My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Princeton.

The conference room on the second floor of the Institute for Advanced Study.

Seven people were sitting on either side of the long oak table.

Every month, the first week, the senior editorial board of the "Annals of Mathematics" holds its regular meeting here.

The names of those who sit at this table are printed in most contemporary textbooks of algebraic geometry and topology.

Pierre pushed open the door and walked in.

He walked to the empty seat at the very end of the long table and sat down, placing his bag beside his feet.

No one greeted him.

Most of the people present here are key figures who have dominated the school of continuous differential geometry for the past thirty years.

Pierre was the outlier who proposed the theory of discrete algebra, which they ultimately deemed a logical failure.

Although they lived in the same building, their opposing academic paths meant that they no longer exchanged pleasantries.

Cyril, the editor-in-chief of the Annals of Mathematics, sat in the head seat.

Cyril flipped through the typesetting proof in his hand without looking up.

"We received 300 submissions this time, but only seven passed the initial review."

Cyril's voice sounded somewhat empty in the spacious conference room.

"Most of it is the same old stuff. Can anyone recommend something new?"

The only sound in the meeting room was the turning of pages.

Pierre leaned back in his chair.

He reached into his briefcase, unzipped it, and took out a stack of A4 sheets of paper stapled together.

It has 43 pages in total.

Pierre gently pushed the paper along the smooth oak tabletop to the center of the table.

The sound of the pages sliding attracted everyone's attention.

"I recommend one," Pierre said.

Cyril stopped writing and looked up at the paper in the middle of the table.

"Whose?" Cyril asked.

"My student who is far away in the East."

Pierre spoke calmly.

"He just handed in his summer assignment for the yearbook a few days ago."

There was a moment of silence in the conference room.

Everyone here knows that Pierre publicly announced a few months ago that he had taken on a thirteen-year-old disciple, and that the young man named Zhuo Chen had published a somewhat noteworthy paper in Discrete Mathematics. But this is the finalization meeting for the Annals of Mathematics.

"Pierre, stop joking."

Arthur, sitting on the left, frowned.

"This is a serious academic conference, not a presentation for an undergraduate summer camp."

Pierre did not refute this.

He picked up the water glass in front of him and took a sip.

"This assignment explores the Whole Hodge Conjecture."

Pierre put down his water glass.

"It mainly concerns the treatment of the scratches."

Cyril's gaze froze.

The whole Hodge conjecture.

The scratching part.

This is an iceberg that has stood before all continuous manifold scholars for the past thirty years.

Calculus always seems inadequate when dealing with these discrete topological invariants.

"How did he handle it?" Cyril asked.

"He wrote a sentence in the summary," Pierre said, looking at Cyril.

He said that traditional approximation methods based on continuous mappings have structural redundancy here.

Pierre paused for a moment.

"To put it simply, he believes that the work you have done on this path over the past thirty years is redundant nonsense."

The air in the conference room suddenly froze.

Arthur gave a cold laugh.

"Arrogant," Arthur said.

"A kid who probably hasn't even fully grasped the basics of calculus is saying our approach is nonsense?"

The other members of the editorial board also shook their heads.

Cyril didn't speak. He reached out and took the piece of paper from the middle of the table.

He turned to the first page.

Title: "Structural Reconstruction of the Twist Part of the Integral Hodge Conjecture Based on Discrete Mesh and Homologous Algebra".

Author: ZhuoChen.

Cyril's gaze fell on the summary section.

He saw what Pierre had said.

The words on paper, in black and white, without any embellishment, resembled a cold, hard verdict.

Cyril's fingers, which were turning the page, stopped.

He looked up at Pierre.

"Do you think he wrote it correctly?" Cyril asked.

"I'm getting old, my eyesight is failing, and my energy isn't keeping up."

Pierre leaned back in his chair, his fingers interlaced on his abdomen.

"I can't finish checking these forty-three pages by myself, so I brought them here for you all to see. I would appreciate it if you could help me correct this assignment," Pierre said, looking at the people present.

"If he's wrong, just treat it as a joke and reject the manuscript."

No one laughed in the meeting room.

Cyril handed the paper to his assistant, David, who was standing next to him.

"Go make copies," Cyril said.

"Give one to everyone here."

David took the manuscript and went outside.

Half an hour later, everyone had a copy.

