100: Chapter 100 Eye of the Storm

6:23 PM.

The video at the entrance of Jiangcheng No. 7 High School was like a bomb detonated in deep waters, exploding across major platforms of the Chinese internet.

What initially began circulating on short video platforms was a raw, extremely shaky clip caused by the cameraman being jostled around.

The frame was packed with a jostling crowd, microphones held high, camera lenses of all sizes, and countless smartphone gimbals extending toward the center.

Clad in his blue and white school uniform, Jiang Lin was blocked next to the retractable gate inside the school entrance, looking like a bewildered day student just trying to walk out.

A barrage of microphones emblazoned with logos from various media outlets and independent content creator watermarks were practically jammed into his mouth.

Everyone wanted to ask if he was the author of that single-tile paper.

"The paper is still undergoing peer review. Until the review is complete, I will not make any conclusive statements."

However, what spread the widest was not this extremely rigorous academic response that Jiang Lin gave at the start.

But rather the final line he uttered as he turned back to his homeroom teacher, Old Liu.

"What they are blocking is the school gate, not the proof."

As if possessed by a strange magic, this single sentence instantly struck a nerve in the emotional landscape of the internet.

Soon, it was edited by various accounts with different motives into completely different flavors.

Hype accounts that specialized in inciting emotions and creating idols for followers color-graded the video into dark, cinematic tones and set it to deep, solemn drumbeats reminiscent of Hans Zimmer.

The screen shifted to white text on a black background, with Jiang Lin's cold, sharp profile magnified frame by frame as he turned.

Captions flashed right in the center of the screen: [His eyes hold the stars and the sea, yet all you care about is traffic.]

It was practically crowning an aloof, solitary genius standing apart from the world.

Education bloggers immediately used it as video thumbnails, writing intensely emotional headlines that aimed to trigger the nerves of every Gaokao parent.

[On the eve of the Gaokao, he was cornered at the school gate by media from across the web, yet this eighteen-year-old youth only cared about mathematical proof. Is our current education system truly worthy of a child like this?]

Local media accounts feeding off trending topics were even more direct; caring nothing about proofs, they changed the video titles directly into the most controversial clickbait headlines.

[Light of Jiangcheng! The most mysterious high school student appears at the gate of Jiangcheng No. 7 High School for the first time, personally addressing a world-class mathematical problem face-to-face!]

Yet amidst this web-wide deification and the wildly swelling frenzy of national pride, a completely different narrative surfaced at almost the exact same time, clinging like a persistent shadow.

What they cut together were a few other deliberately magnified clips from the video.

"The paper is still undergoing peer review."

"I will not make any conclusive statements."

These few phrases were isolated and spliced together.

The footage was overlaid with glaring red circles, massive question marks, and deliberately slowed, suspense-laden pitch-shifted sound effects.

This quickly morphed into another conspiracy theory narrative of "I alone am sober while all others are drunk."

[Notice that he never once personally admitted to solving the problem!]

[Even he only dares to say it's under review, so why are all these media outlets and onlookers already rushing to canonize him?]

[An ordinary high schooler, a staggering world-class problem, inflamed nationalistic fervor, crazy media siege—think about it carefully, doesn't this script look a bit familiar? What was the ultimate fate of the last prodigy hyped up like this?]

In this chaotic arena of public opinion where truth and falsehood blended together, what truly initiated a substantial shift in the tide—and even cooled off some previously fanatical netizens—was a three-thousand-word essay posted by Shen Yanqiu.

Shen Yanqiu was by no means an obscure small account clout-chasing for attention.

Now thirty-nine, he held a STEM PhD from one of the top five domestic universities and had conducted brief postdoctoral research at a renowned overseas laboratory in his early years.

Later, due to various reasons, he stepped away from front-line research and pivoted to full-time science communication and academic fraud busting.

Over the past decade, he had built immense prestige across the Chinese internet.

He had authored a series of extremely hardcore articles that used detailed data and laws of thermodynamics to completely tear apart crackpot perpetual motion machines meant to scam state subsidies.

