104: Chapter 104 The Turmoil of June 10th

June 10th, the first morning after the Gaokao ended.

In the air of Jiangcheng, a long-overdue rainstorm was brewing. It was heavy, muggy, and humid, and even the leaves seemed glued to the branches, not moving at all.

Last night, the entire internet—to be precise, the Moments and social networks of tens of millions of high school seniors—experienced an emotional tsunami that could only be described as a carnival.

Starting from the crisp and decisive bell ringing for the collection of exam papers on the evening of June 9th, topics like "We are liberated!", "We are free!", and "Burn all Five-Three test preps!" flooded the screens all night long, accompanied by exclamation points and crying emojis.

Yet after posting those crazy status updates, most of the kids plunged headfirst into their blankets and slept until high noon.

For tens of millions of examinees, that bell ring on the evening of June 9th was a finish line.

On the other side of that line lay aimless make-up sleep, total mental disconnection, a long-planned graduation trip, a confession of a secret crush where one could love and hate recklessly, and the empty yet radiant summer that eighteen years of age deserved.

But the time Jiang Lin woke up was no different from any ordinary morning.

In the upper right corner of his vision, a countdown visible only to him was ticking down leisurely.

That major exam yesterday, which symbolized a perfect conclusion to a period of youth for countless people, was really not much of a memorable node for him.

On that Wasteland, the years he had lived on and off were already too numerous to count.

Ten years, forty years, yet another forty years...

Crop after crop, every time he returned, his body was smoothed back to eighteen, with only the full weight of those years pressing down in his mind.

For him, the Gaokao felt more like holding a complete graduation ceremony with a beginning and an end for an eighteen-year-old high school student.

To neatly wrap up this leg of the journey.

Only then could he free up his hands to do what he truly ought to do.

Yet what on earth was that thing he truly ought to do?

Yesterday evening, at the gate of No. 7 High School, a state media reporter shoved a microphone right in front of him, asking him which direction he would head next and whether he would continue to deeply cultivate pure mathematics.

His answer was that he still needed a little time to think.

The reporters present, the onlookers, and even the netizens watching the live stream online all thought that this eighteen-year-old genius was being modest, playing hard-to-get in front of the camera, or waiting for top domestic and international universities to offer higher stakes.

Only he himself knew that in those words, there was not a shred of hypocritical politeness, nor any calculation of waiting for a better price.

He truly hadn't been able to see the full outline of the problem yet.

Get up, wash up, eat breakfast.

His father, Jiang Jianguo, sat at the other end of the table, sipping white porridge in small mouthfuls while accompanying it with a plate of crispy fried peanuts.

This was his rare moment of relaxation throughout the entire month.

After finishing his meal, he returned to his room and absentmindedly reached for his phone.

With fingerprint unlocking, the moment the screen lit up, a string of unread messages surged out like a breached floodgate, and the vibration motor emitted a continuous dull hum in his palm.

More than half of the messages were related to that brick.

A rough glance at the list showed keywords so dazzling that it felt like entering a cheap small-commodity wholesale market.

——Puzzle agency.

——Educational board game development.

——Early childhood education building blocks.

——Cultural and creative blind box ornaments.

——Commemorative gold coins/badges.

——Mathematics popularization posters.

——Exclusive souvenir authorization for a certain private school.

——Patent buyout for high-end floor/wall tile patterns.

——Trendy brand clothing print collaboration.

——Exam-passing stationery sets.

——Science museum exhibit proposals.

——Museum interactive installation cooperation.

...

Among these dozens of red-dot unread messages, the very first few were forwarded by Professor Gu Nanzhou.

[Several provincial science museums and formal publishing houses have contacted our college's external liaison office, wanting to do a popular science display and interactive installation for Jiangs Brick.]

[There are also a few large enterprises whose official letters are worded very nicely and very evasively. I took a closer look at their legal terms; essentially, they want to take your name and the pattern of Jiangs Brick for exclusive commercial authorization.]

[In addition, some rather outrageous, you could even say foul and chaotic invitations, I had the college office help you block back first. Take a look at the screenshots below so you have an idea.]

