146: Chapter 146 The Same Carriage

August 14th, 1:15 PM.

On the high-speed train from Jiangcheng to Beijing.

Jiang Lin lifted his black backpack, placed it on the luggage rack, and then sat down by the window.

The air conditioning in the carriage was turned up quite high, and the clean train window vaguely reflected the silhouette of his own outline.

At eighteen, with a freshly buzzed crew cut, his stubble was dazzlingly short, wearing a pure white T-shirt without any prints, and jeans washed so white and soft at the knees.

At first glance, he was fundamentally no different from any other university freshman in this carriage dragging a suitcase and heading to Beijing to register.

At least for the first few minutes before he was recognized, all appearances suggested this.

If there was any difference, it was probably that his brows and eyes were too quiet, exuding a calmness that settled after stripping away the impetuousness and flamboyance typical of a teenager.

Beside him, a boy in a light blue shirt was raising his hand, helping his mother stuff her carry-on computer bag into the luggage rack.

As the action came to an end and he pulled his hand back, his gaze inadvertently swept across Jiang Lin.

He froze for a moment.

The boy's mother was lowering her head to tidy her handbag and didn't notice her son's abnormality, only softly reminding him: "Yizhou, be quick, don't block the aisle."

Yet the boy acted as if he hadn't heard his mother's words at all.

He maintained that half-bent posture, his gaze blankly falling on Jiang Lin's profile.

His lips moved slightly, seeming to want to say something, but he was choked in his throat by a certain immense sense of unreality.

After a full five seconds, he swallowed hard, and finally asked in a cautious and probing voice: "Are you Jiang Lin?"

The voice wasn't loud, but almost everyone near this row of seats heard it.

Hearing someone call his name, Jiang Lin turned his head, met the gaze peacefully, and slightly nodded: "Hello."

With just these two words, the sense of uncertainty and loss on the boy's face vanished instantly, followed by an irrepressible surge of shock and excitement.

"It really is you."

Subconsciously, he tensed his already straight back even stiffer, and a spark of light lit up in his eyes.

But he quickly realized that in front of this person, his current reaction seemed a bit too exposed and out of control.

Taking a deep breath, he tried to make his voice sound steady and confident: "Sorry to bother you. My name is Lin Yizhou, and I'm also a freshman at Tsinghua University this year."

After saying this, as if handing over a precious social business card, he lowered his voice and added three words: "Yao Class."

Tsinghua University Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, computer science experimental class Yao Class.

If it were any other occasion on the high-speed train, facing any other high school student or parent, these three words would be no different than a sudden clap of thunder on a calm day.

It was enough to make all the surrounding parents show looks of amazement, and enough to instantly overshadow any peers.

Because those able to enter this class were either the top group of Gaokao scorers from strong provinces, or top talents who broke through early in competition systems like informatics and mathematics.

Placed among any cohort of nearly ten million national freshmen, this resume already represented that handful of people standing at the apex of the pyramid, looking down at all living beings.

Yet this time, after Lin Yizhou finished speaking, he himself felt that this introduction seemed too light.

Because sitting next to him was none other than Jiang Lin.

He was the geometric constructor of the Jiangs Brick, the person who ended decades of mathematical mysteries with a single aperiodic monotile.

He was the invitee of the 45-minute special report at the International Congress of Mathematicians, a mathematician who stood on the highest academic podium in the field of mathematics at just eighteen years old.

He was the recipient of the iccm mathematics gold medal, an absolute genius who broke the record for the youngest winner since the award's establishment.

He was the founder of the Low Entropy Workshop who stirred up a storm in the real physical world with pure technological power.

In the face of these titles sufficient to be recorded in the history of science, the identity of a Yao Class freshman truly had no capital worth boasting about.

Jiang Lin looked at the peer in front of him, who clearly carried a bit of nervousness and curiosity, and nodded: "Hello, I am Jiang Lin, nice to meet you."

The air in the carriage experienced a brief and strange silence.

Although Lin Yizhou's mother didn't quite understand why her son suddenly became so restrained, she vaguely sensed the unusual atmosphere and didn't speak for a moment.

Just as this quietness was about to spread, on the window seat on the other side of the aisle.

A boy who had been lowering his head to intently read an all-English mathematics handout raised his head.

He was wearing a light gray shirt, wearing a pair of thin metal-framed rimless glasses, his temperament exuding a detached coolness long immersed in books.

He first looked at Lin Yizhou, then his gaze naturally followed Lin Yizhou's line of sight, landing on Jiang Lin.

In the eyes behind the lenses, it was as if some image comparison algorithm was running in his brain, finally completely matching the ordinary teenager wearing a white T-shirt in reality with those few photos circulating in the headlines of major news media and high-level mathematics forums over the past few days.

