Li Dong closed his laptop.
He sat in his chair for a while.
He couldn’t shake the feeling that this path wasn’t quite right.
There was no reason for it. It was just a gut feeling.
The sensation was strange.
He knew math.
He had only started gnawing his way through Engl’s Inverse Problems in the last couple of days. While he hadn’t mastered the whole regularization process, it wasn’t so daunting that he’d shrink at the sight of it.
If he really put his mind to it, he could probably produce some results.
But he just felt that something was off.
It was as if everyone was standing at the same crossroads, and they all turned right in unison.
He stood at the very back, watching the crowd’s retreating figures, and a voice in his head said:
’They all took the wrong turn.’
The problem was,
he couldn’t say which way was the correct one.
Li Dong sighed and closed his laptop.
"Forget it..."
"I’ll read through the equipment manual first."
He opened his laptop again.
And then...
he dove right in.
This thing, Chemical Intuition [Basic Edition], would automatically construct a three-dimensional, dynamic image in Li Dong’s mind whenever he encountered things like molecular structures, ligand fields, or electron clouds.
As he read, the internal structure of the corresponding instrument would materialize in his mind. He could visualize how every turn of a knob corresponded to a specific electric field, a specific magnetic field, and which part of the sample it was applied to.
What should have been a very tedious equipment manual...
...somehow became something like an animated film with the internal structure cut away for his viewing.
The more Li Dong read, the more absorbed he became.
Without realizing it,
he even skipped dinner.
「Outside the dorm room.」
"Hey, so was Professor Zhang’s point that the Riemann-Roch theorem for curves connects divisors on a function field with sections of a vector bundle?"
"I think so."
"And then when you get to surfaces, you add that quadratic correction term."
"Yeah, that quadratic correction is basically the low-order expansion of the Todd class, right?"
"I think that’s what Professor Zhang was getting at just now."
"Let’s look through Hartshorne again when we get back."
"Don’t read Hartshorne, read Vakil first."
"...Fine."
Footsteps grew closer.
CLICK. The door was pushed open.
Liu Qiang and Chen Nan returned to their dorm room.
The two of them had just come from a seminar, their brains not yet having switched back to normal mode.
Liu Qiang looked up.
"Huh?"
Chen Nan froze as well.
The two of them exchanged a look.
Only a few lights were on in the room. Li Dong was sitting at his desk.
He wasn’t looking at the screen.
Instead, his eyes were closed, his right hand moving in the empty air before him, rapidly turning, pressing, and flipping.
His fingers would spread open, then close, then seem to twist an invisible knob.
He was also muttering under his breath.
"...This setting should be in the low-gain region... no, increase the voltage first, then switch back..."
Liu Qiang: ...
Chen Nan: ...
The two of them huddled together and whispered.
"What’s Brother Dong doing?"
"I have no idea."
Chen Nan rubbed his chin.
"I’ve heard that some people who are ridiculously good at mental arithmetic close their eyes and move their hands like they’re using an abacus."
"Brother Dong... you don’t think he’s practicing that, do you?"
Liu Qiang sucked in a breath. HISS.
He thought for a moment.
"It’s not impossible."
"At Brother Dong’s level, just calculating in his head is probably too slow for him."
"He might really be practicing some kind of Advanced Edition."
The two of them stared with great solemnity at Li Dong’s dancing hand for a good while.
In the end, they didn’t dare to disturb him.
They didn’t notice the PDF file open on Li Dong’s laptop screen.
The title on the first page, in all caps:
"SR-CTC-2 MODEL SYNCHROTRON RADIATION-COMPATIBLE CRYOGENIC SCANNING TUNNELING MICROSCOPE—USER MANUAL."
If Wang Hao had been there, he would have instantly recognized what Li Dong was doing.
It was goddamn dry-run training.
Of course, Li Dong had come up with the name himself.
The two academic aces finally suppressed their laughter and quietly returned to their own desks.
Liu Qiang silently took out his copy of Vakil.
Chen Nan also took out his Hartshorne.
Only three sounds remained in the dorm room.
The sound of the two of them flipping through their books, and...
"This range... another half-step to the left."
The night slowly deepened.
「The next two days passed in a flash.」
Li Dong went through the materials Zhang Yan had given him three times from start to finish.
He had thoroughly digested the equipment manual and had also roughly organized the previous researchers’ experimental notes into a timeline.
As for the literature, he didn’t read all of it in detail, mainly picking out a few papers related to the two mathematical bottlenecks to review.
A faint outline was beginning to form in his mind.
But it was still the same feeling.
There was something wrong with this path.
「Early on the third day.」
The sun hadn’t fully risen when Li Dong left.
「North Chemical Building, Second Basement Level.」
Professor Wu Kai’s research group lab.
When Li Dong pushed the door open, the lab was already quite full.
Several new pieces of equipment sat on the benches on either side, some still covered in the original factory plastic wrap.
The metal door at the far end, leading to the ultra-high vacuum chamber area, was also open.
A circle of people stood inside the room.
Professor Wu Kai, Su Yanqing, and Zhang Yan were all there.
As for the other four, Li Dong didn’t know them.
Two men and two women, all looking to be in their late twenties to early thirties, were dressed in lab coats.
As soon as Li Dong entered, he nodded to Wu Kai.
"Teacher Wu."
Wu Kai waved back at him.
"Come on over."
Li Dong walked over.
Wu Kai immediately introduced him to the group.
"Everyone, let me introduce you. This is Li Dong, who will be working with us this time."
"A Yuanpei freshman, who has already..."
Wu Kai paused, then smiled.
"Never mind, I won’t say it."
"You all know the score."
The few doctoral students in the room all grunted in acknowledgment.
Of course they all knew the score.
Yan University’s East God; who didn’t know him?
One of them, a taller guy wearing glasses, proactively extended his hand.

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