Yan University. A men’s dorm room.
"What the hell!"
"Film Appreciation was gone in three seconds! How fast are these people?"
A sophomore, holding his phone, looked like he was about to jump out of his skin.
"Heh." Another guy sitting across from him gave a bitter smile.
"It was the same with my Mental Health course. The moment I refreshed the page, it showed it was full."
"We can’t even get into a few decent blow-off classes?"
"Does anyone at Yan University even sleep?"
These guys weren’t complaining about wanting blow-off classes because they wanted to skip them.
On the contrary, they wanted to knock out their general education credits with minimal effort so they could pour all the time they saved into the hard-core courses for their major and other advanced seminars.
At a school like this, blow-off classes were a true "strategic resource."
The four of them were clamoring together, but one had remained silent the whole time.
His name was Chen Zhe, a sophomore from the School of Mathematics. He was usually a man of few words.
He was staring down at his phone and hadn’t looked up once.
"Old Chen?"
"Aren’t you trying to grab a class? You’re still on your phone."
Chen Zhe looked up, his expression hard to describe.
"You guys..."
"You guys, go look at the course selection group chat."
The others didn’t know what was going on, but they still dug out the course selection group chat from their mess of other group chats.
The first thing they saw was a pinned message.
ANNOUNCEMENT: Preview of this semester’s campus-wide public lecture series.
Professor Arthur Penrose (Professor Emeritus for Life, Princeton University) will be giving a series of 10 public lectures this semester.
Topic: "Analytic Number Theory on p-adic Numbers."
The first lecture is scheduled for next Wednesday at 7 PM.
This course carries no academic credit. All students and faculty are free to attend. No registration is required.
The dorm room was silent for a second.
Then it exploded.
"HOLY SHIT?!"
"Pen... Professor Penrose?"
"The Penrose who’s published in the Annals twice and was invited to give a one-hour address at the International Congress of Mathematicians?"
"You mean he didn’t go back after East God’s seminar?"
"And he’s staying to teach a course for us?"
The guys exchanged a look.
No discussion was necessary.
"We’re going!"
"I can’t even understand the survey papers on ’Analytic Number Theory on p-adic Numbers’! But I have to go! Just seeing Penrose in person will make it worth it!"
Not many people actually knew that Penrose was part of Li Dong’s research group.
So they had no idea that this perk was actually something Li Dong had arranged for everyone...
The news quickly reached Shuimu as well.
The Shuimu Mathematics College group chat erupted.
"Why didn’t he come to our university? Why?"
"Now we have to go all the way to Yan University to crash their class?"
"I crashed one of their talks last year, and the security guard at the door was giving me a weird look!"
After a while of fuming, someone stepped in to smooth things over.
"Come on, guys, let’s not get too worked up."
"Back when Mr. Yang taught at our Shuimu, didn’t entire groups from Yan University crowd into our lectures too?"
"What goes around comes around."
That seemed to placate the people at Shuimu a little.
But only a little.
Yan University School of Mathematics.
Inside Liu Ruochuan’s office.
For the Nth time, he dialed Li Dong’s number...
"BEEP—"
"The number you have dialed is temporarily unavailable."
Liu Ruochuan grumbled irritably.
"What’s that kid up to now?"
"I can’t get through to him at all."
Penrose, sitting on the sofa, slowly took a sip of tea.
Then he spat out the tea leaves.
"Coffee is so much simpler."
Then he said to Liu Ruochuan,
"He’s probably reached the most critical step of his project."
Liu Ruochuan nodded, then turned to look at Penrose.
"Professor."
"Are you sure there are no major problems with your project?"
Penrose put down his cup and said seriously,
"To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. We pushed through eighty percent of it together. The remaining twenty percent is all up to Dong."
"But to be honest, that last twenty percent is actually very difficult."
Liu Ruochuan sighed and said,
"You still remember what he said in Sunshine Hall, right?"
Penrose smiled.
"How could I forget?"
"He said he was going to lay the foundation for the Langlands Program."
Liu Ruochuan laughed too, but his laughter was a bit bitter.
"It sounded so inspiring at the time."
"But this step... the entire mathematics community knows how hard it is."
