My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Chapter 320 Casual Chat

A full day has passed since the proposal of the three-university joint symposium that determined the direction of the entire North American academic community.

David's apartment was currently presenting a strange, even disconcerting, sense of contrast.

The center of the living room looked like a disaster zone that had just been ravaged by gunfire.

The coffee table was piled with leftover pizza boxes, crumpled draft papers, and empty coffee cups lying haphazardly.

In front of the huge whiteboard in the living room, Sam and Allen, their hair disheveled, paced back and forth between the whiteboard and their respective laptops.

"Damn it! How am I supposed to draw this slide?!"

Sam grabbed his already messy curly hair in frustration and let out a painful howl at the computer screen.

He was in charge of the underlying concurrent scheduling part of the entire architecture. At the joint seminar of the three universities two weeks later, he would face questioning from the top old monsters in the computer science departments of Harvard and MIT.

"Alan, come take a look! If I jump straight into the scheduling priority of memory overflow here, those old guys in the audience will definitely ask me how the underlying pointers are redirected! But if I don't talk about redirection, this concurrency logic looks like some damn mystical magic on the PPT!"

Sam slammed his fist on the table in despair.

On the other hand, Allen's condition wasn't much better than Sam's.

He was biting the cap of a marker, staring intently at the eleven-dimensional manifold topology he had drawn on the whiteboard.

Hearing Sam's complaint, Allen didn't turn around and mumbled a curse.

"Shut up, Sam! You just don't know how to draw a scheduling diagram. I don't even know how to demonstrate eleven-dimensional physical manifold integration to a bunch of idiots on a two-dimensional PowerPoint screen!"

Yesterday, when Chen Zhuo casually passed on the highest honors in physics and coding to them, letting them go on stage to give their presentations, these two brilliant postdoctoral fellows were so excited they almost flew to heaven.

But great honors are often accompanied by equally terrifying pressure.

Now, as they actually begin preparing this report to be presented to the world's top scholars, they painfully realize how agonizing it is to transform Chen Zhuo's illogical mathematical foundation into engineering and physics language that humans can understand.

And next to the open kitchen island, less than five meters away from this disaster area.

Chen Zhuo was in a relaxed state that was out of place with the restlessness in the room.

He had just taken a hot shower.

She was wearing a loose, soft nightgown, with a white, dry towel casually draped around her neck. Her hair was half-dry, with the ends still slightly damp.

He held a glass of freshly poured warm water in his hand, took a slow sip, then pulled out a bar stool next to the island counter and sat down.

Watching his two roommates pulling at their hair in the living room, Chen Zhuo's lips curled up slightly, revealing a smug, almost detached smile.

He placed the water glass on the table and reached out to open the IBM laptop in front of him.

As someone who only takes care of the mathematical foundation, Chen Zhuo's current task is simply to go on stage at the end of the seminar in half a month and write those algebraic truncation formulas on the blackboard.

Whether physics can be integrated or whether the code will overflow is none of the mathematicians' business.

The computer screen lights up, and the classic Windows XP blue sky and white cloud wallpaper appears before your eyes.

Chen Zhuo held the mouse and gently shook it twice on the mousepad.

As soon as the computer connected to the apartment's broadband network, the little penguin icon wearing a red scarf in the lower right corner of the taskbar started flashing wildly, as if it had taken a stimulant.

Accompanying the flashing was a long string of urgent and familiar notification sounds coming from the computer speakers.

In this Boston apartment filled with English, high-dimensional physics, and low-level code, these few crisp QQ notification sounds have a distinctly Chinese feel to them.

Chen Zhuo clicked on the flashing profile picture.

[Jinling Roast Duck Squad]

The chat box had accumulated hundreds of messages. Chen Zhuo scrolled the mouse wheel to the top of the chat history.

The first person to flood the group with messages was, without a doubt, the leader of the atmosphere group.

[Chasing the Wind]: Holy crap! Holy crap! Holy crap!

[Chasing the Wind]: @C拙哥! Hey! Why didn't you stay in Princeton this weekend? What were you doing in Boston?!

[Chasing the Wind]: Do you know that the entire university community in China has gone crazy today!

[Chasing the Wind]: I was planning to sleep in until 2 PM today because it was the weekend, and I stayed up all night playing World of Warcraft with my roommate! But at 8 AM, before it was even fully light, my advisor dragged me out of bed with a series of urgent calls!

[Chasing the Wind]: When I got to the lab, wow, all the professors and associate professors in our department were sitting in the conference room, staring at a paper in English on the projector!

[Chasing the Wind]: My advisor was pointing at C. Zhuo on the screen, who had overturned the computing power base of Silicon Valley, and his hands were shaking. He asked me if this was Chen Zhuo, who came from China. I said that the name sounded so familiar, it was you!

