96: Chapter 96 The Inconceivable Two Hundred Pages

May 5th, 2:27 PM.

Second-floor waiting hall of the Jiangcheng Railway Station.

On the electronic display screen, the G-series train bound for Nanjing South had already started scrolling ticket-checking reminders.

Professor Lin Zhaoye sat on a row of plastic seats near the ticket gate, his right arm embracing a black backpack, his left hand holding a mobile phone.

The waiting hall was noisy with human voices.

The wheels of suitcases grinding over the floor tiles, the crying of children, the flat broadcast voice of a female announcer, and the sound effects of short videos playing loudly from someone's phone all mixed together, resembling a pot of boiling water.

Professor Lin Zhaoye actually hadn't rested well in Jiangcheng over the past few days.

It wasn't because the hotel's environment wasn't good enough; it was truly because the moment he closed his eyes, his mind was filled with those thirteen-sided tiles, that boundary diagram, that high school student, and that candidate construction they temporarily called Tile J.

The broadcast sound rang out abruptly overhead, breaking his deep thoughts.

"Passengers, please note that the G1726 train is now boarding, please take your belongings and wait in line at the ticket gate..."

Professor Lin Zhaoye took a deep breath, put on his backpack, and just as he was about to move, the phone in his hand suddenly vibrated.

Professor Gu Nanzhou's call popped up on the screen.

He answered and held the phone close to his ear.

"Nanzhou?"

On the other end of the phone, there was no pleasantry, nor the usual polite honorific opening.

"Professor Lin, have you gotten on the train yet?"

Professor Gu Nanzhou's voice sounded with a strange sense of tension, like a fully drawn bowstring.

Professor Lin Zhaoye frowned slightly and glanced at the queue that had already started moving: "I'm just about to check tickets, what's wrong?"

"Jiang Lin has submitted his work."

Professor Lin Zhaoye pulled back the step he was about to take.

"Did he submit the coordinate table?"

"No."

"Then is it the four types of large blocks diagrams?"

"Neither."

Professor Lin Zhaoye's brows slowly twisted together, and the vertical lines on his forehead appeared exceptionally deep.

"Then it must be the local cases table. Did he list out the exhaustive cases of those finite boundary combinations?"

The other end of the phone was silent for two seconds.

It was only two seconds, but Professor Lin Zhaoye heard Professor Gu Nanzhou's heavy breathing.

"It's a paper proof."

Professor Lin Zhaoye didn't speak.

People came and went in the waiting hall; a man dragging a silver suitcase almost bumped into his knees.

The man turned back, whispered an apology, and hurriedly merged into the crowd of ticket checkers.

Yet Professor Lin Zhaoye acted as if he heard nothing, standing still in place, his thoughts seeming to freeze at this instant.

After a long while, he asked in a deep voice: "What do you mean by a paper proof?"

Professor Gu Nanzhou's voice was lowered very much, as if afraid of startling something: "All seven items are present."

"Shape definition, four types of large blocks, local cases table, skeleton uniqueness, non-periodic strip exclusion argument, main theorem derivation, and a special explanation for the reviewers."

Professor Lin Zhaoye's first reaction was by no means pleasant surprise.

"What did I tell him a few days ago?"

His voice suddenly sank, carrying the dignity of someone who had held a teaching position for many years.

"Better slow than wrong. Mathematical proofs are not building blocks; even if the base has a one-millimeter gap, the building will collapse directly when you build it to the hundredth floor. How did you supervise him? Did you guys make him rush the work?"

"No," Professor Gu Nanzhou replied quickly.

"Then what are these seven core proofs written in less than three days?"

Professor Lin Zhaoye raised his voice a few decibels, drawing sideways glances from several passengers waiting in line nearby.

"Does he think this is an Alibaba Competition question? As long as he writes out a general train of thought, will the grading teachers give him step points? This is going to face scrutiny from the entire discrete geometry and tiling theory circle."

Professor Gu Nanzhou on the other end of the phone did not defend himself, nor did he even try to soothe Professor Lin Zhaoye's emotions.

He only waited for Professor Lin Zhaoye to finish speaking before saying in a low voice: "Professor Lin, when I saw the document, my initial thought was identical to yours, thinking this was nonsense."

