That Man!!!

After sitting blankly on the bed for a while, Xu Yun got up and looked around.

This was a studio apartment with a total area of over forty square meters. The decor was not particularly luxurious, but the location was quiet and relatively private.

Although USTC had renovated some of the dormitories in the East District back in 2019, the living conditions for master's and doctoral students were actually rather average, except for sponsored trainees.

For example, master's students had four people to a room, while doctoral students got double rooms—though the ones over on Science Island were better.

However, Xu Yun had chosen to live alone off campus not because the dormitories were terrible, but because he had a secret.

Xu Yun was twenty-four years old.

Male, identified as male, not an extreme animal rights advocate, not an extreme environmentalist, not depressed, and liked women.

Society referred to him as that guy. If he made the news, he would probably be called the man. Sometimes, for no apparent reason and without doing anything at all, he would even be saddled with a surname—Guo.

He had entered the USTC Gifted Class at fifteen, graduated with his bachelor's degree in 2019, and instead of pursuing an academic master's degree afterward, had applied directly for a doctorate.

Xu Yun's direct doctorate was in synthetic biotechnology and systems bioengineering. This was also a relatively well-known Biology Doctor program at the University of Science and Technology of China, a school famous for physics. He was now about to receive his doctoral degree.

Besides that, he was also currently pursuing a master's degree in Condensed Matter Physics, and the degree certificate was not far off either.

Anyone who had attended a Gifted Class would probably know this.

Whether it was the USTC Gifted Class, the Yao Class and Zhi Class, or the Turing Gifted Class, top institutions like these often called their academic prodigies XX God.

For example, Cao God, Han God, Wei God, and so on.

Thus, naturally, Xu Yun had also earned the title of Xu God.

However, while academic prodigies were nearly invincible in scholarly matters, they often displayed radically different personalities in daily life and were even regarded as oddballs.

Take Wei Dongyi, Wei God, who had once become hugely popular online. He even appeared somewhat vacant because he was thinking about academic problems almost every moment of every day.

Some gifted academic prodigies did not even possess basic self-care abilities and needed their parents to accompany them and handle all the trivial matters of life.

Xu Yun in his previous life had actually been one of those "geniuses" with severely mismatched intelligence. While he had not been so absurdly helpless that he needed his parents to assist with food, clothing, housing, and transport, his social circle had been practically nonexistent. It had only gotten somewhat better after he turned thirty.

By now, readers who were not StarCraft players and understood how to ban Mammoths had probably noticed a particular phrase:

Previous life.

That was right. His previous life.

Xu Yun was a reborn man.

However, compared with some other reborn seniors, Xu Yun's rebirth was somewhat unusual.

It was a winter day in 2041. Xu Yun had been writing a webnovel called Where is Wu Fan when he suddenly became dizzy and collapsed face-first onto his keyboard.

When he woke up, he discovered that he had been reborn to when he was fifteen, the day after the Physics Second Round Defense for the USTC Gifted Class.

This was also a life milestone Xu Yun remembered vividly—because that year's defense questions had been quite interesting:

One of the problem-solving questions was about a group of Little Green Men who went to mine gold on Golden Planet and fell to their deaths. It required calculating their falling time according to two differently shaped slopes, and also asked the students to sketch the appearance of their spacecraft.

Another question gave the condition that the atmosphere had a thickness of h. The students all lamented that it was unreasonable, because if the particles on the surface had velocity distributions in space and flew outward isotropically, it would no longer be h.

The question also claimed that the atmosphere was uniform, which was equally bizarre, so Xu Yun ultimately handed the points for that question over to the nation. There was no helping it—his obsessive-compulsive disorder was terminal.

And as a reborn man who had written webnovels for a long time, Xu Yun naturally knew what made the rebirth setup so satisfying:

Use knowledge of the future course of events to plan ahead, thereby earning vast sums of money and social status.

But when Xu Yun confidently searched through his memories, he discovered that his mind was blank. He only remembered a few scattered things:

For example, a long-distance running competition had produced a champion, Mr. Jia was still claiming he would return to China next week, and thirty years later Tianzu was still taking stock of Milan, and so on.

Other than those things, the only thing Xu Yun remembered was the academic knowledge he had learned before turning thirty.

He had no impression whatsoever of specific derivative technologies, major historical events, competition results, or anything else.