His most viral article, revered as a golden rule by countless fans, was titled "Do Not Package the Fluke of an Individual or Institution as a Miracle of Nation and Science."

Following that article, Shen Yanqiu became a dose of reality for many netizens and a benchmark of objective, rational centrism on the internet.

His most famous quote was: "Truth does not need trending searches for a free pass, nor does science need devotees to indulge in carnival."

This quote was once printed on the belly band of his popular science essay collection, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

Many people were willing to trust him not because he was always absolutely correct, but because in the surreal internet landscape of the past decade, he had indeed shattered far too many beautifully packaged fakes.

Therefore, when the video of Jiang Lin being cornered at the school gate rocketed to the top trending lists on Weibo and Zhihu, many people's immediate reaction was not to look up the original paper, but to click straight into Shen Yanqiu's profile page.

They were waiting for him to speak.

Waiting for this anti-fraud crusade fighter to hand down the final verdict.

6:23 PM.

Shen Yanqiu did not disappoint his fans' expectations; he spoke up.

Cross-posted on both Zhihu and Weibo, the title of his long essay was restrained and rational as always, even carrying a hint of a warning:

"Hold the Celebrations for Now: Judging by Common Sense and Academic Logic, It Is Highly Unlikely for a High Schooler to Independently Solve the Monotile Problem"

No exclamation marks, no snarky sweating Soybean emojis.

The opening paragraph of the article even appeared quite gentle and empathetic:

"Of course, I hope this is true. A strong youth makes a strong nation, and no conscientious Chinese science communicator would not want to see our country's youth produce world-class achievements in top international mathematical fields. However, the more public passion runs high and opinion boils, the more we need to remain calm. We must separate simple nationalistic feelings and the public's romantic narrative of genius from serious academic scrutiny."

This was the posture Shen Yanqiu was best at adopting.

Right after, he delivered five logically airtight arguments.

"First, everyone must understand a basic fact: arXiv is merely a preprint platform. Anyone with an institutional email can upload papers to it. It is absolutely not a formal academic journal that has undergone rigorous peer review. Being uploaded does not mean the proof is correct."

"Second, the real difficulty of the aperiodic monotile problem has never been drawing an odd-shaped tile on paper. The true abyss lies in having to employ extremely complex tools of topology and group theory to prove that all possible tilings covering an infinite plane will be locally forced by geometric rules into an aperiodic substitution structure. This requires an exceptionally deep foundation in modern mathematics."

"Third, stepping back ten thousand steps, even if the author understands local forcing, proofs of this nature rely heavily on massive, tedious local state tables, boundary rejection verifications, and local homeomorphic mappings. In this process, if your deduction misses a tiny mirror reflection or fails to account for a boundary stitching scenario under a higher-level structure, then the entire multi-page paper will instantly collapse from a historic breakthrough into a beautiful but complete failure of an attempt."

"Fourth, judging from sociological and educational experience, a full-time twelfth-grader at an ordinary public high school that isn't even a municipal key school—lacking a guiding mentor, without high-level academic seminars, isolated from the top research community, and having never received long-term, systematic, rigorous academic training—doing a solo run to independently complete a world-class proof that even fields medal winners find daunting? In the history of science, the probability of this is pitifully low."

"Fifth, and most critically, according to the latest insider information I obtained through friends in overseas academic circles, when the computational geometry team at the University of Waterloo attempted to replicate the topological structure of the paper, they ran into a severe bottleneck at the extremely critical F-class mirror embedding of the Level-7 boundary case."

"Peers familiar with proofs of substitution systems know full well that if this suspected obstruction or counterexample at Level-7 truly holds and cannot be resolved via topological homeomorphism, then all those beautiful animated demonstrations netizens made, all the trending topics you scrolled through, those blood-pumping headlines written by independent media, and all the nationalistic sentiment we invested today will not magically make this mathematical proof true."

In the final paragraph of the essay, Shen Yanqiu wrote with resounding conviction:

"Combining the above analysis, judging by my more than ten years of experience in scientific research and science communication, the probability that this paper contains a substantial and unfixable logical gap is likely far higher than the probability that it is fully valid. Conservative estimate: over eighty percent."

