157: Chapter 157 Diamond-level Optional Quest Card!

Two and a half hours later.

The movie reached its finale, the credits began to roll on the screen, and the overhead lights in the theater turned on, the piercing white light instantly shattering the sense of privacy created by the darkness.

The two squinted their eyes simultaneously, and after adjusting to the light, they stood up.

"Let's go."

Zhao Yang picked up the empty paper cola cup and followed the flow of people out of the aisle.

Outside, the daylight was bright, and the mall was bustling with people coming and going.

"What are we having for lunch?" Zhao Yang asked, turning to look at Gu Qing after accurately tossing the paper cup into the trash can at the end of the hallway.

"There's a newly opened Stone Pot Bibimbap place nearby. I heard it tastes good, want to try it?" Gu Qing suggested, her expression having returned to its usual natural state.

"Let's go."

At noon, the two had lunch at a restaurant on the mall's basement level.

When the stone pot was brought out, the rice and side dishes inside made a "sizzling" sound against the red-hot stone walls, and rising steam blurred the space between the two.

Zhao Yang took the stone pot from in front of Gu Qing, skillfully used a long-handled spoon to help her mix the food evenly, and then pushed it back.

During the meal, most of their conversation revolved around daily school life and the enzyme activity assay experiment Gu Qing had been working on recently.

"The catalytic rate of that Peroxidase always shows non-linear decay in the high-temperature range, and the curve fitted from the data looks terrible," Gu Qing said, biting her spoon and sounding somewhat troubled by the academic problem.

Zhao Yang didn't say much, spending most of the time listening and occasionally offering a suggestion or two.

"Non-linear decay is most likely because high temperatures cause irreversible denaturation of part of the enzyme protein's conformation."

Zhao Yang took a sip of barley tea and set down his cup.

"Regarding that enzyme activity assay, perhaps you could try setting up a bivariate orthogonal experiment for the substrate concentration and the buffer's pH value. On the basis of the existing Michaelis-Menten Constant model, introduce a correction term for the temperature decay coefficient."

After hearing this, Gu Qing fell into deep thought. The more she thought about it, the more feasible she found this approach; it could not only explain the data anomalies but also serve as a key direction for follow-up experiments.

The gaze she directed at Zhao Yang was filled with wonder.

The more she understood this boy, the more she couldn't suppress her admiration; he was truly incredible.

After finishing the meal and paying the bill, the two walked outside the mall to catch a taxi back to school.

"I'm going back to the dormitory to organize this morning's experimental data. I also need to go to the laboratory in the afternoon to adjust the incubator."

At the fork in the road leading to the female dormitory area and the Library, Gu Qing stopped.

"I'm going to the Library," Zhao Yang nodded.

The two parted ways, heading in opposite directions.

1:30 PM.

Zhao Yang swiped his card and entered the Library. He didn't stop in the first-floor lobby but went straight to the Computer Science and Information Technology section on the fourth floor.

The Library wasn't crowded on the weekend, especially in this highly specialized foreign language bookshelf area where almost no one could be seen.

He moved between the bookshelves, his fingertips sliding across rows of heavy book spines. He pulled out several extremely hardcore English journals, including "IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks," "ACM Computing Surveys," and several monographs on low-level operating system kernel architecture and TCP/IP Protocol Stack source code analysis.

Finding a completely empty corner by a window, Zhao Yang pulled out a chair and sat down, placing the thick stack of books on the table.

His primary task now was to raise his Informatics level from LV4 to LV5 as quickly as possible.

As the things on his hands increased—whether it was analyzing the massive data streams of us stocks, handling vast scientific research calculations, or various data processing tasks...

Relying solely on his own brainpower, although possible with an IQ of 173, was undoubtedly a huge waste of energy and not the optimal solution for efficiency.

In the system space, there had always been a copy of [Primary Artificial Intelligence Core Code].

He needed to analyze, reconstruct, and deploy this artificial intelligence.

And for this artificial intelligence, the system's requirement was that his Informatics must reach LV5.

Besides that, given the hardware foundation and software ecosystem of 2009, hosting a strong artificial intelligence far ahead of its time was a massive undertaking.

He had to write the compatible low-level drivers himself and re-architect a distributed computing power network, which was also a very troublesome task.

Zhao Yang opened the English journal in front of him.

Sunlight hit the paper through the glass. With his LV4 Informatics foundation, an IQ of 173, and the passive skill of photographic memory, his reading speed reached an extreme level that ordinary people could not comprehend.

He didn't need to read silently word by word.

Almost the instant his gaze swept across a page, all the code logic, algorithm derivations, mathematical models for Support Vector Machines, and the theory of Backpropagation Mechanisms in early deep learning were directly imprinted as a whole in his mind.

Under the integration of his 173 IQ, these scattered theories were like a hundred rivers flowing into the sea, quickly dismantled, absorbed, and merged into his vast Informatics knowledge tree.

The rustling sound of pages turning rang out rhythmically, about one page every ten seconds.

If anyone were standing nearby at this moment, they would only think he was flipping through the book aimlessly and rapidly, rather than reading.

"Ding! Informatics experience +8."

"Ding! Informatics experience +12."

"Ding! Informatics experience +18..."

The system notification sounds kept scrolling in the background of his mind, and the Informatics experience bar rose steadily.

After reading for a full three hours, the time reached 4:30 PM.

Zhao Yang closed the last monograph on memory management architecture and stacked it neatly on his right side.

He rubbed his brow. Such highly focused mental work was a heavy burden even for Zhao Yang, and his spirit was quite exhausted by now.

Zhao Yang cast his gaze toward the bare sycamore branches outside the window.

On the panel, his Informatics experience value stayed at LV4 [(30,150/200,000)].

Although this afternoon's high-intensity reading had earned him over a thousand experience points, it was still a drop in the bucket compared to the massive 200,000 experience points needed to reach LV5.

"Relying purely on reading input, the marginal effect is becoming increasingly obvious."

Zhao Yang made an objective assessment in his heart. At the LV4 level, the new knowledge provided by existing public publications was rapidly diminishing.

With this kind of reading, although he had gained quite a few experience points in one afternoon—over a thousand in one afternoon, two thousand in a day...

200,000 experience points seemingly only required less than a hundred days to resolve.

But things didn't work like that. At his current reading speed, the books and journals that could provide him with experience points would soon become fewer and fewer.

Furthermore, using his brain to this extent was a heavy burden for Zhao Yang; he could only sustain such speed once a day at most.

To quickly break through the 200,000 mark, relying solely on reading would definitely not work. He had to lead some relatively large projects or publish some groundbreaking papers...

At this moment, Zhao Yang suddenly thought of that Diamond-Grade Optional Reward Mission Card stored deep in the system space.

Ever since he got this card from a previous five-consecutive draw, he hadn't used it.

Now that various matters on hand had entered a relatively stable period of development, he had enough energy to start a new main storyline.

Most importantly, he was currently in urgent need of means to improve his physique, as well as the massive amount of free experience points to push Informatics to LV5.

It was time to see what kind of reward mission this diamond card could yield.

"Open system panel."

Zhao Yang thought silently.

Opening the inventory, Zhao Yang's gaze fell upon the card shimmering with brilliant light.

"Use Diamond-Grade Optional Reward Mission Card."