Jiang Lin slid his finger and continued reading downwards.

He found that as a respectable university professor, Professor Gu Nanzhou had used the word "outrageous" with great restraint and elegance.

Because the few screenshots he sent reflected more than just outrageousness—they showed pure chaos and a carnival of capital.

The first screenshot was the search homepage of a well-known domestic e-commerce shopping platform.

The product title was written in bold, flashing fonts: [Genuine Authorization of Jiangs Brick·Advanced Educational Puzzle! The Gaokao top scorer's matching thinking training artifact, ten minutes a day to cultivate children's top-tier spatial imagination!]

What made Jiang Lin feel most uncomfortable was the main product image.

The thirteen-sided polygon of Jiangs Brick, which he had deduced after countless days and nights and countless high-dimensional topological foldings in his mind, had been changed into a glaringly bright rainbow color.

Not only that, but in order to cater to the toddler market, the merchant actually polished every edge containing the rigid beauty of mathematics into rounded corners in the style of children's toys.

A rigorous geometric figure used to prove non-periodic monotile tiling had its corners ruthlessly chopped off, turning into a puddle of colorful plastic devoid of any mathematical significance.

Beside it was glaringly pasted a stolen screenshot of Jiang Lin's profile when he was interviewed outside the exam room that day, underneath which extremely eye-catching large red characters read: [The eighteen-year-old genius's matching item, Tsinghua University and Peking University seedlings are all playing with it!]

The second screenshot was a live stream preview of an education blogger with hundreds of thousands of followers on a certain short-video platform.

In the screenshot, the anchor was dressed in a suit and leather shoes, wearing gold-rimmed glasses, standing in front of an inferior floor mat covered with blue and white geometric patterns, with his arms wide open and a face full of pyramid-scheme-like excitement.

The live stream cover had breathless copywriting: [Tonight at eight o'clock, taking you to uncover the underlying learning method behind Jiangs Brick! Why can other people brush questions to get into Tsinghua University, while your child can only suffer internal friction? Master non-periodic mathematical thinking, open up the Du and Ren meridians of the brain, and raising math scores is no longer a dream!]

The third screenshot was a nationwide press release advertisement for a high-end chain decoration company.

The image was a luxurious children's room, with wallpaper densely printed with the pattern of Jiangs Brick.

The advertising slogan: [Jiang's Brick theme smart space. Build world-class mathematical problems into the wall, letting your child walk at the peak of the history of mathematics every day, winning at the finish line of the starting line!]

The fourth screenshot was even simpler and more brute-force.

It was a poster wildly circulated in Moments by a stationery manufacturer: [Jiang Lin's matching blessing draft paper, logic deduction notebook dedicated to top students. Use the wisdom of Jiangs Brick to calculate your bright future!]

...

All these things made Jiang Lin frown straight away.

What angered him was not how ugly the other party drew Jiangs Brick or how much it violated common sense in geometry.

What truly touched his bottom line were the few vocabulary words that appeared with high frequency in these highly inflammatory advertisements.

Top scorer, matching style, learning method, score boosting, blessing...

These people didn't care at all about what non-periodicity was, nor did they care about the efforts humanity paid when exploring the boundaries of mathematics. They only cared about how much hard cash from anxious parents the name Jiang Lin could exchange for right now.

Jiang Lin picked up his phone again and continued scrolling down.

After the screenshots, Professor Gu Nanzhou also added a long, earnest passage.

[Professor Gu Nanzhou: Jiang Lin, you must never treat this matter as a trivial thing, nor should you feel that the pure remain pure and leave it unmanaged. A paper is a paper, a pattern is a pattern, your name is your name, and commercial use is a quagmire without a bottom line.]

[Professor Gu Nanzhou: Previously you were just a high school student at No. 7 High School, but from the moment your paper was confirmed and your identity exposed, you are now a symbol that others will put on a balance scale and explicitly price with money. If you don't draw boundaries yourself, capital will eat you up completely, and what's left for you in the end will only be a mess of feathers and the bankruptcy of your academic reputation.]

