Chapter 152 did not diverge.

The footsteps at the end of the corridor gradually became clearer.

A cold wind swept across Zhou Qiping's profile, and the air in the office seemed to freeze.

He leaned back in the large leather chair, his hands clasped on the table, his gaze sweeping over stacks of documents and locking onto the tightly closed door.

On the side sofa, Fang Shi, the vice dean of the physics department, sat upright, the blue review report in his hand slightly curled from excessive force. His gaze shifted uneasily between the doorknob and Li Jianming, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down.

Standing directly in front of the desk, Li Jianming's breathing became increasingly heavy.

Those bloodshot eyes, etched with the marks of five months of toil, stared intently at the doorway, while her hands, hanging limply at her sides, unconsciously clenched and unclenched.

Li Jianming had sketched that person's image in his mind countless times.

C. Zhuo, who can write discrete algebraic matrices and single-handedly break the computational deadlock.

Even though he had just seen the photo on the fax paper a few minutes earlier, when the real person was about to push open the door, he still felt as if a stone was pressing on his chest, and his heart was pounding wildly in his chest.

The footsteps stopped.

After a two-second silence, the heavy wooden door was pushed open a crack, and the light from the corridor streamed in through the gap, casting a long, slanted shadow on the dark wooden floor.

The door was pushed open completely.

There was none of the composed aura of a high school luminary that I had expected, nor any oppressive sense of arrogance.

Standing at the door was a boy wearing a clean white collared short-sleeved T-shirt, the clothes were washed very neatly, the collar was casual but not too tight, and he was holding a black softcover notebook with a silver mechanical pencil clipped to it.

A breeze swept through, ruffling the wisps of hair on his forehead and revealing a pair of clear, calm eyes.

Twelve years old.

He was only half a child, his body had not yet fully developed, and he had the thinness typical of his age.

If you were to bump into him on campus, anyone would assume he was just a middle school student from the faculty and staff housing compound, out playing during summer vacation. But when he stepped into the vice president's office, a symbol of the university's administrative power and academic authority, the stark visual contrast caused the technocrats and senior professors inside to momentarily lose their composure.

Zhou Qiping unconsciously leaned forward and pressed his reading glasses down on the bridge of his nose.

He had seen countless people and too many so-called geniuses. Those outstanding students in the gifted youth program were either arrogant and carried an undisguised haughtiness, or they were immersed in their own world and appeared dull and aloof.

But this child is different.

He walked into the room, his gaze sweeping around calmly. He showed no stage fright, nor any awkwardness in front of the school leaders, as if he were walking into a lecture hall where he usually taught.

Chen Zhuo closed the door behind him. He looked at Zhou Qiping, then at the tense-faced Taoist priest, and finally at Li Jianming, who was staring intently at him. The atmosphere inside the room was strangely oppressive.

Chen Zhuo stopped, bent down slightly, and spoke in a clear and gentle voice:

"Hello, Principal Zhou, Dean Fang, and teachers."

No one spoke.

The three people, whose combined age was nearly two hundred, stood frozen in place as if they had been frozen in place.

The sorcerer was the first to react. He stood up abruptly, strode over to Chen Zhuo's side, and subtly blocked Li Jianming's view with his body. His tone revealed a protective urgency.

"Xiao Zhuo, you just came from the lab, right? Did I make the trip and delay your parameter adjustments?"

He tried to steer the conversation toward the physics department, but Li Jianming didn't give him the chance.

"Get out of the way."

Li Jianming's voice was hoarse, like sandpaper rubbing against wood. He ignored the sorcerer, his eyes fixed on the obsession that had tormented him for five months. He walked past the sorcerer and went straight to Chen Zhuo.

As Chen Zhuo got closer, he could see the fine beads of sweat on the old professor's hair and smell the strong aroma of tea accumulated from years of staying up late. Li Jianming's hands were trembling.

He pulled out a sheet of frayed draft paper, densely covered with black and blue derivations, and handed it directly to Chen Zhuo. "Li Jianming! What are you doing!"

The sorcerer grew anxious and shouted in a low voice.

"He's only a sophomore! His head is full of fluid dynamics models. You're trying to force him with that dead-end graph theory from the math department? These aren't even in the same field!"

