70: Chapter 70 Examination Preparation Project

After the Outpost phase one engineering entered a stable maintenance period, the Wasteland finally once again generously showed its gentle side to Jiang Lin, becoming like a place where people could settle their minds and work long-term.

The workstation operated for a limited time daily.

Observation Point A and Observation Point B entered rotational maintenance.

That light-red band of light in the northern low altitude still flickered intermittently in the night sky like an unreasonable ghost.

However, Jiang Lin's current performance was calm to the point of being cold-blooded, unwilling to even give it an extra word of guess or explanation.

Every day, like an old bookkeeper keeping accounts, he bit by bit entered the magnetometer's tiny fluctuations, the anemometer's pulses, the all-sky camera's images, temperature, air pressure, and even the vibration markers of the bracket trembling slightly in the wind along with the maintenance logs he wrote himself into the database.

In addition, he was finally able to carve out time to open a folder that had been put aside for a long time.

[Ali_Math]

This folder was created at Jiangcheng University Physics Building B304.

Senior fellow apprentice Yin Hang and senior sister apprentice Yao Siyu were chatting idly about the gossip of registration for the Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition, and mentor Meng Che half-jokingly patted his shoulder, telling him, a high school student who had nothing better to do, to go join in the fun as well.

At that time, he saved the registration webpage to his phone, and later he actually filled in his name.

This thing called the Alibaba Mathematics Competition was of course impossible to be the main quest of his struggling for survival in the Wasteland.

It was simply a label Jiang Lin planned to forge for himself.

If a high school student merely said he understood contact stiffness, could troubleshoot interferometer low-frequency drift, and could write multi-material assembly thermal cycle models, it would only sound like mad talk.

But what if they changed to a different script?

What if before all this happened, he had already carved out a bloody path in an open competition with no threshold aimed at global mathematical geniuses, and obtained a result that everyone felt was dazzling enough?

Then, when he demonstrated those unbelievable intuitions and unfathomable computing power in the future, many doubts that would have originally stabbed at him would obediently shut their mouths and quiet down.

People would brainwash themselves: "Oh, Jiang Lin, that's a genius who won the gold award of the Alibaba Mathematics Competition in high school. Isn't it completely normal for a genius to understand some unorthodox things?"

Therefore, at the end of the first month of the sixth Wasteland start, after the wind turbines and observation points initially gained a firm foothold, Jiang Lin officially included the Alibaba Mathematics Competition into his daily unwavering fixed training plan.

From that day on, those three hours from after dinner to bedtime every day were carved out by him for mathematics.

Inside the folder lay categorized past exam questions downloaded from the Real World, wild parses by various great masters, lengthy competition format descriptions, several high-upvoted competition discussion posts in forums, several sets of classic university mathematics competition lecture notes, and the directional indexes he organized according to personal habits in the Jiangda University library and laboratory.

Looking at these materials, Jiang Lin did not honestly start reviewing from the basics of limit definitions or matrix multiplication like a beginner who had just entered the field.

Eighty years across two Wastelands, those ε—δ languages in mathematical analysis, the spectral decomposition of various operators in Linear Algebra, singularities and stability in ordinary differential equations, the residue theorem in complex variable functions...

Especially Linear Algebra, analysis, differential equations, and variational methods, these things had long been deeply embedded into the bones and blood of his physical intuition and engineering judgment during countless days and nights of debugging wind turbines, hand-crafting algorithms, and verifying fluid mechanics boundaries.

When he looked at the eigenvalues of a matrix now, his first reaction was no longer that dry det(A - λI) = 0, but rather a system's resonance frequency, energy decay rate, or stability boundary in a specific direction.

Therefore, facing the Alibaba Mathematics Competition, what he truly needed to spend great effort doing was to forcefully gather and twist these wildly growing and extremely scattered internal forces on his body, like twisting a dough twist, organizing them into answers that could be directly written down in a standardized competition and met strict grading standards.

