94: Chapter 94 Next up is physical labor.

The next afternoon, C216.

It was still the same discussion room from last night.

Only this time, everyone was present.

Not only were Professor Lu Zhixing, Professor Gu Nanzhou, and Chen Yan there, but even Professor Lin Zhaoye and Shao Mingtang had arrived.

Not long after the first round of verification ended, Shao Mingtang directly cancelled her next two academic conferences in Beijing and changed her ticket to the earliest southbound high-speed train.

Professor Lin Zhaoye's side was even more decisive; he rushed over from Nanjing overnight.

There was no other reason.

Yesterday, after looking at that irregular brick across the screen and through the camera, neither of these scholars, who had plowed deeply in their respective fields for many years, could sit still.

Glancing at this kind of thing through a screen with compressed image quality was completely different from sitting personally at the desk and examining the original manuscript while breathing the same air.

Breakthroughs in discrete geometry were often hidden in those extremely subtle corners and curvatures; without staring at those few sheets of paper with their own eyes, they couldn't even sleep soundly.

Thus, this afternoon, six people were sitting in C216.

Professor Lin Zhaoye, sitting here, appeared much more exhausted than he did in the video.

There were dark circles under his eyes, and grayish stubble had even sprouted on his chin, yet those eyes were startlingly bright.

He stared at those pages of carefully spread-out manuscripts on the desktop, as if he wanted to burn through the pencil lines on the paper with his gaze.

For a long time, he let out a long breath, reached out to take off his glasses, and rubbed his glabella hard.

"Jiang Lin, your work is exceptionally brilliant."

"The part that most urgently needs inspiration, which is that peak leap of mathematical intuition, from my perspective, you have successfully crossed it."

Professor Lin Zhaoye put his glasses back on, his gaze burning as he looked at the excessively young high school student before him, his tone carrying undisguised amazement.

"After all, you have already produced a skeleton that can completely be called stunning."

Shao Mingtang, sitting on the other side of Professor Lin Zhaoye, also said earnestly, "No matter how sturdy the skeleton is, it is still just a skeleton."

"From an exquisite skeleton to a paper that can be checked line by line by the world's most picky peers without picking out any logical loopholes, and finally nailed firmly into top-tier journal literature, the hidden reefs and quagmires in between may be far more than you imagine."

"In other words, the most agonizing part is actually still ahead?"

Chen Yan, sitting in the corner, couldn't help but ask out of curiosity.

As a current doctoral student, he knew all too well the gap between writing a paper and having a good idea.

The three knowledgeable professors—Professor Lin Zhaoye, Shao Mingtang, and Professor Gu Nanzhou—exchanged knowing glances as those who had been through it.

Professor Gu Nanzhou did not answer directly; instead, he pulled a blank sheet of A4 paper from the side, laid it flat in front of him, and picked up a pen.

"Let's not talk about empty things. Let's first unfold the subsequent work tasks one by one and break them down into several categories: which ones you must define yourself as the first author, which ones we teachers can provide assistance and endorsement for, and which ones must rely on computers for exhaustive verification."

Professor Lu Zhixing at the side nodded, his expression grave: "This is a standard major project management practice."

"Facing a proof of this magnitude, any casual play of individual heroism is fatal. It must be proceduralized and modularized."

1. Graphical Fixation and Coordinate System Mapping

He raised his head, his gaze piercing straight at Jiang Lin: "This is the premise of all work."

"That brick you drew yesterday, that single brick you called a hat or whatever, must turn from a drawing into a set of precise data."

"Coordinates?" Jiang Lin asked calmly.

"Yes, analytical coordinates."

Professor Gu Nanzhou pointed to those random pencil lines on the manuscript, "There can no longer be just sketches in this topological sense."

"Where are the Euclidean coordinates of each vertex, and what is the exact length of each edge?"

"Is every interior angle an absolute integer angle, or an offset with irrational number properties?"

"All of these must be written clearly in strict algebraic form."

"Jiang Lin, you must remember that this is not only written for you to see, but also for all reviewers around the world in the future who try to find loopholes in you."