"Shut up!"

Li Jianming abruptly shook off the sorcerer's hand with astonishing strength. He turned to stare at the sorcerer, his eyes bloodshot.

"Not in the same field? Who wrote the matrices in that book 'Discrete Mathematics'? Who created that set of nonlinear compensation terms that forcibly cut off continuous variables? Fang Shi, stop talking nonsense to me, that's the purest theoretical mathematics! If he can write out the compensation terms, he can understand my Laplace expansion!" After saying that, he looked at Chen Zhuo again, the violence in his eyes faded, replaced by an almost pleading urgency.

This academic luminary shed all pretense in front of the twelve-year-old boy.

"Student Chen,"

Li Jianming tried to keep his voice steady, but the paper in his hand was still trembling.

"I've read your article, and now I've encountered a wall."

He pointed to a series of items circled in red in the equation.

"This is a pure number conjecture about a complex network topology. The framework is fine, but when we get to the Laplace matrix expansion of the core nodes, the number of terms starts to explode by factorial order at the eighth order. Singular terms proliferate wildly. I tried to simplify it using traditional spectral theory, but I couldn't find a general term formula. They cannot cancel each other out, and in the end, it becomes a completely divergent infinite series."

He looked at Chen Zhuo, his voice filled with deep weariness.

"Over the past few months, I've manually checked the first two hundred items with my students, but we can't find any convergence pattern. Can you help me figure out how this explosion... is supposed to converge?"

The office fell silent once again.

The sorcerer stopped interfering, and Zhou Qiping held his breath and watched.

Chen Zhuo lost his previous composure.

Faced with this derivation, which embodies the hard work of an old professor, he did not give a perfunctory answer, nor did he put on airs.

He solemnly accepted the heavy paper and said in a low voice.

"Teacher, please wait a moment."

In the quiet room, only the soft rustling of turning pages could be heard.

Thirty seconds passed.

Chen Zhuo's gaze swept across the complex summation symbols and subscripts, line by line.

Li Jianming stood rooted to the spot, barely daring to breathe, his heart pounding in his chest.

Two minutes later, Chen Zhuo finished flipping through the core pages, tidied the papers, and looked up at Li Jianming.

"How is it?"

Li Jianming's voice trembled slightly.

Is it possible to find a general term formula to cancel out singular terms?

Chen Zhuo looked at him with clear eyes, stating the facts impartially.

"Professor Li, your previous derivation was extremely rigorous, with no logical flaws, but..."

Chen Zhuo pointed to the eighth-order expansion.

"Following the traditional spectral theory, the factorial-level proliferation of singular terms is an inevitable property of this continuous topological space. As long as it is within the framework, it is destined to diverge, and there is no general term formula at all."

Chen Zhuo was very frank.

"This is a logical dead end, and I can't solve it by following this path."

As soon as he finished speaking, the Taoist priest's tense shoulders relaxed instantly.

It's good that it can't be solved. If it can't be solved, it means that Chen Zhuo is still within the realm of humanity, and Lao Li can give up.

The light that had just ignited in Li Jianming's eyes was extinguished instantly, as if doused with cold water.

His back slumped down visibly.

Five months of day and night, half a cabinet full of drafts, ultimately turned into an insurmountable wall.

He gave a bitter laugh, his voice weak.

"It seems like this really is a dead end. I was desperate and grasped at straws. Even the person who proposed matrix dimensionality reduction says it can't be simplified. This traditional spectral theory has indeed reached its limit..."

However, just as he was about to pull back the draft paper, Chen Zhuo subtly twisted his wrist, deftly avoiding his hand.

Li Jianming was stunned.

Chen Zhuo held the stack of papers, twirling a silver pencil halfway between his fingers, his voice remaining calm:

"Teacher, in traditional algebraic graph theory, this is indeed a dead end, but the fact that we cannot solve the general formula for this space does not mean that there is no room for further derivation of this problem."

Li Jianming's outstretched hand suddenly froze. His dimmed eyes instantly shone with a new light.

"You... what did you say?"

Li Jianming raised his voice.

Even the Taoist priest who was standing by, ready to watch the show, changed his expression.

