My IQ Increases Year by Year

The snow in New Jersey had finally stopped.

The hallways of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study were quiet. The blinds of the office were half-drawn, and the snow outside reflected a glaring white light.

Delian stood by the window, holding a cup of cold coffee. He wasn’t drinking it, just staring blankly into the brown liquid.

"David, have you checked the server logs?"

Delian didn’t turn around, his voice tinged with clear agitation.

David sat at his computer, his eyes bloodshot. He took his hands off the keyboard and rubbed the bridge of his sore nose.

"I’ve checked them three times, Professor. No blocks, no dropped packets. Our email system is running perfectly."

David sighed.

"That Professor Chen... he just hasn’t replied."

It had been a full seven days since that groundbreaking email was sent.

In those seven days, Delian and David had practically overturned the last six months of their work. Following the two-page PDF document to the letter, they had completely rebuilt the mapping matrix for their discrete algebra.

The deeper they went into the derivation, the more they could sense the terrifyingly boundless imagination the person named Zhuo Chen possessed in mathematics.

It was like a special, exquisitely crafted key.

Delian’s team had run into a divergent mathematical dead end while building their model. They had originally been forced to use a clumsy and tedious traditional renormalization method, tacking on a few cancellation terms to patch the hole.

This had left an ugly patch in the middle of what was otherwise a beautiful paper.

But this Zhuo Chen had keenly perceived the ugliness of that patch. He had casually borrowed a small trick from discrete algebra to bypass the hole entirely, offering a clean and elegant shortcut.

It was a path never before trodden—direct, decisive, without a hint of superfluity.

But this only made the silent wait all the more agonizing.

"Maybe he’s on vacation."

David tried to offer a reasonable explanation.

"It’s the eve of the Lunar New Year in Hua Country right now. I hear the entire country basically shuts down for this holiday, and everyone is busy reuniting with their families."

"Science doesn’t shut down for holidays."

Delian placed the coffee cup on the windowsill and turned around.

"When your mind is occupied with solutions for multidimensional manifolds, you can’t just sit peacefully at a dinner table eating dumplings, David. It goes against a scholar’s very instinct."

Delian took a couple of steps around the office, then stopped in front of his desk.

He couldn’t wait any longer.

The email address clearly had a Hua Country Science and Technology University domain suffix. In their field, the circle of top scholars was actually quite small.

"Bring me the time zone chart," Delian said.

David glanced at his watch.

"Professor, it’s about ten in the morning in Capital City right now."

"Excellent."

Delian pulled out his chair, sat down, and opened the address book on his desk.

He was looking for a number.

Fang Shi, the vice dean of the School of Physics at Hua Country Science and Technology University. They had met a few years ago at an international conference on condensed matter physics and had maintained sporadic email contact ever since.

Delian picked up the receiver and dialed a long string of numbers for an international call.

A long series of rings echoed from the earpiece.

After the fourth ring, the call connected.

"Hello? Who is this?"

A deep, middle-aged male voice with a thick northern accent came from the other end of the line.

"Fang, it’s me, Delian from Princeton."

「Huizhou, Huake University.」

Fang Shi sat behind his desk, a white porcelain teacup in hand. He had just blown the tea leaves from the surface and was about to take a sip.

Hearing the voice on the phone, he froze, then set the teacup down.

"Professor Delian? Hello! This is a surprise. What brings you to call me?"

Fang Shi switched to fluent English, his tone a mixture of surprise and pleasantry.

"Fang, time is short, so I’ll get straight to the point."

Delian spoke quickly, his urgency undisguised.

"I need your help finding someone, a professor at your university."

Fang Shi leaned back in his chair and picked up a pen.

"Go ahead. Which professor? Did one of our visiting scholars in the United States run into trouble?"

"No, he’s in the country. Zhuo Chen. I’m not sure of the specific characters."

Delian paused, as if weighing his words.

"Fang, you at Keda are hiding your talent too well. This Professor Chen is brilliant—truly, truly brilliant—in the interdisciplinary field of algebraic geometry and theoretical physics."

Fang Shi frowned.

"He solved a topological Singularity problem that has been plaguing us for a long time."

Delian’s voice, though coming over a less-than-clear international line, still carried a tone of sincere admiration.

"It’s a work of art. I sent him an email inviting him to visit Princeton, so we could discuss future extensions of the work. But he hasn’t replied. I’m worried it might be a network issue, so I’ve taken the liberty of disturbing you. Please convey my respects and make sure he checks his email."

Fang Shi’s grip on his pen tightened slightly.

’Delian from Princeton, using words like "brilliant" and "a work of art" to describe someone from Keda.’

’If this is true, it’s absolutely explosive news for Keda, and even for Hua Country.’

But he ran through the list of key figures in the physics and math departments in his head. None of the old stalwarts who carried the weight were named Chen Zhuo.

"Delian, are you sure about the spelling? C-H-E-N, Z-H-U-O?"

Fang Shi wrote down the Pinyin on a piece of paper.

"Positive. The email suffix is from your university. Fang, I’m counting on you."

After hanging up, Fang Shi stared at the Pinyin on the paper and fell silent for a moment.