. What are they doing still hanging on the blackboard? Wasting space!"
Stung into silence, Wu Tao could only sink back into his chair, looking aggrieved.
Li Jianming tossed the eraser back onto the lectern with a dull thud.
He plucked a fresh piece of white chalk from the box.
On the top left corner of the blackboard, he forcefully wrote down the initial conditions of Chen Zhuo’s equation.
After finishing the first line, Li Jianming stopped and turned to look at Chen Zhuo, who was standing by the desk.
The reprimand in the old professor’s eyes was gone, replaced by the fervor of a man encountering something new.
"Close the door. Lock it."
Li Jianming gestured toward the office door with his chalk-wielding hand.
A soft smile graced the corners of Chen Zhuo’s lips.
He turned, walked to the door, took the handle, gently pulled the door shut, and then pushed the lock button.
CLICK.
The sound of the lock engaging was exceptionally clear in the quiet office.
"Get over here."
Li Jianming beckoned.
Chen Zhuo walked to the blackboard and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Li Jianming.
"Since you know there’s something under all this, don’t just stand there like a spectator."
Li Jianming snapped the piece of chalk in his hand, tossing a fragment to Chen Zhuo.
"I’ll build the geometric framework; you’ll be responsible for calculating the Discrete Matrix. Even if it takes us till midnight, I’m going to fix this crude patch of yours and make it whole using orthodox algebraic geometry."
Chen Zhuo reached out and caught the chalk fragment.
"Alright."
Chen Zhuo nodded.
Li Jianming turned to face the blackboard.
"Let’s start with the definition of a complex manifold. We’ll throw your first-order truncation into a vector bundle and see how it converges at the boundary."
As he spoke, the chalk in Li Jianming’s hand was already flying across the blackboard.
Abstruse symbols of algebraic geometry materialized on the board, one after another.
Chen Zhuo stood to the side, his gaze locked on Li Jianming’s chalk.
His brain was like a supercomputer just booting up, rapidly translating the geometric concepts Li Jianming wrote into discrete algebraic matrices.
"Professor, if we substitute it into the vector bundle, the boundary will diverge at the third order."
Chen Zhuo raised his piece of chalk and, beneath Li Jianming’s formula, swiftly scribbled out a three-line derivation of matrix multiplication. At the end, he drew an arrow pointing to an infinity symbol.

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