My IQ has been increasing year by year.

It snowed all night in New Jersey.

The heating at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton kept the office warm all year round, while the cold wind outside, carrying snowflakes, occasionally lashed against the thick glass. Derian tossed the last bit of chalk in his hand into the blackboard tray and clapped his hands.

Chalk dust slowly fell under the dim yellow light of the wall lamp.

The blackboard was covered with formulas.

Starting from the far left and working his way to the far right, the handwriting went from neat and fluent at first, then became increasingly messy, finally stopping abruptly in front of a large mass of formulas filled with compensation parameters and limit symbols. Derian took two steps back, pulled out a wooden folding chair, and sat down.

He picked up the mug on the table with the Princeton logo and took a sip of the long-cold black coffee.

The bitter liquid flowed down his throat, but it did little to clear his mind.

"No, it's still too bulky."

Derian frowned as he looked at the jumble of calculations on the right side of the blackboard.

David, a postdoctoral researcher, stood at the other end of the blackboard, holding an eraser in his hand, his shoulders slumped.

In preparation for submitting the paper to Physical Review Letters, they had been working tirelessly in this office for several nights in a row, trying to optimize this patch. He had been working in this office for almost several weeks, and his dark circles were terrifying.

"Professor, this reorganization scheme is logically autonomous."

David pointed to a parameter on the blackboard.

"As long as this infinity is introduced as a cancellation term, the boundary of the manifold can converge mathematically. For the past two months, the preprint has been online, and no colleagues have raised any objections to this point." "No objections are because they can't find a better way either, so they have to accept it."

Derian placed the mug back on the table with a soft click.

"David, mathematics should be beautiful. When you need to force three compensating variables into an equation to maintain balance, it's like tying three rough ropes to a beautiful suspension bridge that's about to collapse."

Derian leaned back in his chair and sighed.

"The bridge didn't collapse, but it's no longer a bridge; it's become an ugly patch."

David did not refute.

He knew that Derian was right.

The highest level of theoretical physics is simplicity. The current theory, when it comes to this singularity problem, can't avoid the infinite collapse brought about by continuous calculus; it can only rely on this patchwork approach to get by. "Let's take a break," Derian rubbed his temples. "My brain's frozen. The more I look at the blackboard, the more my thoughts get stuck." David put down the eraser with a sigh of relief.

He walked to the desk in the corner, sat down in a slightly messy leather swivel chair, and flicked the mouse to wake the monitor. The screen lit up, its blue light illuminating David's tired face.

"Check your email."

"I'm leaning back in my chair with my eyes closed," said Derian.

"That preprint has been on arXiv for almost two months now. Maybe one of our old friends can offer some suggestions on a fresh perspective." David nodded and opened his email.

There were more than a dozen unread emails lying in my inbox.

Most of them were routine invitations to academic conferences, and a few were from graduate students in physics departments at other universities, usually asking about the derivation details of a fundamental formula in a preprint. David would generally reply to these emails on their behalf or simply archive them.

David scrolled down the line by line, pressing the mouse wheel.

His gaze lingered on the title of an email.

The title is simple, without any polite prefixes, directly quoting the preprint number they uploaded yesterday.

David glanced at the sender.

"Zhuo Chen".

The email address ends in .edu.cn.

"An email from China," David said casually. "China University of Science and Technology."

Derian kept his eyes closed, his fingers tapping lightly on the armrest of the chair.

"USTC? I have a few old friends there who work on condensed matter chemistry. What did they say in their letter?"

David opened the email.

The main text consists of only two lines, written in standard, concise academic English.

There was no flattery, no lengthy self-introduction; just a calm point out of computational redundancy in the renormalization step on page four of the preprint, accompanied by a PDF document as an alternative. "Just two sentences," David said, a hint of helplessness in his voice. "He said our fourth step could try algebraic substitution, and attached a two-page PDF." "Algebraic substitution?"

Derian's fingers stopped.

He opened his eyes and looked in the direction where David was.

"Does he think this is solving equations in high school math? Using algebraic substitution in a multidimensional manifold?"

