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Chapter 105: Chapter 102: The Darkest Hour

Yan University, Men’s Dorm 35, Room 404.

Li Dong, carrying a massive computer box, nudged the dorm room door open with his shoulder.

The dorm was quiet. Liu Qiang and Chen Nan, the two study fiends, weren’t around. They had probably run off to the library or to audit a class in another department.

After all, here at Yuanpei College, aside from a few mandatory general education courses, everyone’s time was quite flexible. And unlike girls, the academic superstars didn’t feel the need to move in a pack just to go to the bathroom.

At the moment, Wang Hao was the only one in the room.

He was holding a thick, all-English math textbook, his brow furrowed time and again, as if he were stuck on a particular theorem.

Hearing the door open, he looked up and his eyes immediately landed on the large black box in Li Dong’s hands.

”Yo, Brother Dong, you bought a computer?”

Wang Hao put down his book.

After a few days of getting to know each other, they had learned Li Dong was the oldest in the dorm, so everyone had started calling him Brother Dong.

”Yeah,” Li Dong placed the box on the desk and let out a long breath.

”This thing is heavy as hell. My arms are sore from carrying it all the way from the subway station.”

Wang Hao moved closer to take a look.

”So thick? A gaming laptop?”

Wang Hao’s interest was suddenly piqued. He pulled over a chair and sat down.

”Hey, Brother Dong, what games do you usually play? Let me join you sometime.”

”I’ll tell you what, when my brain goes numb from doing math problems, I like to play some games to unwind.”

Li Dong was clearly taken aback by this.

’Brain goes numb from math? Unwind by playing games?’

’What a niche way to put it...’

Wang Hao continued.

”Lately, I’ve been really into the PC version of Honor of Kings. My favorite is picking the buffed-up Arthur, putting on Garen’s skin, charging into a crowd and hitting them with a ’Demacia!’ followed by a big spin. Mowing them down like that is a great way to de-stress.”

Listening to Wang Hao’s cobbled-together, Frankenstein’s monster of a description, Li Dong thought to himself,

’Dude, are you playing this on some cheap knock-off game site or something?’

But Li Dong was only focused on optimizing his program, so he didn’t bother correcting Wang Hao’s blasphemous gaming remarks. Instead, he explained.

”It’s not a gaming laptop. It’s a mobile workstation, a Dell Precision 7780.”

When Li Dong finished unpacking everything, the machine that was revealed made Wang Hao frown.

The mobile workstation was all sharp angles, with no flashy RGB lighting. It looked very business-like.

”This...” Wang Hao said, confused.

”Isn’t this just a business laptop? Why would you buy such a thick business laptop?”

The moment he heard the two words ”business laptop,” Li Dong was practically triggered.

”This is not a business laptop!” he corrected vehemently.

”It’s a mobile workstation! It has a standard voltage i9-13950HX processor and a professional graphics card. The cooling and performance on this thing are way better than your average gaming laptop, okay? Those thin and light business laptops aren’t even fit to hold a candle to it!”

Wang Hao looked at the inexplicably agitated Li Dong, then glanced back down at the laptop, which was completely devoid of any design sense.

”Uh... alright, if you say so.”

His interest in computer hardware was nowhere near his interest in mathematics.

Since they couldn’t play games together, he didn’t bother dwelling on the topic.

He turned around and picked up his English book again...

Li Dong plugged in the power cord and pressed the power button.

While waiting for the computer to boot up, he casually glanced at the book in Wang Hao’s hands.

*Commutative Algebra*, by Atiyah and Macdonald.

For a student planning to go into pure mathematics, especially in the direction of Algebraic Geometry, it was indeed a classic, god-tier book.

Li Dong had read through it completely before, but he felt the book’s learning path was too focused on pure ring theory. It was easy for beginners to get bogged down in trivial proofs and forget the ultimate goal of learning it, so he hadn’t followed the book’s pace.

”Atiyah-Macdonald’s *Commutative Algebra*?” Li Dong said casually as he plugged in a USB drive.

Wang Hao looked at Li Dong in surprise.

”Brother Dong, you know about this stuff? I thought you were into physics.”

”Physics and math are two sides of the same coin. I know a little, I know a little.”

Li Dong felt that since they were roommates, he couldn’t just let the guy go down the wrong path, so he said,

”This book is a classic foundation for commutative ring theory, but if your goal is to later delve into Algebraic Geometry, blindly grinding through this before moving on is not an efficient option.”

Wang Hao was speechless.

’This is the bible-tier textbook recognized by the math departments of every top university, and you’re telling me it’s not an efficient option?’

’Are you getting cocky?’

Li Dong looked at the Windows icon lighting up on the screen and spoke without turning his head.

”I’m not telling you to drop it. I’m suggesting you study it alongside Robin Hartshorne’s *Algebraic Geometry*.”

”Whatever commutative algebra concepts you’re missing, you can go back to A-M and fill in the gaps.”

