My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Chapter 296 Daytime

The mornings in Cambridge begin with the wind blowing from the Charles River.

The owner of the Rusty Tavern pulled back the blinds and flipped the wooden sign that read "Open for Business" over to "Closed."

He walked back to the bar, holding a glass of freshly poured ice water. He took a big gulp, and the ice water went down his throat, making his mind, which had been closed all night, a little clearer.

The tavern is now empty.

The hundreds of people who had crowded here a few hours ago have left like the receding tide, leaving no trace. Even the broken glass and crushed onion rings on the ground were blown to the corner by the airflow.

The boss reached into his pocket and pulled out the check.

He laid the check flat on the bar and pressed down the creases with his fingers.

The number on the check was real, and the young man named David's signature was also real.

A low, rumbling engine roar came from outside the door.

A white van was parked in front of the pub, with the logo of a high-end logistics company in Boston printed on the side of the van.

The truck reversed and came to a stop.

The car door opened, and four men in matching gray uniforms stepped out. They were burly, wearing baseball caps, and carrying rolls of bubble wrap, wide tape, and several sturdy straps.

The leader walked to the tavern door, pushed it open, and went inside.

"The car was arranged by Mr. David."

The leader took out a list and glanced at the boss behind the bar.

"Bring three tables and two blackboards."

The boss nodded and pointed to the deepest corner.

"He instructed us over there that we must not touch any of the chalk dust."

The leader didn't ask any questions. He waved his hand, and the three workers behind him followed him inside.

They walked to that corner.

Faced with the three tables covered in alcohol, cigarette ash, and dense chalk writing, the movers showed no curiosity and did not bother to study what was written on them.

In their eyes, this was just a special order with high freight costs.

"Wrap the table first, suspending it in mid-air so it doesn't touch the tabletop."

The leader gives the instructions.

Two workers unwrapped the bubble wrap and, instead of covering the table directly, started wrapping it around the four legs at the bottom of the table and wrapped it upwards. Finally, they used a few pieces of cardboard as support to create a small, transparent tent about ten centimeters above the table.

The bubble wrap was held in place tightly.

The whole process was swift and efficient, without a single word, and the packaging was completed in less than twenty minutes.

Four porters carried the table and blackboard steadily out of the tavern and loaded them into the cargo van, which was equipped with a constant temperature and shock absorption system.

The car door closed and locked.

The truck restarted, spewing out a puff of blue smoke from its exhaust pipe, and drove away down the street.

The boss stood at the door, watching the truck disappear around the corner, then glanced back at the empty corner.

Now all that's left is a patch of somewhat blackened wooden floorboards.

He shook his head, picked up a rag from the bar, and began wiping away the beer stains left from last night.

Just as the truck left Cambridge.

Inside an office in the Physics Department at Harvard University.

The light from the computer screen shone on the faces of the two people sitting at the table.

The young Asian man from the Harvard math department who was the first to recognize Chow last night was sitting in front of his computer, next to the MIT physics lecturer who had been holding half a glass of dark beer.

The air in the office was a bit stuffy, and the desk was piled with draft paper and several empty coffee cups, with the printer sitting on the corner of the desk.

Drop~

A long beep came from the computer case as it read data.

"It's been sent."

An Asian youth stared at the screen.

On the screen is a photograph taken in a dimly lit pub with an old-fashioned digital camera.

The photo has a low resolution and a lot of noise. It's covered with red, yellow, and white lines and symbols, all intertwined like a tangled mess.

The Asian youth held the mouse and clicked print.

Because it was printed in black and white, all the colors in the photo were gone, leaving only varying shades of gray and black lines.

The physics lecturer reached out and pulled out the A4 paper that was still slightly warm.

He walked to a large desk next to him and laid the paper flat on it.

The Asian youth also stood up, walked over, and pulled a red ballpoint pen from the pen holder.

At the very top of the A4 paper, he wrote a line in red pen:

"Chen Zhuo/Sam/Alan, 6 a.m., Rusty Tavern."

After he finished writing, he threw the pen on the table.

The two of them lowered their heads and huddled together at the table, looking at the printed paper that was full of mosaics and noise.

They didn't marvel at how crazy the scene was last night, nor did they discuss how talented the fourteen-year-old boy was.

Right now, there's only one thing on their minds.

Verification.

Go through the logic on the paper step by step in your mind.

The physics lecturer's finger rested on the bottom right corner of the paper.

"This is Sam's code."

His fingernail traced upwards along the gray line.

"A variant of the Monte Carlo algorithm with added local boundary convergence."

"I can't see where the loop exit he set is."

The Asian youth moved closer, looking at the blurry pixelated area.

