Liu Ruochuan froze on the spot.
The corner of his mouth twitched.
"The next one?"
’What the hell is "the next one"?’
Li Dong looked conflicted.
"I haven’t figured it out yet. I’ve only seen a faint outline."
Liu Ruochuan took a deep breath.
He felt like he needed something right now.
He needed a chair to sit down and collect himself. A cigarette would be even better, though he’d quit eight years ago.
’This isn’t scientific.’
Setting aside what the hell Li Dong meant by "the next one," the problem he was currently tackling was extending the Langlands Program from GL(2) all the way to GL(n) in one fell swoop.
That was already damn impressive, alright?
When he’d seen Li Dong looking so lost and dejected earlier, it hadn’t surprised him at all.
It had been over half a century since Langlands himself laid out that blueprint in his 1967 letter to André Weil, and generations of the world’s sharpest minds had been chipping away at it ever since.
But no one had ever managed to move the entire mountain.
So, it was only natural that Li Dong couldn’t solve it.
But...
Now, Li Dong was saying he’d done it.
Liu Ruochuan knew what this meant.
The 2026 Fields Medal was a sure thing.
In fact, the first thought that popped into his head wasn’t even the Fields Medal.
It was...
This was possibly the single most significant result in the entire mathematical community since the turn of the century.
Looking back a hundred years, the only accomplishments that could even compare were Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, Perelman’s proof of the Poincaré Conjecture, and Mochizuki Shinichi’s still-controversial proof of the ABC conjecture... they were few and far between.
And now Li Dong was telling him:
"Oh, it’s done."
"And I haven’t figured out the next one."
Liu Ruochuan looked at Li Dong’s face.
"Li Dong."
"Yeah?"
"Do you have any idea what you’re saying?"
Li Dong tilted his head, thinking for a couple of seconds.
"The Fields Medal?"
Liu Ruochuan almost choked on his own spit.
"It’s not just about the Fields Medal." He did his best to make his voice sound normal.
"If this result gets out, in terms of sheer magnitude, it could be one of the greatest achievements in mathematical history for the past several decades, perhaps even longer."
A flicker of change finally crossed Li Dong’s expression. He nodded earnestly.
"Oh. That’s pretty impressive, then."
Liu Ruochuan was speechless.
’Forget it. This kid has no idea what he’s holding.’
’Or rather, he does understand.’
’He’s just become a bit numb to it all.’
Any one of the things Li Dong had accomplished in the past six months would be enough for someone else to brag about for a lifetime.
A huge leap forward on Montgomery’s Conjecture on Association, extending the zero-point algorithm to 1023...
’Becoming desensitized was only natural.’
"Even if you really have completed such a monumental work," Liu Ruochuan said, composing himself, "you can’t avoid the peer review process."
"For work of this magnitude, the reviewers will check and double-check it repeatedly. The process will drag on for quite some time."
"If at any point you need to provide additional proofs or make revisions, don’t panic. That’s perfectly normal."
Then he looked at Li Dong and said seriously,
"And even if..."
"it doesn’t get accepted in the end, don’t be discouraged. You’re still young."
Li Dong understood that Liu Ruochuan was trying to prepare him mentally.
"I know, Professor."
Liu Ruochuan watched him for a moment before letting out a soft sigh and patting his shoulder.
"Come on, let’s go eat."
"Two orders of spicy chicken."
"...Alright, two orders."
Penrose, who had been left standing on the sidelines without a chance to get a word in, finally found an opening.
"He is Dong. You must trust him."
Liu Ruochuan was speechless.
’Don’t you start adding to the chaos too, old man.’
Two orders of spicy chicken later.
The first thing Li Dong did upon returning to dorm room 404 was rush to the bathroom.
’Eating spicy food on an empty stomach... my stomach really can’t take it...’
He was in there for the better part of half an hour.
Liu Qiang, who was sitting cross-legged on his bed skimming a book, heard the bathroom door finally open. He looked up to see Li Dong emerging, pale-faced and leaning on the wall for support, and tutted twice.
"East God—"
"Shut up," Li Dong said, shuffling back to his desk while leaning on the wall.
"I just want to ask one thing," Liu Qiang said, thoroughly enjoying the situation.
"So, gods can get diarrhea too?"
Chen Nan immediately jumped in. "I thought East God could use some mathematical method to optimize the situation."
"Optimize?" Liu Qiang sat up.
"What would he use? The method of Lagrange multipliers? Using ’sphincter contraction strength’ as the constraint to maximize the probability of ’it not coming out’?"
"No, no, he should use control theory," Chen Nan said with a straight face.
"Treat the intestinal tract as a black box. The input is spicy chicken, and the output is... well, you know."
"Then you stick a PID controller in the middle to suppress the output signal to zero."
"You’re thinking too superficially."
Liu Qiang picked up a water bottle, holding it like a microphone.
"For someone at East God’s level, you’d obviously have to use the fixed-point theorem."
"Apply a contraction mapping to the entire digestive system. The Banach fixed-point theorem tells us a unique fixed point exists. And then..."
He concluded.
"You map yourself to that fixed point, and bam! Problem solved! No more pooping!"
The two of them went back and forth from their beds, nearly laughing themselves sick.
Only Wang Hao silently stared at his desk and sighed deeply.
He, Wang Hao, knew better than anyone what Li Dong’s return to the dorm meant.
’Just wait and see,’ he thought. ’It won’t be long before he single-handedly, and silently, raises the intellectual atmosphere of dorm 404 by another eight hundred levels.’
’Then the three of them would be forced to study along in that invisible, oppressive academic aura, none of them daring to be the first to go to sleep.’
Wang Hao touched his receding hairline.
A wave of sorrow washed over him.
Li Dong laughed and playfully cursed at the two of them, but couldn’t be bothered to engage further. He opened his paper, preparing to review it one more time from the beginning.
This time, Liu Ruochuan hadn’t given him any advice, letting him submit it to whichever journal he pleased.
He wasn’t considering any domestic journals.
It wasn’t that he looked down on them; the main reason was that his name wasn’t the only one on the paper. Penrose and Old Yang were listed as co-authors.
Therefore, the decision of where to submit it wasn’t his alone to make.
He had asked Penrose on the way back from the cafeteria that afternoon.
Penrose had replied nonchalantly.
"Dong, any of them are fine. Just pick one of the top four."
He paused, then added,
"If you must ask, I’m partial to the layout in the *Annals*."
"I also know a few of the reviewers there."
As for Old Yang.
When Li Dong called him, the other end of the line was quite noisy.
He could faintly hear a male voice.
"Teacher Yang, I really don’t get this step!"
Li Dong paused, surprised.
’Seventh Middle School... students are actually asking Old Yang for help with problems now?’
The whole thing felt a bit surreal.
After the event in the Sunshine Hall, Old Yang had become a legendary figure in Jiangcheng’s education circles.
Seventh Middle School had made him an incredibly generous offer to keep him.
They had given him "Special-Grade Teacher" status, cut his teaching hours in half, and allowed him to use the rest of his time for whatever he pleased. The school even set aside a private office with its own bathroom just for him.
Over the phone, he quickly dismissed the student and lowered his voice.
"Li Dong, about the paper, you handle it. Just aim high, send it to the best."
"Who in mathematics wouldn’t dream of having their name on a paper in one of the top four journals?"
Li Dong smiled on his end of the line.
In the end, after weighing all the factors, he still chose the *Mathematical Annals*.
For one, his previous paper was published there, so he was familiar with the process.
For another, people like Terence Tao and Katz were on the editorial board or the list of frequent reviewers. He’d interacted with them before, so they weren’t complete strangers.

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