Fear?
No.
To a true titan of academia, absolute genius was never something monstrous.
It was a miracle. A priceless treasure, the kind seen once a century in this barren academic landscape. It was the sole hope for a lonely trailblazer like him, who had spent his life at the summit, to burn the last of his life’s flame to pass on his legacy.
Pierre didn’t answer who he was looking for, nor did he introduce himself.
He simply strode forward, rounding the long, wide reading table to arrive at Chen Zhuo’s side.
He didn’t look at Chen Zhuo’s face. His azure eyes were nailed to the tabletop.
He saw the large-format scratch paper, the huge question mark in the center of the page, the few lines of aggressively crossed-out, discarded deductions next to it, and the yellowed, original French edition of *Foundations of Algebraic Geometry* lying open beside them.
As a grandmaster who had sat at the peak of the mathematical world for half his life, Pierre had no need to understand the phrase Chen Zhuo had just mumbled in Chinese about getting over a wall.
A single glance at these three items was enough for him to instantly comprehend the dead end this boy was facing.
Pierre took half a step forward, positioning himself just behind and to the side of Chen Zhuo.
He extended a finger and, with extreme naturalness and no preamble, tapped the scratch paper right next to the question mark.
"The homological algebra you’re using at this Singularity is wrong."
Pierre spoke in English, his voice steady with a faint, indelible French accent, yet it carried an undeniable, absolute authority.
Chen Zhuo froze.
He turned his head to look at the old foreign man who had suddenly approached him.
Pierre didn’t look back at him. He lifted his finger from the scratch paper and tapped the cover of the thick *Foundations of Algebraic Geometry* twice.
TAP, TAP.
"This book is too old."
Pierre’s voice echoed in the quiet reading room.
"The classical tools it describes are completely incapable of containing the high-dimensional topological boundary you just cut open. If you try to force convergence with them, your equation won’t close. It will just shatter into useless junk."
Chen Zhuo’s eyes widened slightly.
He wasn’t angry at the stranger’s presumptuousness. On the contrary, his attention was instantly seized by the core concepts in the man’s words.
’Incapable of containing it.’
’Shatters into junk.’
’This was the exact fatal flaw that had tormented him all afternoon, the one he couldn’t figure out! He had made the cut on pure intuition, only to find that the threads he had for suturing the wound were all rotten wood, snapping at the slightest touch.’
Before Chen Zhuo could react, Pierre moved.
The old man’s movements were unusually agile, possessing an almost predatory force. He reached out and snatched the pen from between Chen Zhuo’s slightly loosened fingers.
Pierre bent down slightly, his left hand holding down the edge of the scratch paper.
Directly below the question mark, he wrote no explanatory text, no basic calculation steps.
He simply wrote a single, long line: a high-dimensional mapping formula from algebraic geometry, its structure exceedingly complex.
’This boy doesn’t need any step-by-step guidance,’ Pierre saw at a glance. ’The only thing he’s missing is the top-level building block from the modern mathematical framework.’
’Just give him that underlying bridge, and he’ll build a spaceship on his own.’
After writing the line, Pierre stopped and straightened up.
Chen Zhuo’s gaze was fixed on the freshly written formula, the ink not yet fully dry.
One second.
Two seconds.
The layer of confusion and frustration in Chen Zhuo’s eyes vanished without a trace, like morning mist scattered by a sudden gale.
In its place was a brilliance so intense it was almost startling.
He understood.
That single, short formula was like a searchlight suddenly switching on at the end of a dark tunnel, illuminating all the intricate, dead-end paths ahead with perfect clarity.
’So modern mathematics has already developed this kind of dimension... So the Singularity doesn’t need to be forcibly contained at all—it can be directly mapped to another homology group and resolved!’
Chen Zhuo’s breathing began to quicken.
He completely ignored who was standing beside him.
The old foreign man, manners—all of it was thrown to the back of his mind.
The fervor for mathematical truth buried in his bones was completely ignited by this new weapon.
Chen Zhuo’s hand shot out, and he snatched the pen back from Pierre.
The movement was rough, sharp, and decisive.
Pierre’s now-empty hand hovered in mid-air, but he wasn’t angry. In fact, his eyes grew even brighter.
Chen Zhuo leaned back over the table, his wrist flicking rapidly.
Following the high-dimensional perspective Pierre had provided, the tip of the pen flew across the paper in a near-frenzy.
He didn’t just dutifully build the bridge; he used this new bridge to kick down the second and third walls right behind it.
Line after line of sharp, savage, yet logically seamless deductions poured onto the page like a waterfall.
Using an even more brute-force method, he forcibly stitched together the fault line that had been on the verge of collapse.
Pierre stood to the side, his eyes locked on the paper.
His chest began to heave noticeably.
He had only provided a standard advanced tool. He never imagined that the moment the boy received it, he would not only instantly understand it, but also immediately digest it, reconfigure it, and even use it in turn to carve out a savage new path—one that Pierre himself had to pause and think for a moment just to follow.
"No, the boundary here shouldn’t be locked like this..."
Pierre suddenly muttered in English.
