The red Xiali weaved through the streets of Huizhou.
Li Jianming leaned back in the rear seat, gazing out the window.
In 2004, Huizhou had not yet been completely devoured by steel and concrete.
The telephone poles along the road receded swiftly behind them.
One after another.
Like rows of silent musical notes.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. The distinctive vibration of a Nokia sent a tingling sensation across his thigh.
It was Zhou Qiping calling.
Li Jianming pressed the answer button.
"Old Li, are you back at the university?"
Principal Zhou’s voice was polite, but Li Jianming could detect an undercurrent of tension he couldn’t hide.
Like a fully drawn bowstring.
"Just got off the train. I’m in a cab now."
"Perfect. Come straight to my office."
Principal Zhou’s speech quickened slightly.
"Professor Pierre from Princeton is here."
"He’s been waiting for you for a while."
Li Jianming clutched his phone.
’What’s coming has finally come.’
The Xiali pulled up in front of the Keda administration building.
Li Jianming pushed the door open, threw down a twenty-yuan bill, and walked away without waiting for change.
The hallway of the administration building was quiet; the voice-activated lights had yet to turn on.
The door to the Vice Principal’s office was ajar, a sliver of cold, white light leaking out.
Li Jianming paused at the door.
He adjusted the collar of his suit.
Calmed his breathing.
Pushed the door.
The scent of tea filled the room.
The kind from a fine Taiping Houkui.
Zhou Qiping was sitting on a single-seater sofa, holding a Zisha teacup.
Across from him sat an elderly foreign man in a light gray jacket. His hair was salt-and-pepper, but his back was ramrod straight.
At the sound of the door opening, both men turned their heads.
But Li Jianming’s gaze didn’t land on them.
It went past the coffee table, fixed on the whiteboard against the wall.
It was the whiteboard used for administrative meetings, usually filled with notes on enrollment expansion plans or infrastructure budgets.
Now...
It was covered in black marker.
A dense jungle of formulas.
There were two styles of handwriting.
One was strong and neat.
That was Pierre’s.
The other was free-flowing, with a lot of cursive connections.
It exuded a sharp arrogance that looked down on everything.
That was Chen Zhuo’s.
Li Jianming walked over slowly.
He stopped in front of the whiteboard, the floorboards beneath him letting out a faint CREAK.
Dimensionality reduction.
Homomorphic mapping.
Singularity convergence.
Li Jianming’s heart hammered in his chest.
This was the very dead end he had been struggling with in his own office for the past half-month.
The boundary divergence problem in continuous topological spaces.
He had thought it was a wall for human thought.
But in this moment...
The wall had crumbled.
Not pushed down, but seamlessly stitched together by a higher-dimensional logic.
It hadn’t circumvented the obstacle.
It had brutally smashed a path right through it.
A bloody path to the wasteland of truth, one no one had ever seen before.
"Old Li."
Zhou Qiping set down his teacup and stood up, his voice tinged with a sort of bewildered excitement.
Li Jianming didn’t turn around.
He stared at the final solid square, followed by the equals sign and a zero.
"Did he add that himself?"
Li Jianming asked.
His voice was quiet, raspy from his long journey.
"I gave him a foundational mapping tool."
Pierre spoke.
His English carried a faint French accent.
His pace wasn’t fast, but every word landed like a verdict.
"He walked the rest of the path himself."
"It only took him a few minutes."
Li Jianming turned around.
It was the first time he had seen Pierre face to face.
He lacked the sharp, imposing air from his photos in academic journals.
The old man before him looked like a weary traveler who had been on the road for a long time.
But his blue eyes were so bright they were hard to look at directly.
"Old Li, sit."
Zhou Qiping pointed to an empty seat.
Li Jianming sat, placing his briefcase by his feet.
Inside were the manuscript pages he had prepared.
Now, they felt as heavy as scrap paper.
"Professor Pierre has been talking to me for over half an hour," Zhou Qiping said, looking at Li Jianming.
"About Chen Zhuo."
Li Jianming picked up a cup of warm tea from the table.
And drank it in one gulp.
The bitterness of the tea exploded on his tongue.
"You want to take him away."
He looked directly at Pierre.
"Yes."
Pierre nodded, not hiding it in the least.
"To Princeton?"
"To my place."
Pierre emphasized those two words.
He stood up and began to pace slowly around the office.
"At Princeton, he won’t have to go through any of the regular doctoral admissions."
"He will have absolute academic immunity."
"He won’t have to be a junior teaching assistant for any professor."
"He won’t have to wash test tubes in a lab for some damn research grant."
"And he certainly won’t have to suck up to a bunch of old men whose brains are riddled with bureaucracy just to get a degree."
Pierre stopped pacing and turned back to look at Li Jianming.
"I will personally apply for a dedicated position for him at the Advanced Research Institute."
"An independent laboratory."
"The authority to mobilize the institute’s computing resources at any time."
"The only thing he’ll have to do is sit behind that desk."
"And continue writing those formulas that would astonish God himself."
Zhou Qiping’s breathing grew heavy.
This was 2004.
For a thirteen-year-old boy from Hua Country...
...this kind of treatment was something out of a fairy tale.
"Li, I know what you’re worried about."
Pierre leaned forward slightly.
The pressure in the room instantly intensified.
"In your country, the internet speed is currently as slow as a snail."
"If you want to read last month’s *Mathematical Annals*, you have to wait for a ship to cross the Pacific Ocean."
"But I can promise you this."
"I will get him access to the IAS private terminal."
"From anywhere in the world, he’ll be able to wake up in the morning and see the data we just finished running in Princeton late last night."
"He will have the highest rate of information synchronization in the world."

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