Li Dong walked out of the gates of the Sunshine Garden District.
Recalling the scene from Old Yang’s study, he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was strange.
The moment he opened the paper on the Langlands program, Old Yang had actually zoned out.
His hand had trembled so much that he’d shattered the purple clay teacup on the desk.
Then Teacher Yang’s wife heard the noise and came in. While cleaning up the shattered cup, she looked at Li Dong apologetically and said,
"Xiaodong, I’m so sorry, but Teacher Yang and I might have to head out for something soon..."
With the hint being that obvious, Li Dong naturally took his cue and rose to leave.
He noticed, however, that Teacher Yang’s wife had clearly seen the paper on the computer before she said that.
’What exactly is the relationship between Teacher Yang and the paper’s authors, Jiang Yubai and Zhou Shenzhi?’ Li Dong muttered to himself, glancing back at the old faculty apartment building.
He had a feeling it wasn’t that simple.
’Oh well. I’ll take a closer look at this paper after I’m completely done with the physics model.’
Li Dong pulled himself from his thoughts and headed for the nearby bus stop.
The days flew by. For the seniors at Jiangcheng Sixth Middle School, the two-day New Year holiday didn’t signify the start of a new year. Instead, it meant the final, brutal countdown to the college entrance exams had officially begun.
And during this period, Li Dong was so busy he barely had a moment’s rest.
To complete his physics experiment for the Qiu Prize, he had to constantly travel to the labs at the Sichuan University School of Physics with Elder Chen, since the equipment at Sixth Middle School wasn’t precise enough.
There, he borrowed high-precision servomotors and rotation encoders to repeatedly tune the "rotating loop-small ball" dynamical system, recording minute fluctuations in the critical rotational speed.
Elder Chen’s reputation was still quite effective, as long as they didn’t leave the province...
As for going out of province...
Heh, hadn’t they seen that Lin Wei wouldn’t give him the time of day?
In the meantime, Li Dong also managed to squeeze in a trip to Zhejiang University with Sun Xiang.
Of course, a biology project, unlike a physics model, couldn’t produce results in just a few days. It had to follow the natural growth cycle of the plants.
In the plant tissue culture lab at the Zhejiang University School of Life Sciences, Li Dong personally performed the Agrobacterium infiltration of the Alpine Willow Chrysanthemum.
He then placed the delicate callus tissues into an illuminated, temperature-controlled incubator.
This was destined to be a long growth process.
He would have to wait for them to differentiate into plantlets, screen for the positive knockout strains, and then wait for them to flower and produce seeds to observe the segregation ratio of traits. He probably wouldn’t be able to wrap everything up until after he started college.
Li Dong wasn’t in a rush. After doing everything he could for the current stage and recording the detailed experimental data, he hurried back to Jiangcheng, weary from his travels.
In the blink of an eye, the calendar had turned to April.
Inside the Honors Class at Jiangcheng Sixth Middle School, the atmosphere grew increasingly tense and feverish.
This was because in April, registration for the various regional academic Ossai competitions had begun one after another.
The Honors Class curriculum was now completely geared toward competitions, with the difficulty cranked up to the maximum.
In fact, it seemed the only person in the entire Honors Class who was still, at least in name, cramming for the college entrance exams was Li Dong.
But if you said he was cramming for the exams... well, he was barely ever seen in the classroom.
Then again, if you were to say he was absent, his monstrous score on the school-wide ranking board was a constant reminder to everyone of his existence.
「Early morning」
Sunlight streamed through the floor-to-ceiling windows, falling upon the tables and chairs in the Jiangcheng Sixth Middle School library.
Unlike a university library, the high school library was basically empty during class hours.
Li Dong was sitting in a corner, focused on his laptop.
Elder Chen was no longer tailing Li Dong like some kind of stalker.
After several months of observation, Elder Chen had come to a thorough understanding.
Whenever Li Dong was focused on something, you could be beating gongs and drums right next to him and he wouldn’t hear a word you said.
Besides, on academic matters, the kid’s insights were sometimes truly unconventional.
It was often better to just let him think for himself rather than offer suggestions.
So Elder Chen had decided to leave him be. He would just wait for Li Dong to finish the first draft and then check it for grammatical and formatting issues.
Li Dong’s fingers were currently flying across the keyboard.
He was writing his paper entirely in English.
[Title: Phase Transitions in Mechanical Systems: Rotation-Induced Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking and Hysteresis Loops]
[Abstract: This study constructs a rotating loop-small ball dynamical system. Through experimental and theoretical analysis, we report the first observation of rotation-induced spontaneous symmetry breaking in a macroscopic mechanical system...]
Reaching this point, Li Dong wrote an interesting passage in the "Introduction" section:
"Phase transitions, abrupt phenomena that occur in matter under specific conditions, are widespread throughout the natural world."
"From the boiling of water and melting of ice in everyday life to the ferromagnetic-paramagnetic transition in condensed matter physics, the essence of these phenomena is a change in symmetry."
This was also what made physics so fascinating.
A seemingly unremarkable, everyday phenomenon could contain the fundamental laws of physics.
These laws are right there in front of your eyes, but how many people ever stop to think about them?
As he delved deeper into his writing, Li Dong gradually entered an absolute flow state of [0.2 Concentration].
The rustling of leaves outside and the footsteps of the patrolling librarian were all blocked from his perception.
However, when it came to deriving the core mathematical model, Li Dong ran into a bit of trouble.
Perfectly proving how the eccentricity of the rotation axis (the introduced external field) caused the critical thresholds for acceleration and deceleration to not overlap within a Lagrangian framework was far more complex than he had anticipated. The expansion of the nonlinear differential equation even involved extremely difficult-to-handle jumps in elliptic integrals.
Li Dong tapped his fingers on the desk.
That god of Classical Mechanics had merely regarded it as "a minor corollary within my system of mechanics," disdaining to delve deeper into why the critical point produced a lagging jump.
A wave of defiance washed over Li Dong at the thought.
’I refuse to believe it! This scrap of knowledge that Newton looked down on!’
At that moment, his Basic Attributes were magnified by [Physical Perception]—doubling, and then doubling again.
This was the limit of the Basic Edition’s passive effect.
The rotating ring in his mind began to accelerate and decelerate manically, every vector arrow in his force analysis seemed to glow!
’Got it!’
’The system’s rotational speed corresponds to thermodynamic temperature, and the competition between centrifugal and gravitational potential energy corresponds to the evolution of the order parameter! I just need to expand the effective potential energy model to include high-order terms and substitute the eccentricity as a perturbation parameter into the equation for the extrema of the potential energy. Then I can use bifurcation theory to perfectly solve for the width of the Hysteresis Loop!’
With his train of thought unblocked, line after line of elegant and rigorous English derivations and formulas flowed from his fingertips onto the screen.
Before he knew it, the bell signaling the end of class had already rung.
Students began to trickle into the once-empty library to check out books and materials.
In the library, in front of a row of shelves dedicated to advanced and pure mathematics...
Qin Yan was looking for the original English edition of an *Algebraic Geometry* textbook. He wanted to familiarize himself with Grothendieck’s scheme theory to lay the groundwork for his future university studies.
"Found it."
He pulled out the book, which was as thick as a brick.
And then...
Through the gap between two bookshelves, he saw a familiar figure.
It was none other than Li Dong, who had been "missing" from the Honors Class for several days!

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