Chapter 247 - 149: "Professor Chen

Chapter 247: Chapter 149: "Professor Chen

The sun was high in the sky.

The asphalt roads on campus had been baked soft by the sun, feeling a little sticky underfoot.

Li Jianming didn’t feel the heat.

Stomping toward the administration building, his mind was filled with the smug, triumphant look on Alchemist’s face in the hallway. And that algebraic matrix—he knew it was in the physics department, yet they absolutely refused to lend it to him.

Li Jianming didn’t stop on the first floor, heading straight up the stairs to the third.

The third-floor hallway was silent.

Reaching the wooden door with the "Vice Principal’s Office" plaque, Li Jianming stopped, took a deep breath, and raised his hand to knock.

"Come in."

A deep voice came from inside the room.

Li Jianming pushed the door open.

It was a spacious office. A large, dark, solid wood desk sat by the window.

Vice Principal Zhou, who was in charge of research and personnel, was wearing a pair of half-rimmed glasses, his head lowered as he read a red-letterhead document.

A cup of freshly brewed green tea sat on the corner of the desk, the leaves standing upright in the glass. On the windowsill, an old-fashioned window air conditioner emitted a low hum, blowing cold air into the room.

Hearing the door open, Vice Principal Zhou looked up.

"Old Li?"

Vice Principal Zhou looked a little surprised. He put down the pen in his hand and took off his glasses.

"What brings you here in the middle of the day? Didn’t you go to the cafeteria for lunch?"

Li Jianming closed the door behind him, walked to the desk, pulled out the wooden guest chair, and plopped down into it.

"Couldn’t eat."

Li Jianming’s face was grim as he placed his briefcase on his lap.

Vice Principal Zhou looked at the dark circles under Li Jianming’s eyes, then at his furious posture, and pretty much knew what this was about.

Working in university administration, he had seen far too many cases of professors from different departments fighting with each other, scrambling for funding, and vying for labs.

Vice Principal Zhou smiled, stood up, and picked up the thermos from his desk. He walked over to the nearby tea cabinet, grabbed a clean paper cup, pinched a bit of tea into it, and poured in hot water.

"Have some water first."

Vice Principal Zhou placed the paper cup in front of Li Jianming, then slowly sat back down behind his desk.

"So, tell me, who’s managed to upset our esteemed Professor Li from the School of Mathematics this time? Is the funding approval too slow, or did the computer lab not give you enough quota?"

"Neither."

Li Jianming didn’t touch the paper cup. His gaze was fixed on Vice Principal Zhou.

"Principal Zhou, I’m here to file a complaint. I’m lodging it against Alchemist from the physics department."

Vice Principal Zhou’s hand, holding his glass, paused for a moment before he chuckled again.

"Alchemist? He’s in fluid dynamics, you’re in complex network graph theory. The two of you are in completely different worlds. How could he have possibly offended you?"

Vice Principal Zhou blew on the rim of his cup to cool the steam.

"I just ran into him in the hallway this morning. His midterm report on that wind tunnel model was quite impressive. You could say he’s made a beautiful comeback. Are you sure there isn’t some misunderstanding between you two old colleagues?"

"There’s no misunderstanding."

Li Jianming gritted his teeth, his voice growing heavy.

"Principal Zhou, do you have any idea how he managed that comeback?"

"A little."

Vice Principal Zhou nodded.

"I heard he found a new approach, did some sort of dimensionality reduction on the foundational logic to bypass the computational limits of their machines. Old Fang is still sharp as ever."

"Him, sharp?"

Li Jianming let out a cold laugh.

"That’s not being sharp, that’s bullshit! He’s forcibly clutching another department’s lifeline in his own damn hands!"

Vice Principal Zhou put down his teacup, the smile fading slightly from his face.

"Old Li, you can’t just say things like that. What lifeline?"

Li Jianming didn’t waste any more words. He unzipped his briefcase, pulled out the autumn issue of *Discrete Mathematics*, and slammed it directly onto the wide desk.

The cover collided with the solid wood desktop, making a sharp crack.

"Principal Zhou, take a look at this."

Li Jianming pointed at the journal.

"My project on complex network topology has been stuck on the redundant computation of core nodes for a full five months."

Vice Principal Zhou leaned forward, his gaze falling upon the journal.

"The computational requirements exploded. We couldn’t find a general formula, the polynomial was showing factorial-level growth. The students at the School of Mathematics have been calculating day and night, losing handfuls of hair, but they just can’t derive it."

A trace of suppressed anguish laced Li Jianming’s voice.

He reached out, opened the journal, and flipped to a page with a dog-eared corner, pushing it in front of Vice Principal Zhou.

"A month ago, I saw this paper. It proposes a completely new discrete algebraic matrix that can directly cut off meaningless brute-force enumeration and use a non-linear compensation term to force a logical closed loop."

Li Jianming looked at Vice Principal Zhou.

"Principal Zhou, this is the key! A key specifically designed to unlock a computational deadlock! With this person’s guidance, I can guarantee that my graph theory project will achieve full convergence within a week, tops. I could wrap it up and submit the report!"

Vice Principal Zhou glanced at the paper’s title, then at the author’s name below.

"C. Zhuo, Huake University."

Vice Principal Zhou read the name aloud, his brow furrowing slightly.

"Someone from our university? From the School of Mathematics?"

"Not from the School of Mathematics."

Li Jianming took a deep breath.

"I’ve checked. A paper published by Delian from Princeton a few months ago gave him a special acknowledgment. This person is right here at our university—in the physics department! It must be someone in interdisciplinary studies. In other words, it’s the one Alchemist mentioned—the Professor Chen who helped them with their foundational dimensionality reduction!"

Vice Principal Zhou leaned back in his chair, his fingers tapping lightly on the desk.

"So what you’re saying is, Alchemist used this Professor Chen’s algorithm to solve their wind tunnel model problem?"