Physics is very tolerant, allowing you to first use a beast-like intuition to lock onto a general direction in the dark night, and then slowly sew and tighten the theory with experimental data.

Engineering is also very practical, allowing you to make compromises in the face of cost, materials, and environment that are not elegant enough but work.

But mathematics competitions do not buy this routine.

If you skip a step, it is broken.

If you miss a sentence of reasoning, it is void.

If you think it is obvious, the grader will only think you are being lazy.

On the first day of training, Jiang Lin did not do problems, but instead made a map first.

The problems of the Alibaba Mathematics Competition were never a step-by-step textbook, nor were they a teaching assembly line with a clear syllabus.

It was a dark continent with complex, interlaced, vast terrain, hiding traps and wonders everywhere.

Analysis, algebra, geometry, combinatorics, probability, number theory, differential equations, applied calculation.

Every territory here, as long as you dared to go deep, could easily drown a genius.

Jiang Lin had good self-awareness.

He was not the kind of genius born for mathematics, and it was neither necessary nor possible for him to push all directions flat to a height of looking down on all heroes.

What he had to do was, like deploying troops and arranging formations, carve out his own core battlefield and strategic buffer zone on this continent.

He swishingly wrote down on his notebook.

[Main Attack Zone: Analysis, Linear Algebra, differential equations, and continuous models in probability.]

These were the housekeeping skills of Physics and engineering, and not an inch of land could be yielded; kill every problem seen.

[Strongly Related Zone: calculus of variations, matrix inequalities, spectral methods, recurrence and extrema.]

These things frequently showed up in optimization algorithms and system stability analysis; the foundation was still there, and he only needed to polish the proof routines clean.

[Reinforcement Zone: combinatorics, number theory, basics of abstract algebra.]

Soft underbelly.

Lacking physical correspondence, relying entirely on pure logic, construction, and sharp eyesight.

Not seeking to slaughter the leaderboard, but seeking not to be pulled away by a fatal gap.

[Conservative Zone: deep geometry and topology problems.]

Cost-performance ratio was too low.

If there was no intuition within three minutes, strategically abandon.

Competitions in the Real World were not Wasteland Stone Houses.

The greatest privilege the Wasteland gave him was nearly infinite time.

Yet what competition test papers examined was precisely the ability to make optimal choices and precise strikes within limited time.

The first stage consumed four months of his time.

During these four months, Jiang Lin did not pursue problem-solving speed, and even deliberately restrained the desire to completely calculate the problems through.

Every day he only did the same thing.

Dissect question types.

When past exam questions popped out, he was not in a hurry to calculate integrals, not in a hurry to diagonalize matrices, nor in a hurry to expand that scary string of summation symbols.

He applied labels first.

What was the surface packaging?

What was the underlying structure?

Was it testing compactness, convexity, spectral decomposition, or invariants?

Was it symmetry cancellation, or the extreme value principle?

Was it a recurrence structure, or an algebraic identity transformation hidden extremely deep?

This kind of training was boring to the point of being anti-human.

Yet Jiang Lin did it with relish.

Because this felt simply identical to the feeling of him dismantling those broken down machines on this Wasteland.

If an old wind turbine broke, and you only stared at whether the blades spun or not, then you would only be a stupid repairman changing parts for your whole life.

You had to chop it into pieces in your brain, dismantling it into wind farm fluid, impeller aerodynamics, main bearings, yaw gears, generator coils, rectifier bridges, controller logic, dump heat, and energy storage chemistry.

Treating a math problem that looked baring fangs and brandishing claws was the same.

You must absolutely not only look at its surface packaging of integrals, matrices, or combinatorics.

Like dissection, you must calmly dismantle it into known structures, implicit conditions, boundary constraints, final goals, and exactly which wrenches in your hand toolbox could turn these screws.

Soon, his first volume of [Question Type Dissection] notes was written full.

Opening it up, the content of every page was surprisingly short.

Underneath each problem, he only wrote three core things.

One, the true structure of this problem after stripping away its outer garments.

Two, which misjudgment pit was easiest to step into when scanning it at first glance.