Then, this coldly tempered boy made a move that surprised his father beside him.

He very solemnly closed the notebook in front of him, neatly tucked his pen between the pages, held the back of the seat, and slightly bowed across the aisle to pay respects.

"Hello Jiang Lin, my name is Gu Mingche, a freshman at Qiuzhen College."

Gu Mingche's father sat nearby, watching his son, who had always only been interested in mathematics, actually take the initiative to greet a peer so solemnly, and a trace of surprise instantly arose in his heart.

But the instinct to protect his child, coupled with that irrepressible pride, still made him unable to help adding a sentence for his son.

"Mingche is a rather introverted child; he actually secured direct admission through the national mathematics competition team."

This father fully believed that this sentence was enough to establish equal dialogue qualifications among peers.

However, hearing his father's addition, Gu Mingche looked at his father with some helplessness and even a bit of embarrassment, gently shook his head, signaling him not to continue.

Competitions, direct admissions?

Mentioning these two words in front of Jiang Lin was simply a dimensional-reduction misinterpretation of the name Jiang Lin.

Gu Mingche knew better than anyone that Jiang Lin's achievements in the field of mathematics had long broken away from the scope of solving problems and competitions, entering the grandmaster realm of expanding knowledge boundaries for humanity.

Although Gu Mingche's father didn't understand why, he also saw his son's resistance, smiled, and sensibly closed his mouth.

Just at this moment, in the row ahead, a round-faced boy was gesturing a Beijing travel route to his family, his right hand still pinching half a piece of unfinished mung bean cake.

The moment the two words Jiang Lin drifted over, his speech suddenly jammed, and he even forgot to swallow the mung bean cake.

Then he abruptly stood up, quickly turned back to take a peek, and the moment his small eyes saw Jiang Lin's appearance, they widened completely, as if seeing an alien in broad daylight.

"Holy shit!"

The most rustic piece of national essence slipped out of his mouth, almost spraying out the cake crumbs in his mouth.

Before his voice faded, he was immediately slapped on the arm by his mother sitting beside him: "How are you talking, making a fuss in a public place."

The round-faced boy shrank his neck from the slap, hurriedly swallowed the cake, lowered his voice, his voice trembling with excitement: "No, Mom, you don't know, this is alive—no, no, I mean this is Jiang Lin himself."

"Is this kid very famous?" The boy's mother felt her son was being inexplicable.

"Mom, he is that genius mathematician on the news."

With a look of excitement akin to witnessing history on his face, excited to the point of incoherence, he hastily whispered a brief science popularization to his mother, then turned back to face Jiang Lin, grinning exceptionally brightly.

"Jiang God—no, right, President Jiang, hello, my name is Xu Zhiyuan, from the School of Information."

Originally, after announcing the four words School of Information, Xu Zhiyuan habitually wanted to say: "I also entered through this year's Gaokao, maybe we'll be in the same class for major category courses."

But the moment the words were about to escape, he forcibly swallowed them back into his stomach.

Granted, he entered Tsinghua University fair and square with scores ranking in the top three for Physics in his province.

But within the track of the Gaokao, there was also a gap that made people look up in awe.

Because on Jiang Lin's score report, which was being frantically forwarded online, his total score was only one point short of a perfect score.

And that one point, online analysis generally believed, was arbitrarily deducted from the paper score by the Chinese composition grading teacher just to avoid giving a full score.

Even more frighteningly, the Gaokao was like a carp leaping through the dragon gate for ordinary people.

But for Jiang Lin, this turned out to be just the most inconspicuous yet easiest footnote for the public and media to understand in his heaven-defying resume that was enough to shock the global academic and technological circles.

Jiang Lin looked at these three freshmen of the same cohort with different personalities but similar lights flashing in their eyes, feeling the youthful vigor, slightly adjusted his posture, and politely nodded in response to them one by one.

"Hello everyone, we'll all be in the same school from now on, there's no need to be so polite."

After greeting them, the carriage fell into a subtle silence once again.

If regular passengers today accidentally recognized a popular film and television star or traffic idol on the high-speed train, everyone was very familiar with the subsequent process.

The surrounding people would quickly gather around, take out their mobile phones to snap pictures, ask for signatures, excitedly exchange pleasantries, or tentatively take group photos for memories, and the entire carriage would fall into a noisy joy.

But at this moment, sitting in this small space composed of several rows of seats happened to be three Tsinghua University freshmen.

Moreover, they were three elites who had already left ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of their peers nationwide far behind in their respective tracks.

Of course they knew Jiang Lin, and they knew him much more profoundly than any netizen or onlookers.

NOI National Training Team.

