110: Chapter 110 Preliminary Results

In the small kitchen, the range hood emitted a low, steady hum.

Hot oil sizzled in the iron wok, and the savory aroma of fried eggs drifted into the living room on the morning air.

"Is the data processed?"

Zhang Xiufen asked casually as she flipped an egg with her spatula.

For the past few days, her son had stayed holed up in his room staring at screens filled with cascading characters. Although she didn't understand it, she knew it was no easy task.

"It's all processed. I'm taking a day off today." Jiang Lin pulled out a chair at the dining table and sat down.

"What?" Zhang Xiufen froze, thinking she had misheard. Even the hum of the range hood seemed to fade for a moment.

"Taking a day off," Jiang Lin repeated with a smile.

Zhang Xiufen turned off the stove, dished out the fried egg with its golden, crispy edges, and placed it beside his bowl, her eyes still full of skepticism. "Really taking a break?"

"Mm." Jiang Lin picked up his chopsticks and took a bite of egg white.

Sitting opposite him, Jiang Jianguo looked up slightly at his son without saying a word.

But in the deep wrinkles at the corners of the taciturn father's eyes, a faint smile was clearly visible.

Zhang Xiufen became even more uneasy instead. Wiping her hands on her apron, she pulled out a chair and sat down, unable to stop herself from launching into a rapid barrage: "Don't just say you're taking a break, only to finish eating, close your bedroom door, and dive right back into tinkering with your data, your bricks, and those reports of yours."

"Not tinkering today," Jiang Lin swallowed his egg and said with utter certainty.

"Then what are you going to do?" Zhang Xiufen pressed.

Jiang Lin paused slightly.

Such a simple, mundane question actually seemed to stump him.

Decades in the Wasteland had consisted entirely of farming and studying, where too much slack was never permitted.

After returning to the Real World, his schedule was equally jam-packed—reading, attending classes, building the MPS architecture, cleaning private quantitative data...

It had been too long since he had seriously considered what an eighteen-year-old high school student should actually do on a "day off."

Seeing the confusion and silence in her son's eyes, Zhang Xiufen felt an inexplicable pang in her heart and couldn't help sighing: "Look at you. Studying, studying—you've studied yourself silly and don't even know how to have fun anymore."

"Then I'll go out for a walk," Jiang Lin offered after a moment of thought, giving a safe answer.

"Where to?"

"By the river."

Only then did Zhang Xiufen's furrowed brow smooth out, and she nodded repeatedly. "Go get some sun and fresh air. It's better than staying cooped up in the house all day."

In June, Jiangcheng had just seen the end of the plum rain season. The temperature climbed day by day, and the mugginess of midsummer was already brewing in the air.

A little past eight in the morning, a layer of white glare floated over the broad surface of the river, slightly dazzling to the eyes.

Dressed in a white t-shirt, shorts, and sandals, Jiang Lin walked aimlessly under the shade of the camphor trees along the riverside walkway.

The river was wide, and occasionally a few sand barges sounded muffled horn blasts as they slowly navigated the middle of the river.

The breeze blew off the open water, bringing a pleasant air carrying moisture and a slight muddy smell.

Beside the stone railing along the bank, veteran anglers set up fishing rods every few meters, daydreaming of catching massive fish.

On the water-facing platform not far away, a few preschool kids were chasing a colorful ball.

By a stone table in the shade, two young people were sipping cold drinks and shouting at their phone screens.

The scene here was mundane to the point of feeling sluggish.

Walking among it all, Jiang Lin surprisingly felt a long-lost tranquility where even his breathing slowed down and deepened.

Suddenly, the phone in his pocket gave a brief vibration, its screen lit up, and a push notification popped up from a hidden background process.

PrivateQuant/morning_check_routine

[Trading Status: Flat]

[Data Directory: Normal]

[Log Writing: Normal]

[System Memory Usage: 12%]

[Low-Level Exception Alarm: None]

Jiang Lin merely glanced down at it before calmly slipping the phone back into his pocket.

Today was Saturday, and the commodity futures exchange wasn't open at all; the entire market was physically disconnected.

Naturally, there wouldn't be any trading signals.

The only reason the system still sent this push notification was because Jiang Lin had written a heartbeat detection mechanism into the low-level architecture.

Whether the market was open or not, the system woke up on schedule every day, probed the database connection status, checked itself for memory leaks, and confirmed that all window operators were ready to trigger at a moment's notice.

The corner of Jiang Lin's mouth curved up slightly; he was very satisfied.

A machine that truly possessed industrial-grade robustness and could replace humans in long-term combat within the financial Asura field should definitely not be a fragile item that required engineers to constantly worry and keep an eye on just to keep it alive.

It should be like autonomic human breathing, meticulously maintaining the rhythm of life even when conscious attention wasn't focused on it.

He enjoyed the cool breeze by the river, while his machine lay quiet and dormant in the cloud, neither disturbing the other.

