Jiangcheng South Industrial Park.
Li Yang stumbled out of the office building in a daze.
A blast of cold winter wind made him shudder, snapping him back to his senses.
Just now, Chairman Liu himself had walked him from the office to the elevator.
Li Yang had been completely bewildered. He was just the owner of a small workshop. What had he done to deserve such courtesy from a major boss like Chairman Liu?
DING.
His phone suddenly vibrated in his pocket.
Li Yang pulled out his phone. It was a text alert from his bank about a deposit.
[Your account ending in 8848 has received a deposit of 450,000 RMB. Current balance...]
Staring at the string of numbers, Li Yang let out a long sigh. He tilted his head back, his eyes gradually welling up with tears.
After so many years of struggling, being looked down upon, hounded by debt collectors, and even having his wife leave him, he had been barely holding on at the bottom, like a running joke.
"It looks like... there’s finally a glimmer of hope."
The hand Li Yang used to hold his cigarette trembled slightly.
The first people who came to his mind were his older sister, Li Qin, and his nephew, Li Dong.
’Once I make this factory a real success,’ Li Yang swore to himself.
’I’ll never let my sister suffer the slightest grievance again, and I’ll never let Xiaodong be at a disadvantage!’
Meanwhile, in the physics lab at Jiangcheng Sixth Middle School.
Li Dong, the very same nephew his uncle was vowing "never to let be at a disadvantage," was getting an earful from Elder Chen.
"Come on, tell me, who taught you English?"
Elder Chen pointed at the Word document on the computer screen.
"Look at this sentence you wrote: ’The ball suddenly jumps up?’ The ball suddenly jumps up? Is this how you write a research paper? Huh?"
Li Dong felt a bit guilty and hurriedly tried to defend himself.
"Teacher Chen, it’s just a phenomenal description. It’s simple and easy to understand..."
"Simple and easy to understand?"
"This is an academic paper, not a pop-science article! It needs to be rigorous and objective!"
Elder Chen picked up a red pen and circled the mistake.
"Right here, you should use ’undergoes a discontinuous bifurcation’!"
"And here! The proper physics term for a Hysteresis Loop is ’Hysteresis loop’! And what did you give me? ’Delay circle’?"
"A ’delay circle’? Is that Chinglish?"
Li Dong felt a little awkward. He had indeed crammed a lot of vocabulary using his 0.2 Memory Attribute, but his intuitive feel for the language was still very raw.
This time, they were aiming for the global finals of the Qiu Prize, and the all-English paper and defense were a hurdle he had to clear.
"Okay, Teacher Chen. I’ll change it right away."
Li Dong began to replace the technical terms word by word.
BUZZ BUZZ.
The phone on the desk vibrated.
Li Dong glanced at it. It was a WeChat message from his uncle, Li Yang.
[Uncle]: Xiaodong, are you free this weekend? The factory got paid, so I want to take you and your mom out for a meal!
Li Dong glanced at the English research proposal on his screen, for which he had only just written the introduction, then thought about his upcoming two-track experiment plan.
So, he replied.
[Third-Year Grinding Problems]: Uncle, I have to write my paper this weekend, and I might have to go out of town for an experiment. I really don’t have time. You and Mom should just go without me!
A reply came back quickly.
[Uncle]: Okay! Study hard then, and tell your uncle if you need money!
’Need money? I’ve got over eight hundred thousand on me. Are you richer than I am?’
Li Dong smiled, put down his phone, and refocused all his Concentration on the physics paper about the "spontaneous symmetry breaking of a small ball in a rotating loop."
As the project progressed to the experimental stage, the situation in the lab changed somewhat...
Watching Li Dong use a wrench to tighten the base of the DC variable-speed motor, Elder Chen quickly interjected.
"Li Dong, you should add the damper to the base of the main shaft. That will stabilize the rotational speed, reduce high-frequency oscillation noise in the system, and smooth out the data at the critical point."
But Li Dong shook his head. He had his own judgment when it came to physics.
"Teacher Chen, that’s not right."
Li Dong pointed to the formula on the whiteboard.
"If we force the damping onto the main shaft, it will change the structure of the system’s dissipation function near the critical point."
"The whole point of this effective potential model is to observe the abrupt change in the system’s state when rotational speed is used as the control parameter."
"If we forcibly intervene with the main shaft’s damping from the outside, it will cause a physical distortion in the width of the Hysteresis Loop we’re trying to measure."
"Therefore, we should introduce a non-linear air resistance term into the ball’s equation of motion for theoretical correction, rather than tinkering with the hardware."
Elder Chen froze, then followed Li Dong’s line of thought to work through the Lagrangian dissipation equation.
Three minutes later, Elder Chen put down his pen, his old face flushing with heat.
Li Dong was right.
He watched Li Dong adjusting the parameters of the eccentric adjustment mechanism and felt a sense of helplessness wash over him.
’What kind of gold-medal coach am I?’
This kid’s intuition for physics and his grasp of its fundamental Logic didn’t need any teaching from him at all!
’On this project, I’m just the damn guy in charge of procuring acrylic rings and correcting his English. Might as well just let Xiaoqin, the English teacher, take over...’ Elder Chen thought indignantly.
During this time, Li Dong also made a trip to Zhejiang University with Sun Xiang.
This time, he was there to find a deeply hidden switch within the vast expanse of a genome.
In the lab, a group of graduate students watched wide-eyed as a teenager sat in front of a computer, typing out Linux commands.
Li Dong was running a bioinformatics analysis script. He was using homologous alignment combined with transcriptome analysis on the sequencing data of the Alpine Willow Chrysanthemum, comparing it against the Hairy Mountain Willow Chrysanthemum’s PpPAR Gene sequence published by the team from the Netherlands, in an attempt to locate the homologous candidate gene.
"Brother Dong..."
A second-year grad student swallowed hard and nudged the postdoctoral researcher, Liu Dong, beside him.
"This high schooler’s technique for plasmid extraction and vector ligation... how is he steadier than me? That BLAST alignment script he just ran, he wrote that himself, right?"
Liu Dong pointed expressionlessly at a grinning Sun Xiang and said flatly.
"How the hell would I know? Ask him!"
Besides physics and biology, late at night when all was quiet, Li Dong would always open his chat window with Gauss.
He would check the transfer progress of that file...
[Transferred: 45.7%]...
[Transferred: 46.3%]...
[Transferred: 47.2%]...
It was slow, but it was definitely moving.
During this time, Li Dong tried clicking on the file again, but he could still only make out that one sentence.
"Little guy, I have a student named Riemann..."
What fundamental Logic of this chat group had Gauss seen through? What exactly was the method to "increase permissions"?
Li Dong knew that to find the answer, he just had to wait.
And so the days passed, full and busy. Outside the window, the leaves of the plane trees all fell. Red lanterns were gradually hung up on the streets and alleys of Jiangcheng, and supermarkets began to play "Good Luck Comes" on a loop.
Finally, the New Year arrived.
But for the third-year competition hounds and exam-preppers, the festive spirit of the New Year had always been a luxury.
Because at Jiangcheng Sixth Middle School, the third-year students only got a two-day break.

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