Chapter 319 - 175: A Stone from Another Mountain (Part 2)

Chapter 319: Chapter 175: A Stone from Another Mountain (Part 2)

"Digging coal? What are you talking about? This is the scent of a man, got it?"

Dayong grinned, grabbing the largest pork rib with his chopsticks and stuffing it into his mouth. He mumbled indistinctly.

"I spent a few hours in the workshop this afternoon. Just finished the baseplate Teacher Liu asked for."

Chen Zhuo glanced up at Dayong, then at the elated faces of Zhao Peng and Zheng Nan across from him.

He’d seen the two PhD students a few times before. Usually, around the Science Department, they looked like they were carrying the weight of the world, tormented by their research projects. This kind of genuine relief was a rare sight.

"You solved it?"

Chen Zhuo asked softly.

"We solved it!"

Zhao Peng jumped in first. He pushed up the glasses on his nose, his eyes filled with genuine awe as he looked at Dayong.

"You guys have no idea what a crazy thing Dayong did in the workshop today. The precision drift problem with that baseplate... Old Zheng and I have been racking our brains over it for almost a week. We tried every filtering algorithm we could think of, but Dayong fixed it in a single afternoon."

Zhao Peng pointed at the pork ribs on the table.

"These ribs are on me today. Dayong, eat your fill! If it’s not enough, we’ll get more!"

Chu Ge’s interest was piqued. He even stopped eating his meal.

"What baseplate? How did you end up working on a baseplate?"

Dayong gave a simple, honest laugh, spit out a bone, and waved his hands dismissively.

"Come on, I didn’t solve anything. It was just a stroke of blind luck."

Dayong picked up his bowl of seaweed and egg drop soup and took a huge gulp, letting out a contented sigh.

"Don’t listen to Senior Brother Zhao’s hype. These past few days, I’ve nearly worn out my copy of *Mechanics of Materials*. All that calculus and those thermal stress tensor formulas... it was enough to make my brain dry up."

As he spoke, a self-deprecating look appeared on his face.

He looked at Chen Zhuo and Lu Jia.

"I’m not just being modest. You guys have the kind of brains that can figure out all that math. I really can’t. My brain’s too slow. The moment I see those squiggly symbols, I get sleepy. I could never calculate exactly how much that piece of iron would expand when heated."

Dayong put down his soup bowl and gestured with his hands in mid-air, his tone conveying a sense of helplessness against the uncooperative nature of the material itself.

"Think about it. When the iron heats up, the atoms inside just expand and push against each other all willy-nilly. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. No matter how well you build the external frame, it’s still fighting itself on the inside. What can you do?"

Lu Jia pushed up her glasses, listening intently.

"So what happened? If you couldn’t calculate it, how did you fix it?" Chu Ge pressed.

"If I couldn’t figure it out by calculating, I just decided not to calculate it at all."

Dayong picked up a second pork rib, speaking nonchalantly.

"I couldn’t win a direct fight, so I found another way. It wanted to expand, right? So I went to the scrap heap, found an aluminum rod, and fitted it inside the steel tube."

Dayong put down his chopsticks and held up his hands. Above the table, in the space between the dishes, he clasped them together tightly and then demonstrated a pulling motion in opposite directions.

"The book says aluminum expands faster and steel expands slower. So I just let them expand however they wanted inside, let them fight each other."

Dayong’s eyes were fixed on his two hands, his voice rising slightly with excitement.

"The aluminum pulls in, the steel pushes out. The two forces... they completely canceled each other out inside!"

Dayong released his hands, picked up his rice bowl, and took a big mouthful of rice.

"It could be a total mess on the inside, it didn’t matter. The outermost load-bearing frame was locked in place by those canceling forces. It couldn’t move a single micrometer!"

The cafeteria remained noisy.

Not far away, a few guys were loudly arguing about which internet cafe to book for an all-nighter.

A lady at the service window was banging an iron basin, shouting that they were out of sweet and sour fish.

Chu Ge was just about to mock Dayong’s method as a classic example of "backyard steelmaking."

Chen Zhuo’s chewing stopped.

His chopsticks, holding a piece of braised pork, hovered over his plate.

His gaze had been on Wang Dayong’s face, but in the instant Dayong said the words "fight each other," "canceled out," and "outermost frame was locked,"...

...the focus in Chen Zhuo’s eyes dissolved.

The surrounding noise of several hundred people eating and chatting was, to Chen Zhuo’s auditory system, like someone had suddenly thrown a master switch.