A name that others would use to price things.

Jiang Lin closed his eyes and leaned back against the chair.

Actually, it wasn't that he hadn't thought about money before.

On the contrary, he desired it more and understood the weight of money better than any eighteen-year-old youth in this world.

In those desolate Wasteland reincarnations, every preparation for survival and every reboot of industry required money.

Purchasing wind turbine generators, high-configuration workstations, deploying precision monitors...

Every single item required extremely massive financial support.

Later, when he launched the quantitative audit line and used network technology to obtain his first pot of gold, he was even clearer that funds in reality were never virtual numbers on a screen, but levers that pry open the gears of future fate.

Yet the nature of the money this time was completely different.

The money that came knocking on his door this time wasn't because he wrote a few lines of marvelous code, wasn't because he caught some fatal data leakage vulnerability, nor was it because he could make a lagging industrial assembly line run faster and with higher precision.

Instead, it was because of that brick.

Because of the huge drama contained in the story itself: an eighteen-year-old high school senior miraculously solving a world-class mathematics problem that had plagued humanity for decades on the eve of the Gaokao.

A gentle knock came from the doorway.

"Jiang Lin?" It was the voice of his mother, Zhang Xiufen.

"Mom, is something the matter? The door isn't locked." Jiang Lin pulled back his thoughts and turned his chair around.

Zhang Xiufen walked in holding her phone and said, "Take a look at this. Is it real?"

On the screen was a massive relatives group chat.

Usually, the group chat only had tacky morning greetings and Pinduoduo slash-price requests sent back and forth among the elders, but today, the messages exploded.

Someone in the group forwarded an extremely eye-catching link with an image.

[Blockbuster! Jiangs Brick Mathematical Thinking Enlightenment Special Training Camp! First batch limited to 500 spots nationwide, original price 9999, now only 3999! Rumored to be exclusively internally authorized courses by Jiang Lin's genius team! Grab your spots while they last!]

Below, the relatives were already chatting enthusiastically.

[Oh my goodness, Xiufen, is this a course made by your family's Linlin? He's really made something of himself!]

[I always said this child looked smart since he was little, and now he's even starting his own class to take on apprentices. How much money must he make in a year?]

[Aunt Xiufen, my youngest son is advancing to junior high next year, and his math grades just won't go up. Is there an internal price for us relatives to sign up? Can Jiang Lin personally tutor my child?]

[That's right, that's right! Don't let fertile water flow into outsiders' fields; leave a few spots for the relatives!]

...

Zhang Xiufen was clearly dumbfounded by this sudden commotion.

She lowered her voice, acting like a thief afraid of startling something unseen: "Jiang Lin, did you make this so-called special training camp?"

"No."

Jiang Lin answered very quickly.

Zhang Xiufen let out a sigh of relief, but immediately became nervous again: "Then why do they write it like that, and even say it's authorized by you?"

"Mom, it's fine, I'll handle it," Jiang Lin soothed.

"Then Mom will say something in the group, say this isn't made by you, that they're scammers, and tell them not to buy it." Zhang Xiufen eagerly wanted to press the voice-message button in the group.

"Yeah, you can clarify it in the group first, so that everyone doesn't get scammed." Jiang Lin nodded.

Outside, Jiang Jianguo heard the commotion in the room, put down the wine glass in his hand, and walked over in his slippers.

He wasn't as flustered as Zhang Xiufen; he just took the phone and glanced at it, his brows immediately knitting together tightly.

"Isn't this purely cheating people under your banner?"

"In law, this is called misappropriation of the right to a name and false advertising," Jiang Lin said. "If they overtly or covertly hint during their course sales that this set of courses has a direct relationship with me personally, it's a serious infringement. If the content of this course itself is fabricated and teaches wrong mathematical concepts, and parents eventually complain after finding it ineffective, everything that gets damaged will be my credibility."

Zhang Xiufen seemed to realize for the first time that what her son was facing now wasn't just people praising him, photographing him, and surrounding him to ask questions.

