Li Dong sighed again.
’Might as well listen. There’s always time if you make it.’
He didn’t bother with Xiaohai for now, letting it slowly munch on his elementary school textbooks on its own.
He turned off his screen, locked the room’s door from the inside, and checked the status of the building’s access control.
Only then did he slowly walk in the direction of his dormitory.
In the days that followed, Li Dong packed his schedule to the brim.
He basically spent all his time running back and forth between the library and the Science and Technology Teaching Building.
In Gao Wen’s Low-level Algorithms and High-Performance Computing Architecture, he sat in the front row.
He sat in the second row for Discussion on Neuromorphic Computing, a course taught by another professor from the School of Information Science, Professor Chen.
He even went to audit the small seminar class taught by the visiting professor from Shuimu who specialized in computational neuroscience.
During this period, he also went to see Mr. Yang twice.
He mainly went to discuss some of his recent ideas with Mr. Yang.
Every time he went, he would take out the derivation he was most proud of, one he had recently wrestled with, and run through it with Mr. Yang.
Mr. Yang would just listen most of the time, nodding occasionally.
After Li Dong finished, he would only say one sentence.
"Li Dong."
"This part here, try looking at it from a different angle."
Just that one sentence.
It was enough to keep Li Dong thinking for a whole week.
Time passed, and Professor Wiles had now been in Huaxia for a month.
On the day he was scheduled to leave, Li Dong personally saw him off at the airport.
The two of them didn’t say much on the way.
Professor Wiles wasn’t a talkative person by nature, and Li Dong, having been exhausted lately, wasn’t very talkative either.
When they reached the boarding gate, Wiles turned back to look at Li Dong.
"Li Dong."
"It was a pleasure to meet you."
He paused.
"Please let me know once you’ve sorted out your schedule."
Li Dong nodded.
"Professor Wiles."
"Once I’m done with my work here, I’ll schedule a time with you."
Wiles didn’t say anything more. He nodded at him and turned to enter the boarding gate.
Li Dong stood where he was, watching Professor Wiles’s receding figure.
He suddenly recalled what Professor Wiles had said during that one lecture: about being a ten-year-old boy in an Oxford library, opening an old book for the first time and seeing the line Fermat had written in the margin.
"I have discovered a truly marvelous proof, but unfortunately, this margin is too narrow to write it down."
And so Wiles had completed it in his stead.
And now, what he had to do was also complete that missing page—for Wiles, for Langlands, and for the countless people who had struggled on the path of the Langlands Program.
Li Dong stood outside the boarding gate for a long while.
He said silently to himself.
’Safe travels, Professor.’
That night, after seeing Wiles off, he returned to his dorm room to find his three roommates already fast asleep.
Lying in bed with his eyes closed, Li Dong slowly entered his Memory Palace.
On the wooden table in the very center of the palace lay a notebook.
It was the gift Klein had given him.
Symmetry and Natural Law—Göttingen Private Discussion Notes.
’By my calculations, it should have finished loading by now.’
Li Dong reached out to grab it.
But his hand still passed right through it.
He lowered his head.
Below the notebook’s cover, a faint progress bar was still floating.
Li Dong frowned.
’That can’t be right. A whole month has passed already.’
He stared intently at the progress bar again.
In the bottom-right corner of the progress bar, there was another line of even smaller text.
[Estimated Time Remaining: ∞]
Li Dong: ???
’What’s that supposed to mean? Did they throttle my connection because I’m not a premium subscriber?’
’So the time is just an estimate?’
’It changes based on the data transfer speed?’
’Then who’s doing the transferring?’
Li Dong remembered what Klein had said—that he also wanted to cap the Langlands Program, and then show it to Fields.
’So...’
’Klein is stuck?’
When he thought of this, he actually felt less disappointed.
Because he now had an audacious idea.
’What if I manage to cap the Langlands Program before Klein does?’
With this thought, Li Dong withdrew from the Memory Palace.
He decided he should visit the research group more often in the coming days.
The next morning, Li Dong went to his research group’s office.
He pushed open the door to the seminar room.
Penrose was standing right next to Fu Chen, watching his derivation with great concentration.
When he saw Li Dong arrive, Penrose hurried over and grabbed his arm.
"Dong."
"You have to come see this."
Before Li Dong could even react, he was dragged over to Fu Chen’s whiteboard.
The whiteboard was densely packed with Fu Chen’s derivations.
The top line read—
[The Preserved Correspondence between the Anomalous Residue of Cyclic L-factors and the Local Dimension of the Deformation Ring].
Li Dong had already seen this line the last time he was here.
Last time, Fu Chen had been stuck here.
Li Dong had originally thought that the next few steps were just Fu Chen’s trial and error.
But as he looked more closely this time,
He discovered...
Fu Chen had advanced three full steps beyond where he was last time.
And the third step...
...landed right on the edge of the Li Clan’s conjecture.
Li Dong’s gaze followed the derivation down, all the way to the bottom-right corner of the whiteboard.
An unresolved operator was written there.
Beneath the operator, Fu Chen had drawn a question mark.
Li Dong stared at the question mark for several seconds.
Deep down, he already knew what that question mark was.
He even knew how to fill it in.
He gave it a gentle push in that direction in his mind.
In less than ten seconds,
The thing had already taken shape.
But he couldn’t tell Fu Chen.
Because if he were to reveal it...
...any of Fu Chen’s subsequent work that was good enough for the Annals...

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