Three, the shortest path to cut into this problem.

For example, encountering a multivariate analysis problem that made people's eyes dizzy, he did not rush forward recklessly like before to write a full page of scaling estimates, but instead annotated like this.

[The surface is a flashy integral inequality, but deep down it is actually the convexity in Lp space + the normalization of Lebesgue measure. For the first step, absolutely do not have itchy hands to expand the integral formula; first forcefully construct a convex function, and use Jensen's inequality for a direct dimensional reduction strike.]

Encountering a matrix equation problem of extremely high order, he wrote.

[Quadratic form perspective first; do not foolishly use coordinates to expand, the expression will become messy and prone to calculation sign errors. Treat the matrix as an operator, look at the orthogonality of its characteristic subspaces, and you can see through the truth and falsehood in three lines.]

...

Jiang Lin did this not because he could not do case-by-case discussions, much less because his computing power was no good.

On the contrary, precisely because he was too good at calculating, he was too adept at using physical intuition to push through hard.

Decades of Wasteland life had not only given him nearly inhuman psychological endurance, but also imperceptibly stuffed him with an extremely dangerous habit in test-taking exam rooms.

On the Wasteland, as long as an engineering problem was unsolved, as long as the machine had not started spinning, he would sit in the sandstorm, continue to squeeze his brainpower, continue to calculate crazily, and continue to tear the system to pieces.

Yet mathematics competitions never reward this sweat-soaked brute force.

What competitions reward is whether in those ten minutes upon seeing the problem, you can, like a supreme assassin, see at a glance the path of survival hidden behind the thorns amidst the chaos.

Thus, Jiang Lin began braking training on himself.

Whenever a new problem popped out, for the first five minutes, he was not allowed to move his pen to push long formulas, only allowed to look with his eyes and build the structure in his brain.

These five minutes were anti-human and also anti-intuitive.

He clearly felt that he had enough computing power in his body to forcefully tear the formula apart, and clearly felt that relying on his profound Physics and mathematics background he could forcefully crush through, but he used his left hand to hold down his right hand's pen.

Half a year later, Jiang Lin added a commandment on the frontispiece of [Question Type Dissection].

[No matter how formidable the violent computing power is, it cannot replace the precise judgment of the problem-breaking entrance. Brute force is used to harvest the battlefield, not to scout the path.]

When the training progressed to the second stage, which was from the fifth month to the tenth month, Jiang Lin encountered torture even more painful than grinding problems.

He began to stubbornly tackle proof writing.

Jiang Lin opened the notes from when he did research or derived Physics equations in the past; those pages were filled with Wasteland passwords belonging exclusively to himself.

His notes were very suitable for himself to read: concise, terrifyingly dense with information, carrying a large amount of leap-style ellipses in the middle.

When he read it himself, his brain could instantly react to why the integral exchange of a certain step held, and why a certain limit operation was physically legitimate.

However, the grader did not know.

Nor did the grader care how strong your physical intuition was.

The exam room of the Real World would never show mercy and default that his mathematical proof chain on the test paper was flawless just because he, Jiang Lin, had deduced fluid mechanics equations a hundred times in the Wasteland of another world.

Missing a proof of topological equivalence, missing a statement of boundary continuity—sorry, that was a logical fracture, that was zero points.

Thus, enduring his nausea, he specially opened a second volume of notes.

[Proof Expression Rewrite Copy].

The first page had only one sentence.

[The answers you write down are never for your own appreciation; they are for those people holding magnifying glasses to find fault with you to look at.]

From this day on, Jiang Lin washed clean every single word of his like an inquisitor of a literary prison.

He mercilessly crossed out the four words obviously known that he was previously accustomed to writing.

He uprooted the sentence easily obtained through simple algebraic deformation.

He slapped a big red cross on lazy sentence patterns like similarly, the remaining cases can be proved analogously.

Every seemingly natural omission now had to be accompanied by rock-solid mathematical theorems as supporting reasons.