[Chasing the Wind]: Bro! You owe me my weekend! I was forced to sit in the conference room for four hours listening to them analyze algebraic matrices. It gave me goosebumps, and I didn't even get to eat lunch! [Crying][Crying][Crying]

As Chen Zhuo looked at the screen full of exclamation marks and groans, he could almost perfectly picture Wang Huashao with dark circles under his eyes, scratching his head and jumping around in the lab, looking utterly miserable.

He picked up his water glass, took a sip, and instead of typing, continued scrolling down.

After Wang finished venting his frustrations, an extremely meticulous and serious ID appeared in the group.

【ZK】：Chen Zhuo.

These two simple words conveyed Zhou Kai's consistent restraint.

[ZK]: I just received an email a couple of days ago. A paper I submitted last month about turbulent boundaries in fluid mechanics has been accepted by a Nature sub-journal.

[ZK]: This is the best work I completed independently during my undergraduate studies. Last night, I felt quite proud, thinking that I had finally touched a real threshold on this path.

Upon seeing this, Chen Zhuo raised an eyebrow slightly.

To be able to publish in a top-tier journal or sub-journal of this caliber during one's undergraduate studies, Zhou Kai has indeed reached the forefront of his peers in the field of physics.

But then, Zhou Kai changed the subject.

[ZK]: As a result, this morning, my supervisor printed out the paper on ArXiv with your name on it and sent it to me separately.

【ZK】: I saw it.

【ZK】: I watched it for a whole afternoon.

[ZK]: Your algebraic truncation operators...

【ZK】: I spent the whole afternoon working on scratch paper trying to figure out how you connected the continuous physical manifold and the discrete algebraic mesh, but I couldn't find it.

【ZK】: Physically, this is completely discontinuous and goes against classical physics intuition.

【ZK】: But, by sheer coincidence, the computer ran it successfully, and the model closed the loop.

[ZK]: My advisor stood in front of the blackboard for two hours this afternoon, and finally sighed and said to me, "This is no longer physics explaining the world; it's mathematics forcibly dictating how the world should operate."

【ZK】：I can't figure it out, but I know it's correct.

Chen Zhuo looked at Zhou Kai's message and lightly stroked his fingers on the keyboard.

Just as this slightly somber academic atmosphere was beginning to spread in the group, a black period icon suddenly popped up, completely changing the tone of the group.

【.】：Chen Zhuo!!!!! I hate you!!!!! [Angry][Angry][Angry][Frustrated]

【.】：Are you ever going to stop?!

【.】：I already had a lot of courses this semester, and I was so sleepy every day. I finally managed to get through the weekend and wanted to catch up on some sleep!

【.】：And this is the lousy operator you came up with! This afternoon, our Tsinghua University math professor went crazy and dragged several of us into a discussion group! It was all about your mathematical foundation, making us derive the homology mapping you omitted!

【.】: Our professor was banging his fist on the blackboard, insisting that there must be a perfect calculus bridge in the middle, but you were too lazy to write it out! We were forced to complete the process!

【.】：Dozens of pages of draft paper!!! All used to wipe your butt and calculate that damn extreme point transition!!!

【.】: Can you please shut up?! You take the shortcut and don't write proofs, do you know how much extra work this adds to our math department's workload?! I just want to take a nap! [knife][knife][knife]

Seeing Lin Yi's unpredictable and furious accusations, Chen Zhuo couldn't help but let out a low chuckle.

He turned his head and glanced at Sam and Allen, who were still pulling their hair in the living room. He thought that if Lin Yi knew that even the engineering collaborators of this paper didn't understand where the calculus bridge was, he would probably climb over the internet cable and smash up this Boston bar.

When those high-ranking scholars and multi-million dollar architects in Silicon Valley saw this paper, they were amazed by the world-changing truth.

In Lin Yi's eyes, this groundbreaking discovery that overturned the world's technological landscape was simply because you didn't write out the proof steps, making me work overtime on the weekend to clean up your mess.

This unconventional complaining, ironically, allowed Chen Zhuo to experience a genuine, down-to-earth sense of relaxation in North America, a place rife with academic scheming.

He smiled and shook his head, then continued scrolling down the chat history.

After Lin Yi bombarded the group with emojis, the group was quiet for about half an hour.

Later that evening, a composed profile picture lit up, sending several messages along with two pictures.

[Miao]: Captain, how have you all been?

Old Miao's opening remarks are always so gentle.

As the domestic internet speed slowed down, the two photos in the group gradually loaded.

The first photo is a candid shot of a street scene.

In the photo, the glaring sunlight shines on a dusty street, and the buildings on both sides of the street have a distinct Arabic style.

Not far away, there was a tall wall covered with barbed wire, and two fully armed security personnel wearing bulletproof vests stood outside the wall.

Even through a screen, one can feel the dry heat and restlessness of the Middle East's heartland, as well as the danger and chaos lurking beneath the calm.

The second photo appears to have been taken secretly in a heavily guarded internal conference room.

The image quality is somewhat blurry, and the lighting is a bit dim.

However, it is still clearly recognizable that this is a high-level internal business and technology summit.

