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Chapter 197: Chapter 193: Not Yet 40, the Perfect Age to Dare

The moment Li Dong spoke, everyone in Sunshine Hall was confused.

It wasn’t because Li Dong had called someone to the stage.

Inviting a collaborator onstage to elaborate on a point was a common occurrence at academic seminars.

It was because Li Dong’s words held a hidden meaning, one that no one dared to dwell on.

*Come up and explain it to Professor Zhou.*

Explain what?

Explain the underlying logic of the p-adic integral path deformation scheme?

So why couldn’t Zhou Shenzhi, the paper’s second author, explain it?

Was it because he wasn’t the one who came up with the construction?

There had been rumors that the paper’s core contributions had come from someone else, but there was never any hard evidence.

And now, with that single sentence, Li Dong was gently lifting a corner of that fig leaf in front of the world’s leading number theorists.

Everyone was also intrigued by the ”Teacher Yang” Li Dong had mentioned.

”Teacher Yang? Which one?”

”Isn’t Li Dong’s advisor Tian Gang? Since when was there a Teacher Yang?”

Liu Ruochuan couldn’t believe it. ’?! Is this academic bullying?’

”Anyone Li Dong would call to the stage by name in a setting like this couldn’t be a nobody, right?” someone guessed.

”Could it be Yang Zhenning?”

The person next to him rolled their eyes.

”Yang Zhenning is a physicist. What would he be doing at a number theory conference talking about p-adic integral path deformation? Are you crazy?”

As the crowd murmured amongst themselves,

a middle-aged man, around forty years old, slowly rose from his seat in the back.

He first turned to look at his wife and daughter sitting beside him.

The little girl tilted her head back, looking up at him with a confused expression.

”Dad?”

The man smiled and reached out to ruffle his daughter’s hair.

Then he looked at his wife.

His wife’s eyes were slightly red-rimmed, but she still gave him a firm nod.

Yang Shengguo took a deep breath, turned, and started walking toward the stage.

...

In the front row, Zhou Shenzhi hadn’t paid much mind at first.

He assumed Li Dong was calling up a collaborator.

But as Yang Shengguo drew closer,

Zhou Shenzhi got a clear look at his face.

And then...

His expression changed drastically.

He hadn’t seen that face in nearly ten years.

He thought he would never see the man again.

But there he was, walking toward the stage.

...

Onstage, Li Dong smiled at the audience and spoke.

”Allow me to make an introduction.”

”This is my high school math teacher, Yang Shengguo.”

”He has a very profound understanding of the underlying logic behind the p-adic integral path deformation scheme.”

The audience was completely stunned.

”A high school math teacher?”

”What kind of joke is Li Dong playing?”

”What could a high school math teacher possibly have to do with the Langlands Program?”

Murmurs rippled through the audience.

However, a few people had a more subtle reaction.

A middle-aged professor stared at Yang Shengguo for several seconds, then gasped so sharply you’d think he’d inhaled the Langlands Program.

”Isn’t that... Yang Shengguo?”

The person next to him asked curiously.

”Yang Shengguo? Who’s he?”

The man gave a wry smile, his voice filled with a complex mix of emotions.

”He was the Li Dong of our generation.”

That might have been a slight exaggeration.

But it was undisputed that over a decade ago, Yang Shengguo was indeed a top-tier genius among the young scholars of his time.

As an undergraduate, he had independently published a paper in the *Journal of Mathematics* on the spectral decomposition of Hecke operators for modular forms. He was only a junior at the time.

During his master’s studies, he published two more papers in *Science China: Mathematics*: one on the explicit construction of the Hodge-Tate decomposition of p-adic Galois representations over local fields, and another on the mean-value estimate of the zero distribution of GL₂ automorphic L-functions in the critical strip.

Any one of those three papers today would be more than enough to get a master’s student direct admission into a Ph.D. program at a top Chinese university.

But back then, Yang Shengguo’s ambitions went far beyond that.

