Li Jianming hung up the phone.
The office fell into a deathly silence.
Li Jianming sat in his leather chair, feeling as if all the strength had been drained from his body.
A scolding, a retreat, a new direction.
Three blows in a single day.
In the face of Chen Zhuo’s single, incomplete page of manuscript, the three highest pillars of mathematics in the country had been utterly shattered.
Li Jianming turned his head, gazing at the night sky outside, which was now completely dark.
A genius doesn’t need to be carefully nurtured. They need a framework that allows for savage, uninhibited growth.
Since no one in the country could handle this savage axe.
Since Old Wei had pointed out that clue, a thread lost since the late nineties.
Li Jianming shot to his feet.
He didn’t turn on the overhead light. Using the faint glow of the streetlights filtering through the window, he snatched an old trench coat he’d worn for years from the coat rack and threw it on.
He pulled open his office door and strode out.
The hallway was empty.
Li Jianming headed down the stairs, his pace quickening.
He left the Mathematics Building and headed straight for the old library deep within the Keda campus.
In the old library’s basement was a special collection of foreign-language texts, off-limits to students. It was filled with original-language foreign journals subscribed to since the university’s founding and perpetually smelled of mothballs and the must of old paper.
Li Jianming walked up to the collection’s iron gate, took out his professor’s ID, and had the attendant on duty open it for him.
He descended the dim staircase.
The basement lighting was faint. Tall, sheet-metal bookshelves stood in rows like a forest.
Li Jianming went to the regional index sign, his eyes scanning it quickly.
"Core Foreign Journals in Mathematics... Section I..."
He walked down the aisle and stopped in front of the third row of shelves.
Here, the shelves were packed tightly with stacks of heavy, bound journals.
Li Jianming found the section labeled "Inventiones mathematicae."
He crouched down and began to search through the bottommost shelf.
"1995... 1996... 1997..."
He pulled out the dust-covered journals and placed them on the grimy concrete floor.
Finally, he pulled out a 1998 bound edition with a slightly damaged cover.
Li Jianming sat cross-legged on the cold floor, placing the bound volume on his lap.
He put on his reading glasses and, by the dim incandescent light overhead, opened it to the table of contents.
Nothing.
He pulled out the 1999 edition.
Hundreds of thick pages, all dense with English and French, accompanied by countless abstruse mathematical symbols.
Li Jianming flipped through them, page by page.
He didn’t know the name of the paper. He could only rely on his memory of Chen Zhuo’s manuscript, searching for a similar savage aura.
The basement was quiet, the only sound the rustling of pages.
Time ticked by, minute by minute, second by second.
Li Jianming’s eyes grew dry and sore from staring at the small print for so long, but he didn’t stop.
Just as he was flipping through a French paper in the fourth issue of 1999,
Li Jianming’s hand suddenly froze.
His gaze was riveted to a line of derivation on the left-hand page.
It was a discrete representation of a dimensional reduction map in topological space.
Its method wasn’t exactly the same as Chen Zhuo’s, but the underlying sense of logical severance, that brutalist aesthetic of recklessly cleaving continuity, was a perfect match!
A resonance of souls.
Li Jianming even felt a chill crawl up his spine.
’So there really is another madman like this in the world.’
He hastily flipped back to the paper’s title page.
His finger landed on the line of French spelling in the author section.
There was no long list of collaborators—just a single, incredibly proud name.
"Pierre."
?Beneath the name was a short academic affiliation:
?Princeton Institute for Advanced Study.
?Li Jianming stared at the name.
?Old Wei’s words echoed in his ears:
They were a small group of radicals. Most of them disappeared later on.
?But this Pierre had not disappeared.
?Li Jianming knew this name all too well.
?As the dim incandescent light of the basement fell on the yellowed pages, the long-forgotten rumors about the international academic world flooded Li Jianming’s mind, coalescing into the complete truth.
?’This was no youthful rebellion.’
?He had won the Fields Medal in his thirties, becoming a god in the fields of topology and algebraic geometry.
In the late eighties and early nineties, when Pierre was in his forties—at the absolute peak of a mathematician’s intellect, stamina, and authority—he decided that classical continuous topology was too tepid, too boring.
?And so, this tyrant, sitting on his throne at Princeton, personally took up the scalpel and unleashed this heretical theory of discrete truncation and brutal splicing.
?He had taken a savage axe to a delicate china shop and smashed everything in sight.
?The young geniuses who followed him and learned his methods, lacking his terrifying mathematical intuition, found their logic collapsing as they delved deeper. Some even had their spirits broken and left academia altogether.
The mainstream schools of thought seized the opportunity to attack him en masse.
?During that firestorm, Pierre discovered that no one in the world besides himself could keep up with his thinking, and no one could bridge the logical chasms he had violently cleaved open.
?The profound loneliness and disdain that came from seeing the entire world as mere mortals made him too lazy to argue with the academic community any longer.
?Li Jianming’s gaze shifted down from the author line, landing on the main text of the paper published in 1999.
