Chapter Eleven: The Astonishment of the Tsinghua Professor—You Call This a Failed Candidate?

The live stream screen was split into two cold, harsh worlds.

On the left was He Yu.

Behind him hung a cheap little blackboard, and he sat quietly in front of the camera, his youthful face expressionless under the harsh white light of the lens.

On the right was Zhang Chengyan.

A doctoral advisor from Tsinghua University, his background was a study room steeped in antiquity, with redwood bookshelves crammed with heavy, classical volumes. His refined visage bore the natural authority of a long-established figure of great stature.

Between the two worlds, the live viewer count scrolled in real time—three million.

Three million pairs of eyes were piercing through the cold screen, converging into an invisible storm, swirling above this historic confrontation destined to be recorded in the annals.

Inside the monitoring room, the atmosphere was so tense that even breathing felt weighty.

Liu Jie stared intently at the main screen, his knuckles pale from gripping tightly. Though he did not understand mathematics, he understood interrogation and psychological strategy. Professor Zhang Chengyan’s tactic was a sharp psychological assault—an academic scalpel aimed precisely at cutting through He Yu’s façade of “genius.”

“Hello, He Yu,” Professor Zhang began, his voice loud and clear, carrying the force that could resonate through a thousand-seat lecture hall.

“I have watched your livestream recordings and am intrigued by your problem-solving approach. However, while your method is clever, it is insufficient to fully prove the Riemann Hypothesis. I would like to discuss an extended problem with you—one concerning the deeper structure of the distribution of zeros of the Riemann Zeta function. What is your take?”

The moment the question dropped, among the three million viewers, twenty-nine hundred ninety-nine thousand brains momentarily crashed.

The comment stream froze for a fraction of a second, then was overwhelmed by a tsunami of question marks.

[???????]

[I declare, as soon as the word “Riemann” was mentioned, I completely lost track.]

[Oh no, the old professor’s playing dirty—starting with his ultimate move, no ordinary attack at all!]

[Host in danger! I feel even my advisor’s advisor wouldn’t be able to answer this!]

Liu Jie’s heart leapt to his throat.

Here it comes—the main act.

He could almost predict that the young man on camera would turn pale, stumble over his words, and amid a storm of laughter and scorn be nailed to the pillar of disgrace as a fraud.

Yet, He Yu only smiled.

That smile was faint but like a steadfast anchor, instantly calming every prying wave.

He stood, picked up a piece of white chalk, and turned toward the modest blackboard.

With a swift stroke—

The chalk traced a clear, elegant formula with no hesitation.

“Professor Zhang, the question you posed is quite ingenious.”

He Yu’s voice carried through the microphone across the entire network—neither fast nor slow, imbued with a peculiar cadence, as if not answering a question but stating an established fact.

“But if you attack it purely from the perspective of mathematical theory, it’s like trying to open a whole wall of locks with a single key—a terribly inefficient approach. Actually, we can reverse-engineer the model from its applications.”

As he spoke, the chalk danced nimbly at his fingertips.

“First, in asymmetric cryptography, the distribution of zeros of the Zeta function directly determines the ultimate efficiency limit of certain large number factorizations. We can use this as a basis to construct a function model relating ‘encryption strength’ to ‘zero density’...”

“Second, in the chaos theory of quantum physics, the statistical distribution of eigenvalue spacings in random matrices closely resembles the zero distribution of the Zeta function. We can leverage this connection to transform a purely mathematical problem into one of experimentally observable energy spectra...”

“Third, financial models...”

Ten minutes.

A full ten minutes.

He Yu’s voice dominated the entire livestream.

He did not pause or falter. The profoundly advanced knowledge seemed not stored in his brain but engraved in his very soul, ready to pour forth with a mere spark.

Not only did he offer a flawless, newly conceived solution approach, but from that starting point, he radiated outward, forcibly opening up three completely unprecedented application directions—in cryptography, quantum physics, and financial modeling—that no predecessors had conceived!

At the other end of the video call, in the study at Tsinghua University—

Professor Zhang’s expression was undergoing a violent collapse.

His initial scrutiny shifted to a trace of amazement.