"If you only give a diagram, the first step for others will be to question: Is your angle precisely 90°, or 89.9999°?"

"Does this edge look the same length because it is strictly equivalent algebraically, or simply because your hand shook and you drew it close enough?"

"After a 180° rotation, can that indentation mesh in a mathematical sense, rather than a visual sense?"

"Jiang Lin, this step looks like the most untechnical and rigid work, but in fact it is the easiest place to bury mines."

"In the history of aperiodic tiling, many seemingly exquisite constructions did not fall on the logical fracture of major theorems, but got stuck because the basic primitives were not drawn clearly and the boundary conditions were not defined cleanly."

"You say it can be tiled, but others redraw it in the computer according to your parameters and find that a 10^-8 millimeter gap appears when tiling to the ten-thousandth piece."

"As long as there is a gap, no matter how small, your proof is invalidated on the spot."

Professor Lin Zhaoye added from the side:

2. Standard Diagrams of Four Categories of Large Blocks

"The so-called four categories of large blocks are currently just four abstract codes in your manuscript," Professor Gu Nanzhou said, staring at the paper.

"Next, they need to be materialized into standard diagrams."

"How many basic single bricks are each category of large block composed of?"

"Among them, which ones have undergone chiral inversion, which ones have undergone specific angle rotations, and how do their internal boundaries seamlessly dock with each other?"

Chen Yan listening from the side felt his scalp start to tingle.

Hearing these things, it had completely divorced from the high-sounding romanticism of mathematics, and instead looked like compiling an extremely tedious IKEA furniture assembly manual with a zero fault tolerance rate.

But as a doctoral student, he knew all too well that this was precisely the most agonizing part of modern mathematical proofs.

A true inspiration breakthrough might only occur in a flash of insight late at night, but to translate it into an academic asset that others can understand, check clearly, and without producing any ambiguity, often takes ten or even a hundred times the boring time.

"I' rather offer a reminder." Shao Mingtang suddenly spoke up, interrupting Chen Yan's thoughts, "Jiang Lin, your standard diagrams must never be drawn to look pretty."

Chen Yan was taken aback, subconsciously looking at this physicist who had always been known for her rigor.

"Pretty has no academic value; absolute clarity is the only standard."

"The internal matching rules must be marked, and the marks of chiral inversion must be extremely eye-catching."

"Which edge must match which edge must be strictly constrained using lines of different colors or specific arrow symbols."

"Most importantly, why those incorrect tiling methods are wrong must be explained with counterexamples next to the diagrams."

Having said this, Shao Mingtang gave Jiang Lin a deep look.

"There is not that much goodwill in academia; readers cannot rely on guessing, and reviewers have even less obligation to guess for you."

"If your logic is not chewed up and fed to his mouth, he will write a sentence in the review comments saying 'poor description, lack of rigor', and then directly reject the paper."

Professor Gu Nanzhou nodded slightly, and then wrote down the third line.

3. Local Situation Table

After writing these few words, he raised his head and looked at Jiang Lin with a trace of sympathy in his eyes.

"Jiang Lin, this is the most anti-human and most exhausting step in all the work."

Jiang Lin nodded slightly.

What they argued most fiercely in front of the whiteboard yesterday was also this table.

"Your breakthrough mindset yesterday was very exquisite, compressing the tiling method of the infinite plane into a limited combination of local situations through mandatory matching rules."

"This dimensionality reduction strike mindset is definitely right."

"But whether this mindset can hold water in the end entirely depends on whether the table you enumerated has even a single omission."

Professor Lin Zhaoye immediately took over the conversation: "Every vertex, even the most marginal vertex, and all possible tiling near it must be exhaustively listed."

"For those that can continue to tile outward, you must clearly state in the table which category of Super-tile it will eventually fall into."

"For those that cannot continue to tile downward and are doomed to be unextendable, you must prove at which step it cannot go on and why it cannot go on."

Professor Lin Zhaoye heavily tapped his finger on the tabletop, making a dull sound.

"You must never just write a sentence like 'this path is blocked' in the paper."

"You must write clearly: exactly which angle interference appeared, which two edges had topological overlap, and which tiny gap still could not be filled after exhausting the rotation and flipping of all available bricks?"