Professor Lin Zhaoye gave a light hum to indicate he heard.

Professor Gu Nanzhou continued: "But I looked at the table of contents and tried reading the lemma derivations of the first three sections; it completely doesn't look like a rushed draft."

The expression on Professor Lin Zhaoye's face changed slightly.

"Send it to me to take a look."

"Already sent."

The call ended.

Professor Lin Zhaoye stood in the open space beside the ticket-checking queue, swiped open his phone screen with one hand, and tapped open WeChat.

In Professor Gu Nanzhou's chat window, a long screenshot abruptly popped out.

That was a screenshot of a folder's directory structure.

The folder name was cold and restrained.

Tile_J_internal_proof_v0.9

Neatly arranged below were seven PDF files.

00_shape_definition.pdf

01_supertile_construction.pdf

02_local_cases_table_paper.pdf

03_skeleton_recognition.pdf

04_no_periodic_strip.pdf

05_main_theorem.pdf

README_for_review.pdf

No code package.

No computer verification program.

None of those computational workflow files that required a huge amount of time to compile, debug, package, and reproduce on a server.

This caused the first breath hanging upside down in Professor Lin Zhaoye's heart to relax just a little bit.

At least Jiang Lin wasn't outrageous enough to claim that he had finished writing the verification program within two days, debugged all local enumerations, and packaged them into reproducible materials.

If he had even handed over the verification package, Professor Lin Zhaoye would have directly thrown this document into the wastebasket, because that violated the limits of carbon-based life in physical time.

But the next second, when his line of sight shifted to the right and he saw the file size and the page count markers attached behind each file, the breath he had just relaxed was once again stuck in his chest cavity.

Shape definition, fourteen pages.

Construction of four types of large blocks, twenty-six pages.

Paper version of the local cases table, sixty-eight pages.

Skeleton recognition, thirty-seven pages.

Non-periodic strip exclusion, forty-two pages.

Main theorem, nineteen pages.

Review notes, eight pages.

Combined, two hundred and fourteen pages.

Professor Lin Zhaoye stood beside the bustling ticket gate, not moving for a full dozen seconds.

This was not just a matter of page count; this was a typeset PDF, which meant a massive amount of formula input, graphic drawing, and symbol definition.

Typing out over two hundred pages of mathematical typesetting in less than three days was no longer just mental labor; this required machine-like typing speed and a completely stutter-free logical flow.

"Comrade, are you moving or not?"

A young man behind him carrying a travel backpack couldn't help but speak up to remind him.

Professor Lin Zhaoye raised his head and glanced at the ticket gate.

The turnstiles were rapidly devouring and spitting out tickets, green passing arrows flashed frequently, and the queue kept moving forward.

On the large screen, the status of G1726 had changed to boarding.

He didn't move, lowered his head, and clicked open the second screenshot sent by Professor Gu Nanzhou.

That was the first page of the main text of that section, 03_skeleton_recognition.pdf.

Beneath the bolded sans-serif title, in the abstract introduction position of the first paragraph, such a line of words was written——

"What this section proves is not the uniqueness of the bottom-layer single tile attribution, but rather that, in the sense of allowing limited boundary perturbations, the high-level composite skeleton can be uniquely read out from local boundary rules."

Professor Lin Zhaoye looked at this line of words, his throat feeling as if it were gently stuck by something, unable to swallow it down or spit it out.

This sentence was not showy at all, completely devoid of aesthetic appeal.

It even appeared somewhat lengthy in its choice of words.

But it happened to nail the exact point they had repeatedly reminded him of.

The WeChat prompt sound rang again.

Professor Gu Nanzhou sent a text message.

[Professor Lin, do you want to come back and take a look?]

"Have Chen Yan print out all the documents, I'll take a taxi back to Jiangda University right now."

Professor Lin Zhaoye didn't look at the ticket gate again, held down the voice message button, and said to the other end of the phone, the fatigue in his voice swept away completely.

At the same time.

Jiangcheng Tianhe Airport, Terminal T3.