Direct admission through pure mathematics competitions.

Top ranks of the Gaokao in strong provinces.

Pull out any single one, and in any high school, they would be legendary ceiling-level figures.

Yet now that they were sitting in the same carriage as Jiang Lin, breathing the same air conditioning, they suddenly felt that the things they had once been so proud of had all become weightless.

Breaking this silence was Lin Yizhou's mother.

She did not entirely understand the undercurrents of psychological gaming among these teenagers, but she instinctively sensed the stiffness of the atmosphere and thus tried to break the ice with adult tact.

"Oh, so you boys are all new freshmen admitted to Tsinghua University this year! You'll be classmates after that, studying in the same campus—what a coincidence."

"Indeed, indeed, absolutely!" Xu Zhiyuan's mother immediately picked up the conversation, trying to relax the atmosphere in this area again, "We were thinking that official registration isn't until the 17th, and by then there will definitely be people from all over the country, so we brought our child to Beijing a few days early. We wanted to first familiarize ourselves with how to take the subway around the school and what the road conditions are like, so we won't be caught clueless when the time comes."

Lin Yizhou's mother smiled and chimed in repeatedly, "We planned it the same way. When Yizhou used to participate in computer competitions, he came to Beijing several times. But those were all led uniformly by school teachers under closed-end management. Every day it was just staying in a budget hotel, entering the test venue to compete, and returning to the hotel to write problems—a straight line between two points—without ever taking him to seriously tour the Tsinghua University campus. This time, we just happen to take advantage of arriving early to look around properly."

Gu Mingche's father nodded in deep agreement, joining this casual chatter among parents, "That's right. When entering Tsinghua University as a freshman, there are plenty of matters—things like military training, entrance education, physical examinations, and department meet-and-greets, with schedules packed tightly. Once enrollment actually happens, the kids probably won't be nearly as free."

The topic finally drifted back down to earth like a kite with a broken string, returning to the track intimately familiar to all freshman families.

Which cafeteria window has the best reputation?

What are the conditions in Zijing Apartment actually like now, and is the air conditioning powerful enough?

Is August in Beijing sunny or not?

...

Several parents chatted warmly and familiarly across the aisle and seats.

The fragments of mundane life slowly drifted up, quietly diluting the suspended sense of oppression from just moments before.

Yet, in this bustling parents' chat session, the three freshmen who should have been the protagonists appeared exceptionally silent.

Lin Yizhou's fingers unconsciously rubbed against his knees, Gu Mingche maintained his upright posture, and Xu Zhiyuan leaned over the back of the front seat.

Just at this moment, Jiang Lin made a new move.

He opened the laptop resting on the small folding table.

"Beep—"

The moment the screen lit up, Lin Yizhou, sitting beside him, swept his gaze across with almost reflex-like speed.

He swore he wasn't intentionally peeping at the screen; it was just that as an informatics competition student who grew up soaked in piles of code, he had an ingrained sensitivity to the color schemes and layouts of code editors.

Merely the UI layout at the edge of the screen was enough for him to instantly distinguish what the other was doing.

On the screen was an integrated development environment.

To be precise, it was the editing interface of Lean 4.

In the project directory tree on the left side of the screen, as Jiang Lin quickly swiped on the touchpad, several highly recognizable file names flashed across Lin Yizhou's retina like lightning.

Node4ing _ rearrange . lean

Node47 _ final _ global _ assembly . lean

v1_0 _ dependency _ graph . md

Lin Yizhou's Adam's apple involuntarily rolled up and down.

He did not specialize in pure mathematics and could not understand the abstract mathematical symbols involving high-dimensional measure spaces, Shannon entropy, and complex polynomial bounds in the center of the code window.

Yet he understood the naming conventions of formal verification projects.

Numbered node files, finishing files with final and assembly.

This was not routine development at all, but performing the final closed-loop verification.

His gaze fell toward the code area, where a lone feature marker floated at the very end.

For the entire project, only this final remaining proof gap waited to be filled.

"Are you writing that final node?" Lin Yizhou's voice was somewhat drifting, as if living in a dream.

Jiang Lin's fingertips stopped on the touchpad, the cursor hovering right above that feature line.

Hearing this question, he turned his head slightly, glanced at Lin Yizhou, and explained: "The main algebraic structure of node 46 has already been wrapped up. Now I'm checking whether any extra redundant loops were generated in the dependency graph after integrating the conditional lemma of node 47."

Lin Yizhou froze in his seat, muttering after a long while: "On a high-speed train traveling at three hundred and fifty kilometers per hour, using a laptop to do the final wrap-up of the formal proof for the PFR Conjecture?"

Xu Zhiyuan, sitting in the front row, abruptly turned his head back.