He stared at Jiang Lin, as if trying to see through this young man's bottom line of endurance.

"And don't forget, the combination of vertex neighborhoods may seem limited in theory, but if you really want to exhaust them in actual operation, its state space will experience an exponential explosion."

"You have finished listing the neighborhoods of the first layer, what about the second layer?"

"Each legal state of the second layer will branch out into a bunch of branches outward."

"If you rely on manual listing and use the human brain to carry it hard, omissions will inevitably occur."

Professor Lin Zhaoye slowed down his tone slightly when he said this.

"For an exhaustive table of this level, if an ordinary research team grinds it out by human labor, a few weeks if they move fast, and two or three months if they are slow is common practice."

"And during months of boring troubleshooting, if you suddenly discover one day that the bottom layer actually missed an extremely rare local tiling method, Jiang Lin, that means all the thousands of derivative states you piled up above are invalidated, the entire proof chain is broken, and all the hard work of the previous few months starts over from scratch."

He looked at Jiang Lin's still calm face.

"Don't think that just because you have a good skeleton, you can look down on this mason's work."

"A skeleton is ultimately just a skeleton, and this table is every steel nail that nails this skeleton firmly into the Real World."

Chen Yan, sitting in the back row, heard this, and his stomach began to twitch nervously.

He was truly too familiar with this kind of work.

To outsiders, it sounded like a simple table-filling game, but for the executor, this was no different from locking oneself in a closed small room without windows and with pale, glaring lights.

You have to hold a magnifying glass and scrub the texture on the floor inch by inch.

After finishing the first pass, you check it a second time like someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

After checking, you have to hand the record over to others to pick faults.

If someone points to the gap of the thirty-seventh floor tile and says, "There seems to be a bit of dust here," you don't even have the qualification to lose your temper and feel annoyed.

Because the other person is right, that little bit of dust really might hide the loophole of the entire paper.

Professor Gu Nanzhou's pen tip swished as he wrote down the fourth line.

4. Computer-Assisted Verification

"Precisely because manual enumeration will inevitably make mistakes, your huge local state table must eventually and can only be handed over to a program to run through."

Shao Mingtang took over the conversation, pointing at that line of words.

"Humans are responsible for formulating rigorous geometric matching rules, machines are responsible for emotionless brute-force enumeration according to the rules, and finally humans check back to see whether the machine's output perfectly conforms to expectations in the physical sense."

"For an exhaustive proof of this level, the current international top journal convention is that computer-assisted verification code must be attached."

"Moreover, the verification program you write must never be toy code that can run on your own computer but throws errors when changing environments."

"You must provide extremely clean, well-encapsulated source code so that any reviewer across the ocean can independently compile, independently run, and finally run out identical verification conclusions on their own servers."

"I heard from Teacher Lu that you have written very complex crawlers yourself."

"With code experience in this area, you should be more sensitive to algorithms than many pure mathematics students who only know how to push formulas."

"But as a senior, I want to give you a little piece of advice: never blindly trust programs."]}```¶[instruction]Fixing a typo in JSON string (

I' rather offer

I'll offer

"A program is not a judge capable of telling right from wrong. In essence, it is simply a diligent clerk with astonishing computing power but zero subjective judgment. If you write a single parameter incorrectly in your underlying rules—even if it is just a reversed plus or minus sign—it will execute this erroneous rule impeccably and generate an error report consisting of tens of thousands of lines of code for you within seconds."

Jiang Lin nodded slightly.

Professor Lin Zhaoye sighed on the side, saying, "Just building this computer-aided verification framework, debugging the boundary conditions, optimizing the algorithm complexity, and finally organizing it into pseudo-code format that complies with academic standards and can be cited in literature... Jiang Lin, believe it or not, even a PhD student from the Department of Computer Science at a top domestic university, specializing in this, might not be able to produce a Bug-free version in two or three months. Many pure mathematics research groups reach this step only to stall, ultimately having to pull an algorithm master from a neighboring department just to put their name on it for collaboration."

V. Skeleton Uniqueness

After writing these five words, Professor Gu Nanzhou deliberated for a moment and switched to a relatively colloquial explanation.