There were also countless hidden, greedy hands behind the screens, frantically wanting to strip the flesh and bones off the two words "Jiang Lin" and trade them for hard cash.

Looking at the worry and sense of powerlessness gradually emerging in his parents' eyes, Jiang Lin smiled slightly and softened his tone: "Dad, Mom, rest assured, I know what I'm doing. These monsters and demons cannot hurt me."

Having pacified his parents, Jiang Lin turned back and sent a message to Professor Gu Nanzhou.

"Professor Gu Nanzhou, you are right. Regarding the commercial authorization and the use of my name, I must immediately draw a line. My initial thought is that all pure academic dissemination, public-interest science education, and classroom teaching displays in primary, secondary, and higher education institutions can be completely free and open. However, any training classes involving commercial profit, score-boosting courses, health supplements, and marketing behaviors that abuse my portrait and name will be severely cracked down on without exception, and authorization will never be granted. As for cultural and creative products and large-scale exhibitions, a case-by-case approach can be adopted for strict review item by item."

On the other end of the phone, Professor Gu Nanzhou replied almost instantly.

"Since you have this sober realization, half of my mind can be put at ease."

"Tomorrow morning, I will personally go find the director of the school's legal affairs office and ask him to help arrange an intellectual property lawyer to connect with you. But before the lawyer steps in, you need to draft your own personal authorization principle statement first. Only by putting your attitude in black and white can the school justly and forcefully help you block those messy flies outside."

Jiang Lin replied: "Understood, I will draw up a draft and send it to you right away."

He opened his computer and created a new document.

Title: 《Public Authorization Principles Concerning the Related Geometric Figures, Naming Rights, and Science Dissemination of Jiangs Brick / the Jiang tile》

I. Regarding the mathematical definition, theorem statements, and proof ideas of Jiangs Brick, they belong to the categories of academic discussion and knowledge dissemination. Any institution or individual may use them for academic research, classroom teaching, and non-profit science popularization, provided that they correctly cite the paper, indicate the source, and do not distort the conclusions.

Any institution or individual, when conducting academic journal citations, school classroom teaching, and non-profit public-interest science dissemination, shall in principle be granted free and open use, on the premise of strictly indicating the source and absolutely not distorting its mathematical conclusions.

II. Any commercial training institution, enterprise, or individual who, without written permission from me or my authorized agent, unauthorizedly uses misleading or clinging wording such as Jiang Lin, Jiangs Brick, Jiang tile, same style as Gaokao top scorer, or exclusive authorization by Jiang Lin's genius team to conduct any form of commercial promotion such as profitable course sales, extracurricular tutoring and training, stationery and toy vending, decorative material sales, and further education planning services.

Once discovered, the right to retain evidence, file complaints, take down items, issue lawyer letters, and pursue litigation accountability will be reserved.

III. Any organization and individual are strictly prohibited from falsely packaging the geometric patterns of Jiangs Brick containing complex Advanced Mathematics principles, or Jiang Lin's personal experiences, into a quick score-boosting shortcut, a top scorer's exclusive study method, a fortune-bringing blessing pattern, or a short-term intelligence-boosting tool.

Writing to the end of the third point, Jiang Lin thought of something and added a supplementary sentence at the back.

Note: Rigorous mathematical theoretical achievements are not cyber amulets that can be hung around the neck, and they cannot replace down-to-earth learning.

Zhang Xiufen walked in carrying a cup of freshly cut oranges and saw those rows of words on the screen.

In fact, she didn't fully understand those authorization principles, public domains, or intellectual property.

But she clearly understood the words fortune-bringing blessing pattern in the last sentence.

She wiped her hands with her apron and muttered softly: "Jiang Lin, you might not believe it, but I actually heard a few aunties in the vegetable market talking about this matter. They said they want to find someone to turn that brick thing you drew into a gold pendant for their grandson who is about to take the high school entrance examination, saying that hanging that brick will make the child's exams go smoothly."