At the end of the long post, he even attached a promise that bordered on taking a solemn vow:

"If, and I say if, this preprint is ultimately confirmed by the international discrete geometry community to be a complete and correct proof, I will immediately offer a public bow and apology to student Jiang Lin across the entire internet, halt updates on all my accounts for three months, and reflect behind closed doors."

As soon as these words dropped, the long article blew up completely.

The number of shares and likes surged exponentially.

It looked far too much like a rare, responsible dose of sobering wisdom in this fanatical era.

For an eighteen-year-old student at an ordinary public high school to independently produce a world-class breakthrough of this magnitude on the eve of the Gaokao indeed severely violated common sense regarding human intelligence and educational norms.

What's more, the frantic media deification over the past few days truly gave people an unearned sense of illusion.

In just a few minutes, shares across all platforms exceeded ten thousand.

The comment section was rapidly ignited by a mood of rational moral superiority and sudden enlightenment.

[My god, someone finally dared to step up and speak sense. The hyping online these past few days had me thinking Jiang Lin was about to win a Nobel Prize (even though there's no Nobel Prize in math).]

[Teacher Shen is willing to stake a three-month hiatus on this—with that confidence, I believe him. Everyone wrap it up, it's most likely just another farce.]

...

Of course, amidst the chorus of agreement, there were also enraged individuals desperately refuting him.

[Who are you to use your experience to decide a high schooler couldn't do it? Gauss proved the compass-and-straightedge construction of the regular heptadecagon when he was eighteen!]

[Foreign experts haven't even concluded the proof is wrong; they just said it's stuck. You, a popular science writer long detached from front-line research, jump out so eagerly to play judge and pass a death sentence—if this isn't for clout, I'll eat my hat!]

...

But these angry rebuttals were quickly drowned out by the tide of neutral-rationalist comments from Shen Yanqiu's fans.

Netizens of this generation were truly not encountering a so-called genius myth for the first time.

Over the past few years, the Chinese internet had witnessed far too many packaged child prodigies: girls who could supposedly write two thousand poems a day, privileged second-generation kids researching gene knockout anti-cancer mechanisms in elementary school, ghostwritten papers, forged high-level international competition results, and miracle stories forced out by local propaganda systems for political achievements.

People had been fooled by passion before, and they had been harshly educated by plot twist after plot twist.

The threshold for trust had long been raised to its limit.

So this time, when Jiang Lin, as an ordinary twelfth-grader holding a tile said to change mathematical history, suddenly stood under the internet's spotlight, Shen Yanqiu's condescending skepticism naturally possessed a cruel sociological plausibility.

Shen Yanqiu didn't even need to derive the proof line by line; he only needed to say lightly, "Friends, look at yourselves being swept away by emotion. This script is far too familiar."

That alone was enough to make tens of millions of people instantly pause their cheering hands and put on expressions of scrutiny and suspicion instead.

The storm of public opinion reached its crescendo at this very moment.

...

Meanwhile.

Inside the conference room on the second floor of the administration building at Jiangcheng No. 7 High School, at the very center of the storm, the atmosphere was starkly different from the online uproar.

No one here was mentioning Shen Yanqiu.

Old Liu had no idea who Shen Yanqiu even was.

Although the principal was somewhat aware of public opinion, he had no time to spare for whatever some science influencer was saying.

The dean of discipline was currently in a frenzied sweat, explaining to the local police chief on the other end of the phone line.

"Yes, yes, Chief Zhang, it's really not our school pulling a stunt. These people have gone mad and completely blocked the main gate. How are our senior day students supposed to go home? Right, please send two patrol cars over right away to set up police tape and maintain order. Above all, don't let a stampede happen."

The windows were tightly shut, with thick curtains drawn.

Yet the bazaar-like commotion outside still managed to faintly seep into the conference room.

There was even an independent streamer who had somehow gotten a bullhorn and was conducting an outdoor livestream directly in front of No. 7 High School's sign without restraint.

