Li Dong finished reading the entire group announcement, his eyes starting to light up.
’This group seems pretty interesting...’
Just then, his phone screen suddenly trembled.
The entire chat interface began to fill with huge blocks of garbled text.
The chat history from the other group members all turned into gibberish, as if the signal was being forcibly jammed.
Only Newton’s messages remained completely unaffected.
[Detecting a qualitative change in group member "Isaac Newton’s" fundamental attributes.]
[Evaluation Dimensions: Physics Intuition, Mathematical Rigor, Engineering Feasibility, Cross-Disciplinary Integration, Historical Impact Weight.]
[Evaluation Result: Isaac Newton (Divine Power Thief), Attributes Maxed Out]
Li Dong stared at the notification.
Divine Power Thief?
’What the hell is this edgy title?’
But then it hit him.
Attributes maxed out??
The corner of his mouth twitched...
’In that case, was my "2/5ths of a Newton" claim a little too full of myself?’
Li Dong gulped and subconsciously glanced at his own attribute panel.
[Concentration: 0.4]
[Logic: 0.4]
[Memory: 0.6] (Special Effect: Memory Palace)
He was starting to feel like Wang Hao.
"Sigh..."
’Forget it. I’m not going to think about this anymore. It’s too damaging to my pride.’
Just as he was about to put his phone away, he caught a glimpse of the border around his profile picture.
The experience bar had actually filled up by a third since he last saw it this morning!
’What the hell?’
He hadn’t done anything all day.
He’d only exchanged a few words with Newton in the group chat. He hadn’t made any other contributions.
So where did that one-third of an XP bar come from?
Li Dong pondered for a moment.
The only plausible explanation was...
Newton’s creation of the AI had earned him experience points.
’So... have the other group members been helping me gain experience all this time?’
’Well, I’ll be.’
’So I don’t just get to skim benefits from the inspiration I give these legends, I can also profit from the major breakthroughs they make on their own...’
’This group is a gold mine!’
He could barely contain his grin.
To confirm his theory, he decided to pay close attention to his experience bar every time one of the legends in the group made a big move.
While Li Dong was still reveling in the joy of discovering a new way to farm benefits, the blocks of garbled text on the screen suddenly cleared up.
The chat history reappeared, and the group returned to normal.
[Isaac Newton]: I’m done talking with you.
[Isaac Newton]: I need to get back to taming that Xiaohai.
Li Dong: "..."
Xiaohai?
’What the hell kind of name is that?’
’You’re going to name an AI that’s practically achieved godhood... Xiaohai?’
Li Dong stared at the name "Xiaohai" for a long time before finally deciding not to dwell on it.
This group held too many secrets.
At his current level, he wasn’t qualified to dig any deeper.
It was just as Newton had said...
Mortals should know their place.
However, Li Dong was a mortal standing just beneath a ceiling defined by the maxed-out attributes of an entire Newton.
It wasn’t like he had nothing to do.
Li Dong locked his phone and tossed it onto the desk.
’No more distractions. Time to work.’
He pulled out the research proposal draft he was developing with Old Yang and Penrose.
The necessary framework for the local-global compatibility of GL(n) automorphic representations. Yesterday, Old Yang had proposed abstracting the "layer-by-layer compensation" into a unified filtered embedding operator.
Once that step was established, he could connect it to his own necessity derivation.
He then wrote a line on a sheet of scratch paper...
"Consider a family of embedding operators {Φ_k}_{k≥0} acting on an infinite-level Hodge-Tate filtration..."
「Meanwhile, in a residential complex in Beijing’s Haidian District.」
Zhou Qifeng sat in his home study, a cigarette burned down to its filter.
In front of him lay the third draft of a research paper.
"On the Non-Perturbative Correction Structure of Anomaly Coefficients of the Boundary Conformal Field Theory in Four-Dimensional AdS/CFT Duality"
This was his most important project of the semester.
The AdS/CFT correspondence is a powerful tool from string theory, capable of translating a high-dimensional gravitational problem into a conformal field theory problem in one lower dimension.
The computational difficulty on either side of this duality is often worlds apart, and the academic community has been striving to make this "bridge" more robust.
What Zhou Qifeng was trying to do was simple in principle, but incredibly difficult in practice.
He wanted to find a computable correction term for the anomaly coefficients of the boundary conformal field theory, beyond the perturbative regime.
If he finished this paper, getting it published in a journal on the level of JHEP or a Physical Review D Letter would be no issue. With a bit of luck, it might even make it into Physical Review Letters (PRL).
For a senior professor approaching sixty, who for years held the title of administrative advisor at Yan University Yuanpei College, work of this caliber was already quite respectable.
It had been many years since he’d pulled an all-nighter on a paper, trying to break into the absolute top tier.
He muttered to himself, "Hmm... the renormalization group flow approximation in this section is a bit too tight. I’ll need to loosen it up later..."
Just then...
DING.
An email notification popped up in the bottom-right corner of his computer screen.
Zhou Qifeng hadn’t planned on paying it any mind.
He received a ton of notifications like this every day.
Memos from the university’s internal system, emails from journal editorial boards, peer review invitations, questions from students, notices for all sorts of obscure academic conferences...
If he opened every single one, he’d never get any real work done.
But just as he was about to close the notification, he noticed the sender: Li Dong.
Subject: Exercise on the Chiral Anomaly of SU(N) Gauge Fields on a Four-Dimensional Compact Euclidean Manifold.
Zhou Qifeng froze for a second.
’This kid is fast...’
He tried to recall what he’d told Li Dong in his office a few days ago.
"Two days is fine, a week is fine too. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just write down what you can."
And the kid sent him an email in less than three days.
’That’s way too fast...’
Zhou Qifeng stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray, and with a click of the mouse, opened the email.
The body of the email was just a single, short line:
"Teacher Zhou, I’ve organized my thoughts below. Please let me know if there are any errors or omissions. Regards, Li Dong."
Attached: one PDF file.
Zhou Qifeng: ...
’Damn it, what kind of filename is that! Is he that careless with his physics work?’
Nevertheless, he clicked open the attachment.
As the file loaded, his eyebrows shot up.
"...Seventeen pages?"
’An undergrad wrote a seventeen-page summary for a problem spanning four fields—differential geometry, Algebraic Topology, Functional Analysis, and Quantum Field Theory—in less than three days?’
A thought began to form in Zhou Qifeng’s mind.
’Don’t tell me this kid actually solved the whole thing?’
He shook his head.
’Impossible.’
’Seventeen pages... at most, he’s just laid out the framework for the first two parts. There’s no way he could have completed the third part’s argument, which involves the renormalization group hierarchy, in this amount of time.’
Despite his thoughts, he obediently scrolled back to the first page.

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