If writing the reasons made the whole proof appear top-heavy, too long, and too verbose, he would strip this logic out separately and prove a lemma first.

If after proving it he found that this lemma was too weak to support the subsequent derivation, he would change to another mathematical structure.

If the structure of the entire derivation twisted around like a tangled ball of hemp, he would change his train of thought and rewrite it.

In the first two months, the proofs written by Jiang Lin still carried the wild flavor of physical drafts.

The general direction was startlingly accurate and his vision was extremely venomous, but critical positions occasionally showed a matter-of-course leap.

So natural that when he finished writing the first pass and reviewed it himself, he felt it was flawless and logically self-consistent.

Yet when the next day came, with his brain calmed down, forcing himself to reread what he wrote yesterday like a picky third-party reviewer, he would break out in a cold sweat of shock.

Between two formulas, he had taken it for granted and laid one less foundation called uniform convergence.

This feeling made him extremely uncomfortable.

It was as if he had clearly relied on lightness skills to fly to the scenic spot across the river, but now he was forced, holding his nose, to swim back into the river to nail the wooden boards on the bridge snugly piece by piece, just to prove to others that he was qualified to stand on this side.

Suffocating, irritable.

Yet he never threw his pen down even once.

Because Jiang Lin saw through it more clearly than anyone else; this was precisely the greatest value to him of the Alibaba Mathematics Competition, a test-taking competition that seemed to have nothing to do with Wasteland survival.

It was not here to teach him some awesome new formulas at all.

It was merely here to teach him the rules.

It forced him to transform those miscellaneous, systematic-lacking peerless internal forces within his body into a standard form that others could audit, reproduce, and pick faults in with a microscope.

This and true scientific research publication were essentially the same thing.

On this Wasteland, there were only howling sandstorms, no harsh peer review.

Yet one day he would return to that Real World.

Sooner or later, he would use restrained and rigorous language to announce to that world the truth he found under this night sky.

The Alibaba Mathematics Competition was his training ground.

In the eleventh month, Jiang Lin's training focus shifted to the [Reinforcement Zone].

Combinatorics and number theory.

This was definitely not because his foundation was thin or his IQ was not enough.

It was purely because these two fields had an extremely serious non-isomorphism with the main trunk physical training he had been immersed in over the past few decades.

Doing analysis, he could see function spaces and energy estimates.

Doing Linear Algebra, he could see operators and stability.

Doing differential equations, he could see phase portraits, waves, diffusion, and boundary conditions.

Doing probability, he could summon intuition from statistical mechanics and error propagation.

But when it came to pure combinatorics and number theory, his heavy-duty Physics weapons felt like punching a pile of cotton.

These problems weren't heavy warhammers that required you to mobilize all your theoretical muscles to swing.

They were more like thin, single-edged razor blades hidden in the corner of a drawer.

Not long, not heavy, and unassuming, yet sharp enough to slice through a throat in an instant.

Solving them often didn't require you to know much heavy modern mathematical theory.

Sometimes, it simply required you to keenly grasp an invariant characteristic quantity beneath the intricate appearances, construct an extremely clever mapping, discover an extreme boundary object, or spot a deeply hidden congruence rule.

Once seen through, this problem could be utterly defeated in three lines of equations.

If you couldn't see through it, even if you filled thirty pages of scratch paper with dense brute-force enumeration, in the end, you could only despair in front of a pile of useless scrap paper.

In this field, Jiang Lin suffered a few solid setbacks.

The one that left the deepest impression was a seemingly harmless graph theory coloring problem.

Right from the start, Jiang Lin deployed his powerful case-analysis ability, stubbornly writing a full six pages.

He plowed forward little by little like a bulldozer, attempting to exhaustively list all possibilities.

The classification process was so rigorous and meticulous that even he felt disgusted by the time he finished writing it.

As a result, after he finally plowed his way through and opened the standard answer key, there was only half a page of text.

The true breakthrough entry point was extremely elegant, merely utilizing a parity invariant within the graph network.

