My Study Chat Group is Full of Real Big Shots

Chapter 124: Chapter 121: World-Subverting Zero?

After saying goodbye to Liu Ruochuan, Li Dong returned to his dorm room.

The moment he opened the door, he heard a voice.

”Go! Get him!”

Wang Hao shouted.

Liu Qiang and Chen Nan shot over in a flash, grabbing Li Dong’s arms from both sides and holding him tight.

”My heroes, let’s talk this out! No need for violence!”

Li Dong struggled for a moment but couldn’t break free.

Wang Hao slowly got up from his chair, walked over to Li Dong, and pointed a finger at his nose with a look of utter grief.

”Brother Dong! How could you keep this from us? We’re crushed!”

Wang Hao began his tirade, pretending he had only just found out.

”You go and make such huge news, and we, your roommates, weren’t even the first to know!”

Chen Nan, who was squeezing Li Dong’s neck from the side, added indignantly, ”Exactly! We only found out when we heard Professor Zhang on the phone.”

Liu Qiang snorted and delivered the final verdict.

”Speak! How are you going to compensate our fragile hearts? There’s no way you’re getting out of this today without treating us to a huge meal!”

Li Dong looked at these three drama kings and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

”Alright, alright! My treat! It’s my treat, okay?!”

Li Dong begged for mercy repeatedly.

”Let go first, you’re going to break my neck! Barbecue stall off campus, order whatever you want!”

Hearing those four magic words, ”order whatever you want,” the three animals finally let go of Li Dong.

”Now that’s more like it. Let’s go!”

In truth, his three roommates did have some mixed feelings about Li Dong causing such a huge stir.

After all, they were all top scholars from their respective provinces. In high school, weren’t they all heavens’ favored children, the center of attention?

When a monster so much more brilliant than them suddenly appeared in their midst, a sense of disparity and a bit of sourness were inevitable.

But they weren’t like the ordinary students from Jiangcheng Seventh Middle School.

Those who made it into Yan University Yuanpei all had their own pride.

’You’re a badass, Li Dong, we admit it.’

’But we’re not bad either! You just took the first step thanks to your talent, but the road of academia is long. We’ll be right behind you!’

As they walked, Wang Hao watched Li Dong’s back and sneered inwardly.

’Brother Dong, oh, Brother Dong, you told us at the start of the semester that you liked physics best? Heh, your math skills are already making headlines in top international journals. That so-called ”love for physics” of yours was definitely a smokescreen to hide how sharp you are at math!’

’Just you wait. I’ll see you on the physics track!’

...

The four of them left through Yan University’s East Gate, bickering noisily, and found a bustling barbecue stall.

Before all the skewers had even arrived, a few bottles of ice-cold beer were already down, and the mood among the roommates completely loosened up.

Just as the three were taking turns toasting Li Dong and pestering him to teach them the Burning Technique, the plastic curtain of the barbecue joint was pushed aside.

A group of girls walked in, talking and laughing.

Liu Qiang, who was sitting by the aisle, had the sharpest eyes. He immediately started kicking Li Dong’s foot under the table, whispering and wiggling his eyebrows frantically.

”Brother Dong! Brother Dong! Look! The upperclassman with glasses!”

Li Dong was in the middle of gnawing on a lamb skewer. He looked up when he heard this.

It was really her.

The newcomer was none other than Qi Yu, the upperclassman from the chemistry department he had run into at the cafeteria.

She was wearing a simple white T-shirt today and was looking for a table with a few of her friends.

As if sensing his gaze, Qi Yu turned her head, and her eyes met Li Dong’s.

Both were slightly taken aback, then they gave each other a polite nod before looking away.

Qi Yu and her friends sat down at an empty table not far from Li Dong’s.

Liu Qiang nudged Li Dong with his elbow, exasperated.

”Brother Dong! What are you spacing out for? She looked at you! Hurry up and go say hi! Get her WeChat while you’re at it!”

Li Dong rolled his eyes speechlessly and looked at Liu Qiang as if he were an idiot.

”Are you crazy? We barely know each other, and you want me to run over with a beer and say hi? That’s called harassment, you know!”

Li Dong had absolutely no interest in this kind of pointless socializing.

He turned back and continued to shoot the breeze and have a drinking contest with Wang Hao and the others.

However, since they weren’t far apart, and despite the noisy environment of the food stall, Li Dong could faintly overhear the conversation at Qi Yu’s table.

”...For next month’s AICHE car model competition, are our power system and control group calibrated yet?”

”The reaction rate of the catalyst is still a bit unstable. We have to go back to the lab tomorrow morning to run a couple more sets of data...”