That amazement swiftly swelled into uncontrollable surprise.

When He Yu introduced the quantum physics model, the surprise was utterly shattered, replaced by an abyssal shock!

Finally, when He Yu completed his exposition, set down the chalk, and quietly gazed into the camera, Zhang Chengyan was frozen stiff. He instinctively leaned back heavily against his chair, producing a dull thud.

The refined dignity and authority he so prided himself on vanished instantly, leaving only an unhidden, near-fearful astonishment in his eyes.

This young man...

His constructed cognitive model, the breadth of knowledge and depth of logic he exhibited...

Not to mention his most prized doctoral students—even Zhang himself would never have reached such a terrifying height on this problem in merely ten minutes!

This was no longer genius—it was something otherworldly!

“Impossible... this is absolutely impossible...” Zhang murmured blankly, his throat dry. Unwilling to yield, driven by a primal urge to defend his academic honor, he cleared his throat and almost blurted out a second round of attacks.

“Then... how about the problem of algebraic cycles and cohomology classes in the Hodge Conjecture?”

A slight smile flickered at He Yu’s lips.

“The core of the Hodge Conjecture lies not in geometry, but in algebra. Most have gone astray.”

In just a few words, he struck at the core.

Zhang’s pupils contracted sharply.

“What about the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture? Its applications on elliptic curves...”

“The key to the BSD Conjecture is the rank of the L-function. Approached from here, everything falls into place.”

“The Poincaré Conjecture’s differential manifolds...”

“That is a problem of topology. Using manifolds to solve it is missing the point.”

Five!

Unwilling to concede, Zhang launched five world-class problems in rapid succession—each capable of confounding any top mathematician for months, driving them to the brink of madness!

The result?

All were defused by He Yu with an even deeper, dimension-reducing logic, lightly dismissed within breaths. He barely bothered to write on the board; a few sentences tore through layers of academic fog, revealing the fundamental logical core beneath.

The livestream was deathly silent.

Three million viewers, along with Liu Jie and all the cyber police in the monitoring room, gaped, dumbfounded, staring at the unnervingly calm young man on screen.

They didn’t understand the details.

But they understood this:

They could read the expression on the scholarly titan’s face at the other end of the video as if he had seen a ghost!

Zhang Chengyan fell utterly silent.

He seemed drained of all strength, slumping motionless in his chair. Moments stretched on until everyone thought the stream had frozen.

Finally, he raised his head and looked deeply—profoundly—into the camera at He Yu.

That gaze was infinitely complex: shock, shame, confusion, but above all, a heartfelt reverence.

He released a long, weary sigh as if expending half a lifetime’s spirit.

“Today, I have been taught a lesson.”

His voice was hoarse yet carried clearly across the entire network.

“I just want to say this: if a genius like He Yu is someone who failed to get admitted, then ninety-nine percent of Tsinghua University’s students probably... aren’t even qualified to enter university!”

Once spoken—

The entire internet exploded.

In the monitoring room, the investigative report in Liu Jie’s hand fell to the floor with a clatter.

He and all his colleagues stood petrified, staring at the screen. The words “academic fraud” and “scholarly imposter” on that report now appeared utterly absurd, cruelly ironic.

At the very moment public opinion ignited into a frenzy across the web, a cold yet melodious system notification sounded in He Yu’s mind.

[ Ding! You have received public recognition from an academic titan, your credibility has skyrocketed. Reward: 20,000 points! ]

[ Current credibility balance: 24,850 points! ]

Staring at the sudden surge in his credibility, an unprecedented surge of pride swelled in He Yu’s chest.

He knew the moment had come.

Ignoring the delirious comments flooding the screen—“Holy shit!” and “Awesome!”—he fixed his burning gaze on the camera and, summoning all his strength, declared loudly:

“For the brothers of Nanhe Province, the Longhai University admissions announcement is effective immediately!”

“All Nanhe examinees will receive an additional thirty-point score reduction on top of the lowered admission threshold due to donations!”

“This year, Longhai University will recruit at least—”

He paused, then each word struck clearly into everyone’s hearts:

“One hundred thousand students!”