Jiang Lin stared at that half-page of answers and remained silent for a full ten minutes.

Then, without a word, he tore off his six pages of blood, sweat, and tears from the scratch paper and pinned them into that copy of Anatomy of Problem Types.

Beside it, he wrote a sentence overflowing with self-mockery.

"A crazy bulldozer, miserably dying by an embroidery needle."

This sentence became his motto for doing combinatorics problems.

Ever since then, whenever the shadow of a combinatorics problem appeared on the test paper, the first line of his scratch paper was no longer setting up a bunch of unknowns.

Instead, it was four soul-searching questions.

"Are there any invariants?"

"Are there any monotonically changing quantities?"

"Where are the objects under extreme conditions?"

"Does the system possess symmetry?"

These four questions were not some cure-all panacea, but they acted like four-sided radar, helping Jiang Lin avoid countless soul-crushing detours in the dark combinatorial labyrinth.

As the first year of wilderness special training drew to a close, Jiang Lin suddenly realized that his state could no longer be described simply as studying for the Alibaba Mathematics Competition.

Inside his brain, using engineering thinking, he had built a high-speed response system tailor-made for Real World exam competitions.

A new problem appeared on his retina, and the system instantly activated.

Scan the features, determine the corresponding field, identify the underlying structure, open the corresponding toolbox, and select a wrench.

Evaluate the input-output ratio to decide whether to launch a full-scale assault or stop at a shallow touch.

Once a commitment was made, he immediately switched to the proof-output mode, strictly followed review specifications, wrote an impeccable logical chain, and finally performed a routine check for boundary loopholes.

When encountering a dead end exceeding the threshold, the protection mechanism was triggered, decisively abandoning hard nuts that shouldn't be stubbornly cracked.

In the second year of entering the Wasteland, the training entered the timed simulation phase.

During this year, Jiang Lin discovered that his greatest enemy had become time.

Long-term life in the Wasteland gave him an extravagant illusion.

Time was abundant, even static.

But the cruel selection competition in the Real World left him with time counted down in hours or even minutes.

These two completely different time scales produced a violent rejection reaction in Jiang Lin's brain.

When he first started the timed simulations, Jiang Lin felt extremely uncomfortable.

When encountering a moderately difficult problem that got him stuck, he could clearly feel that he was just a hair's breadth away from the thread of the breakthrough; his reason told him to switch problems immediately, but the ruthless streak deep in his bones made it hard for him to pull away.

Twenty minutes passed, thirty minutes passed.

By the time he finally managed to chew through this problem with a sweat-soaked head and looked up at the time, his heart instantly turned half cold.

There were still two advantageous problems behind that he normally had in the bag, and he hadn't even had time to glance at their stems.

This kind of error where a whole game was lost due to lingering in battle was, to Jiang Lin who valued system efficiency immensely, simply more painful than killing him.

Because this wasn't points lost due to insufficient ability, but rather the most foolish loss of strategic control.

That night, with a dark face, Jiang Lin opened the third volume of his notes and forcefully added a warning on the cover.

"In this game, your proud endurance must never be used to replace macro-tactical strategy."

Then, he began training to give up.

Seeing a problem, after reading the stem, he could judge the general direction at a glance, but the sandbox simulation in his brain told him that paving this path of proof required extremely tedious algebraic transformations and an excessively long time.

Walk away, next problem.

Seeing a problem with an extremely enticing background, which even had a wonderful isomorphic connection to a top-tier literature on plasma partial differential equations he was reading last night, solving it would definitely feel great.

But it clearly exceeded the time budget.

Walk away, next problem.

...

The word "walk away" was repeatedly circled and drawn by Jiang Lin with a pen countless times in this year's training log.

He constantly brainwashed himself: walking away is not running away.

Walking away is a load-dump resistor that must be actively triggered in this competition system to preserve the overall situation.

When a certain problem began to devour your precious time out of control like a black hole, you had to act like a cold-blooded power grid dispatcher, pulling down the circuit switch without hesitation and forcibly cutting it out from your main attack circuit.