"Family, folks, it's almost seven in the evening now, and Jiangcheng No. 7 High School's gates remain firmly shut, without giving any direct response regarding the so-called genius youth. What secret is hidden behind this? Are they feeling guilty? Hit that follow button, and I'll keep bringing you continuous live updates!"

In the center of the conference room, an open laptop glowed on an oval mahogany conference table.

On the laptop screen was an eight-page PDF file that Professor Gu Nanzhou had just sent over.

Jiang Lin sat in front of the computer, reviewing the document.

Old Liu stood behind him, wanting to ask if the situation was serious, yet fearing he might interrupt his thinking.

But in his entire life, he had truly never seen a scene as surreal as today's.

Outside the school gates was a horde of media waiting for interviews like hyenas sniffing blood.

On the internet, tens of millions of netizens were arguing fiercely, waiting to witness either the birth of an epochal myth or the spectacular crash of a monstrous scam.

Meanwhile, the protagonist at the absolute center of the storm, his own student Jiang Lin, sat quietly in front of the computer, reviewing an attempted mathematical counterexample against his world-class proof sent by a top mathematics team from the University of Waterloo in Canada, tens of thousands of kilometers away.

He felt that standing here was like witnessing the kind of history that would only be written in textbooks.

Jiang Lin had already finished reading the PDF.

The PDF was only eight pages long.

Kaplan's phrasing was very cautious, calling it merely "A suspected obstruction."

The real red circle fell on page three, on the mirror embedding of the Class-F boundary in the local boundary expansion diagram deriving from Layer-5 to Level-7.

In fact, the Class-F boundary of Level-7 had once bogged him down for three whole months as well.

He had thought there was a path through there.

Later he discovered it was a hidden dead end.

Later still, he continuously refined the proof, and by the seventeenth version of the proof, he stripped this tedious dead-end deduction from the main text and moved it into the appendix.

[part:gemini-3.5-flash-lite]

By the twenty-fourth edition, finding the appendix still too bloated, he applied a higher-order equivalence class merging technique to fold it into the transition state table of the Class F reverse embedding.

By the streamlined version uploaded to arXiv, only three refined lines of index letters and a number pointing to the transition matrix remained there.

He certainly knew that such a writing style was extremely unfriendly to readers.

Yet at the time, he believed that readers capable of pushing the proof deduction to the Level-7 step could follow the three signposts he left behind, mentally reconstruct that hidden dead end on their own, and then safely walk past it.

But looking at it now.

Even the team from University of Waterloo tripped up here when facing this kind of high-dimensional topological folding.

They failed to read those three highly compressed lines of indices, mistakenly believing that this Class F mirror embedding was an independently existing valid state that could lead to periodic collapse.

"Jiang Lin, have you finished reading?"

Professor Gu Nanzhou's slightly anxious voice came through the computer speakers.

Jiang Lin pulled back his thoughts and gave a soft grunt of acknowledgment.

"Is it a problem?"

As soon as these words were uttered, everyone in the meeting room unconsciously held their breath.

Jiang Lin flipped the PDF to page five, glanced at Kaplan's derivation path, and flipped back to the red circle on page three to confirm it once more.

"It is not a counterexample."

Jiang Lin's voice remained as flat as ever, without a single ripple.

"Are you sure?"

"Positive."

Jiang Lin picked up his pen and began to write.

Supplementary Note: Layer-7 Boundary Obstruction

(Supplementary Explanation: Clarification on the Layer-7 Boundary Obstruction)

As he wrote, he explained to Professor Gu Nanzhou on the other end of the phone in an equivalent academic context.

"When deducing, Kaplan's team misread the equivalent folding after the Class F boundary flip as an independent and free topological state. It's my fault; those three lines of indices on page seventeen of the original draft indeed had too high a compression ratio, neglecting intuitiveness. He isn't familiar with this equivalence class merging group I constructed, so getting stuck there is no fault of his."

When Lao Liu heard the words 'it's my fault', his heart jerked upward, almost leaping out of his throat.