His final research topic was the p-adic integral path deformation scheme.

”What happened to him?” someone asked.

The middle-aged professor fell silent for a few seconds.

”He just disappeared.”

”I heard he had a falling out with his advisor. And that advisor... was Professor Jiang Yubai.”

...

Yang Shengguo stepped onto the stage.

He stood beside Li Dong, shorter by more than half a head.

Li Dong turned to look at Zhou Shenzhi.

”Professor Zhou, I’m going to have my teacher explain to you the underlying logic of the p-adic integral path deformation scheme, as well as the specific line of thought behind the layer-by-layer recursive filtered embedding.”

Zhou Shenzhi didn’t say a word.

His jaw was clenched tight, and beads of sweat were forming on his forehead.

Seeing his silence, Li Dong continued.

”It seems Professor Zhou isn’t interested. In that case, let’s move on to something he *is* interested in.”

Li Dong turned to Yang Shengguo.

”Teacher Yang.”

”Yes.” Yang Shengguo nodded.

He took a long, hard look at a certain seat in the front row.

Jiang Yubai.

Their eyes met.

Then he looked away.

Then, Li Dong spoke. His voice wasn’t loud, but everyone in the audience heard him with perfect clarity.

”Teacher Yang, let’s work together today and push the ramification index of local-global compatibility for automorphic representations from e_v≤2 to e_v=3.”

The moment he said that,

the entire hall erupted.

Jiang Yubai, who was sitting in the front row, finally lost his carefully maintained composure. A distinct change washed over his face.

His lips pressed into a thin line, and his fingers, resting on the armrest, dug deep into the leather.

Pushing the proof from e_v≤2 to e_v=3.

His research group had been working on this very problem for more than a decade.

More than a decade.

Countless days and nights. Countless dead ends. Countless times they thought they’d seen a glimmer of light, only to be dragged back into the dark.

And now, Li Dong was standing on stage, casually suggesting they ”push from e_v≤2 to e_v=3.”

How could he not be choking on his own fury?

Voices of disbelief rose from the audience as well.

”Derive it live, on stage? From e_v=2 to e_v=3? Has he lost his mind?”

If Li Dong had merely claimed he could achieve this result before Jiang Yubai, they might have believed him. After all, the young man had already proven his genius.

But to derive it right here on stage?

No one believed it was possible.

In fact, it wasn’t just the audience who was in disbelief.

Even Yang Shengguo himself was stunned.

When he heard Li Dong say ”let’s push it through together,” his first reaction wasn’t excitement, but...

’Has this kid lost his mind?’

He was absolutely confident that he understood the underlying logic of the p-adic integral path deformation scheme more thoroughly than anyone else.

Every construction, every path, every single step of the deformation in that original scheme—he had derived it all himself, bit by bit, in the library at Capital University.

He knew the general direction for pushing the proof from e_v≤2 to e_v=3. He could even faintly see the outline of the path forward.

’But to do it on stage? In such a short amount of time?’

’I can’t do it.’

But Li Dong looked at him and said with utter seriousness,

”Teacher Yang, trust me.”

”You’re not even forty. This is the age for taking bold chances.”

Yang Shengguo looked at Li Dong, then glanced down at his former mentor and senior colleague in the audience.

He suddenly smiled.

”That’s right... I’m not even forty,” he murmured. ’Have I lost that much drive? I’m not even as daring as my own student.’

Then he turned and looked at Li Dong.

”Alright then. Let’s push it through together.”

Yang Shengguo reached out and took the laser pointer from Li Dong’s hand.

Li Dong smiled.

He turned, picked up a marker, and wrote a line of text across the top of the whiteboard.

GL₂→ GL₃: A Generalization Path for the Local-Global Compatibility of Automorphic Representations in the Case of Ramification Index e_v=3

Then he looked at Yang Shengguo.

”Teacher Yang, the layer-by-layer recursive filtered embedding. Why don’t you start us off with the anchoring conditions for the first layer?”