Cambridge University, Trinity College.
The November fog was thick, creeping up from the surface of the River Cam to cling, damp and cold, within the cracks of stone walls that were hundreds of years old.
When the wooden door of the faculty lounge was pushed open, it let in a gust of frigid, damp air.
Professor Gray took off his scarf and hung it on the coat rack by the door. He was old, and his knuckles were misshapen from years of arthritis, making the act of unbuttoning his woolen overcoat slow and laborious.
"Any mail for me today?" Gray asked.
Miller, who was flipping through a newspaper by the fireplace, looked up and pointed to the round wooden table by the window.
"Over there. The new issue of the *Mathematical Annals* just arrived, along with a few letters from Bonn. They look like invitations to an academic conference."
Gray walked over and sat down in the armchair by the window.
On the wooden table was a stack of unopened journals. The one on top was the latest issue of the *Mathematical Annals*, the Fall 2004 edition.
Gray picked up the paper knife from the table and slit open the edge of the packaging.
He turned directly to the table of contents.
His eyes scanned rapidly over the dense, spell-like titles, finally stopping on the third line from the bottom.
_Discrete Mapping and Singularity Convergence in Large-Scale Network Topology._
First Author: C. Zhuo.
Second Author: W. Tao.
Corresponding Author: L. Jianming.
Institution: Hua Country Science and Technology University.
Gray flipped to the first page of the article.
And then, he froze, as if he had just seen something that should not exist.
The lounge was silent. Outside the window, a crow landed on a withered branch, tilting its head to look into the room.
The freshly poured cup of black tea in front of Gray was steaming, the vapor rising in a graceful spiral, but his hand gripped the *Mathematical Annals* so tightly he never once reached for the cup.
His gaze was locked on the three-line introduction.
The text was cleanly formatted, yet it exuded a coldness that sent a chill through his entire body.
The first line: pointed out the inevitable collapse of continuity in infinite-dimensional networks.
The second line: stated the philosophical paradox of local chaos and global conservation in discrete topological spaces.
The third line: gave the final verdict of the paper—the absolute dominion of algebraic invariants over geometric divergence.
Gray’s eyelid twitched violently.
He was all too familiar with this tone.
This undisguised ruthlessness, this arrogance that treated existing geometric rules as nothing, this writing style that couldn’t even be bothered to give the reader the slightest bit of transitional context.
It was exactly the same.
He turned to the second page.
It was covered in dense matrices, each one partitioned at an exceptionally sharp, incisive point.
Those cuts were like a scalpel, so precise as to be almost cruel, slicing horizontally through network collapse singularities once considered insurmountable.
No gentle homeomorphic mappings.
No tedious citations of topological axioms.
Only this logical slicing, so violent it was nearly barbaric.
Gray felt his hands grow cold, and even his arthritic joints began to ache faintly.
He thought back to 1999.
He had been at Princeton for a seminar.
In a conference room filled with oak bookshelves, where even the air felt thick with intellectual pressure, a man with graying hair stood before a blackboard.
That man had also wielded an ax named discrete algebra, and he had nearly smashed the cornerstone of the entire school of continuous geometry to pieces.
Back then, that man’s name was Pierre.
"Miller."
Gray’s voice sounded hoarse, as if he had swallowed a handful of dry sand.
Miller didn’t hear him clearly and continued to read the newspaper article about a rowing competition.
"What is it?"
"Go find the 1999 Princeton internal briefing, volume three. The one on topological tearing. Immediately."
Gray’s voice was trembling.
Miller paused, finally sensing that something was wrong. He put down the paper and walked over, looking at the journal in Gray’s hands.
"What... What is this?"
Miller’s brow furrowed as he stared at the pages of formulas, dense as a web of barbed wire.
"Li Jianming? Who’s that? And who is this C. Zhuo?"
"This is that ax."
Gray pointed to the derivation for the infinite-dimensional mapping.
"Look here, Miller. This unreasonable truncation, this violent logic that completely disregards geometric continuity... In this world, besides Pierre, no one would dare to make such a cut."
"But Pierre sealed his pen many years ago."
Miller leaned down, staring at the name.
"Very few people in the world could understand his final paper on mapping. At the end, he wrote in French that if future generations lack the necessary intuition, this set of tools is a self-destructive poison."
"But now someone has drunk his poison, and they’re very much alive."
Gray stared at the name C. Zhuo.
’Who is this first author? A student of Li Jianming? Or some madman he found in Hua Country?’
Gray shot to his feet.
Ignoring his still-damp scarf, he strode quickly to the black telephone in the corner of the lounge.
His movements were rushed. He bumped into the corner of the table, and the black tea sloshed out, forming a dark red stain.
He dialed a number.
The phone rang for a long time, the static hissing in the earpiece until the call was finally answered.
"Durand? It’s me, Gray."
Gray stared at the thick fog outside the window. In the distance, the silhouette of Kang Bridge was as faint as a ghost.
"Did you get this issue of the *Annual Journal*? Have you seen it?"
The other end of the line was silent for a full five seconds.
Durand’s voice came from Paris, tinged with an irrepressible terror.
"I’m looking at it right now, Gray. I just spilled coffee on my trousers, but I can’t be bothered to wipe it off."
At the Ecole Normale Superieure de Paris, where Durand was, it was currently the afternoon.
"He’s back, isn’t he?"
