My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Chapter 294 Go Back to Sleep

The sky outside the window has changed color.

The deep blackness that originally belonged to the dead of night has faded away at some point, turning into a cool tone with a hint of gray and blue.

The morning light in Boston slanted in through the dusty and water-stained glass windows of the pub, falling on the wooden floor covered with footprints.

The streetlights outside the tavern went out with a snap.

The dim yellow wall lamp in the room appeared somewhat white and even a little dazzling under the weak natural light.

The half-stub of white chalk in Chen Zhuo's hand stopped at the very edge of the table.

There wasn't much space left; just half an inch down was the edge of the table.

His fingers were covered in white chalk dust, and his fingertips were red from pressing hard for a long time. There were even a few small hangnails that were scratched and bled slightly.

Chen Zhuo's wrist did not tremble.

He steadily added a half-bracket at the end of that lengthy quotient space mapping formula.

Then, next to the parentheses, he made a firm dot with the tip of chalk, drawing out a neat little solid square.

In the general rules of mathematics, this symbol is called QED.

This signifies that the proof is complete.

After drawing the square, Chen Zhuo stopped.

He didn't throw away the chalk in his hand, but slowly loosened his fingers.

The pitiful bit of chalk slipped from his fingertips, fell onto the table, rolled twice, and came to rest on the edge of a water stain left by a beer glass.

Chen Zhuo tried to stand up.

He remained in a kneeling position for a long time, with his right knee pressed against the floor.

Poor blood circulation, coupled with a sudden relaxation of his highly focused mind, caused a dense, tingling sensation in his right leg the moment he stood up, as if tens of thousands of needles were pricking his muscles at the same time.

He lost his balance and swayed.

Chen Zhuo took a half step back, stretched out his left hand, and grabbed the edge of the bar behind him.

The bar was a little sticky, but he didn't care at all.

He leaned against the bar, absorbing most of his weight.

Chen Zhuo lowered his head and looked at his hands, whose original skin color was almost unrecognizable. His fingers were slightly bent due to stiffness. He then looked down at his shirt, which was covered with crisscrossing gray and white stains on the white fabric.

He took a deep breath; his lungs felt dry from inhaling so much chalk dust, and a faint taste of blood rose in his throat.

He didn't excitedly wave his fist.

No.

When mental energy is pushed to its physiological limits, a person cannot feel ecstasy; they will only feel a pure, deep-seated exhaustion.

At the same second that Chen Zhuo stood up.

Sam, who was to his left and slightly in front of him, also stopped moving.

Sam didn't even have the strength to stand up.

The yellow chalk in his hand fell directly to the ground.

This MIT researcher, who weighed over 200 pounds, braced himself on the edge of the table with both hands, and then his whole body looked like a rotten piece of wood that had had all its tendons and bones removed.

He slid down the edge of the table.

Sam landed on his back, then flipped over and lay sprawled on the floor covered in cigarette ash, liquor, and shards of glass.

The hem of his hoodie was soaking in a puddle of murky water.

But he didn't care at all.

Sam lay on the floor, staring blankly at the tavern's dark ceiling.

His chest heaved violently like a bellows, each breath accompanied by heavy panting, his mouth was half-open, and he didn't even have the strength to curse.

On the other side, Allen's situation wasn't much better.

Allen slowly straightened up and casually wiped the last bit of red powder on his trouser leg.

He turned around, stumbled back two steps, bent his knees, and landed hard on his buttocks on a high chair.

The chair creaked under the weight.

Allen's hands hung limply at his sides, his head tilted back against the chair.

His once-impressive shirt was now completely open at the collar, one button missing, and his chest and neck were covered in traces of sweat and chalk dust.

His eyes were closed, and his lips were somewhat pale.

The area in front of the table suddenly became empty.

Chen Zhuo leaned against the bar and rested for a few seconds until the soreness and numbness in his legs subsided a little.

He raised his head, his gaze passing over the three tables pushed together, and looked towards the front of the tavern.

It was only at this moment that Chen Zhuo noticed the strangeness of his surroundings.

He had assumed that after all the commotion that had lasted most of the night, there would be hardly anyone left in the tavern by now.

Even if there were, they would only be a few drunkards who were sleeping on the table.

but.

When his vision cleared to the scene before him, his hand on the bar trembled slightly.

people.

It was full of people.

The already cramped Rusty Tavern is now completely packed.

From this deepest corner where they were, it stretched all the way to the tavern's entrance.

The aisles, the pool tables, the gaps between the booths, and even the corners of the bar were packed with people.

Three layers inside, three layers outside.

Chen Zhuo's gaze swept across the faces of these people.

This is not a group of ordinary onlookers.

Standing at the very front were the Ivy League researchers who had been in the tavern earlier; their billiard cues were nowhere to be found.

Behind them, those whose bodies were mostly obscured were dressed in a very incongruous manner.

Chen Zhuo saw a middle-aged man in his forties wearing a thick black down jacket, but the zipper was undone, revealing a wrinkled striped pajama set underneath.