If you didn't do this, not only would you fail to finish this problem, but your entire test paper and your entire examination system would completely burn out and rot due to severe overload.

By the fourth month of the second year, after hundreds of painful trials of integration and trade-offs, Jiang Lin's timed simulation scores finally welcomed their first truly stable landing in a meaningful sense.

For the problems in the main attack zone, he was like a ruthless executioner, basically able to bring the knife down and secure full points.

For medium-difficulty problems, he could extremely shrewdly weigh the cost-effectiveness, knowing what to take and what to give up.

As for those perverted finale problems, he would no longer bash them head-on like a gambler, leading to a dual loss of mindset and time.

As for the expression of proofs, his handwriting and logic had become extremely clean and rigorous, resembling a standard academic micro-paper.

What satisfied him most was that now, after finishing every set of test papers, he could still steadily reserve ten minutes for checking and error correction.

This sense of perfect control over the overall situation made him ten thousand times more at ease than occasionally erupting once, guessing a super difficult problem correctly, and getting a stunning high score.

In the second half of the second year, the training entered full-process simulation.

Questions started punctually at 8:00 PM, with a fixed three-minute break in between.

When the warning time arrived, checking was mandatory.

One hour of review after the end.

He wanted to compress the nearly infinite time in the Wasteland into instantaneous judgment that could not afford errors within those few hours in the Real World.

Just as the countdown reached over six hundred days, a short but extremely fierce sandstorm blew up without warning outside the Outpost.

Amidst the flying sand and rocks, a small area of the hemispherical lens cover of Observation Point B was frosted and blurred by sharp sand grains.

Meanwhile, to protect itself, wind turbine no. 2 triggered three consecutive violent yaw wind-shedding events within half an hour, and the load-dump resistor hanging on the outer wall lit up twice with a dazzling red light like an alarm, warning of system energy overload.

All day long, Jiang Lin was tied to these machines that could collapse at any moment.

During the day, enduring the residual wind-blown sand, he bit a flashlight in his teeth to climb the tower and check the bolts, then knelt on the ground to repair the wind-proof structure of the observation point bit by bit.

At dusk, dragging his legs which felt as heavy as lead, he forced himself to back up the precarious environmental control data into the workstation.

By 8:00 PM, the Stone House was as cold as an ice cellar, and all the bones in Jiang Lin's body were aching and screaming.

Yet he still sat down before the stone table like a programmed robot, opening the timed mock exam as usual.

His state that night was being polite even if described as a complete mess.

Due to extreme fatigue and brainpower overdraft, he actually got a Linear Algebra characteristic polynomial calculation problem wrong, one that shouldn't have been missed even with his eyes closed.

The reason was infuriatingly simple.

He was too tired, his vision blurred, and he misread the sign of a matrix element.

After the simulation ended, Jiang Lin looked at that bright red cross, feeling no anger nor making any weak excuses for himself like "repairing the generator today was too tiring."

He merely calmly wrote a cold comment in his review notebook.

"On the day you sit in the examination room in the Real World, who can guarantee you won't suffer from insomnia last night? Who can guarantee you won't have diarrhea? Fatigue and low states are force majeure factors. Your exam strategy must possess the redundancy to accommodate such low-level states."

With this lesson, in subsequent simulation plans, Jiang Lin actively added low-state pressure resistance tests.

For example, directly sitting down to do problems after spending a whole day outside battling the cold wind to de-ice the photovoltaic panels.

For example, doing problems when data interruption suddenly occurred at the observation point in the middle of the night, forcing him to get up and urgently handle the malfunction while being too sleepy to even open his eyes.

Another example was intentionally reducing sleep time for three consecutive days and doing problems when his brain felt like it was stuffed with paste.

The simulation scores run under these extreme low states were uglier than the last.

But Jiang Lin regarded these test papers as treasures and pasted them on the wall.

Because they proved one thing: the Real World would never, like in fairy tales, considerately guarantee that you would be at your peak state of energy on the day of the competition.