"Mom, such absurd things will only become more common in the future." Jiang Lin turned his head, looked at his mother's somewhat helpless expression, and smiled faintly.

Jiang Jianguo also carried a small bench at this moment and sat down next to his son.

He pointed at the screen and asked: "Son, you've blocked the path so completely, what about the genuine versions? For example, the science museum exhibition Professor Gu Nanzhou just mentioned, and that puzzle others seriously want to produce—are we not going to do these proper things either?"

Jiang Lin shook his head and said: "It's not that we aren't doing them; it's that we need to figure out clearly who to do them with and how to do them."

He opened the email client, clicked open several formal invitation emails that Professor Gu Nanzhou had previously forwarded and that had been preliminarily screened, one by one to show his father.

"Dad, look at this one."

The first email came from a top domestic provincial comprehensive science museum.

The other party hoped to plan a special exhibition in the second half of the year titled Non-periodic Order and the Beauty of Cosmic Mathematics.

In the email, the curator detailed plans to set up an interactive floor projection device of Jiangs Brick developed based on a Physics engine in the center of the hall.

"We hope that when visitors walk into this area, step on those patterns, or drag the virtual Jiangs Brick with their hands, they can intuitively observe how a simple local geometric rule forces a non-periodic structure that never repeats in a grand space, and we will showcase the astonishing beauty within this order to the public."

The other party made a clear promise at the end of the email: This project is purely for public-interest science popularization, absolutely does not involve any form of training course sales, and will never use Jiang Lin's private portrait for vulgar commercial traffic-generating promotion.

"Furthermore, once it involves the commercial use of Jiangs Brick graphics, interactive exhibition technical consulting work, and related visual material authorization, our science museum will sign a formal commercial contract with you in accordance with the country's highest standards of expert consultant fees and intellectual property usage fees."

"Dad, look, this is the right attitude to doing things." Jiang Lin pointed at the screen.

Immediately afterwards, he opened the second one.

It came from a highly prestigious formal science publishing house in China.

The editor-in-chief sent a letter personally, wanting to publish an illustrated mathematics popular science book specifically for high school students and lower-grade college readers. The tentative title is The Mathematical Evolutionary History from Penrose Tiling All the Way to Jiangs Brick.

The other party not only sincerely requested the high-definition publication and usage rights of some graphics, but even offered a high manuscript review fee, cordially inviting Jiang Lin as a special review expert to vet relevant chapters to ensure that the mathematical common sense imparted to young people is not distorted.

The third one came from a well-known domestic high-end building block brand manufacturer.

This email appeared somewhat eager for quick success and crude.

"Respected classmate Jiang Lin, after market research, we believe that the peculiar splicing properties of Jiangs Brick are very suitable for development into high-end educational building block products. We are extremely eager to invite you to participate as a co-development founder. You only need to lend your name, and afterwards we will jointly create a major Chinese-original mathematics IP with global influence!"

Jiang Lin noted: The building block direction itself is feasible, but this partner only talks about lending a name, not about mathematical accuracy, authorization boundaries, product verification, and educational descriptions. Unqualified.

The fourth email came from an internationally award-winning avant-garde architectural design firm.

The other party was bidding for the interior design scheme of the entrance hall of a new national-level science museum.

The chief designer's tone in the letter was extremely excited; they eagerly desired to obtain authorization to use Jiangs Brick as the core paving pattern for the several-thousand-square-meter floor of the entire hall.

Attached to the email was a high-definition rendering with strong visual impact.

In the futuristic hall, the black, white, and advanced gray tridecagonal floor tiles of Jiangs Brick spread out in all directions on the floor as if they had life.

No matter how your line of sight extended, you could not find two identical repeating areas.

On the ceiling, several slender LED light strips cast down.

Amidst the interweaving of light and shadow, the silhouettes of several children were happily running along those complex geometric patterns.

On the giant fair-faced concrete wall directly in front of the hall, a deeply philosophical sentence was deeply engraved using minimalist sans-serif font.

"Locally ordered, globally non-repeating."