There were a few young people nearby, their hair so messy it looked like they had just crawled out of bed and hadn't combed it. One of them was even wearing a pair of gray slippers, the edges of which were covered in mud from the street outside.

There was also an elderly man wearing thick-rimmed glasses, using a long-handled umbrella instead of a cane, being supported by a young student, standing against the wall, slightly tiptoeing as he looked this way.

Those were professors and PhDs from several top universities in the surrounding area.

In the past few hours, Sam has been frantically yelling for chalk, and David has been keeping quiet while buying the jukebox.

The constant stream of phone calls and text messages outside, like a virus, dragged the night owls in Boston's academic circles—those most sensitive to high-dimensional topology, quantum field theory, and underlying algorithms—out of their beds and labs.

Hundreds of people were crammed into this dilapidated tavern with its stuffy air.

But strangely, there was not a single sound.

No one was whispering or talking on the phone.

Everyone watched quietly.

Their gazes all passed over Chen Zhuo, past Sam lying on the ground, and were fixed on the two old blackboards and the three cobbled-together tables.

Chen Zhuo leaned against the bar, watching the group of people.

He didn't speak, nor did he interrupt the people's stares.

He knew what they were doing.

These hundreds of people could almost be considered the most rigorous and top-notch peer review committee in the world.

They were conducting a live review without any rehearsal or formatting.

The people in the front row were looking very carefully.

A young lecturer wearing an MIT sweatshirt followed Sam's gaze down the yellow line he had drawn on the desk.

His eyes followed the nested loop, his lips moving slightly, as if he were silently reciting the changes of variables in his mind.

His gaze traveled all the way to the very bottom of the code, landing on the quotient space truncation symbol written by Chen Zhuo.

He stopped.

He stared at C, which represents the upper limit of the constant, for a full minute.

Then, the young lecturer's shoulders visibly slumped.

He turned his head and looked at a colleague next to him who was also engaged in computer theory. The two looked at each other.

The young lecturer let out an extremely suppressed sound.

"There is no memory overflow."

His voice was very soft, but in the quiet surroundings, several people nearby could hear it clearly.

"That algebraic constraint tightly bound the dimensional boundary, and the loop achieved local convergence in the last layer."

The young lecturer shook his head and rubbed his dry eyes.

"This variant algorithm works on paper."

The colleague didn't speak, but simply nodded silently, his eyes filled with a complex emotion unique to an expert.

Not far to their left, the old man with the umbrella pushed up his thick-rimmed glasses.

He is a senior professor in the Department of Physics at Harvard University.

The old man ignored the yellow codes; he only looked at the red physical equations and the white mathematical substitutions.

He followed the Hamiltonian of the normative field that Allen had written down and read on.

When he saw Allen forcibly equate the boundary conditions of the vacuum state with Chen Zhuo's algebraic loops, the old man's brows furrowed tightly.

His wrinkled hands gripped the umbrella handle tightly.

The old man stood there, like a statue, lost in thought for a long time.

No one dared to make a sound to disturb him; even the student supporting him held his breath.

a long time.

The old man slowly exhaled a long breath, his chest rising and falling slightly.

"There is no mass tensor, and there are no gravitons."

The old man muttered to himself in a low voice, which was somewhat hoarse.

"In this commercial space, the collapse is stopped by mathematics, and the string membrane achieves self-consistency on the two-dimensional boundary."

The old man raised his head, his gaze passing over the table and landing on Chen Zhuo, who was leaning against the bar.

The old man neither laughed nor showed any signs of emotional outburst.

He simply looked at the Asian boy very seriously and calmly, and nodded slightly.

Chen Zhuo saw the old man's movements.

He straightened up and stopped leaning against the bar.

He looked at the old man, a slight smile appearing on his lips, and nodded slightly in return.

After that, Chen Zhuo didn't look at the reactions of the others.

He turned around and walked to the table where they had just been drinking water.

His glass of soda was still on the table, but there were no water droplets on the outside of the glass, and the water had completely cooled to room temperature.

Chen Zhuo did not drink water.

He reached out and picked up the notebook that was on the chair.

There was a little chalk dust on the surface of the notebook, but Chen Zhuo didn't brush it off with his hand, knowing that his hands had more dust on them.

Chen Zhuo took the Montblanc pen out of his pocket. He had kept the pen in his pocket the whole time and hadn't taken it out to use it.

He used a few clean sheets of paper to wipe the chalk dust off his hands, but it didn't work well; white powder was still stuck to his fingers.

He didn't pay any attention, put the pen back into the notebook, and then carefully folded the grid paper with the initial sketches and tucked it into the notebook.

Chen Zhuo turned his head and looked at Sam lying on the ground and Allen sitting in the chair.

David walked over at that moment.

David was in much better shape than the other three, since he hadn't participated in the physically demanding, hand-to-hand combat simulation they had just witnessed.

David walked up to Sam and extended his right hand.

"Can you get up?"

David looked at Sam, who was lying on the ground panting, and said with a hint of teasing.

Sam opened his eyes and looked at David's outstretched hand.