But on the other hand.

Compared with his hazy memories, the mentality and experience of his forty-something-year-old self had been completely preserved.

This made him far more mature than his peers, whether in dealing with people or in self-discipline.

It was precisely because of this that Xu Yun had been able to graduate with a doctorate at twenty-four in this life—he had been twenty-eight when he earned his doctorate in his previous life.

And in truth, the changes that had happened to Xu Yun went far beyond that.

Inside the bedroom.

Xu Yun rubbed his left temple with his thumb and silently recited a syllable with no apparent meaning:

As the sound left his lips, Xu Yun's vision abruptly went dark.

When he came back to his senses, he was already in a dim space.

The space was not large, only around twenty square meters in total. Other than a jade-green ring roughly two meters in diameter at the center, there was nothing else inside.

At that moment, a number was flashing above the ring:

300/300.

This space had appeared on the second day after Xu Yun's rebirth, exactly ten years ago.

Its size and appearance had been like this from the beginning. Its boundaries were made of some kind of hard solid material—at any rate, much harder than Bo.

However, in the beginning, the value on the Central Ring had been "0/300."

And at that time, the space had given its only prompt to date:

The ring's value would increase positively according to the amount of knowledge mastered by the "Wall-facer," and the first doctoral degree had to be in biology—the ring's value was called Knowledge Points by Xu Yun.

That was why Xu Yun, who had studied physics in his previous life, had inexplicably "defected" to the field of biology. This was practically unheard of in the USTC Gifted Class, which was famous for physics.

Now, after spending a full ten years on grueling study, Xu Yun had finally pushed the score to its maximum today with the completion of his defense answers.

Perhaps sensing Xu Yun's arrival.

A few seconds later, the ring suddenly began to rotate slowly.

Then several more seconds passed.

Three Doors abruptly appeared on the halo, each one clearly marked with the number "100."

At the same time, a sudden understanding surfaced in Xu Yun's mind:

He could spend 100 Knowledge Points to open any one of the doors, and only one door could be opened within a certain period of time.

To be honest.

Even as a reborn man, Xu Yun still felt somewhat unnerved seeing this happen right before his eyes.

He had even considered telling his advisor, Pan Shuai, about it, but the moment that thought emerged, the "300" before him instantly turned into the three digits "404."

Xu Yun had no choice but to give up.

Then, scenes of his bitter studying over the past ten years began to appear before Xu Yun's eyes frame by frame, page by page.

As the final image turned over, Xu Yun took a deep breath and walked toward the door on the far left.

What?

You asked why the left one?

Of course, because the left side had more attempts!

As someone born in the late 1990s, Xu Yun was also a Potterhead of no small degree.

Although in recent years both Rowling herself and several of the lead actors had pulled some strange moves in terms of Public opinion, Harry Potter was indeed still a good book.

Even forty years later, Xu Yun still remembered Hagrid's huge beard, Avada Kedavra, Voldemort's outlet-like nose, Tom Riddle and Hermione Granger love, as well as

the original novel's descriptions of Portkeys and Apparition.

And at that moment, Xu Yun's sensation was much like riding a Portkey:

A dizzying feeling as though he were being churned in a washing machine, the tick-tock of a pendulum like a countdown, and a sharp ringing in his ears.

He reckoned that when King Piccolo had been stuffed into the International Rice Cooker Hotel by the Mafuba, the stay had probably felt about the same.

In short.

After an intense bout of dizziness.

With a thud, Xu Yun fell to the ground—face first.

Strangely enough, however, he did not feel the slightest pain.

He then opened his eyes and discovered that he was lying atop someone else. That person was also face-down, embedded in the soft earth, with only a lion-like head of golden hair exposed.

Xu Yun hurriedly climbed off the person and carefully turned him over from the dirt.

This was a very young man, with a high nose bridge, deep-set eyes, eyebrows slanting upward at the corners, and a somewhat defiant look on his face.

The man's chest rose and fell faintly. He was still breathing, and appeared to be merely unconscious.

But facing him, Xu Yun's breathing suddenly stopped.

As someone who had once worked in physics, Xu Yun had long since had the face from this man's portraits carved into his DNA. More than once, he had even seen his coffin lid tremble in anime and webnovels.

His name was.

Isaac Newton.