I Almost Believed It!

Everyone in the dorm froze at those words.

Especially Li Hui, who was sitting on his bed playing on his phone.

Li Hui had been secretly watching what was happening. When he heard Chen Yuan say he couldn't solve it, he had felt a little smug. Now that Chen Yuan had actually passed the buck to Qi Hao, Li Hui almost burst out laughing.

Qi Hao?

You've got to be kidding.

Li Hui laughed inwardly. Didn't he just spend a few afternoons at the library these past few days?

Did he really think he could pick up a copy of Demidovich, put on a show, and have a sudden revelation that turned him into a master?

Even Chen Yuan, the king of cramming who read every day, couldn't solve it, and you want Qi Hao to try? When he can't solve it, let's see how you save face!

Zhou Peng had his doubts too. Since the start of the semester, he didn't think he'd heard anything about Qi Hao being particularly good.

"Forget it." Zhou Peng gave an awkward smile. "This problem takes a lot of brainpower. I won't keep you from resting. I'll ask the professor tomorrow..."

"It's fine. Let me take a look."

Qi Hao took the book, and his gaze fell on the problem statement.

At first glance, the limit of the product seemed impossible to tackle, but as long as he dealt with that nasty trigonometric function...

"There is a trap in it. The usual theorems won't work."

As Qi Hao spoke casually, he picked up a gel pen from the desk, pulled over a sheet of scratch paper, and swiftly wrote down three lines of equations.

"Forget about the product. Just take the natural logarithm, ln, of both sides to turn the product into a sum. Then use a Taylor expansion on this nested trigonometric function to the second order. Now look: the higher-order infinitesimals are naturally swallowed up, and what's left is simple."

Qi Hao pushed the scratch paper in front of Zhou Peng and tapped the final integral sign with the tip of his pen. "For the rest, just apply the definition of a definite integral. The answer should be 1/π."

The whole process was so quick that the others hadn't even had time to react.

Zhou Peng struggled to keep up with Qi Hao. He studied the scratch paper for a while before saying, "Right! Take the logarithm and turn it into addition!"

"Why the hell was I so stubborn about trying to force bounds on the whole thing just now? That Taylor expansion was a stroke of genius!"

Wang Jun, standing nearby, hadn't really understood much, but seeing the look of sudden enlightenment on Zhou Peng's face, he knew Qi Hao really had solved the problem in seconds.

"You're freaking awesome, bro!" Wang Jun threw an arm around Qi Hao's shoulders. "Didn't I tell you my brother was invincible under heaven?"

Chen Yuan said nothing. He just leaned over to look at the steps on the scratch paper, and when he found there were parts he didn't understand, he was secretly astonished.

Curious, he moved his chair over and discussed the reasoning with Qi Hao.

Li Hui, who had been sitting on his bed waiting to see them make fools of themselves, could barely conceal his surprise.

How was that possible?

Qi Hao had actually solved a problem Chen Yuan couldn't?

Just how much had this guy been secretly cramming?!

Could one copy of Demidovich really turn someone into this?

Li Hui was itching with curiosity, wondering whether he should get a copy of Demidovich and try it himself.

After all, having people fawn over you for being a top student really did feel great.

"Brother Hao, you've been hiding your talents way too well! Come on! The barbecue stall at the south gate-I'm treating you to a good meal today!" Zhou Peng reached for Qi Hao's arm with the familiarity of an old friend.

"Really, there's no need. It was nothing. I was planning to read a little longer." Unaccustomed to that kind of closeness, Qi Hao smiled and pulled his arm free.

"Come on! If you don't go, you're not giving me face!" Zhou Peng refused to take no for an answer. "Brother Hao, honestly, I'll need to hug your thigh a lot more in mathematical analysis class from now on! If you won't even let me buy you barbecue, how could I have the nerve to come to you when I run into a hard problem later?"

He'd only just shown a tiny bit of his ability, and someone already wanted to hug his thigh?

Qi Hao sighed silently.

It seemed being a top student who could casually solve problems in seconds had its troubles too.

