The next few days passed as usual.
Li Dong spent all his time before bed on Xiaohai.
He went through the three steps Gao Wen had given him, over and over again.
Each time, he would use a new interval, a new input topic, and a new snapshot resolution.
And each time, the clusters of connections on the differential graph shifted slightly from their previous positions.
But there was a pattern to this shift.
Li Dong watched it for many nights in a row, and he started to get a rough idea of what the pattern was.
But knowing it was one thing; being able to explain it clearly was another.
As for the [Agree] button under the Shannon column,
it was still unclickable.
Li Dong wasn’t in a hurry anymore.
He knew it was just a matter of time.
「The night before the opening ceremony.」
Li Dong had just gotten back to his dorm from the library.
His phone started ringing off the hook.
They were all calls from the opening ceremony organizing committee, the Yan University and Shuimu University publicity departments, and a few major media outlets requesting exclusive interviews.
Li Dong scrolled through them one by one, finally picking a teacher who was in charge of coordination and calling them back.
"I’m not doing any exclusive interviews."
"Whatever I have to say, you can just record it then."
The teacher on the other end was stunned.
He had prepared a whole speech to persuade Li Dong to cooperate with the university’s publicity efforts.
But hearing Li Dong’s words, he swallowed it all back down.
"...Fine."
"Teacher Li, as you wish."
Li Dong hung up and tossed his phone onto the desk.
Wang Hao, who had been watching from the side, sighed.
"Brother Dong."
"You’re turning down everything I’ve ever dreamed of. Why don’t you tell them to let me go instead?"
Li Dong chuckled and shook his head.
"Get lost. Once you dominate the National Mathematical Modeling Competition, they’ll naturally come looking for you too."
Wang Hao paused. ’That actually makes sense.’
「The next day.」
Shuimu University’s opening ceremony was two days earlier than Yan University’s.
Beneath the golden backdrop in the center of the stage, an extra, relatively inconspicuous speaker’s podium had been set up—a first for the university.
A small nameplate sat on the podium.
[Li Dong, Doctoral Fresher Representative].
Sitting below the stage was a sea of faces—the several thousand new students of this year’s class.
In the first few rows were several vice presidents and senior academicians.
President Li Ming himself sat right in the center of the front row.
Li Dong, dressed in a light gray suit custom-tailored for him by Shuimu’s logistics department, walked up the small steps at the side of the stage.
A round of applause rose from the audience.
Li Dong stood before the microphone.
His opening remarks were something he had mulled over in his dorm for twenty minutes the night before.
"Teachers, fellow students."
"My name is Li Dong."
"I just turned twenty this year."
The audience was completely silent.
"I’m sure the upperclassmen before me have told you a lot about Shuimu—about the courses, the labs, and which cafeteria has good food and which has bad."
"I won’t repeat what they’ve said."
Someone in the audience couldn’t help but chuckle.
Li Dong smiled along with them.
"I just want to say one thing to a certain group of you here today."
"You’re the ones who tested your way here from a very small middle school, from a very small county."
"Along the way, you must have heard a certain phrase."
"’For someone from a place like yours, just getting into a Tier 1 university would be a great achievement.’"
"I’ve heard that before, too."
"In my last year of high school, I was ranked near the bottom on a monthly exam, and a teacher wrote a line on my test paper."
"’Just do your best. Don’t push yourself too hard.’"
Most of the freshers in the audience were a little baffled. ’Huh? We’ve always been the chosen ones.’
But a few other new students listened with reddened eyes. They were the ones who had come from small counties.
Li Dong was, in fact, speaking to them, because they were the ones who needed the encouragement.
"I later spent a year turning that line, ’Don’t push yourself too hard,’ into another line of text."
"That line is written on my current admission notice."
"It’s called—’Shuimu University Doctoral Program Admission Notice.’"
After half a second of dead silence, thunderous applause erupted throughout the hall.
Li Dong waited for the applause to die down before continuing.
"So I didn’t come up here today to preach some grand philosophy to you."
"I just want to tell you one thing."
He looked at the new students who were visibly moved and continued.
"The past is the past. Starting today, it’s all null and void."
"Here at Shuimu, it doesn’t matter where you came from."
"Nor does anyone care what your test scores were before."
"For the next four, five, or seven years, wherever you want to go, you go."
"This campus will be with you every step of the way."
"Thank you."
He pushed the microphone away.
The applause from the audience exploded with a ROAR, sweeping from the front row all the way to the back of the auditorium behind the stage.
「Two days later, at the Yan University opening ceremony.」
The crowd seated below the stage at Yan University was even denser than the one at Shuimu.
Nearly all the undergraduate students admitted to Yan University this year were present.
This time, Li Dong was the final speaker.
The moment he stepped up to the microphone, the sea of heads below the stage all turned to look up at him.
Li Dong first nodded to the senior academicians in the audience.
"Fellow students."
"This is my second time giving a speech like this. The first was two days ago at Shuimu."
"I was even tempted to use the same speech again, just swapping out ’Shuimu’ for ’Yan University.’"
As soon as these opening words were out, the audience erupted in laughter with a ROAR.
Many people had actually already seen the video from the Shuimu event two days prior.
Li Dong smiled along with them.
"But I thought about it, and since this is my alma mater, after all, I’d like to chat with you a bit about something different."

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