"The photo is out of focus at this position; all you can see is an 'i' symbol approaching a certain value."

"Here."

The physics lecturer moved his finger half an inch to the left, stopping next to a relatively clear vertical line.

"He hung the exit here on this algebraic cutoff line."

"But that doesn't make sense."

The Asian youth straightened up, his brow furrowing.

"If the exit is on the cutoff line, how do we handle the mass tensor? Allen can't possibly erase the mass of the graviton. If he doesn't erase it, the parameters will still go back into the loop, and Sam's array will still overflow."

"This is what we're looking for."

The physics lecturer didn't look up; he tapped his fingers twice on the paper.

"Last night at the scene, the three of them almost got into a fight here. It was only after Chen added a line that they were able to continue writing."

Following the direction the physics lecturer pointed, the two searched for Chen Zhuojia's stroke amidst the black and white noise.

"Business Space"

The Asian youth pointed to a blurry symbol slightly to the left of the vertical line.

He pulled over the draft paper next to him, picked up a pen, quickly wrote the symbol on the paper, and then began to deduce the logic.

The physics lecturer stood beside him, watching him write.

"Chen folded all the physical states with mass tensors into this quotient space."

The Asian youth muttered to himself as he wrote.

He drew a large circle to represent Allen's vacuum state physics field, and then drew a small circle to represent Sam's code loop.

Finally, he drew a thick straight line in the middle of the two circles, representing Chen Zhuo's algebraic constant wall.

"To the left of the constant wall, the laws of physics continue to operate as usual, and Allen's vacuum equations can continue to be derived."

The Asian youth's pen tip points on a straight line.

"However, when these physical quantities attempt to cross this line and enter the algorithm loop on the right, Chen uses this quotient space mapping to equate them all to a single point."

He looked up at the physics lecturer.

"A pure equivalence class without any extra parameters."

The physics lecturer looked at the diagram on the draft paper.

His mind was racing.

"In other words..."

The physics lecturer took over the conversation.

"For Sam's code, it doesn't receive a complex mass tensor, but just a simple pointer?"

"right."

The Asian youth nodded.

"Pointers do not occupy additional memory, and the variable dimension of the loop is locked within the upper limit of the constant represented by the pointer."

The physics lecturer gasped. Although he had vaguely guessed the result last night at the scene, the feeling of sorting out the logic on paper now was completely different.

He picked up a pen and drew a checkmark in Sam's code section.

"Sam's algorithm works; the array will not overflow."

"Now let's see Allen."

The Asian youth turned a page of the draft paper.

The physics lecturer looked at the physics symbols at the top of the printout.

"Allen's vacuum equations unfold along this constant boundary."

The physics lecturer pointed to a spot on the paper.

"He redefined the boundary conditions."

The physics lecturer wrote the Hamiltonian on a piece of scratch paper.

"Since the spatial collapse has been forcibly stopped by the algebraic wall, there is no need for gravitons to provide outward tension support."

His writing speed increased.

"All physical evolution takes place on this two-dimensional boundary, where the string membrane achieves complete self-consistency."

He stopped writing and looked at the draft paper filled with physics symbols.

"Alan's equations currently have no flaws and are logically closed loops."

A brief silence fell over the office.

The Asian youth looked at the blurry printed paper, then at the draft paper next to it filled with calculations.

"These three are lunatics."

The Asian youth leaned against the edge of the desk and muttered a curse under his breath.

"They used tools from three different fields to carve out a path. Sam's algorithm worked, Allen's physical field became self-consistent, and the foundation of all of this was the line drawn by Chen Zhuo."

At the same time.

In a luxury apartment provided by Harvard University for visiting scholars.

Pierre was wearing a gray knit sweater and was sitting on a single sofa by the window.

A freshly brewed cup of black tea sits on the coffee table in front of me, its aroma filling the room.

He held a preprint of the latest developments in algebraic geometry in his hand, a pair of reading glasses perched on his nose, and was reading it intently.

There was a knock on the door.

The knocking was somewhat hurried, unlike the gentle rhythm that hotel staff usually use.

Pierre looked away from the preprint and glanced at the clock on the wall.

It's 8:30 in the morning.

He put down the papers in his hand, stood up, and walked to the door.

Open the door.

An old man wearing thick-rimmed glasses stood outside the door.

The old man was no longer holding the long-handled umbrella from the previous night, but instead tightly clutching several sheets of A4 paper stapled together.

The old man's hair was somewhat disheveled, and there were obvious dark circles under his eyes.

"Smith?"

Pierre looked at the old Harvard professor outside the door, somewhat surprised.

"It's so early, you look like you haven't slept all night."