Before he had walked much farther, his phone vibrated in his pocket again.

This time it wasn't a system heartbeat, but a WeChat notification sound.

A message from Sun Ming.

[Old Jiang, down to team up for a game?]

[What do you mean team up for a game?] Jiang Lin typed back. He was indeed somewhat unfamiliar with current internet slang.

[Uncle Zhu's Lemon Tea Shop on Jincheng Road, second floor. Hurry up! Zhang Long and Zhao Hu are here too. Today we'll show you the charm of esports!]

...

Meanwhile...

Uncle Zhu's Handcrafted Lemon Tea Shop, Jincheng Road.

Because of its strong air conditioning and a boss who never minded how long students sat inside, this shop had long been a favorite secret haunt for students.

Right now, Sun Ming and two other boys from Class 4, Grade 12—affectionately dubbed Zhang Long and Zhao Hu by their classmates because they were always inseparable—were each sucking on a nearly melted popsicle, bantering on the sofa.

"Hey, Sun Ming, stop wasting your breath. Jiang Lin is a big mathematician who's even been on the Evening News now. Every day he thinks about how to change the world. How could he possibly come back on a weekend to play games with mere mortals like us?"

The boy called Zhang Long ridiculed without raising his head, his fingers tapping frantically on the screen.

"What's wrong with being a big mathematician? Are big mathematicians not made of flesh and blood? Do they not need to eat, sleep, and play games?" Unwilling to yield, Sun Ming crunched the ice in his mouth. "That's just your stereotype. Even Mr. Lu Xun said that a warrior also needs that... interaction."

"What kind of 'interaction'?" Zhang Long and Zhao Hu's ears instantly perked up like radar, two pairs of eyes flashing with slightly suggestive gossip.

Seeing their sleazy expressions, Sun Ming rolled his eyes dramatically and knocked each of them on the head: "You illiterate heathens, your minds are full of trash. You don't even know such a trendy Lu Xun quote?"

"Come off it! Who knows if you just made it up on the spot to sound cultured?" Zhao Hu retorted while clutching his head. "Eight out of ten famous quotes on the internet are fake attributions to Lu Xun."

"Come, come, today your Scholar Sun will show you for free what an educated man's culture looks like."

Sun Ming stopped matchmaking in the game, switched to the desktop, pulled up his mobile browser, typed a few keywords rapidly, and slapped the search results onto the table right then and there.

"Look closely! Lu Xun's exact words in 'Semi-Concession Studio Essays II: Drafts Without Titles (6)': 'A warrior's daily life is not entirely heroic and moving, yet every bit of it is intimately connected to his spirit...'",

Zhang Long and Zhao Hu leaned in to look, then simultaneously let out a long "Tch."

Just as the three were bickering, Jiang Lin pushed open the glass door of the tea shop and walked in, bringing a wave of outdoor heat with him.

...

Thirty minutes later.

"Holy crap, blind spot in the left corner, and you headshot him?"

"That crosshair placement was insane! Old Jiang, how is your pre-aim point so accurate? It's like you're using wallhacks!"

Accompanied by the victory sound effect in the game, Sun Ming excitedly ripped off his headset and turned to look at Jiang Lin beside him like he was an alien.

Jiang Lin, Sun Ming, Zhang Long, and Zhao Hu each had a cup of chilling punched lemon tea in front of them, lounging comfortably on the soft leather sofa.

Perhaps because he had spent so much time practicing fitting and rubbing flat plates, once he became familiar with the game rules, his feel for tapping on glass touchscreen controls turned out to be quite good.

Another match had just finished settling.

Before Jiang Lin could put down his phone, messages in his four-person WeChat group—including Meng Che, Yin Hang, and Yao Siyu—suddenly flooded in like a bursting dam.

[Yao Siyu: The preliminary results for the Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition are finally out.]

[Yin Hang: I passed! I passed!]

[Meng Che: You two quiet down for a second, can't you show a little composure? Old Jiang, ignore them, go check your score on the official website quick.]

Watching the messages pop up on his screen, Jiang Lin switched out of the game, opened his browser, and entered the official website for the Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition.

The homepage was already dominated by a huge banner.

He clicked into the score lookup portal and entered his contestant ID.

The page refreshed.

A line of results popped up.

Name: Jiang Lin

School: Jiangcheng No. 7 High School

Preliminary Score: 98.5

Finals Qualification: Qualified

Jiang Lin's gaze lingered for half a second on the not-quite-perfect 98.5, guessing that his steps for a certain problem were probably written too concisely, resulting in a minor deduction.

He returned to the main page and scrolled down with his mouse.

In that densely packed list of finalists featuring math geniuses from top universities worldwide, his name rested right at the very top.

Ranking behind him were PhD students from Tsinghua's Yao Class, Peking University's Department of Mathematics, and even MIT and Princeton.

Of course, the preliminary ranking wasn't actually that important.