Zhang Xiufen originally just came over to watch the fun, but when she saw that grand and artistic rendering, she couldn't help letting out a soft exclamation of surprise and praising with a tut: "This drawing is really quite nice-looking. Just looking at it gives off a sense of high-class quality, much better than that flashy puzzle from just now."

Jiang Lin looked at that stunning rendering and did not make an evaluation immediately.

These were the things that truly required him to carefully screen and treat differently.

An interactive immersive exhibition project in a top science museum, a rigorous and sincere formal popular science publication, an architectural art project that perfectly combined mathematics and spatial aesthetics in public spaces...

Although they all had the logic of commercial operation behind them, they could indeed allow more students struggling in exam-oriented education to truly feel through this way that mathematics is not just about dry problem-solving drills and exams.

Mathematics itself possessed a soul-stirring beauty.

He turned around and continued typing on the keyboard to refine the authorization statement.

IV. The scope of cooperation that may be considered for authorization is limited to: national and provincial science museums, public museums, full-time school teaching, pure public-interest science popularization organizations, formally qualified academic and popular science publications, high-standard mathematics education special exhibition items, and high-quality cultural and creative products that promise no false propaganda.

V. Core authorization bottom line and principles: Any approved partner must not imply or state in all its promotional materials and statements that purchasing its products or services can achieve pseudo-scientific effects such as improving test scores, developing children's intelligence, and increasing personal luck.

They must not use my portrait and personal life experience without permission to conduct any form of consumer inducement.

They must not deliberately exaggerate or distort the original topological mathematical meaning of Jiangs Brick for commercial gimmicks.

They must not declare in any occasion that this purely theoretical mathematical achievement has directly produced any unverified practical industrial application value.

...

The point of unverified practical industrial applications was especially important.

It was even more important than guarding against those course-selling fraudsters mentioned earlier.

In those chaotic and complex screenshots sent to him by Professor Gu Nanzhou, some so-called tech self-media bigVs and financial analysts had already started spouting nonsense in their articles in order to attract eyeballs and harvest stock market leeks.

"Earth-shattering breakthrough! Jiangs Brick may completely subvert the global semiconductor chip industry landscape!"

"Overtaking on a curve! An eighteen-year-old Chinese teenager used a brick to smash open the industrial door of the metamaterial new era ahead of time!"

"Exclusive disclosure: The sudden emergence of non-periodic structures may completely change the underlying operational logic of future photonic chips, and a hundred-billion-market is about to ignite!"

...

Looking at these sensational titles, Jiang Lin only felt they were extremely absurd.

As an old hand who had personally built wind power arrays under extreme environments on the Wasteland and assembled underlying logic controllers in radiation ruins, he naturally knew better than anyone else.

The wonderful mathematical topological property of non-periodic structures indeed had immeasurable potential in the future.

It could indeed have profound connections theoretically with quasicrystal materials science, next-generation photonic crystal arrangement, phononic crystal filtering, and even nanoscale self-assembly technology and high-frequency antenna array design.

But this was merely a theoretical possibility.

Knowing that a connection could happen and actually solving it and manufacturing it on an industrial assembly line were separated by an unknown amount of time.

A purely on-paper mathematical geometric construction was separated from truly usable new materials or chips in reality by countless insurmountable high mountains.

Complex physical model construction, repeated simulations by supercomputers, countless failed laboratory Physics experiments, extremely rigorous processing technology explorations...

And countless trial-and-errors destined to fail.

If he now, for the sake of short-term fame or profit, allowed this irresponsible, over-praising propaganda to ferment in the public opinion field, then Jiangs Brick would quickly degenerate from a respectable pearl into marketing rhetoric used by those capitalists to harvest leeks, and into a fig leaf used by those scam companies in PPTs to swindle national scientific research funding.

This was much more troublesome and much worse than being questioned by the academic community for plagiarism.

Questioning at least meant that everyone was still discussing the boundaries of truth and still asking about true or false.

And bottomless commercial marketing would directly soil and stink up the name of Jiangs Brick completely.

Jiang Lin did not hesitate to bold the last principle and highlight it in red font.