Because this concept was far too counterintuitive.

"Simply put, this is the ironclad rule that Professor Shao forced you to establish in front of the blackboard yesterday. After we piece together tens of thousands of tiny individual bricks into a vast ocean, if we zoom back in on a macroscopic scale, can we uniquely and deterministically deduce backward from this chaotic texture where the Super-tile of the previous layer is located?"

Professor Gu Nanzhou looked into Jiang Lin's eyes: "You used villages and main roads to metaphorize this hierarchical relationship yesterday, which was very intuitive. This metaphor can even be retained in the Introduction section of the paper to guide readers. But once we enter the core proof chapters, this metaphor must be completely discarded and turned into an impeccable formal proof."

"This step cannot have the slightest ambiguity," Shao Mingtang said solemnly. "If you muddle through here, then all the increasingly large, infinitely tending hierarchical structures you build afterward will become castles in the air. Because reviewers will question you: are the hierarchies you divided merely auxiliary lines forcibly drawn based on your subjective will for the convenience of proof? Or are the geometric rules inside these bricks helplessly forcing you to divide them this way?"

At this point, Professor Gu Nanzhou's tone grew somewhat helpless.

"To write this clearly in academic language, you must introduce complex equivalence classes and handle those individual bricks with ambiguous ownership along the intersection zones of different Super-tile boundaries. You must use strict formal language to define why boundary disturbances can be legally ignored on a macroscopic scale, while also proving that such an omission will never affect the uniqueness of the overall skeleton."

"And to guarantee the words 'will never affect,'" Professor Gu Nanzhou smiled bitterly and shook his head, "you need to introduce boundary estimation theory, conduct complex local density comparative analysis, and create an entirely new symbol system to tightly seal all logical loopholes."

"So not to mention innovation, just writing out the logic that has already been figured out cleanly requires a well-trained PhD student giving it their all for at least two to three weeks," Professor Lin Zhaoye sighed. "If you get stuck on a special boundary singularity during the derivation process, being stuck for a month or even several months is the norm in this field."

VI. Periodic Strip Exclusion

Hearing these five words, Chen Yan subconsciously straightened his back.

This was that ghostly, strip-like, stealthily repeating trap from yesterday's discussion.

"This problem is most easily overlooked by laymen, or even half-baked peers," Shao Mingtang said. "As long as laymen see that the entire large map does not have completely identical repeating blocks, they feel the job is done. But those of us in this trade know that the most insidious enemies often lurk in the local details. The entire infinite plane indeed has no global repetition, but hidden inside it might be a narrow corridor only a few bricks wide yet extending infinitely. And the pattern within this corridor is actually undergoing microscopic periodic cycling."

Shao Mingtang tapped the table.

"As long as such a periodic strip exists, no matter how chaotic the entire plane is, your proof and the physical application of this brick will become extremely messy, or even completely overturned."

"Regarding this, I will solve it by extracting the boundary sequence."

Jiang Lin finally spoke.

"Encode that potentially existing one-dimensional boundary into a one-dimensional abstract symbol sequence through geometric features, and then write out its corresponding substitution matrix. By calculating this matrix and solving for its eigenvalue λ, as long as it can be proven that its maximum inflation factor λ is an algebraic irrational number, then according to number-theoretic properties, this sequence is absolutely not allowed to have any rational periodicity in Physics and mathematics."

Chen Yan listened in a daze from the side.

This hardcore algebraic method directly dimensionality-reduced a geometric problem into a Linear Algebra and number theory problem, making it so gorgeous that it was practically a work of art.

"The train of thought is definitely right, and the tools chosen are extremely precise," Shao Mingtang looked at Jiang Lin with eyes full of appreciation. "But Jiang Lin, you must understand that an unbridgeable chasm lies between oral genius argumentation and flawless execution down in black and white."

"The most tedious part is that you must use an entire section in the paper to prove one single thing alone. That string of uneven physical features you read with the naked eye from the two-dimensional geometric boundary, and that abstract substitution sequence you derived algebraically on paper here, are the exact same thing in mathematical essence."

