Chapter 389 - 208: The Strange Old Man

Chapter 389: Chapter 208: The Strange Old Man

After about a ten-minute walk, the old library came into view.

Withered, yellow ivy vines clung to the red brick walls. The wooden double doors were somewhat faded, and an old wooden sign hung above them.

There were no modern electronic screens, no clamor of voices.

Pierre pushed open the half-closed wooden door and went inside.

The familiar musty smell of old paper, mixed with the scent of mothballs, washed over him.

The first floor held the circulation desk and a few rows of old bookshelves. A librarian wearing reading glasses sat with his head bowed, reading a newspaper.

Pierre didn’t disturb the librarian. He lightened his steps and walked up the timeworn stairs.

The stairs let out a faint CREAK.

The sound was strangely comforting to him.

At Princeton, the hallways of the Advanced Research Institute were lined with thick carpets that absorbed even the sound of footsteps. The silence there was oppressive, but the quiet here had a certain warmth.

He went up to the second floor, then continued up the stairs to the third.

The third floor was an open-plan reading room.

Light streamed in through the tall, old-fashioned, mullioned windows, revealing fine dust motes dancing in the air.

Several long wooden tables were arranged in neat rows.

Since it was during class time, the reading room was empty, save for a few scattered individuals reading in different corners.

Pierre stood at the top of the stairs, his gaze slowly sweeping across the reading room.

He was looking for that stubborn old man with white hair and worn-out clothes.

But after scanning the room, he saw no one who fit the description, only a couple of university students hunched over their graduate school entrance exam materials.

He remembered what that student had said—in a corner on the third floor.

He slowed his pace and walked down the aisle closest to the wall.

All the way to the far corner by the window.

There was a table there.

Two people were sitting at it.

On the left was a girl in a white sweater, her hair in a ponytail. Her head was lowered as she quietly took notes in a textbook.

On the right sat a boy.

He wore a very plain, unzipped jacket over an ordinary white t-shirt.

From the looks of him, he couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen.

The boy’s hair was a little long and unstyled, resting softly on his forehead.

Two foreign-language books, thick as bricks, lay open on the table.

The boy was hunched over the table, unconsciously chewing on the cap of the pen in his hand. His brow was slightly furrowed as he stared at a large sheet of scratch paper in front of him.

Pierre stopped in his tracks.

He stood less than three meters away from the table.

No old man.

No hermit.

Just two kids studying.

Pierre figured that the student named Wu Tao must have given him the wrong directions, or that he had misunderstood the Chinese words for the location.

With the dignified air of an elder, he decided to walk over and ask the two children.

He took a step with his left foot, silently moving to a spot diagonally behind the boy.

He bent down slightly, preparing to speak in English.

"Excuse me, children, I was wondering if there was a..."

He didn’t even get the words out.

Pierre’s gaze followed the tip of the boy’s pen and casually fell upon the open sheet of scratch paper.

His voice was caught in his throat, as if it had been instantly severed by an incredibly sharp scalpel.

The air froze in that moment.

Pierre’s azure pupils contracted violently to a pinpoint.

In the center of the scratch paper.

It wasn’t a middle schooler’s geometry problem.

It wasn’t a university student’s calculus.

It was a set of transformation equations for a Discrete Matrix.

Below the equations, a cross was drawn to represent dimensional collapse. Next to that cross, written in an exceedingly fluid, almost casual hand, was a formula for a dimension-reducing homomorphic map.

This was the exact same method he had seen in that manuscript for the *Mathematical Annals*—the one that was savage, crude, and unreasonable, yet was perfectly self-consistent and born of the same fundamental principles!

There was no preliminary groundwork, no gentle transition.

Just this one solid cut, tearing a continuous topological space to shreds and then forcibly aligning the boundaries locally.

Pierre felt his breathing stop.

He stared intently at the scratch paper.

The pen in the boy’s hand tapped lightly on the page, leaving a few small black dots of ink.

The boy seemed to have run into some trouble.

He put down his pen and reached for the thick book beside him.

Pierre’s gaze shifted mechanically to follow.

It was a French-language original of *Foundations of Algebraic Geometry*. The pages were yellowed, clearly quite old.

The boy flipped to a Chapter on the intersection number of algebraic varieties.

Head bowed, his finger traced over the lines containing basic axioms and corollaries. His lips moved slightly, as if he were struggling to fit this classical, rigid framework onto the brutal truncation he had just written down.

He was trying to use foundational tools to explain the cut he had made on pure intuition.

He had hit a wall.

He didn’t know how to use algebraic cycles to completely enclose the Singularity, because his knowledge base hadn’t reached that level yet.