The expression on his face looked as if he had suddenly heard someone say they had casually cobbled together a nuclear reactor on the small folding table of a high-speed train.

Meanwhile, Gu Mingche on the other side of the aisle cast his gaze across the gap of the aisle, landing on Jiang Lin's screen.

Gu Mingche was not in the informatics direction and could not understand the specific programming operators in the Lean 4 code or those low-level computer grammars.

However, just in these past few days, screenshots of the verification progress in Jiang Lin's public repository had been carried over to major mathematics forums by people.

The number 46 / 47 had almost become a countdown that all gazes across the entire high-level mathematics circle were holding their breath for.

With only this final local verification closed-loop passing, that towering mountain spanning between Additive Combinatorics and information theory, which had troubled countless geniuses for as long as thirty years—the PFR Conjecture—would be completely pierced through for the first time at the mechanically verifiable formal logic level.

This meant that humankind had forcefully broadened its territory in cognizing the mathematical laws of the universe by another giant step forward.

In this ordinary carriage, the three geniuses among peers, upon remembering that they were only just carrying their luggage, full of yearning and ambition, to go study in Beijing, felt a weightless sensation as if they had lost gravity all at once.

The gap was so immense to a certain degree that thoughts of jealousy and comparison wouldn't even have the chance to sprout; all that remained was the purest form of looking up.

The question that had lingered in Xu Zhiyuan's heart for a long time and which he never dared to ask finally couldn't be held back any longer.

"Uhm, Jiang Lin, I previously saw gossip online saying that the school held a special overnight meeting just for you and approved a very special training program. Then after school starts, will you still go to regular classes like the rest of us?"

As soon as this question was asked, the voices of several parents who were previously chatting heatedly beside them about school opening matters abruptly stopped.

They stopped their conversations one after another, turned their heads over, their gazes carrying the same curiosity and inquiry.

Through some understanding, several people already knew that the teenager before them had long since proved he possessed academic and engineering capabilities far surpassing undergraduates, and even far surpassing the vast majority of professors.

Would such a legendary figure really, like other ordinary eighteen-year-old freshmen, rub his sleep-heavy eyes every morning, carry a school bag to grab seats in the lecture hall, and attend early morning calculus and Linear Algebra classes?

Would he really queue up in the cafeteria for braised pork belly, and miserably elect some general education courses at the end of each semester for the credit requirements in the academic administration system?

Just thinking about this picture made people feel a strong sense of dissonance and unreality.

Facing Xu Zhiyuan's question and the surrounding pairs of equally curious eyes, Jiang Lin's fingers tapping on the keyboard paused slightly.

The high-speed train carriage happened to pass through a tunnel at this moment, the scenery outside the train window instantly turning dark, making the originally soft lights inside the carriage appear even brighter.

The faint light of the Lean 4 editor on Jiang Lin's screen reflected upon his calm face.

He simply used his left hand to gently close the angle of the laptop screen a bit to prevent reflections from the side, then raised his head, looking calmly at Xu Zhiyuan.

"I will."

He gave an unusually down-to-earth answer.

Watching the slightly astonished expressions of Xu Zhiyuan and the others, a rare hint of a smile emerged on Jiang Lin's normally expressionless face.

"Tsinghua University has many foundational courses and interdisciplinary lectures. Whether it's the design of the curriculum system or the teaching approaches of elderly professors, I find them quite interesting. As long as time permits, I should attend them all."

In Jiang Lin's view, the palace of knowledge was infinite; he had merely happened to walk a bit faster on a few paths, which did not hinder him from appreciating the scenery along the main road.

Lin Yizhou, Gu Mingche, and Xu Zhiyuan looked at each other in dismay.

The high-speed train rushed out of the tunnel once more, and the bright daylight outside the window poured back into the carriage.

Jiang Lin had already turned his attention back to the screen. As the enter key fell, the last red node that had hovered for a long time in the dependency graph on the left slowly turned green.

The entire logical network spanning 47 nodes finally completely turned into a uniform dark green.

Meanwhile, the three Tsinghua University freshmen sitting near him each withdrew their gazes.

Lin Yizhou took out his tablet computer, tapping on it absent-mindedly; Gu Mingche reopened his notebook but failed to turn a page for ages.

As for Xu Zhiyuan, rationally he knew this was somewhat impolite, but the urge to witness history simply couldn't be suppressed.

Therefore, in the end, he still took out his phone, secretly snapped a photo of Jiang Lin's profile, and sent it to the high school group chat.

Yet the train continued to speed toward Beijing at a speed of three hundred and fifty kilometers per hour.

Some people's university hadn't even begun, while some people's milestone had already landed.