People Live to Learn!

Ye Kaifu thought about it and let out a long sigh. Forget it, forget it. He'd just have to go look on the spaceship.

The ratio of men to women aboard the spaceship was strictly kept at 1:1. Everyone had also been tested for genetic sequences, and none had any dominant hereditary diseases. The girls were bound to be good-looking!

250,000 young, beautiful girls... 250,000! Surely there'd be someone right for him!

Zhang Yuan took a bite of fried noodles, pulling Ye Kaifu back to the cold reality. "...It's just dating. There's nothing to envy. Reproduction isn't a compulsory part of life. Look at them, just drinking nonstop. What's the point?"

Ye Kaifu argued stubbornly, "Isn't being alive all about mating and reproducing?"

Zhang Yuan replied with a hint of disdain, "Of course not!"

"People live for... learning!"

"Pfft?!" Ye Kaifu nearly spat out a mouthful of noodles.

Zhang Yuan said seriously, "Let me tell you a story. There was a survivor named Wolf who, after a breakup, planned to kill himself at midnight."

"Then what?"

"Since he was efficient, he'd finished writing his will by ten. With two hours to go, he decided to read a math book..."

"He came across Fermat's Last Theorem and tried to prove it."

"Then the sun came up, and he still hadn't managed to prove it."

"???" Ye Kaifu was a little confused.

Zhang Yuan continued, "After a whole night of doing math, Wolf's mind finally cleared, and he decided not to kill himself. Later, he became a successful entrepreneur."

"...After he died of old age, people found his revised will. It offered a hundred thousand yuan to the first person to prove Fermat's Last Theorem."

"At the end of the twentieth century, the mathematician Wiles eventually received that prize."

"???" Ye Kaifu blinked.

"What I'm saying is, love makes you stupid, while math makes you happy. There's nothing worth talking about when it comes to romance. Instead of spending time getting a room, you might as well study hard... Knowledge will never let you down or abandon you."

"So people live to learn!"

As he spoke, Zhang Yuan couldn't help pulling out his phone and browsing the Super Brain app, fully enjoying the pleasure it brought him.

Ye Kaifu's brain nearly crashed.

He wanted to argue back, but an ancient aura of power forced him to nod.

Thinking back on his days as a lovesick puppy, he really had seemed to lose intelligence, unable to tell right from wrong. One sentence from his goddess could keep him excited for a whole week. He'd been such a moron.

He said, a little speechlessly, "You make a good point..."

As he browsed math problems, Zhang Yuan praised his newly invented philosophy to himself.

Doing one good deed a day was better than building a seven-story pagoda.

Young man, the sea of suffering is boundless. Turn back, and you'll find the shore.

After enlightening Ye Kaifu, Zhang Yuan returned to his dorm and became absorbed in studying his algorithm, unable to pull himself away.

The stuff he'd just mentioned to Ye Kaifu—variance, dynamic programming, and the like—was only basic knowledge in operations research. It was all far too rudimentary. Any idea he could come up with had surely already occurred to some expert.

Besides, Ye Kaifu's mathematical model wasn't good, and its foundations were shaky. No matter how much he optimized it, it could only get so far. Writing a truly outstanding paper based on it was practically impossible.

His own father's idea, on the other hand, was much more elegant: it used a kind of nonlinear geometric theory to solve the nonlinear and nonholonomic problems in robot kinematics. In particular, when two matching parts were symmetrical, geometric group theory made it easy to represent them and perform reasoning.

As for the whole process... How should he put it? His father had already worked out the core algorithm, so all that remained was to understand it. But explaining it was exceptionally tedious. A human arm alone had twenty-seven degrees of freedom, making the entire method of expression unbelievably complicated.

"Maybe Dad saw how troublesome it was and simply couldn't be bothered to do it?"

Zhang Yuan thought to himself, "That's quite possible. He has to design all the spaceship's systems, after all, and those are even more complicated and difficult..."

"Or maybe he prepared it especially as a little gift for me."

"The gap between people really is huge..."

And so Zhang Yuan immersed himself in research and exploration as the days went by.

One day, two days, three days...

A week passed.

After being indoctrinated with the idea that people lived to learn, Ye Kaifu also began a grueling study routine.

On the one hand, he felt envious and jealous, and couldn't help comparing himself to Zhang Yuan, whose theoretical knowledge was far beyond his own.

On the other hand, he genuinely wanted to catch up through hard work.

Whenever Zhang Yuan went to the library, he went too. When Zhang Yuan slept, he slept too. He refused to fall behind for even a moment.

There was no denying that the academic atmosphere was intangible yet real, and it spread easily among roommates. If everyone in the same dorm was a top student, chances were they'd infected one another.

But after a week, Ye Kaifu felt like he was about to explode!

He really couldn't keep it up much longer.

He was about to go crazy. He studied for at least twelve hours a day. Aside from eating, drinking, and using the bathroom, all he did was study, study, study!

He even dreamed about those damn theorems. He was going insane.

"Why am I working so hard? I'm on vacation!" he asked himself more than once. "I'm going to run out of time to have fun soon. I should take a day off."

"Bro, could you take a break... Aaaaaah!" he screamed in his heart.

He'd always considered himself a model of diligence and studiousness. But compared with a real lunatic who treated math problems as "entertainment," he was nothing.

Most importantly, his roommate was actually enjoying himself and couldn't tear himself away. Every now and then, he even laughed with delight...

What was this?!

As he thought about it, Ye Kaifu began panting heavily, trying to calm the muscles in his chest as his heart pounded.

"Work hard! Keep it up! Fighting!"

"Only those who can keep their composure are truly strong!" he encouraged himself, forcing down the urge to go out and hang around with pretty girls.

But in the blink of an eye, Zhang Yuan's casual muttering completely shattered Ye Kaifu's mental defenses. "...Well, I might as well finish reading these papers while I'm at it. I can read them for free on the campus network anyway..."

"There are two hundred pages in all. That's not much."

Two hundred pages!

He silently cursed.

A little figure inside Ye Kaifu's head was tugging at him frantically, urging him to give in and waste his time.

"No, bro, I really can't keep this up. By the time he finishes those two hundred pages, another day will be gone. I want to play games, flirt with girls, or at least have a big meal... Every cell in my body is craving entertainment."

"I need a break!"

Another little figure roared in his mind, "No! Absolutely not! If someone is smarter than you, stronger than you, and works harder than you, then you can only see it through to the end!"

"Ye Kaifu, you absolutely must not give in!"

"No, I'm giving in!"

"...You absolutely must not give in!"

"Aaaaaah, Zhang Yuan, hurry up and give in! Please, I'm begging you—no, I implore you!"