My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Chapter 293 Calling for Help

No one speaks.

The suppressed, heavy breathing carried far in the quiet air.

There's also the monotonous yet continuous sound of chalk rubbing against the blackboard at extremely high speed.

A young white man holding half a pitcher of dark beer stood up.

He was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics at MIT and often came here to kill time.

He was initially just curious why the music had stopped, but he squinted and looked over several empty tables to see a small portion of the content on the blackboard.

He slowly lowered the wine glass in his hand.

Instead of sitting back down, he unconsciously started walking towards that corner.

His actions were like a signal.

People at the next few tables also stood up one after another.

Several people carrying billiard cues followed along, holding them in their hands without putting them down.

No one greeted them, and no one made a loud noise.

These young scholars, who usually toil away with data and blueprints in top laboratories, seemed to be drawn in by some invisible force, slowly gathering from all directions of the tavern.

They stopped about two or three meters away from the old blackboard.

David stood at the front, giving them some visibility.

The crowd formed a semicircle.

The light shone on the two blackboards that were almost completely covered with writing.

Red, yellow, and white characters overlapped one another, and chalk dust, under the light, resembled a fine mist, enveloping the three people standing in front of the blackboard.

The first physics major to walk over immediately fixed his gaze on the red area on the left side of the blackboard.

He looked at it for about half a minute.

"He's writing about the vacuum state of the string membrane..."

The young man lowered his voice, as if talking to himself, or as if confirming with the person next to him.

"But there's no graviton mass tensor...did he throw away the mass parameter?"

"It's not lost."

A Harvard researcher with glasses and slightly messy hair took a half step forward and pointed to the middle right of the blackboard.

"Look at that yellow code."

The bespectacled researcher also kept his voice very low, afraid of disturbing the three people in front of the blackboard who were in a frenzy.

"That's a variant of the Monte Carlo algorithm, but without full expansion. Sam is doing local boundary convergence. If the vacuum state doesn't collapse inward, the mass parameter can indeed be ignored at the boundary."

"How could it not collapse?"

The physics student frowned and stared at the blackboard.

"Without outward tension to support it, once the spacetime lattice reaches its limit, it will definitely become a black hole."

"That's the problem."

The bespectacled researcher's gaze followed the yellow code to the left, finally settling on the thick white vertical line in the very center of the blackboard, and the extremely conspicuous white formula next to it.

"Sam's algorithm did not overflow, and Allen's vacuum state was able to hold, all because of that middle line."

Following his words, the people around him all looked at the white line.

"What's that?" someone asked in a low voice.

A young Asian man standing in the back row of the crowd, who hadn't spoken a word, pushed up his glasses. He was a Harvard math major.

He stared at the line of white symbols, his eyes subtly shifting in the dim light.

"ext{CH}^p(X)......"

The Asian youth silently repeated those letters to himself.

His brows furrowed tightly at first, then suddenly relaxed, and his Adam's apple bobbed up and down.

"Algebraic loops".

The Asian youth's voice sounded somewhat dry.

He turned his head and looked at the people around him, his tone revealing an incredulity that only those in the same profession could understand.

"It's the Chow group."

He pointed to the center of the blackboard, his finger trembling slightly.

"The person in the middle didn't fill in the singularity. He used the rigidity theorem of the Chow group to forcibly perform an algebraic truncation on the entire physical grid. He used mathematics to build a wall to keep out the collapse and overflow."

When this extremely obscure and cutting-edge mathematical term was uttered, several knowledgeable people around were stunned.

Using Chow groups to truncate the contraction of high-dimensional topologies?

The Asian youth from the Harvard mathematics department slowly lowered his hand, shifting his gaze from the blackboard to the figure standing in the center of it.

She was thin and wore a plain light-colored shirt.

When he turned his head to the side to write, you could clearly see that it was an excessively young face.

Around fourteen or fifteen years old.

Asian.

They have a surgical-like skill with Chow groups.

In the mind of the Asian youth, several previously unrelated fragments were instantly pieced together.

He turned his head, glanced at David beside him, and then looked at the boy who was writing yet another commercial space mapping in front of the blackboard.

"That's Chen."

He didn't shout out in surprise, but spoke the name in a very firm and deep voice to the small circle of people around him.

The man next to him holding the billiard cue paused for a moment.

"Which Chen?"

"The one at Princeton."

The Asian youths' eyes never left the boy's back.

"Professor Pierre recently took me in and dissected the flawed proof of the Chow group scratch part."

A few suppressed gasps came from the crowd.

The physics student, holding half a glass of dark beer, twitched his wrist, spilling a drop of beer onto his shoe.

He looked at the boy in the center of the blackboard, who was steadily dropping white chalk.

That makes perfect sense.

Why would Sam and Allen, two proud and arrogant postdoctoral fellows from MIT and Harvard, willingly squeeze into this cramped corner and follow a white line to deduce the truth?