"Even Arthur himself said back in the day that this step might not be seen until the next generation."
He paused for a moment.
"Forget about the foundation. Just the idea that kid and Yang Shengguo presented in Sunshine Hall, for extending GL(2) to GL(3)..."
"Over the winter break, several research groups, both domestic and international, have been racing against time."
"There’s a professor in our school," Liu Ruochuan lowered his voice, "who is also working in this direction."
"And his progress isn’t slow."
"He’s come to me at least three times in the past two months."
"Said he wanted to meet with Li Dong, to see if they could exchange some ideas on certain technical details."
Penrose raised an eyebrow.
"Not at a time like this. Dong can’t be distracted."
"That’s why I turned them all down."
Liu Ruochuan deeply agreed.
"We can’t let him be disturbed by these people during the critical final stages."
Penrose said no more, just nodded.
He glanced up at the clock on the wall.
"Dong, when was the last time he was seen in public?"
Liu Ruochuan thought for a moment.
"Four days ago."
"He came out to the cafeteria for a meal."
"A grad student from the School of Mathematics took a picture of him."
"Posted it on their Moments with the caption, ’East God in human form’."
Penrose: ...
"What does ’East God in human form’ mean?"
Liu Ruochuan was silent for two seconds.
"It basically means... he still looks like a person, he just doesn’t look very... alive."
At that very moment, while they were chatting in Liu Ruochuan’s office,
Li Dong himself was in a seminar room in the basement of Building 35.
An A4 sheet of paper was taped to the door, on which Li Dong had written two words.
"In Use."
The words were written neatly enough.
It’s just that since the day it was posted, it had never been taken down.
Inside the seminar room.
Several instant noodle containers were scattered on the floor. A vacuum flask lay tipped over by the leg of a table, its lid having rolled to the base of the wall.
Li Dong was sitting in a chair in front of the whiteboard.
His hair was noticeably messier than it had been a week ago, his eyes were a little bloodshot, and a few fine whiskers had even sprouted on his chin.
He looked at the stack of freshly printed draft papers in his hand.
On the top page was the title he had written himself.
"The Zero Criterion for the Local-Global Compatibility of Automorphic Representations of GL(n) and Its Generalization."
A few days ago, he had already finished the unified part of the paper.
When the last formula was written, it was four in the morning.
He sat facing the whiteboard for a while, feeling no particular emotion.
Any other mathematician who managed to complete this paper would have been ecstatic by now.
If it had been Jiang Yubai, he probably would have run off to challenge Tian Gang.
But Li Dong felt nothing at all.
It wasn’t that he looked down on this project, but rather...
The moment the paper was finished, he was suddenly struck by a flash of inspiration.
Li Dong himself had never really realized he had this talent.
But he’d had signs of it many times before.
Hmm...
The most concrete manifestation of this was his uncanny ability to glean the most crucial insights from the great masters.
’Those previous inspirations were all a specific point.’
’For example, Riemann’s Manuscript pointed to a parallel algorithm.’
’They were all clear "springboards" that he could use to launch himself forward.’
’This time, it wasn’t a springboard, but...’
’An entire skyscraper.’
Li Dong couldn’t explain where that skyscraper had come from.
But he could feel that his current project was merely the foundation of this skyscraper.
That skyscraper was huge.
So huge that he couldn’t even make out its specific shape.
Li Dong rubbed his temples.
"...A functor?"
He wasn’t entirely sure himself.
He couldn’t say where the word had popped out from.
It might have emerged from the zero criterion he had just established.
After all, what that criterion essentially did was forcibly link two previously unrelated objects: "automorphic representations" and "the statistics of their zeros."
’This act of translating the relationships of one class of objects to another, while also requiring the original structure to be preserved...’
’It has the flavor of a functor.’
’But only just a little.’
Li Dong stared at the last line of the formula he had just finished writing on the whiteboard.
He stared for a long time.
Finally, he grabbed a marker and slowly wrote a line of text in the far right corner of the whiteboard.
"...There’s more above?"
After writing it, he froze for two seconds, then tossed the pen aside and sat back down in his chair.
"No."
"I can’t think it through."

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