Chapter 375 - 200: Unreconciled

Chapter 375: Chapter 200: Unreconciled

「Seven in the morning. Keda Mathematics Building.」

Wu Tao walked up the stairs, his footsteps echoing down the empty hallway.

The jacket he was wearing, the same one from yesterday, was creased from when he had napped at his desk.

He clutched a stack of A4 paper in his right hand.

Twenty-two pages in total.

This was the clean manuscript he had produced after staying up all night, painstakingly transcribing the wild scrawl on the blackboard. He had checked every stroke and every character, filling in the missing steps.

Wu Tao reached the office at the end of the hall, raised a hand, and knocked on the door with his knuckles.

"Come in."

Li Jianming’s voice, slightly hoarse, came from inside.

Wu Tao pushed the door open.

The overhead light was off. The only illumination came from an old-fashioned desk lamp on the desk. Li Jianming sat behind it, a gray vest draped over his shoulders, holding an enamel mug.

’Looks like the old professor didn’t get much sleep last night, either,’ Wu Tao thought.

Wu Tao walked over and gently placed the stack of A4 paper, still warm from the printer, on the desk.

"Professor, I’ve organized it."

Wu Tao’s voice was soft, as if he were afraid of disturbing the symbols on the pages.

"I researched the parts where he skipped steps and filled in the entire process. From the Discrete Matrix on the first page to the final closure of the algebraic cycle, I’ve gone over it three times."

Li Jianming set down his mug, his gaze falling on the top page.

"Are there any logical gaps?" Li Jianming asked.

Wu Tao shook his head slowly.

"No. It’s seamless."

Wu Tao paused, seemingly gathering his thoughts.

"That cut Chen Zhuo made in the middle seemed unreasonable, but by the end, all the boundaries lined up. The logic holds."

Li Jianming nodded and placed his hand on the stack of paper.

"Alright. Go back to your dorm and get some sleep. You don’t need to come to the school today."

Wu Tao glanced at the manuscript on the desk, then at his advisor.

"Professor, if we really pursue this..."

"Go get some sleep."

Li Jianming cut him off. His tone wasn’t harsh, but it left no room for argument.

"From now on, you keep this to yourself. Don’t mention it to anyone."

Wu Tao shut his mouth, nodded, and turned to leave, pulling the door closed behind him.

Li Jianming sat in his chair, listening to Wu Tao’s footsteps fade away until the hallway fell completely silent.

He stood up, walked to the door, and turned the lock.

A sharp click echoed as the deadbolt engaged.

Next, he went to the sofa by the wall, bent down, and unplugged the telephone cord from its socket.

Having done all this, Li Jianming returned to his desk and sat down.

His office was now an island, completely cut off from the outside world.

Li Jianming took a deep breath, pulled the manuscript toward him, and turned to the first page.

He didn’t immediately pick up a pen; instead, he read through it, page by page.

What had been a high-intensity clash of minds on the blackboard yesterday now, viewed calmly as a complete derivation, had an even clearer visual impact.

This was a gap forcibly torn open in topological space through sheer brute force.

Chen Zhuo’s method was like a lumberjack with an axe, completely ignoring the grain of the wood, simply chopping the tree in two and then forcibly nailing the pieces back together.

And yet, somehow, the tree lived.

Li Jianming flipped to the last page, looked at the closing equals sign, and set the papers down.

He took off his reading glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.

At his core, he was an old-school scholar.

He had studied the most orthodox classical algebraic geometry, which valued smoothness, continuity, and the natural extension of logic.

Chen Zhuo’s unorthodox approach might be a miracle in engineering, but in the realm of pure mathematical aesthetics, it seemed far too crude.

More importantly, what Chen Zhuo had created was just a prototype.

To dig deeper through this gap, to touch the true core of the Hodge Conjecture, one could no longer rely on this brute-force, tree-chopping method.

He needed a rigorous, self-consistent algebraic theory to support this barbaric logic.

’Who could build this theory for him?’

Li Jianming looked out the window at the slowly brightening sky.

He was Chen Zhuo’s professor.

Here, on the soil of Hua Country, in this office at the Keda School of Mathematics, he felt this was his undeniable responsibility.

He stood up and walked to the large bookcase against the wall.

The glass door of the bookcase was stiff, and he had to pull hard to open it.

He bypassed the commonly used textbooks on the outer shelves, reaching deep inside to pull out the heavy, foundational tomes he kept stored away, one by one.

Zariski’s *Commutative Algebra*, Weil’s *Foundations of Algebraic Geometry*, and a thick stack of his own handwritten notes from his early research years.

The pages of these books were yellowed, carrying the musty smell of something long kept out of the sun.

Li Jianming piled all the books on his desk, covering more than half of its surface.

He put his reading glasses back on, took a stack of blank scratch paper from a drawer, and uncapped his fountain pen.

He was going to take the rough fault line Chen Zhuo had carved out and, using a lifetime’s worth of knowledge in classical algebra, pave the way forward, bit by bit.

He would build a sturdy bridge for his student, so he could cross over safely and securely.

The nib of the pen touched the paper, making a faint scratching sound.

At first, the derivation flowed smoothly.

Using the familiar theory of algebraic varieties, Li Jianming began to redefine the Singularity that Chen Zhuo had left behind.