Professor Smith didn't exchange any more pleasantries.

He walked straight into the room and closed the door behind him.

He walked to the coffee table and slammed the few sheets of A4 paper he was holding onto it.

Pierre.

Professor Smith turned around and looked at Deligne, his voice hoarse and dry from staying up all night.

"Look at what your fourteen-year-old student did last night in a run-down pub in Cambridge."

Pierre's brow twitched slightly.

He walked back to the coffee table.

He didn't ask Smith what had happened, nor did he ask Chen Zhuo what trouble he had gotten into.

He knew that for a senior Harvard physics professor to burst into his room early in the morning with a few sheets of paper, the situation was definitely beyond the realm of conventional understanding.

Pierre sat down on the sofa and looked down at the few sheets of paper on the table.

Those were images that were received by a fax machine and then reprinted.

At the top of the first sheet of paper, written in red pen, are the names Chen Zhuo/Sam/Allen.

The image below is extremely blurry, filled with black and white noise, and the red, yellow, and white chalk colors have all turned into gray lines of varying shades, like an abstract painting taken with an extremely poor-quality camera.

Pierre reached up and adjusted his reading glasses on the bridge of his nose.

His gaze swept across the paper.

For a top mathematician, filtering out unnecessary information is an instinct.

He ignored the physical field equations belonging to Allen in the upper right corner, and also ignored Sam's computer pseudocode in the lower right corner.

These things were merely background elements in his eyes.

His gaze pierced through the noise and precisely locked onto the area in the very center of the blackboard.

That's the linchpin of the whole picture.

Pierre saw the straight cut-off line.

I saw the symbol next to the line.

Algebraic cycles, Chow groups.

Pierre's breathing paused for half a second at that moment.

He was all too familiar with that symbol.

Pierre's gaze followed the truncated line downwards and saw the quotient space mapping symbol and the C that represented the upper limit of the constant.

He didn't use a pen to check the calculations on paper.

Those basic derivation processes only take him a fraction of a second to run through his mind.

Chen Zhuo did not attempt to solve the problem of curvature explosion during the contraction of high-dimensional space.

He directly used the rigidity of algebraic loops to forcibly define an absolutely safe boundary before the physical grid completely collapsed.

He folded all the infinite variables that would lead to the collapse into an equivalent constant point through a quotient space mapping.

The deadlocks of physics and algorithms are forcibly separated from each other by mathematical logic.

Professor Smith stood to the side, watching Pierre.

"Sam's code did not overflow."

Professor Smith said in a low voice, as if stating an objective fact.

"Alan's string membrane achieves self-consistency at its boundaries."

"The three of them completed a logical loop within this framework."

Pierre did not respond.

He continued to stare at the white line on the paper.

The black tea was steaming in the cup.

The wall clock ticked away.

The room was extremely quiet.

Pierre slowly reached out his hand, his index finger landing on the printed paper.

His finger pressed on the blurry C, gently stroking the paper surface, which was somewhat rough.

As one of the people in the world closest to Hodge's conjecture, Pierre understood better than anyone what these few blurry sketches meant.

If the Hodge conjecture is a fortress without doors...

So the algebraic boundary that Chen Zhuo drew in the tavern last night was like a ladder placed outside the fortress.

Although the ladder is still very rough, and you can't walk directly in yet.

But, but...

Pierre slowly withdrew his hand.

He picked up the cup of black tea in front of him and slowly took a sip.

Then, Pierre looked up at Professor Smith.

Where are they?

This was the first question Pierre asked after reviewing the sketch.

Professor Smith shook his head.

"Can't find it."

Smith pulled over a chair and sat down, sighing.

"After daybreak, David moved all the tables and blackboards from the pub and hired security to watch over them. Sam and Allen's phones were switched off. People from MIT and Harvard went to their apartments and knocked on the doors, but no one answered."

"Where is Chen Zhuo?" Pierre asked.

"It should be at the guesthouse."

Smith gave a wry smile.

"David gave the order that no one was allowed to disturb them for 24 hours. The receptionist at Harvard's guesthouse wouldn't even let anyone in to knock on the door."

Pierre nodded, not surprised.

"Let them sleep."

Pierre picked up the papers, carefully folded them, and placed them beside him.

"Given this level of intensity, they might not even have the strength to hold chopsticks right now."

Pierre leaned back on the sofa, gazing calmly out the window.

"Wait until they wake up."

He didn't say the second half of his sentence.

But Professor Smith knew what he was going to say.

Wait until those three people wake up.

Once the raw data left in the tavern is sorted out.

Once this discrete approximation model is translated into a formal academic paper.

Now it's the turn of the entire academic community to lose sleep.