My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Chapter 316 Visiting

In Boston, sunlight streams through floor-to-ceiling windows, casting long shadows on the floor.

After Sam and Allen left, the apartment regained its lazy and quiet atmosphere typical of weekend mornings.

David stood by the sink, carefully washing the coffee cups he had just used.

Chen Zhuo remained leaning against the island counter, holding a glass of iced milk in his hand, his gaze fixed on a point in the void, his mind in a state of blankness.

"Ding-dong—"

The crisp sound of the doorbell suddenly rang in the apartment.

David turned off the tap, shook the water off his hands, and grabbed a tissue to dry them.

"Aside from those two unlucky guys who got called in to get yelled at, I can't think of anyone else who would ring the doorbell at this hour."

David spoke as he walked toward the entrance.

Instead of checking the peephole to see who it was, he grabbed the doorknob, pressed down, and opened the door.

There were two people standing outside the door.

Pierre stared at David as he opened the door, paused for a moment, then a flash of memory crossed his eyes, followed by a gentle, enlightened smile.

"No wonder Cyril was so angry on the phone that he had to take his medication."

Pierre looked at the young man in front of him wearing gold-rimmed glasses, his tone carrying the familiarity of an elder.

"David Collin, the last time I saw you and your father at the party on Long Island, you were still asking me questions about number theory."

Pierre smiled and shook his head, handing over the long-handled umbrella he was holding.

"If Cyril knew that the one who beat their entire intellectual property department to a pulp in the Cayman Islands Trust was not a senior lawyer from Wall Street, but one of our math students, he would probably faint."

When his identity was exposed by his elders, David instantly dropped his prepared fake smile, bowed slightly politely, and accepted the umbrella.

"Professor Pierre, please excuse my poor appearance. Please come in."

Pierre smiled at David as he hung the umbrella he was holding on the rack in the entryway.

"I originally just wanted to check on Chen's sleep, but this guy didn't even have breakfast in the hotel lounge and insisted on following me here. I couldn't stop this old man who was in a hurry."

Arthur completely ignored Pierre's teasing.

He strode through the entryway and barged into the living room.

Arthur stopped in the middle of the living room.

His gaze swept rapidly across the entire space.

He saw the huge whiteboard that had been dragged to the front of the sofa.

On the whiteboard, the densely packed physical field equations and underlying architectural logic written in black and red markers are still clearly visible. It is a perfect interdisciplinary closed loop that is enough to drive the world crazy.

Arthur shifted his gaze from the whiteboard to the ground around him.

On the expensive wool carpet, dozens of crumpled pieces of waste paper were scattered, and several markers that had run dry were carelessly discarded in a corner.

On the island counter not far away, there were several greasy fast food bags, a half-eaten, cold bagel, and a few coffee cups placed haphazardly.

Finally, Arthur's gaze settled on the boy leaning against the edge of the island platform.

Chen Zhuo was wearing slippers and holding a transparent glass with half a glass of iced milk in his hand.

He was looking at himself, who had suddenly intruded, with a calm and gentle gaze.

Arthur stood still, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down with difficulty.

In his subconscious, the place that could have given birth to those three papers that were enough to overturn the foundation of human computing power and our understanding of the multidimensional universe should have been a national-level laboratory with the highest level of security, displaying countless supercomputers and gathering dozens of top minds.

Instead of this single apartment filled with the smell of cold pizza, cheap caffeine, and trash cans everywhere!

"Is it here?"

Arthur's voice was a little hoarse. He pointed to the whiteboard and then to the mess on the ground, as if he were asking Chen Zhuo, or perhaps asking himself.

"You managed to forcibly lock mathematics, theoretical physics, and computer architecture together right here, in less than a night?"

Chen Zhuo put down the glass in his hand.

"It's just a theoretical deduction. Here we have a whiteboard, paper and pens, and two computers that can run compilers."

Chen Zhuo's tone was very calm.

"It doesn't need to be too big."

Arthur felt a slight twitch at the corner of his eye.

He took a deep breath, forced himself to look away from the damn whiteboard, turned around, walked to the single sofa on the side of the living room, and sat down heavily.

The sofa let out a muffled protest.

Pierre walked over to another sofa and sat down, crossing his arms on his knees, looking relaxed and ready to watch the show.