Shao Mingtang had already passed security check and was sitting on a single-person sofa near the floor-to-ceiling window in the VIP lounge.

On her knees lay a dark gray leather computer bag, and she held a cup of warm lemonade in her hand.

Outside the window, a huge Boeing airliner was slowly taxiing on the runway.

The flight Professor Gu Nanzhou booked for her was to Beijing at 3:10 PM.

The boarding prompt had not yet sounded.

The airport's atmosphere was quieter than the high-speed railway station, but that omnipresent sense of haste was even stronger.

Business travelers dragging suitcases, flight attendants with uniform strides, college students wearing noise-canceling headphones—everyone was partitioning their schedule on a precise timeline, rushing to their next destination.

Shao Mingtang should also leave.

In the research institute in Beijing, there was still a seminar on symbolic dynamical systems and non-periodic structures.

On her desk was a doctoral student's proposal material waiting for her signature.

What was even more troublesome was an eighty-page review comment assigned to her by Annals of Mathematics; she had delayed for three days without replying to the editor-in-chief's email.

It had to be said that time was the scarcest resource for a scholar of her level.

But just as she was about to unzip her computer bag to reply to a few emails during the twenty minutes before boarding, the screen of her phone placed aside lit up.

Incoming call display — Professor Gu Nanzhou.

Shao Mingtang picked up the phone and swiped to answer.

"Professor Gu, I am just getting ready to board. If it is about the minutes of the follow-up, you can email them to me."

"Professor Shao, Jiang Lin has submitted his materials." Professor Gu Nanzhou's voice came through the earpiece.

Shao Mingtang's first reaction was very calm: "Did he send the coordinate system parameters or the vector files of the basic combinatorial diagrams? Progress is not bad; you have Chen Yan check if there are any missing parameters. Beginners are very likely to miscalculate a few digits of precision on boundary angles."

"It's a paper proof."

Shao Mingtang's fingers paused.

"Which part?"

"All of it."

Shao Mingtang's brows furrowed slightly, and suspicion flashed in those eyes that always carried a scrutinizing meaning.

"What does all of it mean? Professor Gu, we both do mathematics; such words cannot be used casually."

"All seven items are present," Professor Gu Nanzhou's voice remained very low, "from the shape definition all the way to the main theorem."

"What about the non-periodic strip exclusion?"

As an expert in geometric topology, she knew all too well where the hardest bone to chew was in the proof of non-periodic tiling.

Constructing a strange shape wasn't difficult; what was difficult was how to prove that this shape, in the process of tiling the entire infinite plane, could absolutely never form a non-periodic strip.

"It was written separately."

Professor Gu Nanzhou knew what she cared about the most.

"How much was written?"

"Forty-two pages?" Shao Mingtang thought she had misheard, her tone rising slightly, "Just to exclude the non-periodic strip?"

"Yes, pure logical deduction and exhaustive analysis, no nonsense."

"Was the flipped reading handled? Single tiles with chirality issues will cause boundary matching conditions to become extremely complicated upon flipping."

"There is a special chapter explaining it."

"What about short repetitive fragments? Those pseudo-periodic sequences that look like periods locally but break at higher levels?" Shao Mingtang's speaking speed became faster and faster.

"He did separate numbering processing for them."

The other end of the phone was quiet for a few seconds.

The broadcast in the lounge sounded a gentle prompt tone: "Passengers traveling to Beijing, please note that your flight CA1834 is now boarding. Please take your boarding pass."

Shao Mingtang slowly zipped closed her computer bag.

"Send me a screenshot of the table of contents."

"It has already been sent to your WeChat."

Shao Mingtang switched her phone to the WeChat interface.

The complete table of contents came into view.

Immediately following was a screenshot of an inner page specially sent by Professor Gu Nanzhou.

Shao Mingtang stared at this screenshot for a long time.

Long enough that the business traveler opposite had already put away their newspaper and headed toward the boarding gate.

The boarding prompt turned urging: "Passengers traveling to Beijing, please note that this is flight CA1834..."

Shao Mingtang raised her head and glanced at the boarding gate, then suddenly picked up her computer bag and stood up.

Then she replied to Professor Gu Nanzhou with a message on her phone.