’AICHE? The Chem-E-Car competition from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers?’

Li Dong listened for a moment before losing interest. He raised his beer and clinked it against Chen Nan’s.

”Come on, drink up!”

...

Since he had drunk a bit too much the night before, and because he didn’t have an 8 a.m. class, Li Dong slept in until after ten the next day.

He was only woken up by his phone vibrating beside his pillow.

Li Dong groggily fumbled for his phone.

The caller ID read: [Mom].

He answered the call.

”Hello, Mom...”

From the other end of the line, he could faintly hear his uncle Li Yang’s loud voice berating someone: ”The tolerance on this non-standard part has to be exact! One more defect and I’m docking your bonuses!”

”Xiaodong, are you still in bed?” Li Qin’s voice came through.

”Yeah... I went out for a late-night snack with my roommates yesterday and had a little to drink.”

Li Dong rubbed his temples and sat up.

”Oh, you should drink less! You’re a university student, you need to take care of your health!”

Li Qin nagged him out of habit before asking her question.

”I have to ask you something. I was watching the news this morning, and it said some undergraduate from Yan University came up with some world-changing zero? Is the Li Dong they’re talking about you?”

Li Dong was speechless.

’What the heck is a world-changing zero!’

But he quickly realized his mom must be talking about his paper on the algorithm for the non-trivial zeros of the Riemann Zeta function.

”Mom, it’s called a non-trivial zero, not just ’zero’.”

Li Dong corrected her subconsciously, but he knew his mom wouldn’t understand these academic terms, so he said.

”You just need to know that the thing your son came up with is super amazing!”

Hearing her son confirm it himself, Li Qin laughed happily on the other end of the line.

”As long as it’s amazing! I knew my Xiaodong was the best!”

”Your uncle was just clamoring to hang a banner at the factory gate, but I stopped him.”

”Alright, you go back to sleep. Remember to eat breakfast on time!”

Li Dong: ...

After hanging up, Li Dong shook his head but couldn’t help but smile slightly..

Being the reason his family could stand tall with pride—it was a pretty good feeling.

After the call from his mom, Li Dong wasn’t sleepy anymore.

He casually opened the various news and social media apps on his phone, ready to see the public’s reaction.

What he saw gave him a shock.

First were the clickbait accounts, which would jump on any trending topic, whether they understood it or not.

”SHOCKING! 18-Year-Old Huaxia Freshman Single-Handedly Tears Apart a Century-Old Mathematical Curse! The Western Academic World Is Sleepless Tonight!”

”MIND-BLOWING! Yan University Genius Single-Handedly Boosts Supercomputer Power by Ten Thousand Times!”

”HUAXIA’S MIGHT! Silicon Valley Experts Exclaim: This is the East’s Hegemony in Foundational Algorithms!”

Reading these ridiculously exaggerated clickbait headlines, which all but hailed him as the reincarnation of Riemann, Li Dong just laughed and shook his head.

What amused him even more was the comment section under these articles.

[Jiangcheng Seventh Middle School alumnus reporting in! Li Dong was my high school classmate. He’s a super nice guy, he once explained a problem to us using four different methods!]

[Verified! I paid a hundred yuan for Brother Dong’s high school physics textbook. Now I put it under my pillow every night. I can feel its divine aura cleansing my intellect!]

’This can’t be Jiang Yizhou, can it...’

Li Dong wondered to himself.

Of course, besides the clickbait accounts, official media outlets had also weighed in.

The front-page editorial of the Guangming Daily featured an introduction that made the blood of countless science students boil with excitement:

[This is not merely a series of cold lines of code. It is a dialogue of the century, spanning a hundred years of time and space, between a young man from Huaxia and the great sage Bernhard Riemann.

In an era where we are constrained by others in foundational algorithms, this freshman’s breakthrough is like the first glimmer of light at dawn.

When the youth are strong, the nation is strong. In the starry ocean of science, the youth of Huaxia will ultimately leave behind the most brilliant of beacons!]

Li Dong took a deep breath and pressed his phone to his chest.

’Sigh... How did I get to be so outstanding?’

...

However, while Li Dong was in his dorm room, basking in his own glory, in a high-performance computing lab at the Beijing Institute of Technology, over twenty kilometers away from Yan University, a certain group was experiencing their darkest hour, a moment comparable to the end of the world.

And the representative of this group was none other than—Qin Fei.

”AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!”

Qin Fei grabbed his hair with both hands, tears on the verge of streaming down his face.

”Li Dong!!! Didn’t you say it wouldn’t be this fast?”

”Li Dong, you son of a bitch!!!”