David came over.

He didn't pour tea for the two uninvited guests, but went straight to the opposite side of the single sofa, pulled out a chair, and sat down.

As soon as Arthur settled down, his bloodshot eyes immediately locked onto David.

"You must be David Collin, right?"

Arthur's tone was very impolite, even carrying a strong sense of hostility stemming from being outmaneuvered.

He held up a finger and pointed at David without any hesitation.

"So this is the seemingly mild-mannered guy who, just four hours ago, used an offshore trust agreement from the Cayman Islands to completely humiliate the head of Princeton's Intellectual Property Department?"

Arthur gave a cold laugh.

"Do you know that Cyril is still taking his blood pressure medication in his dean's office? Princeton nurtured Chen Zhuo, providing him with full funding and top-notch academic support, while you, like a greedy robber, welded the door to the commercial foundation shut at the last minute!"

Faced with the accusations from this academic giant, who held absolute authority in the academic world, David showed no sign of panic.

He didn't even change his posture.

David reached out, pushed up his gold-rimmed glasses, and a flawless smile appeared on his lips.

"Professor Arthur, I think you have some misunderstandings about the legal definition of the word 'robber'."

David's voice was calm and cold, carrying an unquestionable business logic.

"As Mr. Chen Zhuo's chief legal representative, within the existing legal framework, I used the fastest and most efficient means to commercially block and monetize my client's core intellectual achievements. Although I am not a professional lawyer, I think I have done a pretty good job."

David looked at Arthur, unyielding.

"That set of algebraic operators has no legal causal relationship with Princeton in terms of physical space, funding channels, and project assignments. I don't think I took anything that belongs to Princeton."

David paused for a moment, then his smile deepened.

"Moreover, I have not set any obstacles regarding authorship and academic interpretation of the paper. Dean Cyril is now fully capable of utilizing the entire mathematics department at Princeton to produce an official white paper for this theory."

"I left my name to Princeton and took only the profits, Professor Arthur. From a business perspective, I have been very lenient."

Arthur was speechless for a long time after David's watertight, even somewhat mocking, argument about mercy.

His chest heaved violently a few times, and he finally realized with despair that in the fields of business and law, he, an old man who had spent his whole life in academia, was no match for this sharp-tongued young man.

Arthur gave up on his legal battle with David.

He abruptly turned his head, casting that complex, even somewhat resentful gaze back at Chen Zhuo, who was leaning against the central island platform.

That was the gaze directed at a monster, an anomaly, a non-human being who had completely shattered the boundaries of conventional understanding.

"List."

Arthur's voice softened, but the disbelief in his tone grew stronger.

"Yesterday in the lecture hall at Harvard, you told Pierre that you were a little sleepy."

Arthur stared into Chen Zhuo's eyes, trying to find even a trace of fanaticism or ambition in the fourteen-year-old boy's pupils.

"You're telling me that your so-called 'something to do' was just rushing back to write this discrete operator?"

Arthur's speech became faster and faster, and his emotions began to rise uncontrollably.

"Do you even know what that cut you made means? You've used a completely illogical constant to swallow up the mass gap in high-energy physics! You've used a quotient space mapping to fold up the memory overflow of a server with tens of millions of concurrent connections!"

"You've cleaved the two most insurmountable mountains in academia in two, like cutting a piece of butter!"

Arthur gripped the armrests of the sofa with both hands, leaning forward.

"I want to know, what kind of grand vision, what kind of ultimate goal, drove you to make this decision yesterday that spans three pinnacle areas?"

Faced with Arthur's soul-searching question, a question worthy of being recorded in the annals of scientific history, the apartment was so quiet that only the ticking of the clock on the wall could be heard.

Pierre sat beside him, his smile still on his face, but his eyes narrowed slightly. He too wanted to know just how grand a game his unfathomable student was playing.

David stopped faking his smile and focused his gaze on Chen Zhuo as well.

Chen Zhuo looked at the three burning gazes in front of him.

He didn't puff out his chest, nor did he show any of the arrogance often associated with geniuses.

He simply reached out and took an empty glass from the island counter, walked to the water dispenser, and filled himself half a glass with room temperature water.