?His French was good enough for him to understand the article, which had no co-authors.
?This was not an exploratory paper.
?This was Pierre’s final summary, written at the age of sixty, of that savage framework from his past. It was also his farewell to the field.
?Between the lines, there was none of the humility of a mathematician exploring the truth.
?There was only sarcasm and condescension bleeding off the page.
?In the conclusion, Pierre had written a passage in exceedingly cold French, which Li Jianming automatically translated in his mind:
?"The discrete tools for handling singularities and topological tears have all been laid out here. Regrettably, the current academic generation lacks the intuition to wield such boundary-pushing methods. Since no one dares to use them, and no one is worthy of using them, let this framework remain on these few pages."
?Li Jianming stared at the passage, his chest heaving slightly.
?At sixty, Pierre had left behind this Demon Sword, a tombstone mocking an entire era, believing no one would ever be able to draw it.
?From then on, the old madman had completely transformed into an academic inquisitor who sat in his office, sipping red tea, reading conventional papers, and finding the whole world dreadfully boring.
?But.
?Li Jianming’s fingers unconsciously scratched at the cold floor.
?That tyrant on the other side of the ocean would never have dreamed that today, five years later...
?...in a provincial capital deep in the heart of Hua Country...
?...a thirteen-year-old boy, a junior in college, who probably didn’t even know who Pierre was...
?...had not only nonchalantly drawn the Demon Sword he left behind, but had also used it on the highest holy grail of world mathematics...
?...to carve an exquisitely ingenious opening gambit onto the base of the Hodge Conjecture.
?Li Jianming closed the heavy, bound volume.
?THUD. The sound echoed through the empty underground collection, stirring up a cloud of dust.
?He used the rusty metal shelf to support himself as he slowly stood up.
?From sitting cross-legged on the cold floor for so long, his knees had gone stiff, and his legs ached and tingled as if pricked by countless needles.
?He took a moment to recover before staggering back to return the 1998 volume to its place.
?He turned and made his way up the dim, narrow staircase.
?He pushed open the heavy glass doors of the old library, and the cold, late-November night wind hit him head-on.
?The wind carried a few dry sycamore leaves, which scraped across the pavement with a rustling sound.
?Li Jianming turned up the collar of his old trench coat, shoved his hands in his pockets, and walked along the familiar campus path back toward the Mathematics Building.
?It was late, and the halos of the streetlights looked bleak.
Occasionally, a stray cat or two would dart out from the bushes, quickly melting back into the darkness.
?’I’ve found him.’
?But the stone in Li Jianming’s heart didn’t fall; instead, it hung even higher.
?’How do I contact Pierre?’
?This was the most critical impasse he faced.
?’Send a transoceanic email? Or make an overseas call to the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study?’
?Li Jianming shook his head in the cold wind.
?’Absolutely not.’
?’Pierre is too lonely, too desperate for a kindred spirit.’
’If that old madman saw Chen Zhuo’s manuscript, saw that there was finally someone in the world who could grasp his line of thought, he would lunge like a shark that’s smelled blood.’
?’What would happen then?’
?’Princeton would immediately send a top-tier invitation.’
’A full scholarship, a green card, access to the world’s top laboratory resources, a living stipend of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of US Dollars a year.’
’Pierre himself might even fly his private jet to Zeyang City to snatch him up personally.’
?’Chen Zhuo is only thirteen.’
’His parents are just ordinary state-owned factory workers.’
?’Faced with that level of academic oligarchy and its crushing resources, what could an ordinary family from China do to resist? What could Keda do to keep him?’
?Li Jianming had seen it too many times.
?He had taught at this university for decades. He had seen too many astonishingly brilliant young prospects poached by prestigious foreign universities with generous offers. They would change their citizenship, become high-end cogs in the assembly line of Western academia, and never return.
?Chen Zhuo was different.
?Chen Zhuo was the kind of figure who appears only once in several decades, or even a century—someone who could truly become the backbone of a nation’s fundamental sciences.
?He had to put down roots in this country. Even if he went abroad for academic exchange later, his roots had to remain in Hua Country.
?Li Jianming gritted his teeth, the muscles in his jaw tight.
?’I absolutely cannot leave any written evidence that can be traced back to Keda, back to Chen Zhuo.’
?’No emails, no faxes.’
?’I have to meet Pierre in person.’
?Only when they were Face to Face could he gauge the old madman’s depths and character without revealing Chen Zhuo’s identity.
?’But where would they meet?’
’Getting a visa for the United States would take over half a month at the fastest, and the approval process for the trip would be even more cumbersome.’
’Chen Zhuo’s academic inspiration is incredibly precious. Those sparks that fly from collisions on the blackboard—if you don’t strike while the iron is hot to solidify the foundation, they will quickly be extinguished by the mundanities of daily life.’
?’There’s simply not enough time.’
?Li Jianming walked all the way back to the School of Mathematics.
?The hallway was silent, with only the echo of his own leather shoes.

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