"I'm going back right now, hold on a moment."

Four-fifty PM.

Jiangda University School of Mathematics Building C, Discussion Room C216.

A few days ago, Tile J appeared here for the first time. Several scholars and professors surrounded a high school student, listing a long checklist of physical work, trying to tell him how steep the stairs leading to the academic palace were.

And today, when Chen Yan hugged a thick stack of printed materials just taken out from the print room and pushed the door open with his foot, both of his arms were slightly sore.

"Professor Gu, everything is printed out."

He took a breath, placed the thick stack of materials on the large conference table, producing a muffled thud.

The paper even carried the residual heat from the fuser of the large laser printer.

The faint scent of toner permeated the air.

Professor Gu Nanzhou stepped forward and picked up a packaged material from the very top.

The cover did not use any fancy fonts, nor was it bolded or enlarged; there were only standard sans-serif characters, and the layout was as clean as an instruction manual.

Tile J Internal Proof Draft v0.9

(Tile J Internal Proof Draft Version 0.9)

Below it forlornly followed a line of words.

Submitted by: Jiang Lin

No fancy title, no exaggerated abstract.

Not even writing at the very beginning a sentence commonly found in math papers like "we prove".

Opening the cover, it was simply a straightforward table of contents structure.

Shape definition.

Four types of supertile blocks.

Local cases table.

Skeleton recognition.

Non-periodic strip exclusion.

Main theorem.

Review notes.

Professor Lu Zhixing sat on the chair by the window, and he also received a printed copy in his hand.

Flipping through the pages in his hand, the dense geometric boundary conditions and permutation matrices made him feel a burst of dizziness.

He indeed couldn't understand all the details of the mathematical derivations.

But he could understand the rigor of the engineering.

This was definitely not a term assignment rushed out by a kid on a hot head after staying up for three consecutive nights.

Because this document possessed extremely high industrial-grade standards.

The footer of every file had version number tracking accurate to sub-categories.

Every complex splicing diagram had an independent image numbering.

At the beginning of each section, it not only wrote the core objective to be proven in this section, but even honestly listed the leftover matters in the current version that had optimization space.

In that final eight-page Review Notes, Jiang Lin even listed three red lines in the form of project points.

"1. This manuscript serves only as a draft for running through the internal proof logic of the group. Before peer cross-inspection, it does not constitute a finalized public paper in any sense."

"2. Due to computing resource limitations, the computer verification package code is still under organization and refactoring, and has not yet reached deliverable standards. The currently submitted local cases table is a manually deduced paper version, and there is a risk of manual omissions."

III. The reviewers are earnestly requested to prioritize checking the following core logical chains: 1. The convergence of skeleton recognition; 2. The completeness of classification for periodic strip exclusion; 3. Whether there are any unexhausted edge special cases in the local case table.

When Professor Lu Zhixing saw the second item, a weight was lifted off his mind.

Jiang Lin had not left things too absolute.

He did not push himself just to pursue that kind of audience-shaking dramatic effect, stubbornly claiming that he had even perfectly written over tens of thousands of lines of verification code and run it with zero bugs.

He calmly admitted the delay in the computer portion.

This showed that this high school student's rationality always superseded his pride.

He was very clear about where the process boundaries of this work lay and strictly adhered to them.

"Creak——"

The door was pushed open.

Professor Lin Zhaoye walked in with brisk strides.

He had obviously taken a taxi all the way from the high-speed rail station, urging the driver to race back.

Twenty minutes later, the crisp clicking of high heels echoed down the corridor, and Shao Mingtang had arrived as well.

She was pulling a small silver RIMOWA suitcase with one hand, and on her left wrist hung a Jaeger-LeCoultre watch that she had taken off for airport security and just put back on.

Walking into C216, her first sentence was neither a greeting nor a complaint about the traffic.

She pushed the suitcase toward the door, her gaze locking directly onto the long table: "Where is the section on periodic strip exclusion?"

Chen Yan gave a start and immediately pulled out the stack of materials marked with 04_no_periodic_strip, handing it over with both hands.

Professor Lin Zhaoye had already flipped through to the third document.

