Chapter 223 - 138: Theory and Application

Chapter 223: Chapter 138: Theory and Application

Chen Zhuo stood up, turned, and walked into the bathroom.

He twisted the faucet handle, and tap water gushed into the sink.

Chen Zhuo bent over, cupped his hands, and splashed the cold water directly onto his face.

The water was so cold it made him shut his eyes for a moment.

He scooped up another handful and scrubbed his face vigorously.

The temperature his fingertips felt was real, the touch of the flowing water was real, and the faint scent of shampoo was also real.

Chen Zhuo turned off the faucet and haphazardly scrubbed his face dry with a towel.

The slightly coarse surface of the towel scraped against his skin, bringing a little feeling back to nerves that had gone numb from the long phone call.

He returned to his desk, pulled out the chair, and sat down.

On the desk lay the draft paper from the previous night, covered in a half-finished derivation.

It was a discrete algebraic model for some high-dimensional topological space.

The paper was densely packed with matrices, group theory symbols, and elegant logical derivation arrows.

The lines were fluid, the structure rigorous—like a crystal palace built from pure intellect.

Chen Zhuo savored this process.

Using the most concise mathematical language to describe the most complex theories was like playing a puzzle game that only a select few could understand.

Untangling a knot gave him the same rush as clearing a level in a video game.

He habitually picked up the black gel pen on his desk, twirling it deftly between his thumb and forefinger.

The pen tip hovered over a blank space on the draft paper.

But for a long moment, he didn’t bring it down.

The perfect symbols on the page suddenly seemed to blur before his eyes.

They floated weightlessly on the white paper, like motes of dust.

In his ears, the sounds from the phone call minutes earlier—a call that had crossed several time zones—resurfaced.

The howling wind laced with grit, the harsh electromagnetic interference, and the dull, heavy, RUMBLING drone of a heavy-duty diesel generator.

And Miao Shian’s voice, filled with a confusion so suppressed it seemed to carry the scent of blood.

In that world, there were no perfect matrices, no continuous, smooth transitions.

That world was fractured. It was a coarse reality where one moment you were on the phone saying thank you, and the next you were hanging dead from a steel frame.

Chen Zhuo stared at the tiny shadow the pen tip cast on the paper.

He suddenly felt that these meticulously crafted theoretical derivations were a bit unreal.

’A bit pointless.’

’In a place where you trade your life for a glass of clean water, can a perfect topological proof stop a bullet, even the shoddiest one? Can it make a ten-year-old orphan release his bite?’

It couldn’t.

Chen Zhuo let out a soft breath.

A strange sense of insipidness washed over him.

It was like falling in the mud and getting his hands filthy, only to turn around and see someone else meticulously picking up a flawless snowflake with a pair of tweezers.

He casually tossed the pen onto the desk. It hit the surface with a soft clatter.

Then, he reached out, gathered the dozen or so sheets of draft paper covered in advanced mathematical formulas, and tapped their edges against the desk to even them out.

He didn’t crumple or tear them. He simply pulled over the extremely thick *Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary* from the corner of his desk and slid the stack of papers underneath it.

The heavy volume pressed down, firmly crushing that weightless void into the darkness.

Chen Zhuo felt the dorm room was a bit stuffy.

He stood up, slipped off his slippers, and put on a pair of canvas shoes that were faded from washing.

Grabbing his keys and campus card, he pushed open the door and walked out.

The sunlight outside was already starting to get harsh.

Instead of taking the main road, Chen Zhuo cut through the tree-lined path between two academic buildings and headed toward the old library.

The library wasn’t crowded during the break.

He pushed open the heavy glass door and was met with a gust of cool air that smelled of old paper, mothballs, and aged floor wax.

The smell was familiar and calming.

Chen Zhuo walked up the stairs to the third floor.

Normally, he would have turned right to go to the foreign periodicals reading room or the pure mathematics section to look at the books Su Wei had sorted for him—the kind that would make an ordinary person dizzy just by looking at them.

But today, he paused at the top of the stairs, then turned left.

This was the section for applied engineering, systems control, and low-level computer algorithms.

The shelves here didn’t look as refined as the ones on the right.

Most of the titles on the spines had an industrial-era coarseness to them. The students who came here were usually just trying to get through a specific project or lab report.

Chen Zhuo walked slowly down the narrow aisle between the shelves.

His gaze slid over the spines.

*Fundamentals of Fluid Mechanics*, *Electric Machinery and Drives*, *Principles of Microcomputers*.

Finally, his steps halted in an unremarkable corner.

He reached out and pulled out a few hefty tomes.

One was *Discrete Control Systems and Stability Analysis*, another was *Low-Level Algorithms and Applications in Operations Research*, and the last one had the exceedingly dry-sounding title *Survivability and Fault-Tolerant Routing Mechanisms in Complex Networks*.

These books were thick, the paper quality mediocre. Flipping through them, he found not the elegant logical derivations he was used to, but complex flowcharts, lengthy code snippets, and somewhat bloated algorithmic branches designed to handle all sorts of unexpected failures.

In the eyes of a pure mathematician, this stuff was probably crude, even second-rate.

They didn’t strive for ultimate elegance. They aimed for just one thing: under the worst possible conditions, the system must not crash.

Chen Zhuo held the three thick books against his chest, feeling their weight.

He didn’t understand the complex situation in the Middle East, nor did he intend to become some armchair general spouting off about politics.

Right now, he was just a kid who was a little bit smart.

He just felt a primal urge, within the familiar world of mathematics, to find something like the wrench in Miao Shian’s hand.

To find a structure like the gears of a generator.

