Starting Point

He had come in high spirits and returned fully satisfied.

It was nearly half past nine when Huang Tian and Zong Wenjun finally returned to the apartment.

Lying on the bed, Zong Wenjun looked a little tired. "I'm not going out tomorrow. I wish I could stay tucked under the covers forever."

Huang Tian pinched her smooth, soft cheek and chuckled. "Little Zong never gets tired from studying all day, but after a day of sightseeing, she's worn out."

Zong Wenjun let him knead her cheek and answered seriously, "Studying doesn't stir up many emotions. Traveling and having fun are different. Your emotions rise and fall so much that you use up more mental energy, so of course you get tired."

"Fine. We'll stay in the room tomorrow and won't go anywhere," Huang Tian said.

Zong Wenjun wrapped her arms around his, rubbing her little face against him. Huang Tian leaned back against the headboard, opened his phone with his left hand, and expertly logged into Chang University's online library. He began searching its resource database for all kinds of books and papers.

An Introduction to Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics, Topology, Groups and Representations, Second-Order Elliptic Partial Differential Equations, Global Well-Posedness and Exponential Decay of Low-Regularity Solutions to Three-Dimensional Density-Dependent Magnetohydrodynamic Equations...

After recording the contents of the books and papers, he immediately returned to the Late Han Dynasty World with his consciousness and quickly digested and understood the knowledge, making use of the 1:30 difference in the flow of time.

The next day—the third day since Zong Wenjun had arrived in Chang City—the two of them went nowhere except downstairs to eat. They stayed in the apartment, each busy with their own things. Zong Wenjun put on her headphones and listened to VOA, taking breaks to listen to music when she got tired. Huang Tian, meanwhile, was so immersed in the ocean of mathematics that he couldn't pull himself away.

Early on the morning of the fourth day, the two of them got up bright and early, and Huang Tian saw Zong Wenjun off at the high-speed rail station.

At the entrance, Zong Wenjun hugged Huang Tian and whispered, "I'll miss you."

"I'll miss you too."

After a brief embrace, Zong Wenjun entered the station with her backpack on. She waved to Huang Tian from a distance. He watched until she disappeared from sight, then returned to the apartment.

Over the next five days, Huang Tian spent all his time "reading" papers. Converted to the time of the Late Han Dynasty World, that was a full five months. Still, he kept up his daily cultivation without fail, reading papers and reference materials only in his spare time. Even so, he had spent quite a long time at it—especially by the standards of Huang Tian, whose comprehension had evolved.

Five days later.

Huang Tian opened the computer he had bought with money earned from part-time jobs during his undergraduate years. Inspiration surged through his mind. After some thought, he decided, "I'll give the mathematical community a little appetizer first, and test the waters."

He opened LaTeX and began tapping away at the keyboard.

Paper title: A Study of Blow-Up Phenomena in Supercritical Defocusing Nonlinear Wave Equations

Abstract: ...

For Huang Tian, conducting research was actually easier than writing papers. A paper took far too much time. The one he was writing now, on PDEs—partial differential equations—had taken him a full two days and stretched to fifty-five pages. That was only because he hadn't needed to mull over every detail again and again; he'd simply kept writing.

Once he had finished the paper, Huang Tian uploaded it to arXiv. arXiv wasn't a journal but a preprint repository where researchers could upload papers that had yet to be formally published. It was like staking a claim, declaring "ownership" of a paper.

After staking his claim, Huang Tian copied the paper onto a USB drive. He thought it over, then went downstairs to a print shop and printed out a copy. After that, he took a taxi to Chang University to find his undergraduate professor of partial differential equations, Feng Zechun, a professor in Chang University's mathematics department.

He had chosen to approach him because Huang Tian was a newcomer to academia. If he submitted his paper to a major journal, there was little chance an editor would even pay attention to it. It would just gather dust in an inbox with thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of emails. To get an editor to take notice, he needed someone to vouch for him. Only after his first paper was published and he had gained some reputation could his name alone make editors treat him with due seriousness.

Besides asking Feng Zechun to vouch for him, he had another, more important reason for seeking him out: he needed to get some funding from him. Otherwise, journal page fees that could easily run into the tens of thousands would be a real headache...

Feng Zechun was sixty-three that year. After earning his master's degree early in life, he had taught at Chang University ever since. In middle age, he had gone on to earn a doctorate in mathematics. Decades of work had left him with a shelf full of publications, and he had finally been promoted to full professor. But as he grew older and his energy waned, he had done less research in recent years, focusing mainly on teaching and supervising students.

He supervised a few doctoral students and taught undergraduate classes too—a pure blend of teaching and research, with teaching outweighing research.

Though Feng Zechun had become a little laid-back, he was a good man. His path through life had been smooth, and he had rarely gotten into arguments with anyone. He had spent most of his life in the ivory tower and carried a stubborn scholar's air about him. That was another reason Huang Tian had sought him out.

Were there scoundrels at universities? Of course. But ordinary, decent people were still the majority, and Feng Zechun was one of them. In his decades of teaching and research, no one had ever heard of him being involved in any scandal.

After getting out of the car at Chang University's main gate, Huang Tian looked at the familiar, enormous gate, more than three hundred meters long, and felt a wave of emotion.

A little over a year ago, he had still been an "untroubled" student, full of youthful ambition and looking ahead to a future brimming with infinite promise.

But the harshness of reality had soon taught him how the world worked. It had told him that he was nothing but utterly mediocre, someone who had happened to spend a few years studying and been praised for a few years by his parents, teachers, and classmates. Once he entered society, he had immediately reverted to his true colors.

After standing there and reminiscing for a moment, Huang Tian walked to the pedestrian entrance beside the security booth and went straight into campus with a face scan. He strolled through the quiet grounds, past the shimmering waters of Runxi Lake and the naturally charming Beilian Fountain Square, then made his way unhurriedly to the Science and Life Building.

Inside the building, students carrying books or backpacks walked and chatted on the stairs and in the hallways. Downstairs, young men and women brought their shared bikes to a halt, slung on their backpacks, and hurried inside. Huang Tian followed the crowd up the stairs.

He went up to the fifth floor and stopped in front of a door marked "Faculty Lounge." The door was open. Inside, he could see a somewhat chubby old man with thinning, grizzled hair, sitting on a sofa and reading some papers.

"Professor Feng really does like to stay in the lounge after class..."

Knock, knock—

The crisp sound of knocking rang out. Feng Zechun looked up and saw a remarkably handsome young student.

"Huang Tian?"

Feng Zechun spoke with some surprise. He still remembered Huang Tian quite well. Huang Tian had a clean-cut look and a good air about him, like a proper scholar. And his grades had been good, too, so he had made a strong impression.

"Professor Feng, it's me." Huang Tian smiled as he walked into the faculty lounge.

Seeing his former student put Feng Zechun in high spirits. He stood up and beckoned. "Come, come. Sit down and tell me how you've been."

As he spoke, he went over to the water dispenser, picked up a disposable cup, and poured Huang Tian a glass of water.

"I can get it myself, thank you, Professor."

Huang Tian took the cup, then sat beside Feng Zechun.

"It's been over a year since you graduated, hasn't it? How have things been?" Feng Zechun asked with a kind smile, clearly in high spirits.

"Just muddling along. I can't really say things are good or bad."

"Muddling along is already pretty good." Feng Zechun glanced at the thick document envelope in Huang Tian's hands and asked, "Are you here to take care of some paperwork or get a certificate...?"

Huang Tian opened the envelope and took out a stack of densely written pages. "Actually, I wrote something in my spare time and wanted to ask you to take a look and give me some pointers..."