His first reaction was that it was over; Jiang Lin was admitting to writing it wrong.

Would they have to rewrite the paper next?

If this got out, wouldn't his reputation be completely ruined?

Unexpectedly, Jiang Lin did not show any panic upon discovering that he had made a major mistake.

He simply moved the paper half an inch to the left, adjusted to a comfortable writing posture, and began to draw.

Every stroke Jiang Lin made was without the slightest pause or hesitation.

Because at this moment, he was not racking his brains to figure out how to prove this or how he should patch this loophole.

He was merely deciding how to draw the path he had walked countless times simply enough so that experts of Kaplan's caliber could also understand it."

These were behaviors of two completely different dimensions.

The former was an explorer in the fog, treading on thin ice at every step;

whereas the latter was already standing at the peak of truth, delivering an accurate translation manual to the lost people halfway up the mountain.

At the twelfth minute, Jiang Lin put down his pen, opened his computer, and typed out a short verification script.

This script was not used for deduction, but solely to check one thing in an extremely brute-force manner.

After forcibly inputting the Class F boundary mirror embedding that Kaplan doubted into the system as an independent state, could it survive?

At the seventeenth minute.

The supplementary PDF document containing all charts, state descriptions, and this short script was completed in Jiang Lin's hands.

Sent to Professor Gu Nanzhou.

"Professor Gu, this is the minimal exclusion explanation for the Level-7 suspected obstruction. The equivalence class indices in the original draft were indeed not intuitive enough, leading to misunderstandings. This explanation can be used as supplementary material and made public directly to University of Waterloo and the academic community."

On the other end, Professor Gu Nanzhou opened the attachment. Reading it the first time, his brows were furrowed, and his brain frantically followed Jiang Lin's extremely erratic and unrestrained topological mapping to switch back and forth.

Reading it the second time, as the closed-loop of that dead-end logic formed, his brows slowly relaxed somewhat, and amazement flashed in his eyes.

When reading it a third time and thoroughly understanding that state folding, which was close to a work of art, Professor Gu Nanzhou finally couldn't help cursing in a low voice in the empty office with a swear word carrying extremely high praise.

"A genius intuition; this kid is fucking amazing."

After cursing, Professor Gu Nanzhou's voice recovered its composure.

"Jiang Lin, I will immediately forward this supplementary explanation to Kaplan."

"Mm." Jiang Lin leaned back against the chair.

Professor Gu Nanzhou thought for a moment and then asked a question that perfectly fit the current sinister public opinion environment: "Public opinion outside is already in an uproar right now, and that science popularization influencer Shen Yanqiu on the internet is making a big fuss over Kaplan getting stuck, saying your proof most likely has loopholes. Do you want me to represent Jiangda University by adding an official explanation to the reply email and incidentally warning the outside world not to spread rumors?"

"Sorry to trouble you, Professor Gu, but no explanation is needed. Just send the proof."

The email was sent, flying toward Ontario, Canada.

The meeting room fell silent.

This silence only lasted twenty-six minutes.

An email notification sound rang out from Professor Gu Nanzhou's side.

He clicked it open swiftly.

The sender was none other than Craig Kaplan.

"Respected Professor Gu and Mr. Jiang: The Layer-7 obstruction I previously doubted has been completely resolved by the author's extremely clear supplementary explanation. The Class F reverse boundary embedding is indeed not an independent case, but has been elegantly folded into the transition state table and terminated at the second adjacency. I currently see no counterexamples here; the logic there is completely sound, and re-verification for deeper levels will continue."

Professor Gu Nanzhou stared at the screen for a few seconds, then forwarded the email to Jiang Lin.

Jiang Lin glanced at it and replied with only three words.

"Got it, thank you Professor Gu."

Lao Liu, standing behind him with his nerves constantly taut, couldn't bear this riddle-like atmosphere any longer and finally broke the silence: "What does this mean? Is it bad news or good news?"

Before Jiang Lin had time to explain, Professor Gu Nanzhou's voice, carrying obvious smiles and relief, came through the phone first.