In the center of the photo, several tall, well-dressed European and American men are sitting around a round table.

Judging from the color of the badges they wore on their chests, one could vaguely tell that they were senior executives from several of the world's top technology giants, such as Microsoft and IBM, in the Middle East.

At this moment, these usually aloof executives of multinational giants were sweating profusely, their faces ashen as they stared at a report on the table. One of them even stood up agitatedly, his pen almost piercing the tabletop.

After the two photos were posted, Lao Miao followed up with a text message.

[Miao]: I've been working with my supervisor for the past few months, conducting field research on international geopolitics and trade in the Middle East.

[Miao]: Captain, you probably don't know how much of a stir your three papers have caused outside.

[Miao]: Today, the diplomatic circles and top business summits here are in complete chaos. Silicon Valley in the United States has been hit by an extremely serious technological gap. If this concurrent architecture is deployed, the existing computing power barrier will be directly destroyed.

[Miao]: In the second photo I posted, the Middle East presidents of those American tech giants even canceled their regular diplomatic dinners this afternoon. They received a direct order from headquarters to figure out the underlying logic at all costs.

[Miao]: In the internal meeting just now, some people even suspected that this was a nuclear weapon released from a top-secret laboratory that the military of a major country had kept hidden for decades. Some people even speculated whether this would trigger a new round of international technological blockade and trade sanctions.

[Miao]: Everyone is guessing where that deity comes from.

[Miao]: I didn't expect it to be you.

[Miao]: Captain, your casual stroke in Boston has alarmed tech giants across half the globe, and even strategic intelligence agencies of various countries.

Looking at the photos and text sent by Lao Miao, Chen Zhuo paused slightly in his hand holding the water glass.

The chat history in the group scrolled to the very bottom.

【归去来兮】：Captain, awesome.

Chen Zhuo quietly watched the familiar IDs on the screen, observing their responses to him in their own ways within this small chat window.

There were exaggerated wails, pure gazing upwards, languid anger, and also awe-inspiring views of the world.

Outside this Boston apartment, three of North America's top academic cliques are operating frantically, trying to package C. Zhuo's name as a scientific deity of the new era, attempting to bind him firmly with capital and honor.

It was a world of fame and fortune, filled with calculations, exchanges of interests, and cold, hard rules.

But on the ten-inch computer screen in front of Chen Zhuo.

He is still the roommate who gets his beef jerky stolen by Wang Huashao in the middle of the night, the mountain that Zhou Kai can never climb over, the jerk that Lin Yi hates the most for adding homework, and the captain who is always at the forefront in Lao Miao and He Gui's hearts.

Chen Zhuo put down the water glass in his hand.

He listened to the frantic pounding of Sam's keyboard behind him, and the physics formulas that Allen was muttering to himself.

He raised his hands and placed his ten fingers on the slightly warm laptop keyboard.

【C】：@Miaozhong Dong's situation is chaotic. Don't just watch the drama unfold. Be careful when you're out on fieldwork.

【C】：@. If you think there's too much homework, then don't study. If you're really sleepy, skip two classes tomorrow, go back to your dorm and get a good night's sleep. When the professor calls roll, just have your roommate answer for you.

Chen Zhuo finished typing and pressed the Enter key.

It's the middle of the night back home, and everyone in the group is probably asleep, so there are no new messages popping up.

Chen Zhuo gripped the mouse, moved the cursor to the upper right corner of the screen, and clicked the red "X".

The chat window disappeared.

The computer screen returned to the default blue sky and white clouds wallpaper, and the penguin in the lower right corner finally quieted down and stopped flashing.

Chen Zhuo closed the laptop screen.

He turned around, leaned back on the bar stool, and looked out at the Boston nightscape through the apartment's huge floor-to-ceiling windows.

The Charles River flowed quietly in the night, while in the distance, countless lights still shone brightly on the campuses of Harvard and MIT, where countless brilliant minds were working tirelessly through the night on a single line of formula they had casually scribbled down.

"Chen! Come take a look at this damn PowerPoint slide!"

In the living room, Sam, with his messy, bird's-nest-like hair, desperately waved a stack of printed papers in his hand.

"If I don't explain this pointer redirection step in detail, those Harvard old men in the audience will absolutely drown me in their spittle!"

Chen Zhuo withdrew his gaze from the window and slowly stood up from the chair.

He reached for the towel draped around his neck, casually wiped the water from his hair, and spoke in an extremely indifferent and irresponsible tone.

"That's your code, figure out how to interpret it yourselves, I can't understand it."

Chen Zhuo yawned and turned to walk towards his bedroom.

"I'm sleepy, I'm going to bed now. Remember to throw away the pizza boxes in the living room when you two leave."

"Damn mathematician! You heartless, cold-blooded animal!"

Sam let out a pitiful wail from behind.

Accompanied by this wail, Chen Zhuo pushed open the bedroom door and went inside.

With a click.

The door closed.