Many top experts stopped working once they estimated they had enough points to qualify for the finals.

Almost at the same time, the competition's official WeChat account pushed an event summary article.

The first half of the article contained standard content.

Number of applicants.

Qualification ratio.

Problem difficulty distribution.

Performance of contestants in different tracks.

Jiang Lin originally just scrolled casually down, until he saw a familiar problem title in the latter half.

"Magnetic Geometric Cube"

This was the most discussed problem in this preliminary round.

The official review stated:

"This problem tests not mere computational ability, but whether a contestant can identify stable global structures from complex local configurations."

"Most high-scoring answers used case-by-case analysis."

"Some numbered each flipped state one by one, relying on a state tree to rule out impossible scenarios layer by layer."

"Others used simple programs to enumerate local configurations, then deduced an upper bound from the enumerated results."

"These methods were not incorrect."

"However, they tended to be lengthy, and boundary cases were easily missed."

Here, the official review specifically highlighted one particular solution.

That solution did not brute-force its way down a state tree.

The author first abstracted all permissible attraction relationships between modules into a graph.

Vertices on the graph represented local states.

Edges represented potential next states achievable through a valid flip.

The so-called 'longest rigid chain' was thus transformed into a problem of constrained path length on this graph.

Next, the author defined a simple 'potential function.'

With every flip, the path could change direction, but the growth of the potential function was strictly bounded by a triangle inequality.

Thus, branches that originally required extensive enumeration were compressed into a very short proof of the upper bound.

More importantly, after proving the upper bound, the author constructed an extreme chain in reverse.

This chain reached the upper bound exactly.

Therefore, the problem was not only proven to be 'unable to be longer,' but simultaneously demonstrated that 'this length can indeed be achieved.'

The review concluded:

"This solution did not stop at enumerating local configurations, but transformed the problem into a path constraint issue on graph structures. The proof process is concise, boundaries are clear, and the upper bound is tightly closed with the construction, demonstrating highly mature structural thinking."

This passage did not state a name directly.

But attached below was a partially pixelated screenshot of the answer sheet.

In the top-left corner of the screenshot, one could faintly make out the institution column:

Jiangcheng No. 7 High School.

The messages in the WeChat group were still scrolling wildly.

[Yin Hang: Old Jiang, you shouldn't compete in contests. It's an absolute dimensional strike against us mortals.]

[Meng Che: I said it long ago, God Jiang is a born research prodigy, but you guys didn't believe me. Tremble, mortals!]

[Yao Siyu: God Jiang, when you strike it rich, don't forget us! [Crying][Crying]]

Jiang Lin had little emotional reaction to the official commentary.

The problem itself was not particularly difficult.

At least compared to Jiangs Brick, MPS-Kernel, and the mountain Professor Han Yanshan spoke of, it could only be considered a very clean competition problem.

But it had one merit.

It took the act of finding global structures within local chaos and presented it before everyone in a way that was far easier for the general public to grasp.

Before Jiang Lin could reply in the group, a call came through from his contacts.

Caller ID: Old Liu.

Jiang Lin stood up, walked to a quieter stair corner in the tea shop, and pressed answer.

"Teacher Liu."

This middle-aged man, usually stern and solemn on the podium, sounded noticeably more excited than his usual self.

"Jiang Lin, have you seen the list on the official website?"

"I saw it."

"First in the preliminary round—first in the global preliminary round!" Old Liu repeated to himself, as if confirming something utterly surreal.

"Mm."

"I know that with your current level of mathematics, you've even solved world-class conjectures. Coming first in a preliminary round like this probably isn't a big deal worth celebrating for you personally."

As Old Liu said this, his tone grew increasingly emotional.

"But for our No. 7 High School, and for Jiangcheng, this is still a monumental event worthy of being recorded in the school history."

Jiang Lin listened quietly without interrupting.

Old Liu continued: "Although the Alibaba Math Competition doesn't determine college admissions like Gaokao, nor can it get you direct admission to Tsinghua or Peking University like traditional Olympiads, it's organized by a famous company and widely publicized, drawing huge social attention. Especially with your current aura as a genius youth, once this list spreads, the whole internet will be abuzz because of you for a while."

Old Liu chuckled softly on the other end, his laugh brimming with gratification.

"Jiang Lin, to be honest, I've imagined countless times that on the day your Gaokao results came out, you'd score insanely well and bring great honor to our school. But I never dreamed in my wildest dreams that you kid would climb so fast—so fast that one day, I'd actually feel that taking first place in a global mathematics competition preliminary right before Gaokao is just an insignificant icing on the cake for you."

Hanging up the phone, Jiang Lin looked at the endless congratulatory WeChat messages popping up on his screen and let out a long breath.

His mother thought he wouldn't take a rest.

But on this ordinary morning filled with the aroma of lemon tea, game sound effects, and the laughs and banter of friends, amid this clamor belonging to an eighteen-year-old youth...

He truly had enjoyed a proper day off.