"It's probably a Chinese student who's just started learning theoretical physics."

David shrugged and moved the mouse cursor over the PDF attachment.

"Every year we receive many emails from the public that overturn the theory of relativity or find the ultimate solution."

"Open it and take a look."

Derian stood up and stretched his stiff neck.

"Just consider it a break from the mental fog."

David double-clicked the attachment.

The PDF file popped up on the screen.

At the very top of the page, there wasn't even a title, just a massive matrix of integrals and limit symbols—the very singularity equation that had tormented them all night on the blackboard. David leaned back in his chair, resting his chin on his hand, his gaze following the first line of formula down the screen.

The first two steps are based on conventional assumptions.

Now we've reached the third step.

David's nonchalance disappeared.

He lowered his hand that was supporting his chin, and his body involuntarily leaned forward, almost touching the screen.

The previously continuous calculus derivation abruptly stopped in the third step.

Instead, a completely unfamiliar discrete algebraic geometric model was introduced.

In this model, the singularity, which originally approached zero infinitely and would cause the entire equation to collapse, was forcibly divided into countless discrete grids. David's eyes darted around as he frantically performed calculations and verifications in his mind.

That's impossible.

When continuity is broken, the topology of the manifold is completely torn apart.

David scrolled the mouse wheel down a little.

Step 4.

An extremely sophisticated mapping matrix appeared on the screen.

It's like a transparent bridge suspended in mid-air, seamlessly connecting the severed discrete grid.

There are no bloated compensation parameters, and no patches that forcibly suppress infinitely large values.

With a simple, deft twist, it untied the knot.

The only sound in the office was the faint whirring of the computer case fans.

David sat there, like a statue.

He didn't say anything, but frantically moved the mouse, dragged the document back to the top, and read it again word by word.

Derian walked to the coffee machine, ready to pour himself another half cup of coffee.

"What's wrong?" Derian asked casually, unable to hear anything behind him. "Did you get some basic concepts mixed up?"

David did not turn around.

"professor."

David's voice was tight, with a trembling quality, like someone suddenly breathing fresh air after a long period of oxygen deprivation.

"You'd better... come and take a look."

Derian paused for a moment, his hand holding the cup still.

He understands his students.

David is a proud and arrogant young man, so anything that makes him speak in this tone is definitely not a common-sense mistake.

Derian put down his cup, walked to the computer desk, and stood behind David's chair.

"Look here," David said, pointing with a trembling finger to the third line of formula on the screen. "He cut off the continuous integral."

Derian frowned.

He took out his reading glasses from his pocket, put them on, and bent down.

The moment his eyes met the screen, Derian's breath hitched slightly.

David didn't need to explain; his eyes were like a sophisticated scanner, instantly grasping the logic of the first two lines.

As his gaze fell upon the discrete matrix, Derian's fingers unconsciously tightened their grip on the back of the leather chair, producing a very slight creaking sound. What kind of twisted logic was this?

In this office, they were accustomed to repairing the tower using the methods of bricklayers.

The person on the screen simply removed the load-bearing wall at the base of the tower, then used an invisible thin thread to suspend the entire tower in mid-air. Brutal.

It could even be described as unreasonable.

But ironically, it is perfectly autonomous in logic.

Derian reached out and took the mouse from David's hand.

Instead of scrolling down, he stared intently at the mapping matrix, his mind racing with calculations.

One minute.

Two minutes.

three minutes.

The air in the office seemed to freeze.

Outside the window, the wind and snow were raging, but inside it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop.

Derian slowly released the mouse.

He straightened up, took off his reading glasses, and turned to look at the blackboard.

The renormalization patch they had painstakingly pieced together on the blackboard, which they were so proud of, now looked clumsy and ridiculous against the backdrop of the two pages on the screen, like a monster covered in tumors. "This is impossible..." David muttered to himself, "How did he come up with this? Using discrete algorithms to solve continuous manifolds? This is entirely a matter of low-level computer logic, not a path from traditional theoretical physics." "But it solved it."