He dropped all courtesy, bent down, grabbed Chen Zhuo’s wrist, and wrenched the pen away.
Interrupted, Chen Zhuo glanced up at him but said nothing, simply watching his hands.
Pierre forcefully drew a line through the middle of the deduction Chen Zhuo had just written, striking out a redundant constraint.
Then, in the blank space beside it, he added a more minimalist, more ruthless absolute boundary.
"Use this," Pierre said.
Chen Zhuo glanced at the newly added boundary, the light in his eyes flaring even brighter.
’So it can be compressed this far...’
He unceremoniously snatched the pen back from Pierre’s hand yet again.
Following that new boundary, which had been compressed to its absolute limit, Chen Zhuo began to close the net.
A corner of the old library fell into an extremely bizarre atmosphere.
An old man and a young boy.
A white-haired old foreigner and a young boy from Hua Country.
They didn’t say a word.
No pleasantries, no introductions, not even an exchange of glances.
All their attention, all their communication, was poured onto that thin sheet of scratch paper.
The pen was constantly exchanged between their hands.
Or rather, it was being snatched back and forth.
Pierre would write a constraint; Chen Zhuo would snatch the pen, instantly break the constraint, and offer a reverse deduction. Pierre, watching the deduction with ragged breaths, would grab the pen back again to add an underlying support. Chen Zhuo would then seize the pen once more, charging toward the final closure.
Across from them, Su Wei had completely stopped reading.
At some point, the red pen in her hand had fallen onto the table.
She stared, dumbfounded, at the scene before her.
She couldn’t understand the technical jargon the old foreign man had spoken, much less the gibberish-like symbols on the scratch paper.
From her perspective, the scene was absurd to the extreme.
An old foreign man who had appeared out of nowhere and a thirteen-year-old boy were hunched over the reading table like two lunatics fighting over a toy, snatching a cheap pen back and forth.
And the expressions on their faces grew more and more fervent.
The scratch paper was pushed back and forth between them, its edges becoming crumpled from their grip.
The tip of the ink pen scraped rapidly across the paper, so forcefully that it left deep grooves on the back of the sheet.
This monotonous, hurried scraping sound became the sole symphony in the quiet reading room.
「More than ten minutes later.」
Chen Zhuo’s wrist came to a heavy stop.
In the bottom-right corner of the page, he drew a solid black square.
Then, next to the square, with immense force, he drew a clear equals sign, followed by a zero.
Convergence.
The continuous topological space, brutally cleaved by a Discrete Matrix, had now formed a perfect, closed, and utterly seamless loop after incorporating the high-dimensional mapping from modern algebraic geometry.
Chen Zhuo released his hand. The pen fell onto the table and rolled twice.
He let out a long, pent-up breath and leaned back heavily against his chair, as if completely drained of strength.
"Solved..."
Chen Zhuo looked at the dense formulas covering the entire page, a satisfied smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
Pierre did not sit down.
He just stood there, hands braced on the edge of the table, leaning forward, his eyes fixed on the solid square and the equals sign on the paper.
His chest heaved violently as he gasped for air.
His hands were trembling slightly.
It was not due to old age, but a pure surge of adrenaline.
It was solved.
Not only was it solved, but the solution was even more elegant and more savage than he had imagined.
After receiving that crucial building block, the boy before him had not only built the roof but had also gone ahead and nailed down the entire framework of the palace.
Pierre slowly straightened up.
He turned his head and looked at Chen Zhuo, who was leaning back in his chair, rubbing his wrist.
At this moment, in the eyes of the sixty-five-year-old man, this plainly dressed, soft-haired boy was no longer just a student.
He was a miracle.
A living, breathing little Gauss, yet to be tainted by any rigid academic conventions, possessed of terrifying intuition and an ultimate capacity for learning.
This was a gift from God, bestowed upon him as his life drew to a close—a gift he could not refuse.
"What’s your name?"
Pierre finally spoke again, his voice a little hoarse, but his tone more serious than ever before.
Chen Zhuo lowered his hand and looked at the old man who had helped him so much.
"Zhuo Chen."
Chen Zhuo answered in English.
Pierre nodded, repeating the name silently in his mind. ’Just as I thought.’
"My name is Pierre."
He didn’t add "tenured professor at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study," nor did he add "Fields Medal laureate."
In front of this boy, after the exhilarating deduction they had just shared, such titles seemed far too frivolous.
Pierre pulled out a nearby chair and sat down beside Chen Zhuo.
He pointed at the scratch paper on the table.
"You have the intuition of a genius, which is excellent, but everything you’re working with is outdated."
Pierre looked into Chen Zhuo’s eyes.
"The books here, the textbooks... they’re at least twenty years behind the mainstream mathematical world. Has no one told you how far modern mathematics has advanced?"
Chen Zhuo spread his hands, his tone relaxed.
"I’m just looking around on my own."
Pierre’s brow furrowed.
’Just looking around on his own?’
’Such terrifying talent, left to fend for itself in a dusty old library, feeling its way forward with a few decades-old French books?’
’What is that Li Jianming—the one listed as the corresponding author—doing?’
’Is this not a criminal waste of God-given talent?’

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