A lecture hall in the Yan University College of Chemistry.
"Everyone, look at the molecular orbital energy level diagram on the large screen..."
At the lectern, the elderly Professor Zhang Lufang held a laser pointer, gesturing toward the chemical bond structure on the screen as she taught in a slow, deliberate manner.
"When dealing with the structure of multi-electron atoms, especially ligand field theory for transition metal complexes, you must use group theory to handle the symmetry operations."
"That’s the only way you can truly understand the energy level splitting and degeneracy of these microstates, right?"
The third-year students in the audience all nodded.
Qi Yu sat in the first row, listening with rapt attention.
As the only student Professor Zhang Lufang had ever promised to personally mentor all the way to her Ph.D., Qi Yu had always been one of the top performers in the School of Chemistry.
"RING RING RING..."
The bell rang, signaling the end of class.
"Alright, that’s all for today. Go home and write out the derivation of the secular equation by hand. That’s the only way you’ll truly grasp it, understand?"
The elderly professor put down her lesson plan and dismissed the class.
"Goodbye, Professor." Qi Yu stepped forward to help the elderly professor with the microphone, bid a polite farewell, then turned and left the classroom.
She was always very polite in front of others.
Walking down the hallway of the Science Building, Qi Yu took out her phone and checked her messages. Seeing nothing new, she frowned slightly.
Then she locked the screen, slipped the phone back into her pocket, and headed toward Nongyuan Cafeteria.
It was the lunch rush, and Nongyuan Cafeteria was buzzing with activity.
Qi Yu, holding her tray, was about to find a quiet corner to sit down when she suddenly saw three guys sitting not far away.
She had seen these three before, both times with Li Dong.
’His roommates?’
Qi Yu discreetly carried her tray over, settling into an empty seat at the adjacent table with her back to them.
She ate demurely, eavesdropping on the conversation behind her.
"Haozi, you’ve been bringing food to Brother Dong lately. How’s he doing now?"
Liu Qiang asked, taking a loud slurp of the vermicelli in his pork rib and lotus root soup.
Wang Hao let out a long sigh.
"Sigh..."
"He can already stand up and walk."
Hearing this, Qi Yu’s chopsticks paused, and a piece of chicken breast fell onto her tray.
’He was injured?’
Then Wang Hao added in a low voice,
"He can even fucking jump up and give me a kick."
Qi Yu: "..."
Just then, Chen Nan lowered his voice and leaned in closer to the other two.
"Hey, do you guys think, in Brother Dong’s current state... can he really make progress on Montgomery’s Conjecture on Association?"
Qi Yu, at the table behind them, was completely baffled.
’Montgomery’s Conjecture on Association? What the hell is that?’
She picked up her water cup, took a sip, and then, out of boredom, pulled out her phone and started typing something.
And then...
"COUGH, COUGH, COUGH!"
Qi Yu coughed into her hand, causing several nearby students to glance over at her.
[Montgomery’s Conjecture on Association: The spacing distribution of the non-trivial zeros of the Riemann Zeta function is completely identical to the pair correlation distribution of eigenvalues of a random Hermitian matrix (GUE) in quantum mechanics...]
She then shot a strange glance at the group behind her.
’They can’t be bullshitting, can they?’
But when she saw the three words "non-trivial zeros," she immediately recalled the paper Li Dong had published in the top-tier journal, *Mathematics Computing*.
’It might actually be true. So he’s been working on advancing a world-class conjecture all this time?’
The world felt a little surreal to her.
’But at least I’ve found the reason...’
Qi Yu couldn’t help but scoff internally.
’He used to follow me around every day, pestering me with chemistry questions. Stuff about Fourier transform phase shift deviations in Extended X-ray Absorption Fine Structure (EXAFS), or characterization at the single-atom limit using a Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM)... He was so eager to learn!’
’Now that he has math, he’s forgotten all about chemistry, has he?’
’What a fickle man.’ Qi Yu indignantly speared a piece of broccoli and stuffed it into her mouth.
Just as Qi Yu was ranting internally, Wang Hao suddenly spoke up.
"Forget about whether Brother Dong can make progress for a minute. Have you guys noticed... the online sentiment about Brother Dong has been a little off lately?"
"What do you mean?" Liu Qiang and Chen Nan immediately put down their chopsticks and asked.
"Looks like people are trying to smear Brother Dong online," Wang Hao said.
Hearing this, Liu Qiang quickly shook his head.
"That’s impossible, isn’t it? *Guangming Daily* and other major state media outlets specifically singled him out for praise. After they’ve set the official tone like that, who would dare to openly smear Brother Dong right now? Are they asking to get their accounts banned?"
Wang Hao explained.
"Of course they don’t dare to smear him openly."
"First, they hype Brother Dong’s dimensionality reduction algorithm to the moon, calling him the savior of Huaxia’s algorithmic development, hailing it as a world-changing miracle... and then..."
"They say it would be much better if the algorithm could be put to practical use, like in the ultra-fast network architecture for high-frequency quantitative trading, or a next-generation asymmetric encryption system (RSA)."
"Then they express their ’hope’ that Brother Dong will ’bravely scale new heights’ and ’fearlessly take on the challenge’!"
Wang Hao said with a sigh.
"If that’s not setting him up to fail, what the fuck is?"
"Taking a fundamental mathematical algorithm from theory to real-world application requires an entire industry’s hardware and software to mature. It needs hundreds, even thousands, of architects to adapt and optimize it! Is that the job of someone who studies pure math? Don’t we have specialized engineers for that?"
"They’re twisting the narrative, making it sound like if Brother Dong doesn’t deliver these engineering applications immediately, his original algorithm is completely meaningless!"
"This is a fundamental denial of his core academic achievement!"
"They’ll do anything for clicks and clout. They have no shame!"
Qi Yu, hearing this from the table behind, was also stunned for a moment.
She pulled out her phone and searched for keywords related to Li Dong and his algorithm.
Sure enough!
Just as Wang Hao had said, the search results were full of videos with similar, cookie-cutter scripts.
The first half of these articles put Li Dong on a pedestal, while the second half began to ask passive-aggressively: "When will we see this algorithm benefit the people?"
"If it’s just for solving math problems, then it has no value for the lives of ordinary people."
Qi Yu felt that something was very wrong.
As a veteran netizen—one who had spent years surfing the web, expertly navigating product recommendations and warnings on Xiaohongshu, following gossip and managing comment sections on Sina Weibo, and even briefly stanning a celebrity—Qi Yu’s intuition was screaming at her.
’Someone is manipulating public opinion.’
When it came to sniffing out gossip, a woman’s detective skills were on par with Sherlock Holmes.
Forgetting all about her food, she started watching the videos.
’All the videos use the same keywords, and the scripts are nearly identical... They must be copied...’
She then started tracking the network of marketing accounts with the highest number of shares, the ones that had first started pushing the narrative.
Working her way backward, layer by layer, she filtered out the smaller accounts that were just jumping on the bandwagon for clicks.
In less than ten minutes, Qi Yu had found the source account.
All the coordinated talking points led back to a single popular science blogger on an overseas platform, an account with tens of millions of followers.
[Old Yao and Xiaowei]

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