"Reviewers will mercilessly question you: on what grounds do you say the concavities and convexities on the boundary must correspond to the symbols on your paper? Under extreme topological distortion, could reading omissions occur? When encountering chiral inversion, could the direction be misread? After flipping a brick over, would it cause you to read out two completely different, or even mutually contradictory sequences?"

At this point, Shao Mingtang's tone grew heavy, carrying the sentiment of having been through vicissitudes.

"Jiang Lin, I have done research on quasicrystal materials for twenty years, and I have seen too many dazzlingly brilliant geniuses. They proved things beautifully and spiritedly within the grand framework of global aperiodicity, feeling that grand awards were beckoning to them. But what happened in the end? They often stumbled precisely on the semi-periodic strip in some minor direction. A tiny counterexample was picked out by peers, and the entire grand palace collapsed in an instant, ruining all previous efforts."

VII. Main Theorem

Professor Gu Nanzhou wrote down the last three words and let out a long breath, as if unloading a huge mountain.

"This final step is also the closing battle. Regarding this, you actually already have the core logical chain in your mind." Professor Lin Zhaoye looked at Jiang Lin, his gaze filled with expectation. "Your core logic is that if the entire tiling method remains unchanged after undergoing a translation operation, then every layer of macroscopic skeleton extracted from its interior must also remain unchanged accordingly. Yet as the hierarchies are partitioned larger and larger, a fixed finite translation amount is mathematically impossible to simultaneously preserve all hierarchies tending to infinity. Therefore, a contradiction arises. The original hypothesis fails. Thus, the overall aperiodicity is proven."

"This is the intuition of a genius." Professor Lin Zhaoye nodded, but then changed the subject. "However, returning to our topic today, you must transform this literary-aesthetic deduction into long logical sentences that even reviewers with magnifying glasses cannot slip through any loopholes in."

"The hardest part of this matter has never been figuring it out, but writing it out clearly."

When these words fell, Discussion Room C216 fell silent again for quite a while.

Sitting in the corner, Chen Yan suddenly felt a twinge of sorrow in his heart.

Having pursued his PhD for three years, losing countless hairs and staying up countless all-nighters, he felt this sentence far too deeply.

Figuring it out was that surge of hormones suddenly bursting forth while taking a shower or walking; it was the starting point of a dopamine carnival.

Writing it out clearly was crafting it word by word, a self-negation of constantly overthrowing and starting over, a long and painful torment.

And making others admit you wrote it out clearly was the next level of torment—facing peer skepticism and unreasonable fault-finding, fighting tooth and nail in the Shura field of academia.

...

Professor Gu Nanzhou put down his pen and looked at the densely packed seven main tasks on the paper.

And this was merely the trunk dissected from the first round of macro-decomposition.

If one continued to peel down along each item, it could split like tree roots below into dozens of suffocating subdivided minor tasks.

He pushed this A4 paper, bearing immense weight, in front of Jiang Lin.

"Jiang Lin, this is not a job that can be done in a day or two, or even a week or two."

"Normally, if at a research institute, this magnitude of work would be handed over to a mature research group to advance."

Professor Gu Nanzhou calculated while speaking.

"I will assign the most meticulous PhD student to be exclusively responsible for drawing and coordinates, arrange a PhD student to painstakingly tackle the local state table, and pull a master from the Department of Computer Science specifically responsible for aiding code verification. I will personally handle the main text, Professor Lin will help guard the logical bottom line of local enumeration, and Professor Shao will oversee the physical significance of the substitution system and periodic strip. The six of us will work full-time."

He paused and gave a number he considered fair.

"Even so, conservatively estimated, for us to get a passable first-draft version, it will take at least a month to start."

Professor Lin Zhaoye smiled slightly on the side. "One month? Professor Gu, aren't you being overly optimistic? Do you think this is solving an undergraduate's after-class exercises?"

Professor Gu Nanzhou turned to look at him.

"If you can guarantee that the graphics won't need to be modified even once, the enumeration table can run through the whole court without blowing up the memory, the verification program can run through without debugging a single line of code, and the logical proof won't have any restarts..."