”A-M breaks down every algebraic tool in great detail, but it doesn’t tell you where that tool is ultimately used.”

”If you start directly from Chapter two of Hartshorne on scheme theory, you’ll be learning the algebra with a geometric goal in mind. It will allow you to build the most direct bridge between your topological intuition and abstract algebra.”

Li Dong used the trackpad to open his C++ compiler.

”So, you see, Atiyah teaches you how to make the bricks, but Hartshorne lets you see the structure of the entire building, showing you where each brick should go. It’s a much more efficient way to learn.”

After saying that, Li Dong paid no more attention to Wang Hao. He was already starting to optimize the low-level code for the Riemann Zeta function.

But Wang Hao, sitting on the lower bunk, just felt his mind buzzing.

’Hartshorne’s *Algebraic Geometry*?’

’Holy shit! I’m a freshman who just started, and you’re telling me to go chew on the ultimate nightmare of the Algebraic Geometry field?’

Wang Hao stared at the back of Li Dong, who was completely absorbed in his coding, and roared internally.

’Are you fucking showing off, or are you just fucking showing off?’

’You think I don’t know about scheme theory and sheaf cohomology? I did math competitions! The question is, can I understand it *now*?’

...

「Evening.」

Yanjing University, National Key Laboratory of Advanced Computing and Key Software.

Academician Gao Wen was standing in front of a server rack, checking the latest monitoring data on the low-level cache hit rate.

Just then, the phone in his lab coat pocket suddenly started to vibrate.

Gao Wen took out his phone and glanced at the caller ID on the screen: [Huaxuan Technology Lin Wei].

A helpless, bitter smile appeared on his face.

’This kid... calling me is truly useless...’

Gao Wen sighed and pressed the answer button.

”Hello, President Lin.”

Lin Wei’s slightly apologetic voice came from the other end of the line.

”Academician Gao, I’m so sorry to be bothering you again at this hour.”

Gao Wen walked toward his office while saying with a laugh,

”Oh, what’s with the formalities between us? Don’t worry about ’bothering’ me. The moment you call, I know what it’s about.”

He sat down at his desk, and his tone grew earnest.

”But, President Lin, I’ve been upfront with you. This sort of thing really can’t be rushed.”

On the other end of the line, Lin Wei was standing before the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Huaxuan Technology Research and Development Headquarters, gazing at the Shanghai nightscape, his eyes filled with anxiety.

Of course he knew it couldn’t be rushed, but reality had a knife to his throat!

Ever since Li Dong had proposed the idea of ”synchronously tuning wavelengths to compensate for the refractive index” at the Huaxuan Cup, Huaxuan Technology’s R&D team had been frantically running simulations.

But when it came to the fluid-thermodynamic strong-coupling feed-forward control, Zhang Mo’s team had initially said one to two years, and now that had become two to three years. This made Lin Wei increasingly anxious. It would be one thing if there was no hope in sight, but hope was so clearly just ahead.

At an extremely high scanning speed of 1200mm/s, achieving sub-millisecond real-time numerical solutions for the immersion fluid’s Navier-Stokes equations was something that existing chip architectures and low-level algorithms simply could not support. The computational overhead was terrifying.

”Academician Gao...” Lin Wei’s voice sounded powerless over the phone.

”I just checked with several of our country’s top applied mathematics teams. They’ve also made no progress on the dimensionality reduction algorithms for this type of nonlinear partial differential equation.”

Lin Wei sighed.

”Academician Gao, we really can’t afford to wait any longer.”

”These past two years, the outside world has been putting us in a chokehold, and it’s getting vicious.”

”First, the extreme ultraviolet light sources were embargoed, and now they’re even blocking us on components for mature process immersion lithography machines.”

”That top domestic terminal manufacturing company... they can’t even release and sell their flagship products normally anymore.”

”Revenue across the entire industry chain, both upstream and downstream, has been slashed... It’s down a full 60% compared to the same period last year!”

Although Lin Wei didn’t name the company directly, it was crystal clear to Academician Gao.

The company being sanctioned by the full might of the nation across the ocean was currently experiencing its darkest hour. The heart of every Huaxia person involved in fundamental research was bleeding.

Listening to Lin Wei’s words, Academician Gao let out a long sigh.

”President Lin, how could I not know the difficulties you’re facing?”

Academician Gao’s voice carried a hint of the tragic heroism of a researcher.

”But in hardcore fields like semiconductors and fundamental computing, being one step behind means you have to put in ten, or even a hundred times the effort of the pioneers just to catch up.”

”At this stage, the physical bottleneck we face in hardware computing power is truly something we can’t break through in the short term.”

”But rest assured, my team and I will continue to grind away at this, no matter the cost.”

”Okay, Academician Gao. I’m counting on you!”

The call ended.

Academician Gao put down his phone, leaned back in his chair, and gazed out the window at the night sky, once again sighing deeply.

’Computing power... algorithms...’