My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Chapter 313 is good

Inside the spacious apartment, the war on the central island platform finally came to an end.

Chen Zhu swallowed the last bite of food, grabbed a tissue, and slowly wiped his hands.

Sitting across from him was David, who was diligently working as the apartment's cleaner.

He crumpled the greasy wrappers into a ball and precisely tossed them into the trash can.

"Gentlemen,"

David tossed the rag into the sink, clapped his hands, and broke the brief, stagnant silence of the apartment.

"Although I really don't want to interrupt your post-meal carb-induced dizziness, as your legal and logistical advisor, I must remind you of something..."

David pointed to the wall clock, then to the empty tabletop.

"It's 10:30 a.m. Boston time now. Your papers, which were submitted to ArXiv without any peer review or consultation with any advisors, have been circulating online for five hours. And you two have been completely out of contact since last night."

Sam, who had been engrossed in the logic of the code, and Allen, who had just emerged from the theoretical ocean of topological homology groups, both paused for a moment.

After a moment of blankness, their eyes were quickly filled with an emotion called "I am the grass."

"Damn it..."

Sam was the first to react. He sprang up from the high stool, his messy curly hair swinging wildly in the air with his violent movement.

Like a restless hunting dog, he began frantically searching through the sofa crevices, the edges of the carpet, and the pockets of his coffee-stained jacket.

"Where's my phone? Last night, I turned it off because the group messages were too noisy while I was running the server..."

Sam muttered to himself as he pulled his phone out of his inside pocket.

He pressed the power button, but the screen did not respond. A red empty battery icon flashed briefly before going completely dark.

"The power is out."

Sam grabbed a handful of hair in frustration.

Almost at the same time, Allen also pulled his phone out of his clothes and glanced at the black screen.

"Same."

Chen Zhuo didn't say anything; he simply calmly took his phone out of his pants pocket.

Great, fully charged.

David sighed, pulled a charging cable from a drawer under the TV cabinet, and tossed it onto the island counter like a card.

"Pull the power on, geniuses, welcome back to Earth."

A few seconds later, the screen's backlight panel lit up simultaneously.

The boot animation progress bar slowly advanced on the dark screen. As the underlying system finished loading, the baseband chip re-established a handshake protocol with the communication base station over Boston. The torrent of external information, which had been silent all night, found an outlet to pour out at this moment.

A chilling notification sound suddenly erupted from the apartment.

Missed call notifications, new email pop-ups, and voicemail overload warnings flooded their screens like a waterfall.

Sam's phone vibrated the most violently, and the flashing name on the screen almost jumped out through the glass.

That was his boss at the MIT lab.

Without uttering a single word, Sam abruptly unplugged the charging cable, not even daring to glance at the number of missed calls on the screen. He grabbed his phone and strode towards the balcony at the far end of the living room.

Through the soundproof glass, David and Chen Zhuo could only see Sam standing on the balcony, frantically gesturing a famous hand gesture into the phone.

Although no specific sound could be heard, judging from the bulging veins on his neck and the constant pulling at his hair, the noise on the other end of the phone had most likely exceeded the safe decibel level for human eardrums.

On the other hand, Allen's reaction was completely different.

His phone screen was densely packed with missed calls from professors in the Harvard Physics Department and the String Theory and High-Dimensional Physics Models Group, fellow students, and editors of top physics journals.

There was no sign of panic on Allen's face; he didn't even rush to answer the frantically calling number.

He slowly picked up the half-cold espresso in front of him, picked up his still-vibrating phone with his other hand, and turned to walk towards the apartment's guest room.

"Clatter."

The guest room door was gently closed and locked.

In less than half a minute, the apartment, which had become incredibly noisy due to the flood of information, returned to tranquility.

The spotlight on the main stage shone back onto the central island area.

In the large living room, only David, standing by the sink, and Chen Zhuo, still leaning against the edge of the island counter, remained.

David looked at Sam, who was pacing around like a trapped animal on the balcony, then at the closed guest room door, and finally at Chen Zhuo's phone.

Chen Zhu shrugged, about to say that nothing had happened.

The phone started ringing.

It's Li Jianming.

Chen Zhuo touched his nose, reached out, swiped to answer the call, and without wearing headphones or avoiding David, simply turned on speakerphone and placed the phone flat on the table.

"Hello, Teacher Li."

Chen Zhuo's tone was calm, even carrying a hint of languor after a meal, as if he were chatting with a familiar elder on the phone on an ordinary weekend morning.

As soon as the call connected, there was no imposing questioning from the academic luminary that I had expected, nor any heavy sigh.

Instead, a burst of extremely penetrating, hearty, and even somewhat rough laughter erupted directly from the speaker.

"Hahaha! Kid, are you awake yet?"

Li Jianming's voice was incredibly loud, and in the background, one could faintly hear the chaotic footsteps and English conversations in the corridor.

"You three little bastards, you really had a blast last night! This morning, the entire academic community in the Boston area was probably turned upside down by you!"

Li Jianming's tone revealed an obvious and undisguised excitement.

As someone who has spent most of his life working in the Chinese mathematics community, how could he not understand the destructive power of this paper that suddenly appeared on ArXiv in the early morning?

But he completely disregarded the rules of peer review and the rigid academic etiquette.

He only cares about one thing:

This unparalleled sword that cleaves the wall between physics and computer algebra was created by our own people.

Chen Zhuo leaned against the island platform, listening to Lao Li's powerful voice, and a slight smile appeared on his lips.