Chen Zhuo, holding his water glass, gave Arthur a very strange look, as if he had heard something utterly absurd. He calmly corrected three of Arthur's statements:

"Professor Arthur, you've misunderstood."

"First of all, this interdisciplinary framework wasn't something we came up with yesterday; we finished it the night before last while we were drinking at an Irish pub in Boston."

"Secondly, I sent those fifteen pages of core manuscript to Dean Cyril via fax yesterday morning."

"Third, the reason I left Harvard early yesterday was simply because I had stayed up all night the day before and was too tired, so I just wanted to come back and sleep."

Arthur was stunned.

His bloodshot eyes were wide open, as if something was stuck in his head.

"What about last night...?"

Arthur's voice was somewhat unsteady as he pressed on with disbelief.

"So what's the deal with those two groundbreaking papers on ArXiv? What were they doing last night?"

Chen Zhuo sighed as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

"Oh, we gave them the core base the day before yesterday."

Chen Zhuo put down his glass, his tone revealing a hint of helplessness regarding his roommate's intelligence.

"They were going crazy in the living room last night, just because they're stupid."

"They got stuck on the step of 'how to translate my mathematical language into computer code and physical manifolds,' and one by one they were dealing with memory overflows and energy nonconservation issues, pulling their hair and smashing tables in the living room."

Chen Zhuo looked at Arthur again, his eyes filled with utter innocence.

"They were too noisy, and I was too lazy to teach them, so I went back to my room to sleep. I gave them the base, and the rest of the physical work, which was slowly typesetting and writing the paper, I had to let them do it themselves."

The apartment fell into an even longer and more complete silence than before.

Pierre's elegant French smile froze completely.

Looking at his student, he realized for the first time that his supposedly Versailles skills were as crude as a country bumpkin compared to this fourteen-year-old boy.

David's fingers, which were pushing up his glasses, froze in mid-air. He looked at Chen Zhuo, a sense of indescribable absurdity welling up in his eyes.

And Arthur.

Arthur sat on the single sofa, slumped down in dejection as if all his strength had been drained.

He slowly raised his hands and covered his face in despair.

Typing and formatting... it's physically demanding...

What outsiders consider enough to establish a school of thought and be revered as divine—computer code and eleven-dimensional physical models—are, in Chen Zhuo's eyes, merely the foundation. He's told to leave the rest of the work to them and go to sleep.

The world is going crazy over these three papers, top laboratories are holding emergency meetings, Cyril is forcing the entire Princeton mathematics department to write a white paper... and the real mastermind didn't even bother to look at them last night, just tossed them to his roommate and went to sleep!

"My God..."

Arthur covered his face, his voice coming through his fingers, carrying a sense of despair and lamentation after the collapse of his faith.

"Can truth really be so cheap?"

Pierre took a deep breath as he looked at Arthur's miserable state, forcibly suppressing the shock in his heart.

He turned his head to look at Chen Zhuo, his mentor's smile returning to his face, but this time, there was an undisguised bitterness in his smile.

"Chen, the physical labor you dumped on others has attracted all the academic monsters in Massachusetts."

Pierre stood up, walked to the central island platform, and patted Chen Zhuo on the shoulder.

"Richard and Kane, those two old guys who are the undisputed leaders in the fields of computer science and physics, should have figured out the whole story by now and know who the real player is."

Pierre turned to look at the Boston streets outside the floor-to-ceiling windows.

"If you think Arthur's reaction just now was exaggerated enough, then you might need to prepare yourself to face a group of truly fanatical believers."

Just as Pierre finished speaking...

David, who had been sitting silently to the side, suddenly stood up.

He strode to the floor-to-ceiling window, looked down at the street below the apartment building, and let out a very soft "Eh."

"What's wrong?"

Pierre turned his head and asked.

David didn't turn around. He put his hands in his suit trouser pockets, looked down at the street, his expression extremely serious, but deep in his eyes was an barely suppressed excitement.

"Gentlemen."

David turned around and looked at Arthur, who was still questioning his existence on the sofa, and Chen Zhuo and Pierre, who remained calm.

"I think our relaxed and pleasant morning chat is coming to an end."

David held up one finger and pointed down outside the window.

"Just now, four cars stopped at the entrance of the apartment building downstairs at the same time: two Ford vans with MIT lab access passes and two black sedans with Harvard logos."