"Teacher Liu, the meaning is very simple. The world's top experts from University of Waterloo have just officially withdrawn the suspected counterexample they raised regarding the core difficulty of the seventh layer. Currently, the most dangerous academic challenge against this paper—and the biggest one used by those outsiders to attack Jiang Lin—has been very neatly ruled out on the spot by Jiang Lin."

Lao Liu didn't fully understand, but since it had been ruled out, that was enough.

He let out a long breath, touched the back of his neck, and found it covered in cold, clammy sweat.

...

On the other end of the internet, in Beijing, inside a high-end residential complex.

At almost the same time, Shen Yanqiu also saw the latest statement simultaneously updated by Professor Kaplan from across the ocean in that top-tier private academic group and on Twitter.

What first caught his attention were the frantic reminders sent by fans in his Weibo backend direct messages.

[Teacher Shen, quick, look at the foreign internet; that Level-7 problem seems to have new progress.]

[Professor Kaplan just tweeted that the obstacle has been resolved. What is going on?]

[Teacher Shen, you swore just now that there was an eighty percent chance of a loophole; were you referring to this exact spot? Now the foreigner is saying there's no problem!]

Shen Yanqiu was sitting in front of his computer.

Directly in front of him, a DSLR camera used for high-definition live streaming had already been set up.

He had originally planned to start a network-wide live stream at eight o'clock in the evening, half an hour later, to deeply analyze this incident.

He had even drafted an extremely profound title for the live broadcast room.

《Starting from the Reversal of the Single Brick Incident: Why Our Era Always Pathetically Needs Genius Myths to Anesthetize Itself》

But now, looking at the direct message prompts continuously popping up on the screen, this drafted title suddenly became glaringly eye-catching, like a thorn.

He immediately bypassed the firewall, clicking on Professor Kaplan's original post on academic Twitter.

Reading it once, with a rigorous attitude, he copied Kaplan's unambiguous four lines of English and threw them into a professional translation software, fearing that he might have comprehension bias due to being away from the academic circle for too long.

There was no mistake; the meaning was clear that it had been perfectly resolved by the author.

Shen Yanqiu leaned his entire body backward, heavily resting against the back of the chair, remaining silent for a long time.

Under the warm yellow spotlight, his expression did not become exasperated or flush red like those clowns whose defenses had been breached.

What truly made him fall into a prolonged silence at this moment, and even feel a trace of lingering fear, was actually not this minor error in professional judgment.

It was the time difference.

Jiang Lin solved problems too quickly.

So fast that he didn't even have time to push public opinion completely toward the position he was most familiar with and safest in, following his usual rhythm of boiling a frog in warm water.

At this moment, in the comment section under his long article, the public sentiment had already begun to turn in an uncontrollable direction.

[Teacher Shen, are you there? Come out and walk a couple of steps?]

[Didn't you say the conservative estimate was greater than an eighty percent chance of it being fake? How come after just half an hour, half of that has been chopped off?]

[Be rational upstairs, don't hate blindly. Strictly speaking, what Teacher Shen's article talked about was that complete re-verification takes time, not just referring to Level-7.]

[Stop whitewashing him; in that article of his just now, the concrete solid evidence used to convict him was Level-7.]

[Brothers, why do I have an ominous premonition? This time, could this kid really not be creating a god, but rather a true god descending to earth?]

Shen Yanqiu looked at these crazily scrolling comments, his palms sweating slightly.

Ten minutes later, Shen Yanqiu finally moved.

He still did not delete the long article that had triggered massive controversy, because deleting the article meant a guilty conscience and a complete surrender.

Nor did he issue any statement regarding an apology.

The first thing he did was enter the live broadcast backend settings interface.

He modified the title of the live broadcast originally scheduled to start in half an hour.

Original title: 《Starting from the Reversal of the Single Brick Incident: Why We Always Need Genius Myths to Anesthetize Itself》

New title: 《Tracking the Phased Progress of Single Brick Paper Re-verification: How to Define Reasonable Rational Questioning and the Boundaries of Academia》

This new title was modified very securely and possessed extreme professional literacy.