Chen Zhuo ignored the reactions of others, lowered his head slightly, and focused his gaze back on the draft paper.

"Professor Li, you have read the short article I published in Discrete Mathematics."

"I've seen it! I've seen it countless times!"

Li Jianming nodded repeatedly.

"You constructed a discrete algebraic matrix and forcibly cut off the infinite series with a nonlinear compensation term. My question is, can your matrix be applied to my graph theory model?"

Chen Zhuo gently shook his head.

"It cannot be applied directly."

Chen Zhuo's answer was straightforward.

"My paper deals with discrete, independent nodes, while your research focuses on continuous, complex networks. The boundary conditions of the two are completely different. If you force that algebraic matrix into the network, it will cause the entire topology to collapse."

The light that had just appeared in Li Jianming's eyes dimmed again.

"This can't be applied... then... how do we solve it?"

Chen Zhuo walked to Zhou Qiping's large mahogany desk, laid out the draft paper, picked up his pen, leaned over, and fixed his gaze on the densely packed strange items.

The three professors' eyes followed the movement of the pen tip, and the air was so quiet that only the scratching sound of pencils rubbing against paper could be heard.

"Teacher, you have been trying to find patterns in the original continuous topological network."

As Chen Zhuo spoke, he wrote down a basic conversion function in the blank space.

"In this dimension, the continuous proliferation of singular terms is a spatial characteristic, but what if we abandon the practice of calculating the general term formula?"

He added a group space symbol, his voice was calm yet every word carried immense weight.

"If we introduce a homology group mapping at the eighth node, instead of looking for cancellation rules, we can project these continuous variables as a whole into a completely new discrete algebraic space through the homology mapping."

The pen tip touched the symbol.

"In the new space, the originally divergent singular terms will lose their continuity support. Under the new algebraic structure, they do not need to be canceled out, but will collapse spontaneously."

Chen Zhuo put down his pen and looked at Li Jianming.

"At that point, you no longer need to worry about infinite series. You just need to construct a closure in the new discrete space and connect the logic end to end."

Dead silence.

The sorcerer was completely bewildered; this theory of homology groups that transcends dimensions was beyond his scope of application. Although Zhou Qiping did not understand its meaning, he looked at Li Jianming.

At this moment, Li Jianming seemed to be frozen in place.

He stared intently at the line of pencil writing.

Homology group mapping.

Overall projection.

Spontaneous collapse.

These words were like a thunderbolt, splitting open the mountain of combined explosions that had been plaguing him for five months.

His breathing became rapid, his face flushed, and his previously hunched back stiffened due to extreme excitement.

"Homology group mapping...projection...spontaneous collapse..."

Li Jianming muttered to himself, then suddenly snatched the pencil from Chen Zhuo's hand and threw himself onto the desk. He started calculating like a madman, following that line of thought.

Li Jianming's calculations were astonishingly fast; the two troublesome singular terms rapidly transformed under his pen, forcibly dragged into a new discrete structure. Three minutes later, Li Jianming's actions came to an abrupt halt.

He looked at the result he had obtained at the bottom of the draft paper.

Those two singular terms that would have diverged infinitely actually collapsed into two quiet constants in discrete space.

It did not diverge.

The road is open.

Li Jianming lay slumped on the table, his shoulders trembling violently. His pencil fell to the table with a crisp sound.

He slowly stood up, turned to look at Chen Zhuo, his bloodshot eyes burning with fervor.

He suddenly took a step forward and grabbed Chen Zhuo's arm, his strength so great that his voice distorted, and his roar echoed in the corridor:

"What's so great about studying physics?!"

"Those are all engineering tasks involving approximations! Trying to apply that kind of brainpower to physics is a crime against mathematics!"

He held the boy tightly, his eyes filled with an unyielding domineering presence.

"Xiao Chen, come to the Mathematics Department! I, Li Jianming, will personally mentor you! You'll be exempt from basic courses, and I'll help you apply for research projects and funding! You're a natural-born mathematician. If anyone dares to send you to build a wind tunnel, I, Li Jianming, will tear their lab down!"

The Taoist priest's face instantly turned ashen.