This team of contestants
hadn’t just calculated the power generation efficiency for a normal year.
They had also independently verified scenarios involving a few days of sudden, extreme weather.
By this point, the team that submitted this paper was no longer just thinking about getting the question right.
They were truly treating this power station as something that would have to support its owners for ten or twenty years.
Hearing this, Li Dong pulled out the paper on his desk, the one derived from the polar coordinate variational method.
"Everyone,"
"I have one here that I’d really like to discuss with you all."
Li Dong explained the paper’s approach.
From treating the entire mirror field as a continuous field, to the double integral, and finally to the Euler-Lagrange Equations yielded by the variational method.
He didn’t go into great detail, but the other reviewers understood the entire framework.
The room fell silent for a few seconds.
Zhou Mingzhe was the first to speak.
"This method... elegant."
"It’s almost the complete opposite of the approach taken by the two papers Old Min and Old Wen have."
"Old Min and Old Wen’s papers took discrete geometry calculations to the extreme."
"This one jumps up a level, treating the entire field as a continuous medium."
"Two different paths, starting from opposite ends, yet the optimal layouts they produced in the end still match."
"How interesting."
Zhang Wenping spoke up.
"We’ve all picked out three papers today."
"The one Old Min has, the one Old Wen has, and this one from Li Dong."
"Let’s lock these three in for today."
"As for the rest, we’ll make a final decision after we finish reviewing Problems B and C over the next two days."
As was tradition for the national mathematical modeling competition,
the candidate list for the Higher Education Press Cup usually included three to five entries each year.
These three to five papers weren’t simply ranked; they were the small handful that the judges deemed the most outstanding, filtered from over 58,000 teams nationwide.
The contestants on the list would be invited to a designated university in a few weeks for an in-person defense.
This defense would determine the final first-place winner.
That paper would be this year’s Higher Education Press Cup winner.
Li Dong put the paper he was holding back with the others.
He couldn’t guess who had written the paper he had just picked out.
But for the two papers Old Min and Old Wen were holding—for two teams from the same university to both tackle Problem A and both reach a top-tier level...
You couldn’t find many universities like that in the entire country.
He thought to himself.
’Could one of them be Haozi’s...?’
Over the next two days, the review committee went through the papers for Problems B and C.
A few more brilliant ones were also selected and added to the candidate list for the Higher Education Press Cup.
There were five candidates in total.
Once the list was out, the list for the national prizes was also finalized.
The first and second-place national prizes were filled in sequentially, based on the distribution from each competition region.
The list was sent back to the organizing committee for final archival.
The next step was to send invitations to the five candidate teams.
「It was Thursday evening by the time he left the review room.」
Li Dong ordered a bowl of duck blood and vermicelli soup at a small noodle shop outside the north gate of Jinling University.
"How is this not spicy at all? Hmph."
Muttering his critique, Li Dong returned to his apartment.
He then reloaded the event package into the Li Criterion’s framework.
Starting from over ten TeV and up, he ran the simulation again, section by section.
The result was the same as the past two days.
The criterion coefficient still skirted the edge of the anchor interval, jumping back and forth as it progressed.
Neither entering nor leaving.
Li Dong stared at the screen for a long time.
This time, he didn’t rush to write a conclusion.
He closed his eyes.
And slowly walked into his Memory Palace.
The section he entered in his Memory Palace was [Applied Mathematics/Inverse Problems].
This was the framework he had been building up bit by bit recently.
Behind every book on the shelf was a concept he had thoroughly mastered from a particular paper.
Inverse operators, cyclic weights, Tikhonov regularization, Bayesian priors, variational coupling...
Li Dong walked along the shelf.
He reached the wall at the very end.
This wall was an empty space he had recently cleared in his Memory Palace for the [Related Knowledge] section.
Usually, this area was empty.
He would occasionally glance at it but never noticed anything unusual.
But this time,
in the very center of the wall, a patch of white light was glowing, not too brightly.
