Riding the wind of rebirth

Such a large project, a project that benefits the country and its people, and a project led by the second and third sons of the Li family, so Xu Anxin was truly at ease. Since it was related to satellites, it was normal for him to stay in Liangshan.

However, Li Laosan had indeed been in China for quite a while, and the AXA Fund matter couldn't be entirely accomplished within China, so Zhou Zhi ultimately sent the family onto the plane.

Qingshan Airport can still drop off passengers at the tarmac. As Xu Anxin watched the passengers board the plane, she asked Tiedan to wave goodbye to her uncle before she got on the plane.

The one who probably least wants to leave Lianhe Township is Xiao Tiedan. He eats and drinks well here, has many older brothers and sisters to play with, and can get close to all kinds of animals, big and small. He can play in the mountain springs and streams, and play with fire in the square. No one will stop him. The villagers also unanimously believe that boys should be a little wild.

So instead of telling Tie Dan that they were going back to Hong Kong Island, everyone told him they were going to take a plane ride.

But when Xu Anxin told him to wave goodbye to his uncle, Tiedan, being so clever, immediately understood and burst into tears.

"Oh dear, Tiedan is crying, what should we do?" Mai Xiaomiao tugged at Zhou Zhi's clothes.

“Let’s give Cousin Anxin a headache.” Zhou Zhi, however, was oblivious: “She said Grandpa couldn’t bear to part with Tiedan and insisted on rushing back. Serves him right!”

Actually, there was another important reason why Li Laosan went back: the quantitative trading model had been fully matured.

Especially after Xiaozhi achieved fiber optic connectivity and non-linear computing graphics cards, its computing performance has been improved several times over. This is equivalent to using several Galaxy supercomputers to track, analyze, and predict the global financial market. Currently, no other financial research institution in the world can match this level of capability.

This model is actually very similar to weather models. Although these "financial weather" are the result of the financial decisions made by countless people, and although they are nonlinear and complex, they also have amazing regularity, at least local regularity, and predictability.

The difference between this and weather forecasting is that Mai Xiaomiao can intervene in the outcome based on this local regularity and predictability. Through high-frequency quantitative trading, it can amplify and clarify this regularity, guide predictability into certainty, and obtain huge profits in the process.

In Mai Xiaomiao's words, it felt as if she could stir up the winds of the US West Coast with her own hands, guide them across the equator, and eventually form a typhoon cyclone in the Pacific Ocean—a power that only God possesses.

However, Zhou Zhi didn't make so many exaggerated connections. Instead, he simply opened the historical book and told Mai Xiaomiao about the "Treatise on the Five Elements" in the Book of Han.

The "Treatise on the Five Elements" uses the Five Elements and Five Affairs of the "Hong Fan" as its theoretical framework. It systematically combines the celestial phenomena and disasters of "Seven Anomalies" and "Six Calamities" with the disorder of human affairs and the loss of the ruler's way. It uses disasters and anomalies to warn the ruler's power. Although there is no logical connection between cause and effect, it tells the story of the ancient Chinese people's obsession with and study of astronomical laws.

Then Zhou Zhi told Mai Xiaomiao that by the Tang and Song dynasties, astronomical research had progressed to the point where solar and lunar eclipses could be predicted. Could it be that the emperor's moral failings also had a periodic pattern? Therefore, this approach was no longer suitable for advising those in power.

Therefore, their research on the laws of nature and society is not some kind of "hand of God." They are simply like the ancient officials in charge of astronomy, who have a better understanding of the objective scientific laws than others.

After this explanation, Mai Xiaomiao's doubts disappeared, and she began to reflect on whether she had been hanging out with Grandpa Chi Ri and Zhou Zhi for too long and had become more superstitious.

However, such operations fall into a gray area. Although no securities trading company has banned such techniques so far, logically speaking, the frequency of such transactions and the rapid addition and cancellation of orders inevitably raises the issues of "falsely increasing trading intentions," "inducing trading direction," and "inflating trading volume." Even according to later memories, quantitative trading companies were prevalent worldwide, and it's not known that any of them had ever received any sanctions or punishments. But given Zhou Zhi's personality, he would keep it as secret as possible, and the fewer people who knew about it, the better.

Therefore, so far, only Zhou Zhi, Li Laosan, and Li Laosan's R&D and maintenance team, who are far away overseas and whose whereabouts are unknown, know about this.

Even that team has now become a "smokescreen." Even if someone wants to investigate, they can probably only trace back to that team.

After seeing off Li Laosan and Xu Anxin's family, life returned to normal. With Huang Ruishan and Li Yijia "taking care of the children," Zhou Zhi had more time to spare and could start considering his doctoral thesis.

The nationwide field survey and collection of phonetic symbols for Chinese dialects has been completed. The Chinese Language Bar of the Clover Forum, with the great enthusiasm and hard work of young college students from all over the country, has now become a Chinese phonetic and phonological specimen library for all scholars to use.

This is another large-scale cultural heritage protection project of the Yu Tang Cultural Heritage Foundation, as well as a large-scale work-study project and a joint project between colleges. The working principle and management principle of this project are based on the master's thesis of Zhou Zhi, which combines arts and sciences, utilizes network tools and computer technology, and has a generous financial style, which shocked the senior scholars who participated in the review and defense.

However, these are merely foundational tasks. Zhou Zhi's fundamental purpose in establishing this database is not to rescue dialects that are gradually disappearing due to increasing "popularization," but rather to find actual evidence from ancient phonological classics among these "living fossils."

For example, the Shuowen Jiezi mentions that the characters 工, 江, 红, 虹, and 杠 are all "from the sound of 工". In other words, regardless of the specific pronunciation of these characters in the Han Dynasty when Xu Shen lived, one thing is clear: these characters all have the same pronunciation.

In other words, these characters were actually the same in Middle Chinese, and only later underwent "correlation" in various local languages.

But where is the evidence?
Zhou Zhi found evidence in his own dialect and submitted it to the forum, thus receiving a small reward from the Yu Tang Cultural Relics Protection Fund.

In the Jiachuan dialect, "rainbow" is called "gang". There is a famous local proverb that goes: "One gang to the east, the sky will rise high; one gang to the west, the river will dry up; one gang to the south, the sky will be blue morning and evening; one gang to the north, the dynasty will change."

The "line" here refers to a rainbow. This proverb means that a rainbow appearing in four different directions in the sky indicates different weather conditions.

Similar situations exist in eastern Sichuan, where proverbs include "Eastern bar and western bar, one zhang a day," or "Eastern bar brings sunshine and western bar brings rain."

What does this show?

This shows that even though the pronunciations of "虹" and "杠" in dialects are different from those in the Eastern Han Dynasty when Xu Shen lived, the two characters in dialects originated from the same point and have evolved into the same point they have today.

This also proves that in some places, these two characters have maintained the same pronunciation, and even with corruption, they did not differentiate into different pronunciations during the corruption process. (End of this chapter)