My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Chapter 314 Did you know all along?

The executive lounge of a hotel on the banks of the Charles River in Boston.

The morning sunlight streamed in through the huge floor-to-ceiling windows, illuminating the marble floor.

At this time, the lounge was empty, with only the deep cello music playing in the background.

Arthur sat in a dark leather sofa at a round table by the window.

A typical English breakfast was laid out in front of him; the edges of the fried egg were set, the bacon was soggy, and the coffee in the cup next to him had long since gone cold.

Since sitting here twenty minutes ago, Arthur hasn't touched a single thing.

His arms were crossed, and his eyes were fixed on the open laptop in front of him.

The computer screen remains on ArXiv's latest releases list.

Arthur's finger slid down the touchpad extremely slowly.

High-energy physics.

Computer architecture.

Pure mathematics.

Three sections that had previously built their own high walls in academia were now forcibly brought together on the screen by three papers that popped up almost at the same second.

Arthur's gaze was fixed on the author's section of the third paper.

Zhuo Chen

He closed his eyes, rubbed his throbbing temples, and the scene from yesterday morning in Harvard Science Center's Auditorium One involuntarily surfaced in his mind.

The fourteen-year-old boy sat in the center of the first row, facing the dead end on the blackboard. He simply raised his hand slightly and spoke a sentence in a gentle tone that was almost a request for discussion.

Then, Zhu Xiping's chalk came to life.

Arthur opened his eyes and looked at the fifteen-page paper on the screen, a solid work of pure algebra.

"What kind of nonsense is this...?"

Arthur stared at the screen, his teeth grinding together, his voice so low that only he could hear it.

"Sleepy... Is this what you mean by being sleepy and going back to sleep?"

"bite."

The crisp sound of metal clashing broke the deathly silence in the lounge.

The restaurant's ornate doors were pushed open from the outside.

Pierre walked in with a somewhat casual gait, wearing a fine light gray shirt with the collar neatly open, holding a folded copy of the day's Boston Globe in his right hand and his left hand in his pocket.

He looked to be in excellent spirits, his chin was clean-shaven, and he even had a faint scent of cologne.

Pierre glanced around the lounge, spotted Arthur by the window, and immediately smiled, striding over to him.

Good morning, Arthur.

Pierre pulled out the chair opposite Arthur and sat down in complete relaxation.

"The mornings in Boston are always so refreshing. I just ran into some acquaintances from Harvard downstairs, and they were rushing around like the sky was about to fall."

Arthur did not speak.

He didn't even lift his head, maintaining his crossed arms.

Pierre turned and waved, signaling the waiter in the distance to come over.

"A cup of Darjeeling tea, and please get me a freshly baked croissant, with extra butter, thank you."

After ordering, Pierre spread the newspaper flat on the table, smoothing out the creases with his fingers as he smiled at his old friend across from him.

"Arthur, did you leave this breakfast here since last night? The bacon looks like dried tree bark."

Arthur slowly raised his head.

He ignored Pierre's joke.

He stared intently at Pierre with his bloodshot, sunken eyes.

The temperature in the lounge seemed to drop a few degrees at that moment.

The cello music continued, but the atmosphere on the table became extremely strange.

Pierre was about to reach for the sugar jar on the table when he looked up and met Arthur's unwavering gaze.

Pierre's finger paused in mid-air.

He looked at Arthur's face, which was so gloomy it seemed to drip water, and raised an eyebrow.

"Arthur, the way you're looking at me makes me think I wore the wrong clothes this morning, or that I have something on my face that I shouldn't have."

Arthur remained silent.

He stared at Pierre for a full ten seconds.

A lounge server approached with a tray and gently placed a steaming cup of black tea and a plate of fragrant croissants in front of Pierre.

"Please enjoy your meal, sir."

As the waiter left, the table returned to silence.

Arthur finally moved.

He stretched out his right hand, pressed it against the edge of the laptop screen, and with a whoosh, spun the entire computer 180 degrees on the smooth marble tabletop, shoving it heavily in front of Pierre.

"Take a look at this."

Arthur's voice was hoarse, filled with a suppressed emotion that sent chills down your spine.

Pierre glanced at the screen that had been pushed in front of him, then at Arthur, his expression still relaxed.

"ArXiv? Arthur, did you skip breakfast this morning just to read those garbage preprints written by postdocs online?"

As Pierre spoke, he picked up a small silver spoon and gently stirred the tea in his teacup, making a tinkling sound.

He lowered his head slightly, his gaze falling on the screen.

The first one.