Just like countless times in the past ten years when he encountered tough opponents during debunking, he cleverly used rhetoric to quickly withdraw himself into a safe fortress where, regardless of the outcome, he remained invincible.

But the old fans familiar with him could all tell.

Shen Yanqiu's knife was forced to be withdrawn.

A few minutes after changing the live broadcast title.

Shen Yanqiu simultaneously posted his second supplementary status update of the night on Weibo and Zhihu.

"Regarding the latest progress: Just confirmed, the Level-7 suspected obstruction has been ruled out. This is a very positive academic signal, indicating that the author Jiang Lin's mastery of the underlying mathematical structure of local forcing is indeed far higher than my previous experiential estimate."

"But I must reiterate once again: This is merely the exclusion of a local obstacle. The long and complete peer review of this tens-of-pages paper is far from over. I still firmly oppose any unscrupulous media using eye-catching conclusive phrasing such as 'completely conquered' or 'closing the unsettled case' at the current node. Rational questioning is never brainless pessimism, nor is caution toward academia equivalent to hostility toward genius."

This passage was still written brilliantly, so politically correct that it was completely impossible for anyone to forcefully refute it logically.

However, anyone with basic reading comprehension skills could see it.

This supplementary explanation and the conservative estimate from thirty-four minutes ago were long no longer voices of the same confidence.

The former was a death sentence held high above, wielding the power of life and death.

While the latter was a crisis damage-control statement, putting up a fierce front while being cowardly inside, frantically looking for a way out.

And the internet public opinion field was like a pack of shrewd, bloodthirsty hyenas.

What they excelled at most was sniffing out, from extremely subtle contextual changes, the exact moment when someone originally powerful began to feel fear and prepare to stop their losses.

The wind direction welcomed a violent reversal the moment Shen Yanqiu was forced to turn around.

...

At seven-eleven.

In the conference room of the administrative building at Jiangcheng No. 7 High School, the principal's phone placed on the coffee table lit up.

Caller ID: Jiangcheng Municipal Education Bureau Director's Office.

The principal took a deep breath, answered it immediately, and instinctively straightened his back.

The voice on the other end of the phone had no bureaucratic pleasantries whatsoever, its tone so serious that it even carried an undisguisable urgency.

The first sentence was neither the municipal bureau's routine congratulations on the school's academic achievements nor routine official words of encouragement.

Instead, it went straight to the most sensitive crisis point at present, questioning like a string of firecrackers.

"Lao Zhang, what on earth is going on with your school? The public opinion on the internet is about to pierce the sky! I will only ask you a few core points: Is the student named Jiang Lin currently completely safe in person? Has your school's normal teaching and exam preparation order been overwhelmed? Have the media gathered at the school gate been brought under control? Also, have you communicated with the students' parents? Are their emotions stable or not?"

Wiping the sweat from his forehead, the principal hurriedly answered them one by one.

"Director, rest assured, the student is very safe right now, right under my nose, receiving key protection within the school."

"In accordance with our discussion with the experts from Jiangda University, student Jiang Lin has absolutely not accepted any unauthorized media interviews."

"On the academic front, the School of Mathematics at Jiangcheng University has fully taken over and is assisting in handling professional, purely academic international inquiries. We are not speaking recklessly."

Just as Lao Liu stood by listening and felt a wave of intense dizziness, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jiang Lin, sitting at the conference table, calmly pull out those three pages filled with Physics formulas titled Gaokao Physics Final-Stage Error-Prone Model Summary》 from the somewhat old schoolbag beside him.

Jiang Lin picked up his pen.

Crossed out the line "the direction of the supporting force is determined before the equation," and replaced it with a more straightforward one:

"First check if the contact surface is squeezed, then draw the force diagram; stop blindly applying formulas."

Seeing this scene, Lao Liu finally couldn't help asking: "Does this hurdle count as passed?"

Jiang Lin raised his head: "Teacher, this is just a supplementary note within the proof; it doesn't count as a hurdle."