Chapter 340 - 288: Caught You

Chapter 340: Chapter 288: Caught You

To an outsider...

It just kept pushing.

Li Dong stared at that passage for a full ten seconds.

Then he suddenly snapped the book in his hands shut.

He raised his head.

He let out a long breath and smiled.

"Got you."

「North Building of the School of Chemistry.」

There weren’t many people left in the lab.

Guo Han had already left.

Shen Ying was gone too.

Lu Heng had never come back.

Only Wu Kai, Lu Mingyuan, Zhang Yan, and Su Yanqing remained in the room.

They had all lost weight recently.

The four of them were silent.

Just then.

The door was pushed open.

All four of them subconsciously looked up.

Li Dong walked in.

His hair was a bit messy, and there was a thin sheen of sweat on his face.

He must have run over.

Li Dong didn’t wait for them to greet him.

He walked directly between Wu Kai and Lu Mingyuan.

He looked at the two teachers.

He opened his mouth.

"Teacher Wu, Teacher Lu, we should..."

"Continue."

Wu Kai and Lu Mingyuan were both taken aback for a moment.

"They are wrong."

Those three words.

They slammed into the ears of everyone in the lab.

Wu Kai subconsciously half-rose from his chair.

"...You found it?"

Li Dong nodded.

"I found it."

He smiled at the two teachers.

"They can’t replicate it."

...

「Munich.」

Bavaria, a summer night.

In a middle-class residential community in the southern part of the city.

A middle-aged man in his early fifties was walking his golden retriever slowly along the lakeside path of the community.

He wore a gray casual shirt and a pair of khaki slacks.

He wasn’t tall, but he looked sharp and full of spirit.

His name was—Las Vegener.

A senior associate professor at the Department of Applied Mathematics, Technical University of Munich.

A veteran in the field of Tikhonov-type regularization.

In the world of European applied mathematics, he wasn’t considered top-tier in terms of raw ability, but he had a very sharp "nose" for getting published in top journals.

His proudest role in the last two years was that of a regular external review expert for the editorial board of *Inverse Problems*.

He had been in an excellent mood lately.

The reason was simple: the paper he had reviewed on Tikhonov-variational inversion had been successfully published.

He had personally handled this paper.

He had recommended it for acceptance.

And since it was a local German work, and Engelhardt was a colleague from his own school and department,

as the reviewer, he felt a share of the glory.

Recently, his peers had often invited him to give presentations and share his thoughts on this paper.

That pride in his heart had slowly transformed into a comfortable sense of honor.

While walking his dog this evening, he even found himself unconsciously humming an old song.

Just as he was humming the second chorus...

His phone rang in his pocket.

He fumbled for his phone and took it out.

A colleague’s name was on the screen.

"Hans."

This Hans was a lecturer at the School of Mathematics at the Munich University of Technology, and they were on good terms.

He answered the phone with a smile.

"Hans?"

"What gives me the pleasure of a call from you tonight?"

Hans’s voice on the other end sounded a little rushed.

"Las."

"Have you had a chance to look at arXiv recently?"

Las Vegener paused for a moment.

’arXiv?’

He chuckled.

"Hans."

"I’m walking my dog right now."

"Calling me at this hour... Did someone publish something incredible again?"

Hans took a breath on the other end.

"No."

"Someone posted something targeting that paper we just published..."

"Engelhardt’s paper."

"They posted a Comment on it on arXiv."

Las Vegener stopped in his tracks.

’Comment?’

He chuckled and shook his head.

"Ohh~"

"It’s just one of those things."

He slowly tightened his grip on the golden retriever’s leash.

He was a reviewer.

He knew full well how common this was in their field.

Every year, a few groups would get upset seeing another group get a top-tier publication in a direction they’d been working on...

So they’d post a Comment on arXiv, determined to nitpick.

Most of the time, they didn’t end up finding any real flaws.

In the end, the ones who lost face were the ones who posted the Comment.

There was a saying in the industry...

"With a Comment, you think the other person is the clown before it’s posted."

"Only after it’s posted do you realize the clown was you all along."

Las Vegener asked lazily.

"Who is it this time?"

"Is it that guy who’s always had it in for us...?"

A name came to mind.

"Rudiger Kramer?"

This Kramer was a famous "contrarian" in their field.

Every time a top paper came out, he’d have a Comment up on arXiv within two days, regular as clockwork every year.

Hans was silent for a moment on the other end.

Las asked again with a smile.

"Or..."

"The one from Eastern Europe?"

"Jan Novak, the one who’s always saying the methodology of our Tikhonov field is ’dead’?"

This Novak was a radical applied mathematician from Prague.

Every time he posted a Comment on a top paper, his titles might as well have screamed "This Is Wrong."

The industry just laughed it off.

These two...

They were both "old friends" of the field.

If they were the ones posting the Comment, Las wasn’t worried at all.

Hans took a long, deep breath on the other end of the line.

He seemed to be choosing his words carefully.

After a few seconds,

he finally spoke.

"Las, it’s not either of them. It’s neither."

Las Vegener was stunned.

He stopped walking.

The golden retriever at his feet looked up, gazing quizzically at its master.

Las frowned subconsciously.

"Not them?"

"Then who is it?"

On the other end of the line,

Hans was silent for about two seconds.

Then slowly uttered two words.

"Li Dong!"