Part Two.

Part Three.

Pierre suddenly stopped holding the small spoon in his hand.

Although he was sitting in a hotel in Boston, his familiarity with Chen Zhuo's fifteen-page manuscript was unparalleled in North America, except for Chen Zhuo himself.

Yesterday morning, when Cyril received the noisy fax in Princeton, Pierre had already gone through the first three pages of operators over the phone.

But he didn't see what was behind him.

I didn't see either of these two articles in the Physics and Computer Science sections.

Pierre's eyes narrowed slightly, and his previously relaxed back straightened unconsciously.

But he concealed it well, simply placing the spoon on the edge of the porcelain plate, making a slight crisp sound.

"Oh, Sam and Allen."

Pierre leaned back in his chair, picked up the cup of black tea, and took a sip.

"Chen Zhuo's new friends in Boston. I heard that these two kids are both very creative young people in their respective labs. I didn't expect them to be so efficient."

Arthur, seeing Pierre's nonchalant demeanor, slammed both hands on the table.

"Snapped!"

The sound was somewhat jarring in the empty lounge.

The waiter in the distance was startled, glanced in their direction, and then hurriedly turned his head away.

"Pierre, don't put on that disgusting look of someone who just found out!"

Arthur leaned forward, his hands gripping the table tightly, looking like a hunting dog ready to pounce at any moment.

He stared at Pierre, his voice low, but every word carried a terrifying questioning tone.

"Yesterday afternoon, at the Harvard Science Center, old Jukka was at the continuity singularity of the partial differential equation, and everyone was trying to figure out how to fix that damn continuous manifold."

Arthur's eyes were bloodshot.

"Chen Zhuo was sitting at the very front. He casually mentioned quotient space mapping and discrete truncation, and then what? What did he do?"

Arthur scratched his nails hard on the table.

"He said he was a little sleepy and left after it was over!"

"I even thought the child was polite!"

Arthur's voice began to tremble.

"Now tell me, what exactly did he do back at his apartment?"

He stretched out a finger and forcefully poked the hyperlinks of the three papers side by side on the screen.

Five hours!

Arthur gritted his teeth.

"These three papers have been up for a full five hours! Supercomputing labs and high-energy physics groups across the entire East Coast are practically going crazy, calling in people for meetings!"

Arthur took a deep breath and slumped back into the sofa, but his deep gaze remained fixed on Pierre's face.

"Pierre, tell me the truth."

"Did you already know?"

"Did you watch him leave yesterday, and then deliberately keep it from all of us, sitting here waiting for this morning's fireworks?"

Seeing Arthur's near-collapse, Pierre felt a surge of emotions welling up inside him.

He understands Chen Zhuo.

He knew the dominance of those fifteen pages in algebraic geometry.

But to his utter surprise, Chen Zhuo, in the short dozen or so hours after returning to his apartment, not only did not rest, but instead used that pure number base to forcefully create an interdisciplinary closed loop for the industrial applications of the two peak fields next door.

Are young people these days so pragmatic when making friends?

Pierre's hand holding the teacup was very steady.

As a veteran French mathematician, he had the French Versailles instinct almost ingrained in his very being.

Even though he was also deeply impressed by the fourteen-year-old boy's execution ability, he absolutely could not show the slightest bit of naivety in front of this old rival and friend.

Pierre slowly put down his teacup.

He reached out and picked up the freshly baked croissant, cut it open with a knife, and spread a thick layer of butter inside.

"Arthur, you overestimate me."

Pierre took a bite of bread, the crispy crust making a crunchy sound in his mouth.

"I was also surprised when Cyril received the fax yesterday morning. I thought he had just made a simple mathematical tool outside of work hours to help Professor Zhu solve some minor problems in geometric analysis."

Pierre swallowed the bread, wiped his mouth with a tissue, and spoke in an extremely innocent and matter-of-fact tone.

"Who would have thought that young people these days are so indiscriminate in making friends? He probably just chatted with his roommates casually while drinking water in his apartment, and then those two kids felt like they had discovered a new world and insisted on writing their papers overnight."

Pierre sighed and shook his head.

"Fourteen-year-olds always have so much energy that it's enviable, isn't it? When I was his age, I was fighting with someone on the streets of Paris over a pretty girl, while he just casually smashed the jobs of the physics and computer science students next door."

Looking at Pierre's leisurely, even proud, expression, Arthur felt a tightness in his chest.

He felt as if he had punched a soft, fluffy French marshmallow with all his might.

"Did you ruin your job?"