Professor Lin Zhaoye raised a finger.

"Then it indeed only takes a month."

He then raised a second finger.

"Whenever during the advancement we find that the underlying local state table missed even the tiniest scenario, and the whole edifice has to be overthrown and restarted, that's two months."

He raised a third finger.

"If the mathematical language for the skeleton uniqueness part can never be written cleanly and gets choked by boundary disturbances, with the whole group staring blankly at the whiteboard, spending three months on it is also common practice in the circle."

"If the eigenvalue derivation in the periodic strip section runs into problems," Shao Mingtang calmly delivered the final blow, "getting stuck for half a year or even a year and eventually having to give up publication—such tragedies are not uncommon at all in academia."

Hearing this from the side, Chen Yan felt black spots dancing before his eyes.

Half a year.

And this wasn't exploring from scratch.

But under the premise that this freak of nature Jiang Lin had already provided the core skeleton, and had even passed the first round of harsh scrutiny from this group of top bigwigs using his personal charm and logic.

Alas, one has to admit that this is the terrifying barrier of modern basic science research.

Professor Lin Zhaoye retracted the three raised fingers and clenched them into a fist.

Looking at the young man sitting quietly across the table, his tone was unprecedentedly earnest.

"Jiang Lin, I will give it to you straight."

"Yesterday, in front of all of us, you crossed the hardest hurdle in the field of discrete geometry in recent decades, came up with this incredible brick, and figured out with beautiful intuition why it must be aperiodic. This step was a stroke of divine inspiration, the work of a genius blessed by the heavens—a chasm that countless supremely intelligent people in this direction have turned their hair white trying to cross for decades without success."

[part:gemini-3.6-flash]

"But these next seven things on the paper are no longer the work of a genius. They are tedious, demanding, slow, and annoying, leaving no room for taking shortcuts. They're practically hard, exhausting manual labor."

As Professor Lin Zhaoye said this, a flash of pain crossed his eyes.

"I've seen too many talented young people who come up with an idea, feel like the world is theirs, and think all that's left is for their subordinates to fill in the minor details."

"But once they get started, they realize that filling in the details is ten times more painful than coming up with the idea out of thin air. When a crucial lemma gets stuck for three weeks without any progress, half of that genius's confidence collapses. After two or three months of tedious, dry polishing, even the sharpest inspiration turns into resentment. In the end, they either rush out an unfinished preprint or abandon it completely."

Professor Lin Zhaoye looked deeply at Jiang Lin, his eyes betraying the stubbornness of an old-school scholar.

"So today, I made a special trip overnight from Nanjing to give you a cold shower and deliver these hard truths right to your face as someone who has been through it."

At this moment, this mathematician was just like an elder watching his junior about to step into a minefield—anxious and candid.

Chen Yan sat silently in the corner with his head down, feeling as if he had taken an arrow to the knee.

The discussion came to a pause.

Everything seemed to be settled, and just as everyone was preparing to stand up and pack up, Professor Lin Zhaoye suddenly called out out of nowhere, "Jiang Lin."

"Mm." Jiang Lin raised his head.

"Are you taking the Gaokao next month?"

"Yes."

Discussion Room C216 fell into a strange silence once again.

Professor Gu Nanzhou slapped his forehead hard.

Facing this young man whose logic was so rigorous and whose psychological resilience was terrifyingly strong, they had talked so deeply that he had momentarily forgotten that the person sitting opposite him was a high school senior who hadn't even crossed the threshold of a university yet.

In a little over a month, he still needed to take that major examination that determined the fate of ordinary Chinese students.

However, in the present context, this fact was so absurd that it made one want to laugh.

One second, two seconds.

Professor Lin Zhaoye suddenly burst into a hearty laugh.

"Hahaha, good lad! Seeing how calm and composed you are, I can rest easy."

"Jiang Lin, if you want to take a breather while reviewing at home, feel free to come to Jiangda University anytime. If you really can't spare the time to come to campus, it doesn't matter either—just take clear photos of your handwritten manuscripts and send them to me, and I'll have Chen Yan enter them into the computer for you."