Surprised, Li Dong walked toward the white light.
Only when he got closer did he see its shape.
It was the outline of a book.
The book’s outline was complete.
But the book itself... was empty.
Li Dong was stunned for a moment.
Perhaps it was because his Logic attribute had increased by another 0.1.
’Is this reminding me that I’m lacking some relevant knowledge?’
He couldn’t be sure if his judgment was correct.
But he didn’t have time to worry about whether he was right or not.
He immediately withdrew from the Memory Palace.
He snapped his laptop shut and grabbed the backpack on his desk.
「Twenty minutes later, he arrived at the Jinling University library.」
Jinling University’s predecessor was National Central University, and its history could be traced even further back to the Sanjiang Normal College of the late Qing Dynasty.
In 1948, this university was widely recognized as number one in all of Asia.
At that time, it had seven colleges—Arts, Sciences, Engineering, Agriculture, Law, Medicine, and Education—with over thirty departments and more than twenty research institutes.
During the 1952 national reorganization of universities and colleges,
this one university was split eight ways.
Its college of engineering became independent, forming today’s Southeast University.
A part of its college of agriculture was carved off to become Jinling Agricultural University, and another part became Jinling Forestry University.
Its department of water resources was merged elsewhere and grew into Hohai University.
The aeronautics department went to Xi’an and grew into Northwestern Polytechnical University.
The college of education became Jinling Normal University.
The medical school became independent and later became part of the Fourth Military Medical University.
As for the philosophy department, it was unceremoniously kicked hundreds of miles away to the Capital City.
The university was thus brutally dismembered, yet it remains one of the most famous 985 universities in Huaxia today.
This just went to show how strong its foundation was.
Its School of Physics, in particular, was a direct continuation of the complete physics department from National Central University.
Furthermore, its astronomy department was formed by merging the astronomy department of Zhongshan University and the astronomical mathematics department of Qilu University, becoming the first independently established astronomy department in New Huaxia.
The Zijin Mountain Observatory behind the Wukong Satellite project was a fruit borne from these deep astronomical roots.
And its library, with a collection of several million volumes, was one of the richest and most comprehensive university libraries in the East China Region.
When Li Dong pushed open the library’s main doors, the place was filled with people with their heads buried in books.
The moment Li Dong walked in, a girl with glasses at the nearest table was the first to look up.
She took one look.
And then she completely froze.
She subconsciously nudged her companion with her elbow.
"...Hey."
"Look, isn’t that...?"
Her companion looked up.
Following her gaze.
"Holy shit."
"Is that East God?"
The voice wasn’t loud.
But the large hall was already very quiet.
The moment the words "East God" were uttered, heads at several nearby tables lifted almost simultaneously to look at Li Dong.
Li Dong didn’t look at them.
He walked straight to a search terminal and typed in a few keywords.
[Cosmic Rays], [High-Energy Events], [Extreme Space Weather], [Solar Proton Events], [Tree Ring 14C], [Ice Core 10Be]...
A long list of results popped up after each set of keywords.
Li Dong glanced at them.
He couldn’t have said precisely which book he was missing.
But he knew what he was lacking was related to "extreme cosmic ray events."
Since he didn’t know which specific book it was, he would just have to scan through them all.
He stored the call number and location of each book in his Memory Palace, then turned and headed for the high-energy astrophysics shelves in the library.
Fifteen minutes later.
Li Dong placed the stack of books he was carrying onto an empty table by the window.
THUD.
The stack was nearly half a meter high.
It consisted mainly of authoritative books and journals in the field.
Things like *Cosmic Rays at Earth* and *High Energy Astrophysics*.
Below them were several stacks of papers printed from the *Astrophysical Journal*, *Astronomy & Astrophysics*, and the *Journal of Geophysical Research*.
These documents represented the foundational knowledge painstakingly gathered over the last fifty to sixty years by the planet’s largest observatories, satellite collaborations, and high-altitude research stations.

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