A truly mature and reliable exam-preparation system was not something that could only occasionally deal critical damage in the best state of fair weather, full stomach, and adequate sleep.

Rather, when you were tortured to exhaustion by life and found yourself in an ordinary or even extremely low, terrible state, this system could still rely on muscle memory and rigorous strategy to hold the bottom line and ensure that you didn't completely collapse.

When there was only one month left until the end of the second year, Jiang Lin stopped all expansion actions for new problem banks.

In that bottomless database of the workstation, there were actually plenty of lecture notes from famous foreign universities, mountains of perverted problems from past training camps, and various unorthodox wild resolutions.

If he were willing, he could completely indulge in the intellectual pleasure of constantly solving new puzzles and continue grinding in this Stone House for another decade.

But this was a false pleasure.

In these last thirty days, like an old monk about to go into seclusion, he only did three things that were extremely boring every day.

First, all the wrong questions accumulated over the past two years were repeatedly ground down and deduced again as if remelting and rebuilding.

Second, his previously imperfect proof solutions were recopied and polished word by word like carving.

Third, completely discarding external interference, he conducted high-intensity, full-process time allocation simulations.

That first black copy of Anatomy of Problem Types was flipped by him until its edges frayed.

The second volume, Rewritten Proof Expressions, had its corners rolled up.

The third volume, Time Allocation Simulation, had its edges densely annotated with various time nodes and trade-off reviews on every page.

Those handwritings were never self-criticisms used by Jiang Lin to vent his emotions.

They were pins he carefully debugged and soldered one by one, the perfect interface for his isolated island to dock with the Real World's exam-taking system.

Late on the seven hundred and twenty-seventh day.

Accompanied by the last faint tick of the countdown in the bottom right corner of the workstation screen, the final ultimate full-reality simulation ended.

Jiang Lin put down his pen, rubbed his sore wrists, picked up a red pen, and began conducting a final reckoning of himself like a ruthless grading machine.

For the first algebra problem, although he finally circled around to it, the entry-point solution was too cumbersome, failing to use the optimal isomorphic mapping, which needlessly consumed another seven minutes.

Deduct points.

For the third analysis proof problem, the core conclusion was indeed established, but when citing a lemma regarding sequence compactness, the transitional sequence between the context was written unclearly, risking being misjudged by the grader as a logical leap.

Deduct points.

That torturous combinatorics problem second to last was indeed forcibly dug out by him using the coloring method, but the entire process severely exceeded the time limit, crowding out the final checking time and breaking the strategic red line.

Regardless of whether the answer was correct or not, within this system, this was a severe tactical mistake.

Heavy points deducted.

After a round of nitpicking deductions, the final calculated score was not ridiculously high.

But it steadily fell into a range completely within his control.

File name finalized: "Ali_Math_Final_Mock".

Early morning of the seven hundred and twenty-eighth day.

The morning light was faint, and the first ray of grayish-white light hit the window lattice of the Stone House.

Jiang Lin opened the exclusive main log of the sixth Wasteland, solemnly typing out a few lines of words.

"Phase-based preparation for the Alibaba Mathematics Competition: completed."

"Qualitative nature: camouflage label for Real World identity."

"Precipitated achievements: one problem-type structure illustrated guide, one standardized proof-expression output system, one extreme time allocation and pressure load-shedding strategy, one cross-indexed database of error-prone points."

"Recognizing boundaries: This is a victory of test-taking engineering, by no means a theoretical breakthrough in the field of true mathematical research."

Save and exit.

Jiang Lin stood up, stacked together and put away those three volumes of Alibaba Mathematics Competition notes that had accompanied him through countless sleepless nights and were already flipped until wrinkled.

The cursor slid to the exact center of the desktop.

With a crisp click, that "Space Physics Folder" carrying the secrets of the Wasteland sky unfolded before his eyes once more.

The duplicate copy of the Alibaba Mathematics Competition temporarily came to an end here.

The long expedition belonging to this Wasteland was only just beginning.