"I just finished breakfast, Teacher Li."

"As long as I'm full, that's fine!"

Li Jianming slapped his thigh hard on the other end of the phone, the sound so loud that the phone speaker distorted.

"I just got my hands on the preprints of the three of you and looked at them. To be honest with you, I didn't even look closely at all that stuff about the low-level deadlock of the computer server, or that mess of physical eleven-dimensional topological manifolds, or all those bunches of coils and code. I'm too lazy to look at them anyway, and I don't understand them."

"but!"

Li Jianming abruptly changed the subject, his tone rising an octave to reveal an intense pride and a protective, domineering air.

"That algebraic truncation operator at the bottom, and the derivation framework of that discrete lattice model—I knew at a glance that you were the one who built the framework! That unreasonable, brutal style—no one but you could have written it like that! Well done! Absolutely brilliant!"

Li Jianming didn't hold back his praise on the phone; he knew all too well what this groundbreaking mathematical tool meant.

"Teacher Li, you flatter me."

Chen Zhuo maintained his calm and composed tone.

"It's just a handy auxiliary tool, not a big project."

"Don't try to be modest with me!"

Li Jianming laughed and cursed, and then the noise in the background seemed to get louder, with someone shouting something in English.

Li Jianming seemed to have moved to a slightly secluded corner, and lowered his voice.

"I'm calling you for no other reason than..."

Li Jianming's tone became extremely protective of his own.

"Right now at Harvard, the entire geometry analysis group and the physics department are in complete chaos. Everyone's holding a printout of your paper, their eyes wide with disbelief."

Li Jianming snorted coldly, revealing his disdain for those old Western relics.

"Don't worry about them, just rest. You've been dealing with concurrency and servers, your brain must be exhausted. Don't worry about anything, eat when you're hungry, sleep when you're tired, and recharge your body."

"As for this mess outside..."

Li Jianming's voice rose again.

"If any old fogies in this circle dare to complain that your mathematical tools aren't up to standard, or that you haven't followed the proper derivation process and try to cause you trouble, or if any reporter tries to dig into your past, I'll be here to protect you! I may not understand physics, but when it comes to math, those people at Harvard have to take a backseat. Anyone who dares to mess with you, I'll give them a piece of my mind!"

"Okay, whatever you say."

Chen Zhuo did not refuse, nor did he engage in any unnecessary formalities.

He smiled, his tone extremely relaxed.

"Then I'll just lie here. I'll trouble you to keep an eye on things outside."

"Go back to sleep! Bye!"

A crisp, clear dial tone came through, signaling the end of the call.

Chen Zhuo turned off his phone screen and casually tossed it onto the island counter.

He picked up his water glass and drank the last sip of warm water.

You look...

David found a better way to put it.

"You don't seem worried at all about your paper being criticized?"

"Finding fault is their right to exist, but the facts will shut them up."

Chen Zhuo turned around and smiled at David.

Sam yanked open the glass sliding door to the balcony, bursting in with the chilly Boston morning air, his expression utterly captivating.

He strode to the central island counter, slammed his phone on the table, and then, like a starving ghost, grabbed the half-eaten, cold bagel he hadn't finished and took a big bite.

"The old man has gone mad... It's definitely premature menopause combined with a bipolar disorder episode!"

Sam munched on his bread while mumbling incoherently at David and Chen Zhuo.

"Can you believe it? He yelled at me on the phone until I was almost deaf! He insisted that it was an academic violation for me to bypass lab review and upload the preprint directly. What's even more terrifying is that he just roared on the phone, asking me which damn Cayman Islands company I had patented that algorithm for?!"

Sam was so anxious that he waved his arms and legs, spraying bread crumbs everywhere.

"He said MIT's legal department and technology transfer office are ready to skin him alive! I don't even know which ocean the Cayman Islands are in!"

Upon hearing this, David, who was wiping the sink to the side, paused very slightly.

He turned around, picked up his cup of black coffee, took a sip, and suppressed the smile on his lips, keeping his accomplishment hidden.

Sam swallowed the bread in his mouth and began frantically pulling his coat down from the coat rack beside him.

"He gave me twenty minutes to get back to the MIT computer lab to see him, or he'd use his privileges to shut down my project and all my machine testing quotas! I'm practically a slave!"

The guest room door opened at that moment.

Allen came out from inside, his already pale face now so gloomy it looked as if a layer of frost could be scraped off.

"My boss's blood pressure has probably spiked to 200."

As Allen unzipped his backpack, he shoved the laptop and power cord into it, along with a few pages of topological formulas that had been scattered on the floor the night before.

"He considers our model to be utterly heretical in physics! He can't accept that you've swallowed up the eleven-dimensional mass gap with an unreasonable algebraic wall!"

Allen zipped the zipper up tightly.

"He told me to take the manuscript to his office right now, immediately, and explain to him on the blackboard where all that vanished energy went! Otherwise, he'd apply to the department to have my research funding revoked!"

Two geniuses, one an engineer and the other a theorist, who were both severely criticized by their mentor, meet on a narrow path in front of the Nakajima stage.

They looked at each other.

"Let's go, brothers in misfortune."

Sam put his phone in his pocket.

"I'll go to MIT and get yelled at, you'll go to Harvard and be tried. I hope we both come back alive for dinner tonight."

Allen ignored Sam's lame joke. He slung the heavy bag over one shoulder, nodded expressionlessly, and turned to walk towards the apartment door.