Even if it was caked with mud and sand, even if a corner was chipped off, it could still lock tightly into place and force the water up.

He suddenly wanted to read something useful, even if it wasn’t beautiful.

Carrying the books, Chen Zhuo pushed open the door to the foreign periodicals reading room at the end of the hall.

The reading room was mostly empty, with only a few people scattered in different corners. Sunlight streamed through the old-fashioned green blinds, casting alternating stripes of light and shadow on the floor.

He immediately spotted Su Wei sitting in her usual seat by the window.

Several thick notebooks were spread open in front of Su Wei, her pen flying across the page as she verified some calculation.

She was still working on her massive computations, trying to use probabilistic dimensionality reduction to analyze financial markets.

Chen Zhuo walked over, pulled out the chair opposite her, and sat down.

He set the three heavy textbooks on the table with a muted THUD.

Su Wei’s pen paused for a moment.

She didn’t look up right away. She finished writing the second half of the formula before slowly raising her eyes.

Su Wei’s gaze lingered on the spines of the three books in front of Chen Zhuo for less than half a second before her eyebrow twitched slightly.

A flicker of surprise flashed in her eyes, and then she looked directly at Chen Zhuo’s face.

She didn’t ask what Chen Zhuo had been doing all morning, nor did she ask why he seemed unusually somber.

Su Wei’s perspective was always extremely pragmatic and direct.

"*Survivability in Complex Networks*?"

Su Wei read the title of the top book aloud, her tone tinged with appraisal.

"Why are you reading about applied algorithms?"

She put down her pen, crossed her arms on the desk, and leaned forward slightly.

"This isn’t your style."

Su Wei said it with conviction.

In her mind, Chen Zhuo was someone who enjoyed delving into the Ivory Tower of pure mathematics.

There was a sophisticated, effortless quality to Chen Zhuo’s mathematics.

But the books he had now were full of messy business designed to deal with system crashes.

Chen Zhuo didn’t avoid Su Wei’s gaze.

He reached out and opened the hardcover of the top book, the pages making a dry, rustling sound.

"Mm."

Chen Zhuo’s tone was calm, without any attempt to hide or explain himself at length.

He casually flipped through a couple of pages, looking at the intricate node diagrams.

"Just felt like taking a look."

Chen Zhuo’s gaze fell on the page. His voice was quiet, as if he were answering Su Wei, but also talking to himself.

"Maybe I got tired of the other stuff. Wanted a change of pace."

Su Wei watched him.

She was a pragmatist through and through, one who never believed in romantic academic pursuits.

If a tool was useful, she’d use it. If it wasn’t, she’d toss it, no matter how elegant it was.

She could vaguely sense that something about Chen Zhuo had changed today.

But she didn’t press him about what had prompted it. In Su Wei’s logic, the cause was irrelevant; only the result and efficiency mattered.

"These low-level operations and fault-tolerant algorithms are computationally intensive and full of redundant data."

Su Wei leaned back in her chair, offering a very objective assessment.

"Their models are crude. You have to cover every potential point of failure with a brute-force approach. They aren’t as elegant as continuous models."

"It doesn’t have to be elegant."

Chen Zhuo looked up at Su Wei.

"No matter how elegant a model is, it assumes the underlying conditions won’t break."

Chen Zhuo’s voice carried a weight that Su Wei couldn’t understand but could clearly feel.

"But in reality, if just one wire snaps, the whole system collapses."

Chen Zhuo gently patted the thick book beside him.

"I don’t need that kind of approximate beauty right now. I want to see how the clumsiest structures lock up, step-by-step."

Su Wei looked at the hand Chen Zhuo had placed on the book and raised an eyebrow.

She nodded, her tone conveying a matter-of-fact agreement.

The corner of Chen Zhuo’s mouth, which had been tight all morning, finally relaxed a little.

He said no more.

Su Wei lowered her head, picked up her pen again, and went back to tackling the complex data on her paper.

Chen Zhuo also retracted his gaze, focusing his attention completely on the book before him.

He pulled an ordinary ballpoint pen from his pencil case and grabbed a sheet of scratch paper provided by the library.

He began to read the tedious case studies on discrete control nodes.

The example in the book was a damage-resistance test for a large-scale logistics network.

If node A was paralyzed by a natural disaster, and if data transmission from node B was delayed, how could the system perform a crude but effective redirection through nodes C and D?

Chen Zhuo didn’t use his usual advanced algebraic techniques to simplify it.

He started to follow the book’s clumsy method, working through the derivation step by step.

The pen tip scratched across the slightly rough paper, making a soft, SCRATCHING sound.

The process wasn’t the least bit enjoyable.

It was tedious, dry, and full of repetitive calculations and irritating redundancy checks. With every step, he had to look back to make sure the foundation hadn’t collapsed.

It was like being a grease-stained mechanic, testing the mesh of each gear in a pile of rusty parts, one by one.

One node passed.

Another node locked up.

A backup logic circuit was established.

As the ugly but sturdy matrices took shape one by one on his scratch paper, the floating, unmoored feeling that had been hanging over him since the phone call that morning finally, bit by bit, came back down to earth.

The sound of the pen tip gliding across the paper continued in the quiet reading room.

To Chen Zhuo’s ears, this faint scratching gradually began to overlap with the memory of the heavy-duty diesel generator’s RUMBLING drone.

He worked through one redundant algorithm after another in the book—algorithms that could be force-started even during a power outage.

It was as if he could see Miao Shian, out in the yellow sands under a scorching sun, tightening the last screw on the generator’s fuel line.

Two butterflies, in completely different spaces and times, flew through the illusions of civilization and the cruelty of war, each finally landing on the hardest, coarsest-grained reality.