Chen Yan, who had caught strays again, nodded repeatedly beside him. "Yes, yes, yes, leave it to me! I'm best at rigid grunt work like data entry."

"In short, there's no need to rush too much," Professor Lu Zhixing instructed.

"Go slower and take steady steps. You still have a long way ahead of you," Shao Mingtang said earnestly.

Feeling their genuine goodwill, Jiang Lin nodded firmly. "Understood."

Around five in the afternoon, the meeting finally came to an end.

Professor Lin Zhaoye and Shao Mingtang needed to head to a hotel near Jiangda University first to settle in.

After all, one had taken a high-speed train overnight from Nanjing without closing his eyes on the train.

The other had rebooked a flight from Beijing before dawn, flying over and rushing straight to the venue upon landing. Neither of them had taken a proper breather until now.

The dusk wind whistled through the dense sycamore leaves on the Jiangda University campus, carrying the damp heat unique to early summer evenings.

The evening glow at the edge of the sky burned fiercely, dyeing the clouds a magnificent shade of orange-red.

Jiang Lin walked downstairs side by side with Professor Lu Zhixing.

Professor Lu Zhixing spoke, "Jiang Lin, even now, I still don't know how that brain of yours was put together. Nor do I know how you managed to complete deductions capable of overturning common sense in such a short time. But I know one thing—an irrefutable truth in the scientific community. The more you face moments that break convention, the more meticulously you must execute every procedure."

"Especially you."

Professor Lu Zhixing's lowered voice betrayed deep concern.

"Jiang Lin, you are merely a high school senior who hasn't even taken the Gaokao yet. You have no academic lineage, no academic background, and no resume of working in any top-tier laboratory. And then, all of a sudden, you nonchalantly produced an aperiodic tile that could very well reshape half a century of discrete geometry history."

"Right now, in Room C216, Professor Gu Nanzhou, Professor Lin Zhaoye, Shao Mingtang, and I—the few of us here are willing to believe you unconditionally and endorse you. That's because we witnessed the miracle with our own eyes. We saw how calmly you drew diagrams in front of the blackboard, and heard how fluently you answered Professor Lin's and Professor Shao's relentless, almost nitpicking questions. We know how, step by step over these past two days, you rigorously built that searcher, those local state tables, and the final chain of proof."

"But what about later?" Professor Lu Zhixing's voice sounded exceptionally grim in the evening wind.

"Later, when this paper is officially published and detonates across the entire international mathematics community, those European and American peers outside whom you've never met, those academic authorities holding the real power—they won't be in C216, and they won't have seen your deduction process."

"They will only see a result so shocking that it's impossible to accept: First Author: Jiang Lin, a high school student from China."

"Then, they will inevitably feel a tremendous sense of absurdity and ask a deeply malicious question in their hearts: 'On what basis? On what basis could he have figured this out?'"

Jiang Lin remained silent, merely looking quietly at Professor Lu Zhixing.

"Faced with this question, you can't answer with words alone," Professor Lu Zhixing shook his head and let out a bitter smile. "Because you can't go around explaining to the world's news media and your peers why you suddenly understand knowledge systems far beyond your age. The more you explain, the more it will sound to others like you're fabricating a clumsy fairy tale. Genius is sometimes an original sin in itself."

"So, Jiang Lin, don't try to answer anyone with words."

Professor Lu Zhixing enunciated every single word, as if attempting to engrave them into Jiang Lin's bones.

"Let cold records answer them."

"Let those manuscripts covered in revision marks answer them."

"Let the server timestamps that can never be tampered with answer them."

"Let every iteration file on the computer, from V1.0 to V50.0, answer them."

"Let every line of low-level code typed into the exhaustive search program answer them."

"Let Professor Gu Nanzhou, Professor Lin Zhaoye, Shao Mingtang, Chen Yan, and me—as credible academic witnesses—answer on your behalf with our reputations."

The evening wind stirred the stray hair at Professor Lu Zhixing's temples, his eyes firm and sharp.

"Others can suspect that you're too young."

"They can suspect that this result is too ridiculous."

"They can even suspect that you don't act like a normal high school student should."