Cyril stood up.

"Starting today, we will be using the closed seminar room on the third floor of Fan En Building."

Cyril looked at the paper in his hand.

"Stop all other work except for this article."

Arthur looked at Cyril.

"Are you really going to spend the time to verify this?"

"Since Pierre dared to put something on this table, it couldn't have been just some scrap of paper with random scribbles."

Cyril took the copy and walked out.

"I refuse to believe that a building we've been constructing with continuous manifolds for thirty years can be cut apart by a discrete grid within a month." The seminar room door closed.

There were no windows, only a cold white light overhead.

Huge blackboards were hung on all four walls.

Week 1.

The air was filled with the smell of chalk dust.

Arthur stood in front of the first blackboard, holding half a piece of chalk in his hand.

The blackboard was covered with layers upon layers of partial differential equations.

"here."

Arthur slammed the chalk down on the blackboard.

"His discrete singularity is isolated here. As long as we introduce an infinitely small continuous limit, we can forcibly smooth out this singularity." Cyril sat in his chair, holding a pencil, and calculated on the draft paper following Arthur's train of thought.

David was doing auxiliary calculations on the whiteboard next to him.

Half an hour passed.

David stopped writing.

"no."

David's voice was a little dry.

Arthur turned to look at him.

"Why not?"

"It won't fade."

David pointed to the last line on the whiteboard.

"After applying the continuous limit, the number of intersections of the algebraic cycle becomes zero, and the information is lost."

Arthur fell silent.

Cyril also put down his pencil.

They tried to use calculus, that extremely sharp yet flexible sword, to pierce the grid that Chen Zhuo had built.

But the tools of continuity, when they come into contact with that underlying discrete algebra mechanism, are like water splashed on a stone—they simply slide off. Chen Zhuo didn't leave them any smooth gaps at all.

The singularity is locked firmly at the intersection of the grid, refusing any coverage by a continuous mapping.

"He shattered space."

Cyril looked at the blackboard.

"He doesn't allow us to look at it with a continuous perspective."

Arthur threw the chalk he was holding onto the lectern.

"That's robber logic."

Week 2.

Coffee cups were piled up on the corner table in the seminar room.

The equations on the blackboard were erased and rewritten, then erased again.

Since attacking the singularity proved ineffective, they decided to look for vulnerabilities in the overall system.

"Dimensional reduction".

Another senior editor pointed to the photocopy in his hand.

"When he performed matrix dimensionality reduction on page seventeen, he definitely missed the topological information on the high-dimensional manifold. This kind of brute-force cutting cannot be done without a price." Everyone started calculating frantically along this line of thought.

They constructed various high-dimensional spaces on draft paper, attempting to prove that Chen Zhuo's matrix would collapse at the moment of dimensional reduction.

Three whole days.

I only sleep four hours a day.

The atmosphere in the seminar room was so oppressive that it was hard to breathe.

David was rummaging through a pile of scrap paper, looking for something.

He raised his head, his eyes bloodshot.

"It didn't collapse," David said.

Cyril walked over and looked at the draft paper in David's hand.

"How did he handle it?" Cyril asked.

"Algebraic loops".

David swallowed hard.

"In the step before dimensionality reduction, he constructed a homology group. All the high-dimensional topological information that should have been lost in the dimensionality reduction was stuffed into this homology group, and then the entire group was directly removed using a matrix." Cyril was stunned.

He turned around and looked at the photocopies on the wall.

This is an extremely barbaric yet extremely ingenious technique.

Chen Zhuo didn't calculate how the higher-dimensional information changed. He simply made a sturdy box, put the information inside, and then threw the box and its contents into the lower-dimensional space. Not a single drop leaked.

Week 3.

The seminar room became unusually quiet.

No one went to the blackboard anymore to try to attack Chen Zhuo's logic.

They gave up looking for vulnerabilities.

They began to follow Chen Zhuo's handwriting, step by step.

Cyril took the chalk and slowly wrote Chen Zhuo's derivation process on the blackboard.

His movements were slow.

Like a traveler groping his way through an unfamiliar forest.

Arthur sat below, looking at the blackboard.

"How do we fill in that missing dimension?" Arthur asked.

In traditional continuous geometry, there is a natural deep pit here.

Calculus has reached a point where it can't go any further, and this is a problem they haven't been able to solve for the past thirty years.

