Our Goal Is the Stars and the Sea! (Part One)

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Maybe it was just Yang Zhenning's imagination.

He couldn't shake the feeling that Lu Guangda had changed a lot in the more than ten years since they'd last met.

The Lu Guangda he remembered had been an extremely shy young man, the sort who'd blush if a girl so much as glanced at him. In many people's eyes, he'd been the perfect little angel.

When they were kids, Yang Zhenning had once coaxed Lu Guangda into sneaking into a neighbor professor's home at Tsinghua Garden to snip some sunflowers. Lu Guangda had hesitated for ages and still couldn't bring himself to use the scissors.

Now, eleven years later, they were meeting again. Both had long since started families and built careers, each with his own pursuits and beliefs.

At forty, an age when one was no longer easily confused, Yang Zhenning certainly wasn't going to expect Lu Guangda to still be that naive, shy boy.

But...

No longer being naive was one thing. Enjoying dirty jokes was another.

Not only had Lu Guangda gotten a little darker, the things he said had grown more and more cryptic. He kept going on about donkeys, donkey this and donkey that. Anyone who didn't know better might think donkeys were the protagonists.

Still, even though Lu Guangda hadn't spelled it out, Yang Zhenning was clever enough to more or less understand what he meant.

The "other donkey" Lu Guangda had mentioned was probably a domestic scholar with deep expertise in theoretical physics.

Most likely,

this person had made an outstanding contribution to the Proto-hadron Model, but for one reason or another, couldn't have his name made public.

But...

Who could it be?

The country's top theoretical physicists amounted to no more than a handful, including Zhao Zhongyao and Wang Ganchang. Most of