Normally, Qi Hao would have gone with Zhou Peng without hesitation, but he had something to do today and could only force himself to turn him down.

Zhou Peng was easygoing about it and willing to wait until Qi Hao had time.

After he left, the atmosphere in the dorm visibly changed.

Wang Jun cried, "Bro, what realm have you evolved to now? That was a freakishly hard problem that even Old Chen got stuck on! Come clean: did you secretly go out and take some sweeping monk as your master?"

The other roommates weren't as dramatic as Wang Jun, but they all did some probing too. In the end, Qi Hao brushed every one of them off.

The psychology of modern roommates was subtle. Put simply: "You fear your brother living in hardship, but you also fear your brother driving a Land Rover."

When everyone was gaming together and slacking off in the dorm, it was all harmonious brotherly affection. But once they discovered that the roommate who usually fooled around with them had suddenly started spending his time at the library without a word and become an expert who could solve difficult math problems, anyone who claimed not to feel uneasy would definitely be lying.

And so, a remarkable scene unfolded.

That night, everyone was unusually quiet.

Each of them was either reading or watching online course videos with headphones on. Wang Jun played a couple of games but found them dull, so he tried reading too.

Qi Hao quickly finished washing up, climbed the ladder straight into bed, and drew his bed curtain.

"Huh? Brother Hao, it's not even ten yet. You're going to sleep already?" Wang Jun, who was slacking off, noticed Qi Hao's movements and looked incredulous.

"Yeah, I burned through a few too many brain cells today. I'm sleepy, so I'm turning in early," Qi Hao said casually.

Hearing that, the others in the dorm stopped talking as if by mutual agreement, even deliberately turning the pages of their books more quietly.

Lying on his dimly lit bed, Qi Hao took a deep breath and summoned the system in his mind.

With a thought, "Absolute Pruning Inequality and Asymptotic Convergence Theorem for Finite-State Game Trees" instantly appeared before his eyes.

Because he had exchanged system points for the Russian language skill, Qi Hao was delighted to discover that the Cyrillic letters, which had looked like gibberish, automatically resolved into clear word roots and syntactic structures before his eyes.

I know Russian!

The realization thrilled Qi Hao for less than a few seconds before cruel reality dumped a bucket of cold water over him.

Knowing the words and being able to understand a paper were two entirely different things!

The Russian ability the system had given him was real, not some defective product.

His Russian was now roughly on par with that of a local who had lived there for decades. Everyday conversations, reading newspapers, watching the news-none of it posed any problem.

But when he actually began reading the first paragraph of the paper's main text, that sense of fluency vanished in an instant.

In its place came a profound sense of bewilderment.

He knew every Russian word and could parse the grammar of every sentence. He could even accurately understand some academic abbreviations peculiar to the Soviet era that the author occasionally used.

The problem was that he couldn't understand what the words were saying once they were put together.

How could he describe the feeling?

It was like someone saying to you in Chinese, "Absolute pruning inequality and asymptotic convergence theorem for finite-state game trees."

You knew every character, didn't you?

You knew the character for "finite," the character for "state," and the character for "game."

But put them together?

What was a finite-state game tree?

What was an absolute pruning inequality?

These sentences weren't on the same level as "I drank three bottles of cola today."

The latter was human language. The former was human language too, but human language meant for a particular handful of people.

Qi Hao took a deep breath and read on.

The main body of the paper was even more discouraging.

Konrod's writing style was extremely concise. Between long stretches of mathematical derivation, there was a pitifully small amount of prose, and the occasional sentence or two of explanation read like a telegram.

As it turned out, supplies had been relatively scarce in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. To save precious paper and typesetting space, Soviet mathematicians had developed a profoundly inhumane bad habit: their papers were as terse as classical Chinese!

For a complicated interdisciplinary derivation, they would often use a single "obviously, it follows" or "easily proved from the basic lemma," skip a dozen or so intermediate steps, and throw the final result straight at you.

"Obviously, my ass..."

I almost believed it!