Durand asked in a low voice.
"No, it’s not him. The author is C. Zhuo, from Huake University."
"Then it’s his successor. Or his ghost."
Durand’s voice rose a few notches, carrying a neurotic tremor.
"This bloody scent, this logic that tramples continuity underfoot... No one would write like this, except a devil taught by that tyrant."
Gray tightened his grip on the phone.
"What are you worried about?"
"I’m worried about a repeat of the 1999 nightmare, Gray! Do you remember that genius in Zurich back then? The young man who tried to prove to Pierre that continuity was unshakeable."
His medical reports are still in my drawer. Pierre’s methods can destroy a mathematician’s intuition!"
Durand was panting heavily into the phone.
"Gray, this paper deals with large-scale networks. If this discrete ruling is accepted by the academic community, then our thirty years of work on network manifolds and dynamic mapping will all become a meaningless pile of rubble. He’s tearing down our house."
Gray looked at the young doctoral students in the lounge, reading quietly, completely oblivious to the coming storm.
He remembered the geniuses from back then who developed cognitive disorders because they couldn’t keep up with Pierre’s logic.
That kind of logical chasm, that high-dimensional attack, is fatal to the fragile academic ecosystem.
"We can’t let him just emerge like this."
Gray said in a low voice, his tone laced with cold resolve.
"What are you planning to do?"
"This paper’s introduction is too arrogant. It lacks the most basic academic humility. It doesn’t even cite any of our achievements in the field of continuity over the past decade. We can start a joint letter, complain to the *Annual Journal’s* editorial department, and demand a re-evaluation of the paper’s logical rigor. If the first author is an unknown young person, we have reason to suspect this is a form of academic speculation."
"Gray, are you trying to provoke that tyrant?"
"No, Durand. I’m protecting mathematics. The normal kind of mathematics that we can understand."
Gray hung up the phone.
「At the same time.」
Moscow University, Lenin Mountain.
Professor Volkov sat in his office, which was piled high with old books and even had some mold in the corners.
Outside the window, huge snowflakes were falling, partially obscuring the spires of the ancient university.
He was holding a copy of the *Mathematical Annals*, which a student had placed on his desk that morning.
Volkov didn’t bother looking at the gossip from the old professors.
He was focused only on the final convergence conclusion on the last page.
His index finger gently rubbed the solid black square symbol, the final verdict left by Chen Zhuo.
’It actually converges,’
Volkov muttered to himself.
He pulled open a heavy drawer, revealing an old, yellowed photograph inside.
It was a group photo from when a young Pierre had visited Moscow. The man in the picture had arrogant blue eyes that could burn a person.
Volkov picked up the vodka on his desk and took a sip, the strong liquor burning his throat.
"Old friend, have you finally found someone who can wield your ax?"
A "DING" sounded from the computer on his desk.
A Listserv mailing group notification.
Dozens of messages had already flooded the subject lines, each one punctuated with an exclamation mark.
_"Questions Regarding the Logical Ruptures in C. Zhuo’s Paper."_
_"Who is C. Zhuo? A Background Investigation into the Huake University Research Group."_
_"Joint Letter: Defending the Orthodox Position of Continuous Geometry."_
Volkov looked at the constantly updating titles, filled with anxiety and fear, and sneered.
’These old fools. They cowered for a lifetime during Pierre’s peak. Now that they see Pierre is old and a new face has appeared, they can’t wait to jump out and take a bite, just to prove they haven’t been left behind by the times.’
He tapped on the keyboard, typed a line, and sent it to the group:
"If you can’t understand the matrix partitioning for the discrete mapping on page 12, it means you’re old enough to retire."
"He made it perfectly clear in the third line of the introduction—it is the absolute dominion of algebra. You’re all trembling simply because your egos are collapsing right along with those continuous curves."
He hit the Enter key.
Volkov stood up and walked to the window, watching the heavy snow blanket Moscow.
「Germany. Bonn. The Institute for Mathematics.」
Professor Schmidt was striding down the hallway, holding a printed draft.
He was clutching a draft of a joint letter, the initial version emailed from London.
He knocked on the director’s office door.
"They’re organizing a joint letter. Should we sign?" Schmidt asked.
The director was a portly old man, staring blankly at the PDF file he had just downloaded onto his computer screen.
"Gray initiated it?"
"And Durand. Some people in Zurich have responded as well."
Schmidt seemed somewhat excited.
"This is an opportunity, Director. If we can prove that this set of discrete tools has unstable boundary effects when dealing with large-scale networks, we can pull network topology back onto the track of continuous manifolds. This is about protecting our research funding."
"Schmidt, don’t you get it yet?"
The director turned around, rubbing his eyes, which were red from overuse.
"Gray and the others aren’t questioning the logic. They’re questioning the style."
"That arrogant style that looks down on everyone and everything."
"If this paper is accepted, if Chen Zhuo’s method of discrete ruling becomes the standard for future network topology, it means that our efforts over the past thirty years, the textbooks we’ve written, the students we’ve taught—all of it becomes a meaningless pile of rubble."
The director took the joint letter from Schmidt’s hand.
"That admission is worse than death. It’s like spending a lifetime building exquisite carriages, only for someone to drive a tank right over them in front of you, without even deigning to glance back."
He fumbled in the pen holder for a pen and heavily signed his name on the signature line.
"Sign it. For the sake of our life’s work."

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