If that person is a monster who has solved the Chow group problem, if he has drawn this absolute line of defense at the bottom layer of algebra.

Then this isn't just pointless tinkering.

This is a genuine, fundamental restructuring that could potentially be completed on paper.

"Damn it..."

The man with the billiard cue muttered a curse under his breath. He casually leaned the cue against the empty table next to him and reached into his pocket.

He pulled out a black flip phone.

It wasn't just him.

Several people in the crowd made the same gesture simultaneously.

In this era without smartphones and high-speed mobile networks, the only way to transmit such a chilling scene was through the most primitive communication methods.

Someone was looking down, rapidly typing on the keyboard using the backlight of their phone screen.

The soft clicking of buttons echoed from behind the crowd.

Some people complained that sending text messages was too slow, so they simply grabbed their phones, turned around, and walked towards the pub's door.

The pub door was pushed open, and the cold Boston night wind, mixed with the moisture from the Atlantic Ocean, rushed in, causing the empty bottles by the door to shake.

The man walked out of the tavern, stood under the dim streetlights, flipped open the lid, and pressed a number.

The moment the call connected, he didn't care that it was already past 2 a.m., or whether the other person was asleep.

"Wake up! Get up right now!"

He covered his other ear in the cold wind and shouted into the microphone without any politeness.

"Get dressed, take a taxi to Rusty Pub, yes, that run-down pub in Cambridge!"

A complaint seemed to come from the other end of the phone.

"Forget about your bullshit experimental data tomorrow morning!"

He held his phone, his voice trembling with excitement.

"Alan and Sam are here, along with that monster from Princeton named Chen Zhuo!"

He paced back and forth in the cold wind.

"Chen used the Chow group to forcibly truncate the collapse of the spacetime lattice, and Sam's local algorithm has already run through three levels of nesting! They are building an interdisciplinary foundation!"

He looked up at the flashing neon letters on the tavern sign.

"If this thing doesn't collapse... you'll regret it for the rest of your life if you don't come now."

After hanging up the phone, he rubbed his stiff hands, immediately turned around, pushed the door open again, and plunged into the crowd deep inside the pub.

More than one phone call like this was made outside the pub.

The atmosphere in the tavern grew increasingly eerie.

No one spoke, but everyone could feel the heat in the air steadily increasing.

The three people in front of the blackboard were completely unaware of the commotion outside.

They had become completely absorbed in that state of writing without any regard for anything else.

"Bang."

The tavern door was pushed open again.

The tavern owner came running in, panting heavily, carrying a white plastic convenience store bag. He was running very fast, and his forehead was covered in sweat.

He ran to the bar and turned the plastic bag upside down.

Two large boxes of brand-new chalk, one white and one colored, slid out of the bag and landed on the slightly sticky bar counter.

"Chalk! The chalk is back!"

The boss shouted towards that corner.

I heard this sound.

Sam, who had been staring at the blackboard with his fingers almost bleeding from the hard surface, suddenly turned his head.

Like a starving wolf spotting meat, he pushed his way through the crowd and rushed to the bar.

He didn't even look at the boss, but stretched out his dusty and sweaty hand and tore open the colorful cardboard box.

He grabbed a handful of yellow chalk, turned around, and ran back.

The crowd immediately made way for him.

Sam, chalk in hand, strode back to the blackboard.

He stood in the lower right corner of the area he had been in charge of, raised his hand, and wanted to finish writing the loop condition that had been interrupted.

But his hand stopped in mid-air.

Sam stared wide-eyed at the blackboard in front of him.

From the top left corner to the bottom right corner.

The red Hamiltonian, the wavy line, and the tensor symbol.

The yellow pseudocode features nested loops and converging arrows.

White quotient space mapping, algebraic cutoff line, constant constraint.

This old blackboard, which is only two square meters in size, is like a square crammed with thousands of people, leaving no room to even step.

Densely packed, completely airtight.

There wasn't even enough space to insert a comma or a subscript.

It's completely filled with writing.

Sam gritted his teeth, twisting his wrist, trying to squeeze a few letters into the gaps in a white mathematical expression.

But he stopped as soon as the chalk touched the blackboard.

I cannot write, nor can I put it down.

"Wipe off a little."

Sam turned his head and spoke to Allen beside him in a dry voice.

"Erase the assumptions about the initial conditions of the string membrane in the top line."

"Are you crazy?"

Allen didn't even turn his head. He was holding the last bit of red chalk in his hand, staring intently at the last line of equations he had derived.

"If the initial conditions are erased, all the vacuum state equations below will lose their boundary support."

Alan's voice revealed an extreme sense of exhaustion and frustration.

"All of them must be scrapped."

"Then wipe mine?"

Sam stared at him.

"If I erase my outer loop, Chen's cutoff string can't connect to my array! The entire algorithm crashes!"

