Walking into the café.
After taking a seat by the window, Lu Zhou gestured for Wang Peng to wait nearby, then turned his gaze to Professor Milo sitting across from him.
"Would you like something to drink?"
"Anything cold will do."
Lu Zhou nodded, then turned to the waiter and ordered two iced coffees.
He then looked at Professor Milo and asked.
"To be honest, I don't really understand how a 53% mass expansion is connected to... this Spirit of the Universe you mentioned?"
"You're the first person to ask me that question." Professor Milo looked at Lu Zhou somewhat unexpectedly before continuing. "Most people's first reaction is that I'm raving like a madman, rambling on about mysterious and unreliable theories."
"My view isn't fundamentally different from theirs." Lu Zhou shrugged and continued, "I'm simply curious about the connection between the two."
Professor Milo did not answer immediately. Instead, he fumbled around on his person for a while.
The movement made Wang Peng, standing nearby, tense up. His right hand instinctively slipped into his pocket.
However, the professor from the United States did nothing inappropriate. He merely pulled a notepad and a pen from his inner pocket.
"Since Mathematics is what you're best at, I'll prove it to you with Mathematics."
Watching his movements with interest, Lu Zhou made a welcoming gesture.
"I agree with you. What we see may be false, but Mathematics never lies."
Without commenting on that statement, Professor Milo swiftly wrote down an equation on the notepad.
"This is the nucleon mass obtained through chiral extrapolation. m0≈880MeV; c1≈-1GeV-1; Mπ2 is the squared mass of the pion..."
Taking his coffee from the waiter, Lu Zhou said calmly.
"So? I didn't come here for you to explain Quantum Chromodynamics to me."
"Please don't mind it. I'm only confirming