He didn't say anything, but simply grabbed David's hand.

David pulled upwards with all his might.

With David's help, Sam scrambled to his feet from the floor.

He stood up slowly, his back bones making two muffled thuds. Sam reached out and grabbed the edge of the table next to him, his hoodie still dripping murky dirty water.

"My back feels like it's broken."

Sam grinned, muttered a complaint under his breath, and pounded his lower back twice.

Allen also heard the noise.

He placed his hands on his knees, took a deep breath, and slowly stood up.

His legs felt a little weak, and he swayed slightly when he stood up, but he quickly regained his balance.

The three of them, along with David, reunited.

Chen Zhuo looked at them.

"It's dawn."

Chen Zhuo pointed to the sky outside the window, his voice tinged with obvious fatigue.

"I need to go back to the hotel and get some sleep; my brain is a complete mess right now."

Sam rubbed his lower back, looked at Chen Zhuo, and forced an ugly smile onto his bloodshot face.

"Me too. Now, as soon as I close my eyes, all I see in my mind are endless business spaces and nested loops. I need to sleep for a whole day and night."

Allen didn't speak; he simply turned his head and took a deep look at the dense symbols on the table and the blackboard.

That was something he helped build that had the potential to change the course of the entire theoretical physics community.

"Let's go."

David patted Allen on the shoulder.

The four men turned around to face the group of people who had completely blocked the tavern.

Chen Zhuo, carrying a bag, walked at the front.

When he took the first step.

In the crowd, the young lecturer at the front, wearing an MIT hoodie, quietly took a step back.

The researchers next to him also stepped back.

No one gave any orders, and no one asked anyone to make way.

These hundreds of the brightest and proudest scholars from Boston spontaneously began to move to either side when they saw Chen Zhuo and his group approaching.

The originally crowded tavern aisle was transformed, like Moses parting the sea, creating a passage about one meter wide in the middle of the crowd.

This passageway leads straight from the deepest corner of the tavern to the main entrance.

The people standing on both sides of the passageway all watched the four people walking towards them in silence.

There was no jealousy or resentment in their eyes.

Faced with absolute intellectual superiority and a miraculous academic closed loop, only pure respect remains.

Chen Zhuo walked down the passageway, holding a notebook in one hand.

He wasn't walking fast because his legs were still a little weak.

His face was a little pale, a normal reaction after staying up late and using his brain intensively, but he walked steadily with his back straight.

As I passed by the old man wearing thick-rimmed glasses.

Chen Zhuo slowed his pace slightly and turned his head to the side.

He looked at the Harvard professor who had rushed over late at night and said something softly.

"It's so late at night, and I'm making you come all this way."

The old man looked at the young man, and finally a kind smile, typical of an elder, appeared on his face.

"Go back and get a good night's sleep, child."

The old man's voice was a little hoarse. He turned slightly to make way for the road.

"You've kept a lot of people in Boston up tonight."

Chen Zhuo smiled and didn't say anything more.

He continued walking, past rows of eyes watching him, past his colleagues dressed in pajamas and down jackets.

Sam and Allen followed behind Chen Zhuo.

Sam walked with a slight limp, but he tried to keep his chest up, while Allen walked with his collar open and his steps heavy.

They enjoyed this highest level of treatment among their peers.

When we got near the bar.

David suddenly stopped.

"You all go out first."

David turned around and said something to Chen Zhuo and the others.

"I have something to take care of, I'll be right out."

Chen Zhuo nodded, didn't ask David what he wanted to do, and walked straight to the door.

David turned around and walked to the bar.

The tavern owner was standing behind the bar, still holding the white towel he used to wipe the glasses. He was completely bewildered as he looked at the group of crazy intellectuals.

David looked at his boss and reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

He pulled out a black checkbook and a pen from his jacket pocket.

David pressed his checkbook against the bar counter, quickly wrote down a string of numbers, and then signed his name.

He tore off the check, held it between two fingers, and handed it to the tavern owner.

The boss took the check in a daze and glanced down at the number on it.

His eyes widened instantly.

That was a sum more than enough to buy his shabby tavern.

"Sir, this..."

The boss stammered as he spoke.

"Take it."

David's tone was calm and decisive.

He turned around and pointed to the two old blackboards in the corner, and the three tables pieced together, covered with chalk dust, wine stains, and glass shards.

"Starting now."

David looked into the boss's eyes, his gaze gleaming with the oppressive aura of a chaebol heir.

"Those two blackboards and those three tables are mine."

David extended a finger and tapped it lightly on the bar.

"Apart from my people coming to remove them, during this time, anyone, whoever, dares to touch even a speck of chalk dust on them."

David paused for a moment, then lowered his voice slightly.

"I guarantee my legal team will show you what a capitalist society is all about, understand?"

The tavern owner was captivated by David's gaze. He instinctively clenched the check in his hand and nodded frantically.

"Understood, sir, I promise, no one is allowed to touch it!"

The boss quickly made assurances and even tried to find some chairs to cordon off that corner.