The account "Old Yao and Xiaowei" was a fairly well-known popular science channel within the overseas Chinese social media community.
The "science" part of their content, however, was heavily watered down.
When they first started the channel, the pair had been relatively straight-laced, simply reposting specious bits of trivia. Unfortunately, their traffic remained lukewarm.
Then Old Yao figured out the secret to generating traffic in this business.
He began to package all sorts of urban legends, folk tales, and even obviously fabricated pseudo-histories of ancient cultures—like the Takeuchi Documents—as scientific fact, presenting them with an air of authority.
This led many uninformed onlookers to believe it was all true.
As for the frequent errors in their professional knowledge?
They couldn’t care less.
For them, the sole purpose was to create clickbait and grab attention.
Whether the information in their videos was correct, or whether their rumor-mongering and narrative-spinning would cause real cyberbullying and harm to the people involved—they ignored it all.
At that moment, in a high-end apartment in Japan.
Old Yao was at his computer writing a script, while Xiaowei was off to the side, setting up the lighting and audio equipment. The two were preparing to record their next video.
Their last video, about Huaxia Yan University undergraduate Li Dong and his "Riemann Nontrivial Zero Dimensionality Reduction Algorithm," had been a massive success.
Since their primary target was the overseas market, they naturally understood the psychology of their self-important Western audience.
So, they relentlessly pushed one particular narrative in their video.
"This kind of pure mathematical algorithm is meaningless until it’s actually implemented and applied by a multinational corporation. It’s just a numerical game played in an ivory tower."
This narrative perfectly pandered to the so-called political correctness of the overseas audience.
Sure enough, the video blew up. Its view count left everything else in the dust.
The funniest part was that the brainless social media hacks back home didn’t even know how to copy it properly, mindlessly reposting the content in Huaxia without any context.
"Old Yao, what are we recording for this episode?" Xiaowei asked as she adjusted the microphone.
Old Yao was tidying the script in his hands.
"This one? We’re going to press our advantage and completely debunk that so-called nontrivial zero algorithm that Li Dong kid came up with!"
"Huh?" Xiaowei paused, a little confused.
"Debunk it? But I saw reports from both home and abroad saying the algorithm is incredible, right?"
"Incredible? Heh."
Old Yao put on an expression that said he alone was sober in a world of drunks.
"I looked into it. Professor Arthur Penrose, an expert in analytic number theory at Princeton University, said in a report that calculating all these nontrivial zeros has no practical significance."
"That’s why nobody bothers to do it. Otherwise, the world record wouldn’t be stuck at just 10^13."
The report was real, but...
The professor never said the *algorithm* was meaningless, only that calculating the *nontrivial zeros themselves* was.
Old Yao was taking the quote completely out of context.
Xiaowei was dumbfounded.
"Oh! So that’s what’s going on. So the algorithm isn’t actually that amazing after all, it’s just that no one else can be bothered to do the calculations!"
"Of course!" Old Yao’s face screamed ’expert.’
"So as popular science content creators, we’re just telling it like it is."
"Think about it. If his algorithm were really as miraculous as the news makes it out to be, some tech giant would have already shown up with a check for tens of millions of USD to find this undergrad!"
"Would he still be sitting quietly studying at Yan University? When faced with the temptation of cold, hard cash, is research really that important? Don’t make me laugh!"
Huaxuan Technology: ???
"And another thing..." Old Yao suddenly lowered his voice.
"I dug up some dirt on this Li Dong kid!"
"What kind of dirt?!"
Xiaowei asked eagerly.
After all, dirt often meant huge traffic.
Old Yao pulled up a video from the Jiangcheng Education Channel.
"This is a video from his hometown’s education channel. It says he used to go to Jiangcheng Seventh Middle School, had poor grades, and even failed his monthly math exams. Then, through his own ’hard work,’ he managed a successful ’comeback’ and transferred to Jiangcheng Sixth Middle School."
"Heh, a failing student making a comeback? Xiaowei, do you buy that?"
Old Yao shook his head with a smirk.
"So I figured there must be something fishy going on."
"And then I started digging into his family connections."
"And guess what? His family has some deep connections!"
"His uncle runs a large manufacturing plant, and apparently, it’s currently contract-manufacturing some core components for the National Power Group! That’s one of Huaxia’s top semiconductor companies!"
"And his mom is the CFO of that very same plant."
Old Yao spread his hands, a mocking expression on his face as if he’d seen through all the world’s conspiracies.
"I’m telling you, there’s definitely something huge and shady going on here!"
Xiaowei swallowed hard.
"But Old Yao, do you have any proof he used connections?"
"Proof? I couldn’t find any smoking gun, no."
Old Yao said nonchalantly.
"But we don’t need to spell it out in the video."
"We just lay out the background, shatter that so-called ’genius’ filter, and the audience will naturally fill in the blanks themselves."
"Hahahahaha..."
The apartment filled with their laughter.
「Meanwhile, in Huaxia, Yan University, Dorm Building 35, Room 404.」
The rich second-generation kid with a powerful background, the student Li Dong who supposedly got ahead through money and connections...
...was staring at the scratch paper in front of him, his eyes bloodshot, clutching at his hair.
’This isn’t right... The control over the error term still isn’t tight enough. No matter how I derive it, I can’t push it through...’
Li Dong muttered neurotically.
On the screen before him, the data for the nontrivial zeros had already reached 10^23.
The data was perfect.
The spacing distribution of the zeros was a perfect fit, aligning flawlessly with the pair correlation values predicted by the Gaussian Unitary Ensemble (GUE) of random matrix theory in quantum mechanics!
But this was merely numerical verification. In the world of mathematics, even if you calculated to the end of the universe, without a rigorous theoretical proof, it could only ever be called a conjecture.
’Montgomery only proved that within the interval where the absolute value of alpha is less than 1, the limit of the pair correlation function F(alpha) equals the absolute value of alpha...’
’I want to extend this interval! If I could just push it past the ’1’ deadline, that would be something!’
’But how do I control the high-order remainder terms of the prime powers?’
’If I push the interval to where the absolute value of alpha is between 1 and 2... the main term of the summation will primarily come from the contribution of x = p (prime numbers)! Combined with the prime number theorem, the main term is calculable!’
’If I keep pushing it to where the absolute value of alpha is between 2 and 3, the main term’s contribution will become the square of a prime, x = p^2!’
’If it’s the interval from 3 to 4, then it’s the cube of a prime, x = p^3...’
Li Dong took a deep breath, his head throbbing with a dull ache.
’Isolating the main term is easy, but what about the remainder? How can I suppress the error bounds of the remainder term?’
’Do I have to introduce a Fourier optimization framework? Then, by combining it with the fine-grained estimation of the remainder provided by this massive 10^23 sample I have, can I forcibly control the upper bound of the remainder to approach zero?’
’Will it even work? If not, then the proof for Montgomery’s Conjecture on Association across the entire interval will forever be missing a piece of the puzzle!’
This was the "ignorant" rich kid propped up by money, as described by the overseas influencers. At this very moment, he was driving himself mad, alone in a hellish abyss of mathematical derivations, all for the sake of a pure mathematical problem that had stumped the world of analytic number theory for half a century.

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