03_skeleton_recognition.pdf

Professor Gu Nanzhou stood aside, turning his head to look at Jiang Lin sitting at the end of the table.

Jiang Lin sat quietly there, with a black notebook and a pen placed in front of him.

His expression was very calm, neither uneasy nor complacent.

If someone unaware walked in, they would only think that what he had just handed in was not a paper proof that could shake the geometry world, but a step-by-step completed high school mathematics periodic test paper.

Professor Gu Nanzhou looked at him, a sense of absurdity and awe intertwining in his heart.

A few days ago, right in this room, several of them were still earnestly telling Jiang Lin: "This workload is immense; being able to build the preliminary framework in a single summer vacation would already be considered fast."

They were also tapping in front of the blackboard: "Slow down, steady down, don't be eager for quick success and instant benefits."

And now, in less than three days, this child had placed a castle built with rigorous logic, in the form of a paper proof, right before them.

Professor Gu Nanzhou did not ask him whether he had slept these past few days.

Asking this question was meaningless.

For someone truly immersed in the mathematical flow state, the passage of physical time could be compressed.

He braced his hands on the tabletop and asked only the most core question: "Jiang Lin, what state do you evaluate the manuscript you submitted to be in?"

Jiang Lin raised his head, his gaze clear.

"An internal proof draft; away from the final draft that can be submitted to journals, it still requires a computer verification package."

"The logic of graphic definition and hypergraph block construction is relatively mature; teachers can review these two parts first."

"The local isomorphism proof in skeleton recognition, as well as the limit classification of periodic strip exclusion, are what I consider the most time-consuming parts to derive. I suggest prioritizing the re-verification of these two sections. If the basic assumptions of these two sections are falsified, the preceding constructions will all be overthrown and redone."

Professor Lin Zhaoye raised his head from the manuscript and gave him a deep look.

The anger that had accumulated at the high-speed rail station due to mistakenly thinking the student was rushing the work had already dissipated without a trace.

This child was terrifyingly lucid. He knew what he had handed in better than anyone present, where its strengths lay, and where its Achilles' heel might be hidden.

...

In the C216 discussion room, a high-density silence gradually fell.

Just like dismantling an extremely complex detonating device, everyone knew something capable of changing the status quo was happening, but not a single person dared to speak up in advance, fearing that the slightest airflow disturbance would destroy the concentration of the moment.

The room was left only with the rustling sound of pages being turned and the occasional scratching sound of pen tips gliding across paper surfaces.

Professor Lin Zhaoye read very quickly.

His eyes jumped back and forth like a scanner between defining parameters, lemma descriptions, and auxiliary illustrations.

When encountering key derivations, he would pick up his pen without hesitation and draw a large question mark in the page margin.

When encountering complex substitution rules, he would stop, rapidly sketch out a local boundary on the blank draft paper beside him, and deduce two steps himself to see if it matched Jiang Lin's conclusion.

Professor Gu Nanzhou stood in the back row, silently observing his reading trajectory.

Professor Lin Zhaoye first read the definitions on the first page.

Then he jumped directly to Lemma 3.1 on the fifth page.

Then he flipped backward again, bypassing large chunks of text, and stared directly at the core deduction of the proof process on page twelve.

A dozen minutes later, he suddenly flipped back to page two to verify some inconspicuous initial constraint condition.

This was the most typical defensive reading method for mathematics workers when reviewing a heavyweight proof.

Time ticked away minute by minute.

The second hand of the wall clock rotated circle after circle.

A full hour passed.

Professor Lin Zhaoye finally stopped reading.

"Professor Gu Nanzhou."

"Hmm." Professor Gu Nanzhou's nerves tightened, and he immediately stepped forward.

"He stated the objective correctly." Professor Lin Zhaoye's voice was somewhat hoarse.

"Which sentence?" Professor Gu Nanzhou's heart skipped a beat.

Professor Lin Zhaoye stretched out his finger, tapped heavily twice on the abstract section of the first page, and then pushed that page across the tabletop.

"It is not that the attribution of the bottom-layer bricks is unique, but that the high-level composite skeleton is readable."

Professor Lin Zhaoye repeated this sentence word for word, as if tasting its weight.