"But as long as the chain of evidence you leave behind is clean enough and aligns perfectly with the true laws of logical evolution, they won't be able to sling mud at you or claim you stole it."

"Jiang Lin, I'll say this one last time. Strict academic procedures are never meant to restrict you."

"They exist so that in the future, when the whole world looks at you with suspicious eyes wanting to question where you came from, they can take the hits for you."

Jiang Lin nodded heavily.

Professor Lu Zhixing naturally had no idea that the Wasteland World existed, but relying on his years of experience navigating the scientific world, he could roughly predict the storm Jiang Lin was bound to face in the future.

It was an interrogation that an anomaly was destined to endure.

And in this Real World, the only thing that could protect him, a time smuggler, was not pale explanations, but an ironclad, undeniable chain of data.

"I understand, Teacher Lu," Jiang Lin replied in a deep voice.

Looking at the calm far beyond his years in the young man's eyes, Professor Lu Zhixing reached out and gave his somewhat slender shoulder a firm pat.

"Good, as long as you understand. It's getting dark, go home, and ride carefully on the way back."

"Goodbye, Teacher Lu."

As he rode out of the north gate of Jiangda University, a huge setting sun was slowly sinking behind the row upon row of buildings across the river.

The edges of the sky gradually transitioned from a warm orange-red to a deep purple-blue.

Jiang Lin's phone was in his pocket, where that internal email carrying immense academic resources lay quietly in his inbox.

Inside his backpack, the checklist of heavy work filled with the expectations and concerns of several professors was tucked safely in the middle of his notebook.

And in the upper right corner of his field of vision, that cold, mechanical countdown was still ticking forward second by second.

[0:12:39:05]

Facing the evening wind carrying the scent of river water, Jiang Lin pushed down hard on the pedals, merging into the evening rush hour traffic and riding toward home.

Birds returning to their nests streaked across the high sky; the streetlights were not yet fully lit, and the streets and alleys were filled with the noisy, vibrant bustle of everyday life.

He replayed everything that had just happened in the conference room in his mind.

Professor Gu said working as a team would take a month at minimum.

Professor Lin said with various bottlenecks, two to three months was the normal expectation.

Professor Shao said if they hit a dead end, it wouldn't be surprising if it couldn't be done in half a year.

They were all among the brightest minds of this era, and their experience was beyond doubt.

On a normal human time scale, the judgments of these three people were completely correct, and could even be said to carry a touch of the tolerance and expectation unique to academia.

The corner of Jiang Lin's mouth curved slightly in the evening wind.

Tomorrow, May 3rd, six in the morning.

When the first ray of sunlight in the Real World pierced the horizon, he would once again be pulled back to that empty Wasteland World.

There, what he would have was not a few weeks of spare time as Professor Gu said, nor a long summer break after the Gaokao as planned by Professor Shao.

There, what he possessed was several decades.

It was a world where no one would ever knock on the door to disturb him.

A laboratory where he didn't need to deal with high school senior exams, didn't need to navigate complex interpersonal relationships, and had no Real World trivialities to distract him.

Amidst those ruins, there was only him, that tile capable of overturning the history of geometry, his newly bought workstation, and MPS—the cyber laborer he had personally raised on countless lines of bugged code.

The computer-assisted verification part that Professor Lin mentioned—the most error-prone part with a vast mountain of work, which in reality might even require bringing in an algorithm heavyweight to collaborate and spend months tackling—

Coincidentally, that was precisely one of the missions MPS was created for.

Jiang Lin had even already conceptualized the instruction framework in his head.

He would deconstruct that local table containing infinite derivative possibilities into logical units and throw them to MPS.

He would let this tireless program race through the GPU cores to perform brute-force exhaustive searches, cutting off branch paths destined to hit dead ends, and running through tens or hundreds of thousands of local cases without missing a single one.

In the end, he would use tens of thousands of hours of computing power to generate a verification report that no peer could refute.

Pedaling his bicycle, Jiang Lin quietly picked up speed at the edge of the somewhat congested rush-hour traffic.

The chain spun rapidly, and the evening wind whistled past his ears.

A single summer break?

Professors, really, you are far too polite.