Li Jianming stopped writing and looked at the result Chen Zhuo had written down.
"It diverges?"
Li Jianming frowned, staring at the infinity symbol for a moment.
"That means this mapping channel is wrong. Erase it. We’ll start over. Let’s try the algebraic closed-chain approach."
Li Jianming picked up the eraser and unhesitatingly wiped away what he had just written.
Wu Tao sat on the sofa.
His gaze traveled over the coffee table in front of him, landing on the backs of the old man and the young man at the blackboard.
The chalk in Li Jianming’s hand moved quickly across the board.
Gone was the impatience from when he had been scolding Chen Zhuo; his movements now held a pure, focused intensity.
One by one, symbols for algebraic varieties representing complex manifolds and vector bundles took shape amid the white chalk dust.
Wu Tao instinctively leaned forward. He pulled a blank sheet from the pile of discarded draft paper on the coffee table and picked up the black gel pen he had just been chewing on.
He lowered his head and, following the initial conditions Li Jianming was writing on the board, began to work out the convergence of the boundary on the paper.
Step one: introduce the vector bundle.
Step two: calculate the homology class of the boundary.
The tip of Wu Tao’s pen flew across the paper. His line of thought was clear—this was a standard, rigorous algebraic proof path.
If he just followed it, he could figure out exactly where this truncation would cause a problem in five minutes at most.
He had just finished the third line of the formula and was about to substitute in the next variable.
"Professor, if we substitute in the vector bundle, the boundary here will diverge at the third order."
Chen Zhuo’s voice rang out in the office.
It wasn’t loud, and his tone was as calm as if he were remarking that the cafeteria food was a bit salty at lunch.
Wu Tao’s pen came to a sudden halt.
He looked up at Chen Zhuo, who was standing before the blackboard.
Chen Zhuo was indeed holding that half-stick of chalk, but he hadn’t written a single step of calculation on the board.
He just stood there, looked at the initial conditions Li Jianming had just finished writing, and stated the result directly.
Wu Tao fell silent for a moment. ’How could anyone mentally calculate the order of divergence for a mapping involving multidimensional matrices and higher-order polynomials?’
He said nothing, just lowered his head, gritted his teeth, and continued to work through the proof on his paper.
One minute.
Two minutes.
A fine layer of sweat broke out on Wu Tao’s forehead. He substituted the homology class he had derived and performed the matrix multiplication.
He’d figured it out.
The result did indeed diverge at the third order, ultimately tending towards infinity.
Wu Tao let out a long breath. Staring at the result on his scratch paper, an indescribable feeling rose within him. ’This junior brother of mine... he just keeps getting more and more incredible. He’s on a completely different level from when he first arrived.’
He tapped the paper with the tip of his pen, raised his head, and prepared to join the discussion.
"Professor."
Wu Tao spoke up, his voice tinged with the excitement of having reached the solution.
"Since it diverges at the third order, could we maybe try introducing a Laplacian operator here to handle this divergent term..."
His words died in his throat before he could finish.
Because at the front of the room, Li Jianming had already picked up the eraser.
"It diverges?"
Li Jianming stared at the board for a second, his brow furrowed.
"That just means this mapping channel is a dead end."
SWISH.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Li Jianming erased all the complex formulas he had just written.
"This path is useless. Let’s start over. We’ll try the algebraic closed-chain approach and bypass this vector bundle."
As he spoke, Li Jianming picked up the chalk again and wrote a new set of equations on the board.
Chen Zhuo nodded, his eyes locked on Li Jianming’s new formulas. The chalk in his hand made a few phantom strokes in mid-air as his brain spun up to high speed again.
Wu Tao sat on the sofa, mouth agape, watching the two of them, who had already moved on to the next stage.
His suggestion to introduce a Laplacian operator was like a leaf dropped into a raging river—it was swept away without so much as a ripple.
Once again, the only sound in the office was the tapping of chalk against the blackboard.
Wu Tao looked down at the sheet of scratch paper in his hand, filled with his derivations.
He suddenly understood.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t understand what they were talking about, nor was it that his mathematical foundation was poor.
It was the rhythm.
It was the difference in rhythm, born from inhuman intuition and computational power at the absolute limit.
He was like a well-equipped, highly trained mountain climber who had to set a piton and secure a safety rope before taking each step.
There was nothing wrong with that. It was the standard operating procedure for a conventional scholar.
But the two men at the blackboard were not.
Li Jianming, relying on decades of insight accumulated in the deep sea of pure mathematics, would simply point out the next foothold on the cliff face.
And Chen Zhuo, like a human supercomputer, wouldn’t even bother with a safety rope. He would just leap directly to that foothold.
By the time Wu Tao had painstakingly hammered in his piton and climbed up, ready to discuss the view, the other two had already leaped to the next peak.
It was nothing short of academic speciation.
Wu Tao took a deep breath.
He gently placed the gel pen in his hand back on the coffee table.
Then, he stood up.
Wu Tao walked over to the water cooler, took two clean paper cups, and filled them with warm water.
He walked to the blackboard and, without a word to disturb them, gently placed the two cups on the edge of the lectern.
Li Jianming didn’t look at him. The chalk in his hand flew across the board, the wrinkles on his forehead furrowed together as if he were wrestling with some unseen geometric structure.
Chen Zhuo noticed Wu Tao.
He turned his head, gave Wu Tao a gentle smile, and said in a very low voice,
"Thanks, Senior Brother."
Then, Chen Zhuo immediately turned back. With the half-stick of chalk, he quickly added a transitional line for matrix dimension reduction in a blank space on the board, smoothly catching the geometric framework Li Jianming had just thrown out.
Wu Tao saw the focus on Chen Zhuo’s face from the side and smiled as well.
He didn’t return to the sofa.
He walked to his own desk, pulled open a drawer, and took out a brand-new notebook.
Wu Tao opened it to the first page. He moved a chair and sat down, a moderate distance from the blackboard.
He uncapped his pen.
Wu Tao no longer tried to interject, nor did he try to keep up with their calculations on his scratch paper.
He looked up, his gaze fixed on the algebraic symbols on the blackboard—symbols that were constantly being created, overturned, and then reconstructed.
He was going to record all of this. He suddenly had a premonition that he *should* record it.
The sound of the chalk on the board grew more and more dense, like a heavy rain drumming against a windowpane.
Li Jianming’s jacket lay forgotten over the back of a chair.
A thin layer of chalk dust already coated Chen Zhuo’s sleeve cuffs.
Outside the window, the sky slowly began to darken.
The wind seemed to have died down.

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