They all understood that every symbol on the blackboard was a load-bearing wall supporting this massive structure.

They are mutually causal and interdependent.

In this core three-phase closed-loop stage, removing any one of the bricks would instantly cause the hard work of the previous few hours to collapse.

Sam stood in front of the blackboard, clutching the brand-new yellow chalk in his hand.

Once the logic was clear, inspiration began to flow, and the tools were available.

But the physical space is gone.

There's nowhere left to write.

David stood at the front of the crowd, watching Sam's anxious expression as he looked like he was about to tear his hair out.

David did not speak.

He turned around and his gaze fell on the tables directly below the blackboard, where guests usually drank and played cards.

The table was a mess.

There were several half-empty beer glasses with white foam clinging to the sides, a glass ashtray full of cigarette butts, a few greasy napkins used for wiping mouths, and a plate of unfinished, now-cold fried onion rings.

David walked over.

He didn't tidy up those things, nor did he call the waiter to clean them up.

At this point in time, when even taking a breath feels like a waste of time, any sense of propriety or decorum is superfluous.

David raised his right arm directly.

He used his forearm, close to the edge of the table, and forcefully swept it to the side.

"Splash!"

A cracking sound exploded in the tavern.

David swept two heavy glass beer mugs, a glass ashtray, and the plastic plate with onion rings onto the floor without any mercy.

The glass shattered, spilling leftover beer and ice all over the floor, and cigarette ash mixed with the liquid, forming a muddy mess on the floor.

People standing nearby instinctively took a half step back to avoid the flying glass shards.

David cleared one table and then went to the table next to it.

Among the crowd, several MIT postdoctoral fellows didn't wait for David to make a move.

They walked forward without a word, picked up their own empty wine glasses, casually placed them on the windowsill some distance away, and then swept all the clutter off the table onto the floor.

"Give me a hand."

David gripped the edge of a table with both hands, and the group of white postdoctoral researchers immediately understood.

With a dull thud as the wooden table legs scraped against the rough floor, they forcefully pushed three heavy tables directly under the blackboard.

Edges aligned perfectly.

Three tables were put together to form a huge horizontal worktable.

Although there were still some dried beer stains on the table and the wood grain looked a bit rough, that was enough for these three minds that had already gone mad.

"Write."

David took a step back, pointed to the neatly arranged tabletop, and said to Sam and Allen.

Sam turned his head and looked at the huge blank space.

His Adam's apple bobbed.

Without any hesitation.

Sam, clutching the yellow chalk in his hand, took a large step forward.

He completely ignored the broken glass and beer stains mixed with cigarette ash on the ground, and bent his knees.

"thump."

Sam immediately knelt on the floor.

He completely ignored the hoodie hem dragging in the dirty water on the floor, and laid his upper body directly on the table, pressing the yellow chalk in his right hand hard against the rough texture of the table.

He didn't need to write it from scratch; his mind had already picked up the last line of code from the blackboard.

The yellow chalk made a dull but powerful scraping sound on the wooden table.

Allen's movement was only half a second slower than Sam's.

He ran to the bar, grabbed a handful of red chalk, and rushed back.

His usually meticulously made shirt was now completely wrinkled. Allen knelt down next to Sam, his knees pressing against a small piece of broken glass, making an extremely slight creaking sound.

He couldn't feel any pain.

He leaned over the table, his red chalk flying across the yellow line next to Sam's, quickly completing the tensor that crossed the boundary.

Chen Zhuo turned around.

He glanced at the blackboard that covered the entire wall, then at the two people hunched over the table, writing furiously.

He didn't show any extra expression; he simply walked to the bar and took two brand-new white chalks from the box.

Chen Zhuo walked to the table, pulled over the chair he had just been sitting in, and pushed it away.

Then, he knelt on one knee on the floor, which was covered in wine stains.

This is the most convenient posture for exerting force and writing on a desktop.

The once clean light-colored shirt now had its cuffs stained with blackboard grease and chalk dust from the earlier friction.

Between Sam's loop code and Allen's tensor.

Chen Zhuo steadily wrote down an isomorphic symbol representing the closed loop of commercial space.

"Take over the mapping relationship."

Chen Zhuo stared at the table, his voice very soft amidst the sound of chalk scraping, but exceptionally clear.

"Lock it up on this level."

Three top minds are like three laborers repairing a dam in the mud.

Kneeling on the ground.

He lay face down on the stained tabletop.

In the dead of night in Boston, in a corner of a run-down pub packed with dozens of top scholars, a savage deduction that defied the limitations of physical space was taking place.

The surrounding crowd stared intently at the table.

No one whispered to each other, and no one wandered around.

Only the sound of heavy breathing could be heard.

And the dull, hesitant sound of chalk rubbing against the table, yet full of a life force that sends shivers down your spine.

Shake, shake, shake...