The boy sighed.

He scratched his head in frustration, picked up his pen, and drew a line under the mapping formula, adding a question mark.

"Still missing something," the boy muttered in Chinese.

Pierre stood there.

Motionless.

There was no anger.

No roaring.

Even the imposing air of an academic titan, which he usually carried, had vanished into thin air.

The corner of the old library’s third floor fell into a suffocating, deathly silence.

Only the wind outside, making the ivy rustle, created a faint sound.

Pierre felt as though a silent nuclear bomb was detonating inside his mind.

His entire life’s accumulation of knowledge—about academia, about genius, about the laws of mathematics—was, in this instant, like a fragile pane of glass being shattered by a sledgehammer.

He had assumed the person who could write such a paper was an old man who had weathered countless storms, seen through the decay of classical mathematics, and was rebuilding the rules from the ruins.

He had assumed it was a kindred spirit, someone like himself who felt it was lonely at the top and was deliberately using this crude method to mock the world.

But now.

What did he see?

A thirteen- or fourteen-year-old child.

This novice didn’t even know what the line of formula he had written down on a whim meant to the current world of topology.

Perhaps he simply felt this path was viable, so he picked up a rusty saw and cut into it without hesitation.

He was twirling a greatsword capable of cleaving an era as if it were a toy in his hands.

He wasn’t breaking the rules.

He didn’t even know the rules!

Pierre’s hands, clasped behind his back, began to tremble uncontrollably.

He stared at the back of the boy’s head, at his somewhat slender back.

Fear.

Yes, at this moment, the sixty-five-year-old Fields Medal laureate felt a fear that stemmed from the very depths of his soul.

It was the instinctive reaction of a mortal witnessing a miracle.

Mathematics is about logic, about accumulation. It is built slowly, one brick at a time.

But this child before him hadn’t laid any bricks.

He had leaped directly into mid-air, conjured a roof out of nothing, and was now agonizing on the ground, trying to find a few pillars to prop it up.

It defied all reason.

This was an absolute crushing from a higher plane, an utter invalidation of all the scholars who had toiled outside the gates of mathematics until their hair turned white.

Pierre slowly closed his eyes.

Then opened them again.

The boy was still hunched over the table, his pen scribbling unconsciously on the paper.

The girl beside him turned her head, glanced at him, and asked softly.

"Stuck again?"

"Yeah."

Chen Zhuo nodded, his voice gentle.

"The tools in the book are too old. They don’t fit. If I force it, the boundaries all fall apart."

"Don’t rush it. Take your time."

The girl offered a quiet word of comfort and went back to her book.

Chen Zhuo leaned back in his chair.

He tilted his head back, stretching his slightly sore neck.

It was at that exact moment that he sensed someone standing behind him.

Chen Zhuo turned his head.

He saw an old foreign man.

The man was wearing a light gray jacket, his hair was streaked with gray, and he had a high-bridged nose.

The old man was standing less than half a meter away, his azure eyes fixed on the scratch paper on the desk, his expression frozen in a peculiar stiffness.

Chen Zhuo was taken aback for a moment.

He glanced at the old man, then followed the man’s gaze back to his own scratch paper.

"Hello?" Chen Zhuo asked softly in English, out of politeness.

"Are you looking for someone?"

Pierre heard the boy’s voice. It was crisp, clear, and carried the unique calmness of youth.

Pierre slowly lifted his gaze from the scratch paper and let it fall on Chen Zhuo’s face.

He opened his mouth. His Adam’s apple bobbed.

He tried to summon his fluent English, or his elegant French.

He wanted to ask.

’Are you C. Zhuo?’

But he found his throat was tight and dry, his vocal cords seemingly locked, unable to produce a single sound.

He just stared straight at Chen Zhuo.

Staring into those eyes, clear as spring water, without a single impurity.

Chen Zhuo was a bit baffled by the old man’s staring.

He turned back around in his chair and looked at the man with some concern.

"Are you okay, sir? Do you need any help?"

Pierre still didn’t speak.

His hands slowly came down from behind his back, hanging limply at his sides.

Then, under Chen Zhuo’s somewhat bewildered gaze.

This academic tyrant, who ran roughshod over the international mathematics community and gave no quarter to countless top scholars, slowly, and with extreme stiffness, took a step back.

The soles of his shoes made a soft scraping sound against the floor.

He didn’t answer Chen Zhuo’s question.

He was like a lost traveler who had accidentally stumbled into a forbidden land and, upon seeing some monster not meant for the mortal world, had instinctively chosen to retreat.

Then, the stiffness rapidly faded, replaced by an extremely bright, almost searing, light in his eyes.