No infinities.
No divergence.
Within the logic of pure mathematics, it was valid.
A dead silence fell over the office.
The only sound was the faint scratching of Wu Tao’s pen as it came to a stop on the paper after writing the final character.
Li Jianming slowly straightened up.
He didn’t cheer, nor did he speak.
He gazed at the equals sign in the center of the blackboard, a symbol of perfection, and took a step back.
His heel hit the edge of the lectern with a dull thud.
As if he hadn’t felt the pain, Li Jianming didn’t let his gaze waver from the blackboard for even an instant.
The longer he looked, the heavier his breathing became.
As an old professor who had been immersed in the field of pure mathematics his entire life, his insight was far too sharp.
What was written all over this blackboard was no mere boundary derivation for a fluid dynamics equation.
That was just the surface.
In their effort to patch the truncation and align the left and right sides, they had unknowingly constructed an incredibly vast and complex non-singular complex projective algebraic variety.
And they had forcibly expressed it as a linear combination of rational algebraic cycles.
Li Jianming’s fingers began to tremble slightly.
The piece of chalk in his hand slipped from between his fingers, fell to the floor, and broke into three pieces.
“Professor?”
Wu Tao sensed something was wrong. He closed his notebook, stood up, and looked at Li Jianming with concern.
Li Jianming paid Wu Tao no mind.
He turned his head to look at Chen Zhuo, who was standing at the other end of the blackboard.
Chen Zhuo was looking back at him.
There was no ecstasy on the boy’s face. He dusted the chalk from his hands, his expression still holding that same gentle calm, though his eyes now held a glimmer of new insight into the boundaries of knowledge.
“Chen Zhuo.”
Li Jianming spoke, his voice terribly hoarse.
“Let’s stop.”
Chen Zhuo nodded, placing the small chalk nub he had left into the blackboard tray.
“Do you know what this is?”
Li Jianming leaned against the lectern, watching Chen Zhuo.
Chen Zhuo didn’t speak.
In truth, halfway through the derivation, he’d had a vague feeling.
The feeling of suddenly touching an undersea fault line while in the deep ocean.
“This isn’t some polynomial approximation.”
Li Jianming gave a self-deprecating laugh, a smile tinged with a helplessness that bordered on a shudder.
Li Jianming pointed to the core section in the center of the blackboard.
“This is the embryonic form of a special case of the Hodge Conjecture.”
Wu Tao’s notebook fell onto the coffee table with a CLAP.
He stared blankly at the blackboard, his mind buzzing.
The Hodge Conjecture.
To anyone who studied mathematics, those three words were nothing less than an insurmountable mountain.
It was one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems, for which the Clay Mathematics Institute offered a one-million-US-Dollar prize.
The holy grail of algebraic geometry and topology.
Wu Tao’s legs felt a little weak. He slowly sat back down on the sofa, staring at the blackboard. Suddenly, every single character and line seemed to exude a suffocating pressure.
Li Jianming watched Chen Zhuo.
He wanted to see shock, fanaticism, or perhaps fear on the thirteen-year-old’s face.
But there was nothing.
Chen Zhuo simply tilted his head up slightly, glanced at the formulas on the blackboard, and then looked away.
“The wall is too thick.”
Chen Zhuo offered a very pertinent assessment.
He looked at Li Jianming, his tone even.
“With my brain as it is now, even with faster processing power, I can’t get over this wall. It requires too much accumulated theory and too many fundamental mathematical tools. I still haven’t learned enough.”
Chen Zhuo frankly admitted his own limitations.
Just because he was a genius didn’t mean he’d blindly assume he could brute-force a Millennium Prize Problem with intuition alone.
Intuition could lead him to the door, but opening it required an immense and systematic foundational framework.
Hearing Chen Zhuo’s words, Li Jianming felt a weight lift from his heart.
His greatest fear had been that Chen Zhuo, ignorant of the immensity of the challenge, would insist on smashing his head against this wall until he broke.
When a genius becomes obsessed, their downfall is faster than anyone’s.
“It’s good that you see that clearly.”
Li Jianming sighed, his tone carrying an indescribable complexity.
“My own knowledge has reached its limit. I can’t help you climb over this wall. From now on, the most I can do is swallow my pride and find someone else to ask when you run into something you don’t understand.”
Li Jianming looked at Chen Zhuo like he was gazing upon a piece of peerless, uncut jade, but lamented that he held no carving knife.
The atmosphere in the office grew exceptionally heavy.
It was a sense of powerlessness after touching the ceiling of human intellect, mixed with a trace of unwillingness to accept it.
Wu Tao sat on the sofa, even daring to breathe only softly.
Into this near-frozen silence.
“GROWL.”
A very clear, very inappropriate sound echoed in the office.
Li Jianming froze.
Wu Tao froze too.
Both of them turned their gazes toward the source of the sound at the same time.
Chen Zhuo stood before the blackboard, looking down at his stomach.
He reached out and rubbed his belly through his shirt.
Then, he looked up at the somewhat dumbfounded Li Jianming and Wu Tao and gave a slightly helpless smile.
“Professor, we really can’t push down this wall. And also...”
Chen Zhuo paused for a moment, his expression regaining the lively quality unique to a teenager, tinged with a small complaint.
“I was over at the School of Physics at noon, and I was so busy watching them run the data that I didn’t get much to eat at the cafeteria. I’m actually getting a little hypoglycemic now.”
With that one sentence, the heavy academic atmosphere instantly shattered.
The oppressive weight of the Millennium Prize Problem was smashed to smithereens by that crisp growl.
Li Jianming looked at the boy before him, covered in chalk dust, his stomach growling with hunger.

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