"If this sentence wasn't written out in the first step, or if there was even a sliver of deviation in understanding, the dozens of pages of derivation afterward would all be a complete mess."

He raised his head, his gaze staring straight at Jiang Lin across the table.

"You really did it."

Jiang Lin nodded slightly, not taking advantage of the situation to accept this extremely heavy praise.

He only stated matter-of-factly: "After going back, I rewrote the introduction part six times. At first, I also fell into the misunderstanding of trying to prove the absolute position of the bottom layer. Later, I found that the logical chain would break, so I retreated to the path of high-level topological readability."

Professor Lin Zhaoye's sharp gaze did not leave Jiang Lin.

"Since the bottom layer is allowed to be non-unique, boundary perturbations will inevitably occur. If this fault-tolerant space is magnified during iteration, the system will collapse. How did you algebraically suppress the boundary perturbations here?"

This was not just a question; this was already a formal academic defense.

"Please turn to page seventeen," Jiang Lin said without hesitation.

Professor Lin Zhaoye immediately flipped to page seventeen.

A table spanned across there.

Boundary fuzzy geometry types.

Maximum local slideable range.

Whether it affects the skeleton topology of the next layer.

Exception matching handling rule matrix.

Professor Lin Zhaoye looked down line by line.

His finger slid slowly along the border of the table, his brain operating at high speed, simulating several extreme collision scenarios described in the table.

Chen Yan, standing nearby, couldn't help stretching his neck, trying to follow Professor Lin Zhaoye's train of thought to look.

But he quickly gave up.

It was not that he couldn't completely understand every Chinese character and mathematical symbol above, but when these symbols were combined together, the information density was shockingly large, just like a dense steel-toothed comb ruthlessly scraping across his cerebral cortex, leaving deep carved marks yet failing to grasp any entity.

Jiang Lin's manuscript was like a slow but unstoppable bulldozer, pushing forward evenly grid by grid, category by category.

Laying all the dirty and tiring work out in the sunlight.

So slow that it even made people feel somewhat tedious.

But precisely this unprettiness that abandoned cleverness and showing off exuded a hair-raising sense of substance in the eyes of this group of old-school scholars.

Another full half-hour passed, and Professor Lin Zhaoye put down his red pen once more.

"In this section of skeleton recognition, I temporarily haven't found any structural breaks. We can proceed to the next round of line-by-line re-verification."

Chen Yan's heart gave a jolt.

Being able to undergo line-by-line re-verification meant that Jiang Lin had already obtained an admission ticket to enter the adult academic world.

Right at this moment, Shao Mingtang, sitting on the other side, was still reading.

What she was responsible for was periodic strip exclusion.

She read those forty-two pages of material even slower and more laboriously than Professor Lin Zhaoye.

When she finished reading the square symbol denoting the end of proof on the last line, Shao Mingtang's movements paused for a long time.

Professor Gu Nanzhou keenly perceived her abnormality and asked in a low voice: "Teacher Shao, what's wrong, are there omissions in the hypothetical logic of the periodic strip?"

Shao Mingtang did not answer immediately.

She reached out, turned the sheet of paper printed with the short repeated fragment table by ninety degrees, and pushed it to the middle of Professor Gu Nanzhou and Professor Lin Zhaoye's field of vision.

"Look here, he peeled off these five fragments from S-3 to S-7 separately and listed them here."

Professor Gu Nanzhou leaned over to take a look.

Those were several special boundary symbol sequences.

During the process of non-periodic tiling, these sequences would undergo a dangerous phenomenon.

They would produce brief, seemingly very regular repetitions locally.

If only observing these few steps, reviewers would easily mistake the entire tiling as degenerating into periodicity.

But as long as the deduction continued, they would ultimately be broken by other constraints.

This was the most deceptive pseudo-proof zone in the entire proof.

Countless people who tried to prove single-brick tiling all hung in this swamp.

Jiang Lin not only did not try to use vague language to hide these dangerous fragments.

He even made them highlighted markers and placed them in the most conspicuous place of the entire chapter.

