Li Dong and Gao Yuanlin walked along the small path outside the Tsinghua Institute.
Just then, Gao Yuanlin finally couldn’t hold it in any longer.
"You kid."
"How did you end up getting into chemistry now?"
Li Dong chuckled.
"Teacher Gao."
"It’s just a hobby."
Gao Yuanlin was speechless.
He was truly at a loss for words.
’You have way too damn many hobbies!’
Li Dong himself didn’t think much of it.
He sighed with admiration to Gao Yuanlin.
"Teacher Gao, Mr. Yang is truly..."
For a moment, he couldn’t find the right words to describe him.
After some thought, he plucked a phrase from his limited vocabulary that he felt was the closest fit.
"The kind of person who stands above everyone else."
"He doesn’t see himself as just a physicist."
"Or just a mathematician."
"He’s the kind of person who can lay out the entire era before him and view it as an equal."
Gao Yuanlin fell silent for a moment after hearing this.
He nodded slowly.
"Yes."
He sighed.
"Do you know why Mr. Yang returned to the country back then?"
Li Dong shook his head.
Gao Yuanlin slowed his pace slightly.
"In 2003, Mr. Yang returned to the country and settled down at Shuimu."
"He was eighty-one years old that year."
"At eighty-one, he should have been enjoying his retirement."
"But he came back and did one thing."
"He recruited people from all over the world for the Shuimu Advanced Research Institute."
"For anyone he had any influence with, he personally wrote letters to invite them."
"At the time, his entire salary from Shuimu..."
"He donated it all back to the institute to create a foundation."
"Then he got up on the podium himself."
"A man in his eighties, teaching two University Physics classes a week."
"He taught at Tsinghua for several years."
"It’s been twenty years since 2003."
"He single-handedly built the Shuimu Advanced Research Institute from a few small rooms into an institution that can now stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Princeton."
"Condensed matter, statistics, cold atoms, gauge fields..."
"Nearly every prominent figure in all these fields in the country today has a connection to the list of people he brought in."
Gao Yuanlin paused here.
He looked up at the clouds in the sky.
"Kid."
"Our generation calls him a true pillar of the nation."
"And he deserves every bit of that title."
After hearing all this, Li Dong was silent for a long time.
After a while, Gao Yuanlin sighed again.
"Mr. Yang is getting old."
"And his health is failing."
"That fall last year..."
He trailed off.
Li Dong didn’t reply.
He recalled the scene from earlier inside Gui Gen Residence.
Mr. Yang’s energy was low, and he needed Dr. Weng to look after him the entire time.
The blanket, the teacup, the time—someone had to keep an eye on everything.
There was still a light in his eyes, but the body behind them...
...was already a lamp about to be extinguished.
A thought suddenly occurred to Li Dong.
’If human technology could overcome the barrier of mortality...’
’How... how wonderful would that be?’
Just as he thought this, he suddenly remembered he still had two Origin Fragments in his group. ’If I get one more,’ he wondered, ’I wonder if the tech tree has a life science branch.’
’If it does...’
’Then maybe I could...’
Li Dong drew in a sharp breath of "life science."
He then made a silent mental note of it.
’It’s not just Mr. Yang,’ he thought.
’In our field, he’s not the only lamp that’s about to burn out.’
At that moment, his motivation to game the system grew even stronger.
After they returned to Yan University, Gao Yuanlin had originally intended to have Li Dong stop by his office for a chat.
But Li Dong waved his hand dismissively.
"Teacher Gao."
"I need to sort through today’s material while it’s still fresh. In another two hours, I might forget half of it."
Gao Yuanlin smiled and didn’t insist.
"Alright then."
"Be careful on your way."
"Don’t forget to eat dinner."
He knew Li Dong’s tendency to work through the night and forget to eat, so he added the reminder out of kindness.
Li Dong waved back at him.
"Don’t worry."
The first thing Li Dong did when he got back to his dorm was pull out the phone that had been vibrating nonstop like a toy.
The screen lit up, and notifications from the group chat filled half of it.
He opened the group chat.
A new group announcement was displayed at the very top.
[Group Announcement: A still-burning star of the twentieth century has been detected on the surface of this spacetime.]
[In 1954, he and his companion wrote a set of equations on a small desk at Princeton.]
[In the seventy years that followed, that set of equations silently grew into the entire language humanity uses to describe the electromagnetic, strong, and weak interactions.]
[In 1956, he pointed a finger at a coin whose properties all of humanity had taken for granted.]
[He said, the two sides of this coin are not symmetrical.]
[And so, the following year’s Nobel Prize landed in the hands of a pair of Huaxia People for the first time.]
[In 1975, he and his old friend rewrote gauge fields as fiber bundles.]
[From that year on, physicists and mathematicians finally saw each other on the same map.]
[His shadow stands behind some of the deepest doors of the latter half of the twentieth century: quantum groups, knot polynomials, four-dimensional topology, and the geometric Langlands program.]
[He did not ripen the era prematurely.]
[He was the era itself.]
Li Dong held his breath and continued to scroll down.
[Group Announcement: The group has detected a living individual who possesses the most profound mind for physics in this universe.]
[Invite this individual to join the group?]
[Invitation Reward: Group Leader all attributes +0.2.]
Looking at that [+0.2], Li Dong felt a flicker of temptation.
He knew his own attribute panel better than anyone.
[Concentration: 0.4]
[Logic: 0.4]
[Memory: 0.6] (Memory Palace)
All attributes +0.2 meant his Logic and Concentration would cross the 0.6 threshold.
Based on his previous experience...
...the 0.6 threshold was where Derived Skills appeared.
Just like how his Memory reached 0.6 and he unlocked [Memory Palace].
If he pushed his Logic and Concentration to 0.6 as well...
’This wouldn’t just be ’a few more attribute points’.
’This would be a qualitative change.’
Li Dong stared at the [+0.2] for a long time.
But he didn’t tap [Yes].
Instead, without any hesitation, he tapped [No].
The reason was simple.
The people in this group.
From Newton to Galileo to Gauss to Faraday...
They were all figures from the history books.
They were all dead.
He didn’t know what would happen if he invited a living person into the group.
He didn’t dare to imagine it.
And he didn’t dare to risk it.
Even if that [+0.2] was incredibly important to him.
Even if taking this step would make a new skill pop up on his attribute panel.
He wouldn’t tap it.
He silently locked his phone.
The screen went dark.
He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling.
After a long while, he let out a small smile.
"I’m the Group Leader."
He muttered to himself.
"I’m the one who calls the shots in this group."
He paused, then added another sentence.
"Mr. Yang."
"You’ll have to wait a few more years for me."
"Wait until I’ve paved that road of life science for you..."

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