Arthur gave a cold laugh, his resentment deepening.

"Pierre, do you think Cyril can still peacefully enjoy his morning tea at Princeton these days?"

Pierre's brow twitched slightly.

"Cyril? What happened to him?"

Arthur turned the laptop back to face him, tapped a few times on the keyboard with his long fingers, and pulled up an internal email he had just received.

Cyril called me just fifteen minutes ago.

Arthur stared at the screen, his tone revealing a gloating dejection.

"He roared on the phone like an African lion whose tail had been stepped on. David's lawyers, who are as cunning as devils, had already used an offshore trust agreement registered in the Cayman Islands to weld together all the underlying operators and commercial cross-licensing of these three papers a few hours before the papers were uploaded this morning."

Arthur looked up at Pierre.

"Princeton's Intellectual Property Office filed a claim for an invention made in the course of employment half an hour ago, but David, with evidence of three major gaps in space, funding, and research, directly shut the door on legal grounds. Princeton didn't even get a single crumb of this commercial cake that is enough to dominate server architecture for the next decade."

Upon hearing this, Pierre's hand, holding the teacup, froze in mid-air for half a second.

He then placed the cup back on the porcelain plate, making an even crisper sound than before.

"David is more nimble than I imagined."

Pierre's lips finally couldn't help but curl upwards slightly.

"So? Is Cyril now preparing to apply for an emergency injunction in a New Jersey court?"

"Apply my ass."

Arthur couldn't help but swear.

"Although Cyril is a bureaucrat, he is not blind. He knows very well what it would mean if he broke ties with Chen Zhuo and filed a lawsuit now."

Arthur rubbed his temples, his voice lowering.

"Harvard and MIT's academic acumen is no less than ours. Laurent and Richard, those old foxes, are probably already grinding those two lucky postdocs into oblivion. As long as they follow the ArXiv citation chain and understand the value of Chen Zhuo's algebraic foundation, Harvard will not hesitate to use its highest-level special funding to directly offer Chen Zhuo tenure and an independent laboratory."

"If Princeton dares to show even a little bit of institutional greed and hostility at this time, Chen Zhuo might just transfer to Harvard tomorrow without any problem."

"At that time, not only will we not gain any commercial benefits, but we will also give away a groundbreaking mathematical genius to these academic monsters in Massachusetts for nothing."

Pierre leaned back in his chair, watching the racing boats glide across the Charles River outside the window, a wide smile spreading across his face.

"What is Cyril doing now? Smashing vases in his office?"

"He recruited all the core professors of the entire mathematics department."

Arthur sighed, looking at Pierre's smug face, feeling utterly powerless.

"Cyril issued a top-level executive order, canceling all regular classes and seminars today. He ordered Princeton to concentrate all its computing resources in the top-secret conference room number one and produce a detailed 'official compliance certificate' white paper for Chen Zhuo's paper within 24 hours, down to the punctuation marks."

Arthur shook his head.

"David has already won in the business, and Cyril is now trying to use Princeton's decades-long monopoly in academia to forcibly buy out the right to orthodox interpretation and historical naming of Chen Zhuo's theory in the history of human science."

"Once our white paper is published first, then whether it's the application layer in Silicon Valley or the physical models at CERN, as long as they touch upon this algebraic operator, they must always anchor the orthodox source on the cornerstone of the Princeton mathematics department on the first page of their documents."

Arthur stared at Pierre.

"This is an academic and political land grab, Pierre. You two, teacher and student, have forced the entire Princeton to work overtime to crown him as the legal heirs."

After hearing this, Pierre put the last piece of croissant, which was covered in a thick layer of butter, into his mouth.

He swallowed it, picked up the cup of Darjeeling tea that had cooled down a bit, and drank it all in one gulp.

Outside the lounge, the wind rustled the fallen leaves, and the surface of the Charles River shimmered with golden light.

Pierre placed the empty teacup back on the table, elegantly wiped his hands with a tissue, then sank into the sofa, looked out the window at the Boston sky, and smiled faintly.

"Let Cyril worry about it. As long as Chen Zhuo's academic papers still bear the mark of Princeton, let that little guy play the other business games himself."

Pierre turned his head and looked at his old friend across from him, his eyes filled with an undisguised pride as a teacher.

"Arthur, stop worrying about rules and procedures. We are witnessing the birth of a new era monster, and this monster is my student."

Arthur looked at Pierre's Versailles-esque face and couldn't utter a single word.

He glanced at the completely cold English breakfast on the table, lost all appetite, and slammed his laptop shut in frustration.