This was just like a mine-clearing scene; he not only waded through the minefield, but also proactively stuck a bright red flag next to every landmine that was easiest to step on and detonate, openly telling the reviewers walking up from behind:

"I know it looks dangerous here, I know you will definitely question this place. Please look, I have already dismantled its fuse."

Shao Mingtang's sight pierced across the long conference table and landed on Jiang Lin.

"Jiang Lin, how did you discover the traps of these short repeated fragments? Is this pure geometric intuition, or algebraic calculation?"

Jiang Lin met this geometric topology expert's gaze and replied in a calm tone: "At first, it was manually calculated layer by layer on draft paper. When calculating to the expansion of the second layer, I found that a continuously matching boundary appeared with a very uncomfortable symmetrical repetition."

"Just noticed by manual calculation?" Shao Mingtang pursued.

"After noticing it, I could no longer rely on intuition," Jiang Lin replied. "I later introduced a state transition table, using these five fragments as initial inputs, and forcibly deduced them to a higher layer to test whether they would form periodic strips that could extend infinitely in both directions."

"And the result?"

"After performing the third and fifth recursive iterations, these pseudo-periodic sequences underwent irreversible splitting. They could no longer maintain a unified encoding read, therefore the periodic strip hypothesis did not hold."

Shao Mingtang lowered her head, her gaze falling once more upon those few lines of rigorous derivation formulas, and then she nodded gently, neatly gathering that stack of materials together.

"The exclusion logic of this periodic strip section is interlocked and can also officially enter the line-by-line re-verification stage."

Hearing this, Professor Gu Nanzhou's back, which had been tense for several hours, finally slowly relaxed, and he slowly exhaled a breath of stale air.

Up to now, this paper proof of over two hundred pages did not show the slightest bit of impetuous flavor belonging to a rush job.

And what made people most astonished about it was precisely that it looked so unlike something rushed out temporarily.

A massive document handed in by a high school student in less than three days unexpectedly carried a weighty, blunt sense between the lines that had been repeatedly polished by time.

In Professor Gu Nanzhou's mind, those famous geniuses in the history of mathematics and their masterpieces uncontrollably flashed past.

It was not that the history of mathematics had never had high-density texts.

It was not that young people hadn't used dozens of pages of paper to articulate things that others thought would take a very long time to explain clearly.

Yet Jiang Lin was still different.

Those people at least had traceable training paths.

What about Jiang Lin?

Jiangcheng No. 7 High School, Senior Three.

Gaokao next month.

Professor Gu Nanzhou shook his head abruptly, forcefully pulling back the thoughts spreading in his mind.

Now was definitely not the time to sigh at such an incredible thing.

At 6:30 PM, the sky in Jiangcheng gradually grew dark.

The overhead lights of C216 were all turned on, and the cold white light illuminated the table full of documents.

Professor Lin Zhaoye, Shao Mingtang, and Professor Gu Nanzhou, like three high-power operating processing centers, were each responsible for a most difficult-to-crack area.

Professor Lu Zhixing, acting as an observer from an engineering perspective, sat beside them responsible for recording the review process, ensuring that every raised doubt had a record that could be checked.

Chen Yan ran back and forth between the whiteboard and the computer, responsible for numbering the several issues to be verified dictated by the several professors, sorting them into documents category by category.

As for Jiang Lin, he still sat steadily at the very outer end of the long table, like a witness accepting courtroom cross-examination, being questioned one item after another by these three experts and scholars.

Professor Lin Zhaoye asked quickly, like a violent storm.

Shao Mingtang asked accurately, like a scalpel stripping bones.

Professor Gu Nanzhou asked meticulously, like a microscope clearing mines.

But even under such high-intensity three-way crossfire, every single one of Jiang Lin's answers remained airtight.

Not a single problem could shake the core mathematical chain.

Not a single loophole could smash cracks into this building that had just laid its foundation.

The basic skeleton was as stable as Mount Tai amidst the stormy deductions.

It was as if he had already rehearsed it thousands of times beforehand.

But everyone actually knew that this could not be a rehearsal; there was simply no time for him to do a rehearsal.

The only answer could be that this high school student was a true, genuine genius.

After all, geniuses are always incredible.