Derian's voice was low, as if he was suppressing some huge wave.

He walked to the blackboard and picked up the eraser.

Without any hesitation.

Derian raised his hand and, stroke by stroke, wiped away the bloated formula that occupied half of the right side of the blackboard until it was completely clean.

White chalk dust fell down in a flurry.

After wiping, Derian turned around, looked at the clean half of the blackboard, and let out a long breath.

It's like a mountain has been lifted off my shoulders.

"That's mathematics."

Derian stared at the screen, a gleam in his eyes that seemed to reflect the light of encountering a kindred spirit.

"David, we've been wandering around the maze for three months, getting battered and bruised, while this guy just flipped over the maze wall." David swallowed hard.

"Professor, who exactly is this Zhuo Chen?"

Derian strode back to the computer, pulled up a chair, and sat down.

"Check it out, check it out immediately."

Derian pointed to the email address on the screen.

"Huazhong University of Science and Technology, check if their mathematics or physics departments have recently recruited any internationally renowned experts, or perhaps some reclusive academicians?" David quickly opened his browser.

The sound of the keyboard clicking was particularly crisp in the quiet office.

"ZhuoChen... Chen Zhuo? Chen Zhuo?"

David entered the name and institution into Google's search box, limiting his search to academic paper databases.

The page scrolled around a few times.

The results that popped up were few and far between. There were a few people with the same name, but they were either in chemical materials or clinical medicine. None of their resumes could be linked to this kind of cutting-edge algebraic geometry theory. "Nothing." The more David searched, the stranger it seemed. "There is absolutely no record of this person publishing in physics or mathematics in the database. It's like he just appeared out of thin air." Derian frowned.

"It can't just appear out of thin air."

Derian looked at the two pages of the meticulously formatted PDF document.

"This seasoned approach, this style of not wasting a single word, definitely comes from a veteran who has spent half his life in academia and is quite proficient in mathematical tools." He pointed to the document.

"Young people doing academic work like to show off their skills and complicate simple problems to demonstrate their depth, but only those who have truly seen through the essence can write such pure formulas that strip away all pretense." David nodded in agreement.

He already pictured in his mind an elderly Chinese scholar, dressed in a Zhongshan suit, with gray hair, silently working on a blackboard for decades. "Reply to this...Professor Chen."

Derian stood up, his tone becoming extremely serious.

He didn't use "student" or the usual "Dr."; in his mind, he had already placed the other person on an equal footing, or even higher. "Use my personal email address."

Derian paced back and forth in his office, dictating as he walked.

"David, you type it."

David immediately switched back to the email reply interface and placed his hands on the keyboard.

"Dear Professor Chen," Derian said slowly, carefully choosing his words, "we have carefully reviewed your letter and attachments, and this is a truly remarkable response." David typed rapidly on the keyboard, translating Derian's words into rigorous written English.

"We tried to patch the boundaries using traditional methods, but your discrete algebra model, like a scalpel, precisely removed the lesion. We sat in front of the blackboard for two months, but your two pages showed us the light."

Derian stopped and turned to look at the heavy snow outside the window.

"If you have the time in the near future, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton would very much like to invite you for an in-depth academic visit. I also have a few preliminary ideas regarding the further development of this matrix, which I hope to discuss with you in person."

Before David pressed send after typing the last line, he looked up at Derian.

"Professor, you're sending a formal visitation invitation right away? We haven't even verified his identity yet."

"Academic work doesn't require identity verification." Derian pointed to the remaining formula on the screen. "This document is his best proof of identity. Send it." The notification sound of the email being successfully sent rang out in the office.

Derian walked back to the coffee machine, poured himself a full cup of coffee, and held the cup, staring at the blackboard that had been half-erased. Across the ocean.

That email, carrying the academic respect of a Princeton professor and enough to cause a storm in China, silently slipped through the undersea fiber optic cable into the campus network server of the University of Science and Technology of China. It lay quietly in the inbox of a newly registered user named "Zhuo Chen".

Nobody clicked on it.