Cyril did not answer.

He continued writing.

The section up to page twenty-nine.

Cyril's hand stopped.

He looked at the equation on the blackboard.

That's the formula for the number of intersections of two algebraic varieties.

Chen Zhuo, in his position, didn't even think about how to cross that deep pit.

He directly used the nodes of the discrete grid to lay a layer of steel bars on top of the deep pit.

Those intersection points fit perfectly into the missing dimensional positions.

Everything is closed.

There is no ambiguous approximation, no infinitesimal limit.

It's a straightforward, integer.

Cyril took two steps back.

He stared at the entire blackboard filled with derivations.

An unprecedented battle cry rose from the soles of my feet.

Continuous manifolds can never capture the torsion part, not because the tools are inadequate, but because continuous space itself cannot accommodate such discrete invariants. Chen Zhuo broke that soft sword.

Then he handed them a hammer.

The weekend of the fourth week.

The seminar room door remained closed.

In front of the last blackboard, Cyril held a small piece of chalk.

This is the last line of the forty-three-page paper.

Arthur sat in the first row.

David stood in the corner.

The other editors sat silently in their seats.

No one speaks.

The chalk scratched across the blackboard, making a monotonous hissing sound.

Cyril finished writing the last symbol.

A perfect discrete algebraic loop.

The result of the formula is exactly the same as the result on page 43 of the copy.

The chalk slipped from Cyril's fingers.

It fell onto the lectern and broke in two.

Cyril turned around.

He looked at his old colleagues, with whom he had worked for decades and who had dedicated their lives to the study of continuous differential geometry.

Cyril's face showed neither anger nor frustration.

Only a silent calm remained.

"I'm done calculating," Cyril said.

Arthur stared at the blackboard, his Adam's apple bobbing.

Is there a logical gap?

Arthur's voice was very low.

"You followed the calculations all along too..."

Cyril answered.

"From page one to page forty-three, it fits perfectly."

The seminar room fell silent once again.

David looked down at a research plan in his hand.

That was the research topic he was preparing to apply for funding for next month, which focused on approximating the Hodge conjecture using continuous mapping.

Now, this plan is just a pile of waste paper.

"We lost?"

Another editor spoke, his voice a little hoarse.

Cyril stepped down from his seat.

"The continuous manifold tools we have developed over the past thirty years are truly remarkable."

Cyril looked at everyone.

"In other areas of complex geometry, they remain the best weapons."

He paused.

Let's turn our attention back to the diagram of the discrete grid on the blackboard.

"But facing the whole Hodge conjecture."

Cyril took a deep breath.

"ZhuoChen proved that our tools have inherent structural flaws in this area."

"This road is blocked for us."

Arthur covered his face with his hands and rubbed it.

"He's blocked our way," Arthur said in a muffled voice.

"He not only blocked the road."

Cyril turned around.

"He also built a bridge, perfectly transforming the complex integral in continuous space into a finite summation on discrete lattice points."

Cyril walked to the table and picked up the curled-edge photocopy.

"Gentlemen."

Cyril looked at the paper in his hand.

"In the second half of algebraic geometry, the rules have changed."

"Let's go back and tidy up the bookshelves. We need to get used to doing math on discrete grid points."

No one refuted.

Having spent a whole month locked in this seminar room, they knew better than anyone the value of this assignment.

In the face of truth, seniority and school of thought are worthless.

Cyril placed the copy on the table.

"David".

Cyril called out.

David raised his head.

"Notify the editorial department to proceed with the layout," Cyril said.

"Should we attach the reviewers' comments and ask them to revise the introduction?" David asked.

That sentence contains structural redundancy, it's really glaring.

"No changes."

Cyril answered very decisively.

"Not a single word needs to be changed, not even the punctuation marks."

Cyril looked at the photocopy on the table.

"The full text will be published as the front page of the next issue of the Annals of Mathematics."

The regular meeting was held again.

It was the same conference room, with the same oak table.

Pierre sat at the very end.

Cyril placed the typed proof on the table.

The first one is Zhue Chen's paper.

Pierre looked at the sample, picked up the water glass in front of him, and took a sip.

The water is hot.

He looked at his old rivals sitting on either side of the long table.

They looked tired, but no one objected.

Pierre did not speak.

He didn't need to say anything.