The origin of the sketch in Professor Abel's notes had become a mystery.
From the later parts of the notes, it was clear that the scholar seemed to have entrusted everything from the dream to the gods, completely giving up on pursuing that clue.
Given the context of the era, that was understandable.
Although Lu Zhou himself was an atheist, that did not prevent him from understanding Professor Abel's state of mind.
Entrusting unknowable mysteries to some powerful existence was common to human civilization.
Wasn't he himself the same? Assuming that the system came from some "advanced civilization" or "people from the future" was not necessarily much wiser than attributing it to the "Spirit of the Universe."
After all, none of those three had reliable scientific evidence proving that they truly existed, did they?
In any case, whether Abel had escaped that bizarre dream or had simply chosen not to think about it anymore, the later portions of the notes had completely turned into reflections on the century-old problem of "the general quintic equation has no algebraic solution."
As for what happened afterward, Lu Zhou knew it even without the notes.
Professor Abel achieved tremendous success in 1824, consecutively producing a series of mathematical accomplishments such as Abel's Theorem.
However, those accomplishments did not improve his life, nor did they even attract the attention of Paris's mathematical community at the time.
In the spring of 1829, he ultimately died of illness and poverty at his fiancée's home. Most later records of his life came from a collection of his works published by his teacher, Professor Holm, ten years afterward.
The world depicted in that sketch seemed as though it had never existed in history.
Every clue related to it came to an end with that oil painting...
Standing at the