The sounds receded in an instant,

fading away,

becoming a vast expanse of white noise with a faint hum.

In that moment, his brain actively severed all superfluous perception of the outside world. All his processing power, all his neurons, were redirected to the mathematical labyrinth deep within his consciousness.

Dayong’s two hands transformed in his mind into countless discrete nodes oscillating in a high-dimensional space.

Aluminum pulling in, steel pushing out.

Positive error, negative error.

Internal variables fighting and canceling each other out.

In Chen Zhuo’s eyes, this was pure, unadulterated algebraic geometry!

It was a closed chain in a homology group!

The result of the boundary operator acting on the internal elements was zero!

Dayong said: The outermost frame was locked in place, it couldn’t move a single micrometer.

’Yes.’

’Why bother with the oscillations inside? Why obsess over smoothing the non-convergent singularities on the boundary of a continuous domain?’

’So what if calculus fails? So what if the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem can’t be applied?’

’As long as I construct a global topological invariant.’

’As long as I find that Betti number.’

’The framework of discrete topology itself is absolutely conserved!’

’No matter how infinitely the internal errors diverge, as long as they cancel each other out under the mapping of the homology group, the final global boundary will be completely consumed by this topological structure! Completely locked down!’

’There’s no need to prove convergence at all!’

’Because in discrete algebraic space, it is, by its very nature, impregnable!’

A crisp sound rang out.

The chopsticks in Chen Zhuo’s hand had fallen straight onto his plate, splattering a bit of tomato.

The sudden noise startled Chu Ge, who had been about to speak.

Dayong also stopped chewing, his mouth full of food, and stared blankly at Chen Zhuo.

Chen Zhuo’s breathing had grown noticeably heavier.

He didn’t look at anyone, but suddenly reached out.

His hand shot past his own plate and snatched a used piece of printer paper from beside Lu Jia, which she had been using as a bone napkin.

The edge of the paper was stained with a bit of grease.

Chen Zhuo didn’t care in the slightest.

He pressed the paper down with his left hand and, with his right, quickly pulled a black gel pen from his pants pocket.

No preamble, no explanation.

Chen Zhuo leaned directly over the table, the tip of his pen landing heavily on a blank space of the scrap paper.

The pen tip flew across the rough surface, the force so great that you could even hear the faint sound of the paper tearing.

He wasn’t writing calculus.

He wrote down a massive boundary operator.

Following that was a dense series of algebraic matrix mapping symbols and an H_n(X) representing a homology group.

Chen Zhuo’s writing speed was incredibly fast.

He didn’t even seem to have time to pause and think.

The logical loops in his mind, which had been completely cleared by Dayong’s single sentence, poured out through the tip of his pen like a flood bursting through a dam.

Matrix cancellation of positive and negative errors.

The locking-in of the global topological invariant.

The final formula was written.

Chen Zhuo’s wrist came to a sharp halt as he drew a small square on the paper, signifying the end of the proof.

He stopped writing.

The entire process took no more than thirty seconds.

The others at the table looked at each other, not daring to breathe. They watched him quietly as he leaned over the table, staring intently at the tattered paper covered in symbols.

One second.

Two seconds.

Chen Zhuo’s shoulders suddenly trembled slightly.

Chen Zhuo looked up.

His eyes were frighteningly bright, as if two fires were burning in their depths.

He reached out, grabbed Dayong’s broad, sturdy shoulders, and shook him twice.

"Dayong."

Chen Zhuo’s voice was excited yet completely certain.

"This meal... you’ve been a huge help."

Dayong, who still had a piece of cartilage from a pork rib in his mouth, was shaken into a daze.

"Huh?"

Dayong swallowed the cartilage with a GULP and stared wide-eyed at Chen Zhuo.

Chen Zhuo didn’t explain algebraic topology, nor did he explain homology groups.

He just pulled back his hand, snatched the torn scrap of paper from the table, folded it carefully, and clutched it tightly in his palm.

He had to go to the School of Mathematics.

Right now.

The blackboard in Li Jianming’s office was going to be put to good use tonight.

Dayong held his chopsticks aloft, staring blankly at Chen Zhuo’s back as he disappeared through the cafeteria doors.

He turned his head, looked at Zhao Peng, and then at Zheng Nan.

"Senior Brother Zhao..."

Dayong scratched his messy hair.

"What’s up with Xiaozhuo? I helped him just by eating some pork ribs?"