Chapter 59 - 46: Witness My Connections
"Dongzi," he looked up, his eyes filled with disbelief as he stared at Liang Xiaodong. "This guy you found is just too incredible!"
"To solve this problem, he actually thought to constrain a, b, and c to the first quadrant, then transformed the problem into a surface formed by a, b, and c within the first quadrant of a three-dimensional coordinate space. As the time axis d increases from 0 to 6 seconds, the surface continuously shrinks towards the origin! It’s both elegant and concise. Freaking brilliant! How do you know a genius like this?"
Liang Xiaodong spread his hands, an enigmatic smile on his face.
"I paid to know him."
Han Sibo: "?"
...
「June 24th, Tuesday. Not yet 9:00 AM.」
Chen Lin walked into the Nanlin Garden residential complex, carrying fresh vegetables he had just bought from the market.
He looked down at the not-yet-fully-dry concrete path, complaining inwardly. ’The plum rain season in Jiangdu is just as annoying as I remember from childhood. The air is damp and sticky, clinging to your skin. It’s an indescribable discomfort.’
The forecast said it was supposed to keep raining for the rest of the week. Luckily, the weather was cooperating today, giving him an overcast sky.
His parents had both gone to work yesterday, and with the rain outside, Chen Lin hadn’t felt like leaving the house. He ended up lazing around all day, taking the opportunity to study how to write a neural network in Python.
That stuff was basically the underlying logic for large AI models. He figured he’d definitely have to learn it eventually, so he might as well start now.
As it turned out, just as he was getting to a crucial part of his research, he suddenly got a notification from the second-hand app he hadn’t checked in a while.
Chen Lin had thought it was another big consulting job, but when he opened the message, he saw it was from that high school student from last time, the one named [Black Whirlwind is not the McDonald’s Vortex].
This time, the order was for a single, solitary problem.
’Oh well, a hundred yuan is still money.’
Chen Lin didn’t overthink it. He just took out a pen and paper and started working on the calculations.
But unexpectedly, the problem took him nearly twenty minutes and filled two whole pages of scratch paper.
Compared to his usual consulting fee of 880 yuan per hour for the design institute, Chen Lin felt like he’d taken a huge loss on this job.
He also found it a bit strange. Although he didn’t have much of a concept of undergraduate-level math, let alone more advanced fields, he had at least fought his way across the narrow bridge of the Jiangsu Province Gaokao to get into Yannan University.
After 2021, the math exam for both arts and science streams in the Jiangsu Province Gaokao was the same, so he had a pretty good grasp of the scope and difficulty of high school mathematics.
At least, there weren’t problems this difficult when he was in high school.
’Are high school kids really this competitive nowadays?’
But he didn’t plan on digging any deeper. For someone like him, who possessed the "Little Mathematician" title, a more difficult problem just meant spending a bit more time and energy on it.
He finished the problem, took a photo, sent it to the buyer, and considered the job done.
Chen Lin snapped back to reality and pushed these thoughts to the back of his mind.
Before he knew it, he had arrived at the old-style apartment building where his grandparents lived. The hallway was dimly lit, with peeling paint on the walls and the scent of bygone days lingering in the air.
They lived on the fourth floor, and there was no elevator. Chen Lin climbed the stairs one floor at a time. After all these years, everything was still the same, aside from being a little more worn down.
His maternal grandparents had three daughters, and Chen Lin’s mom, Lin Xiaoqi, was the second oldest.
His grandfather was a retired government official and his grandmother was a regular worker. On their pensions alone, the elderly couple should have been living comfortably.
But two years ago, his grandfather had major surgery for a lung problem, and his health had been in decline ever since.
To make matters worse, his grandmother began showing early symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, and her memory was deteriorating rapidly.
After discussing it, his mom and her two sisters decided to pool their money and hire a 24-hour live-in caregiver for the couple.
Then, the three of them set up a rotation, with each one coming over to take care of them for two days a week, mainly to cook, help them bathe, and make sure they took their medicine on time.
In the past, Chen Lin had always come with his mom.
Later, he gradually started picking the day when none of the three sisters were scheduled to visit. He figured he could keep his grandparents company when they might feel lonely without their children around.
As soon as he got home on Saturday, he asked his mom about this week’s schedule and learned that Tuesday was the open day.
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.
Chen Lin knocked on the door.
The door opened quickly. It was the live-in caregiver. She smiled kindly when she saw Chen Lin and stepped aside to let him in.
His grandfather was sitting in a wicker chair in the living room, a thin blanket covering him. He was so weak that it was already a great effort for him to stand up on his own.
But he was still pleasantly surprised to see Chen Lin walk in. He propped himself up slightly and waved at him.
His grandmother, on the other hand, still thought Chen Lin was in high school in Jiangdu.
Last summer vacation, when Chen Lin came to visit his grandparents, he had tried to correct his grandmother, telling her he was already in college. But after realizing it was no use, he gave up. Now, he just went along with what she said.
Chen Lin put down the vegetables and chatted with his grandparents for a while. He mainly took out his phone, found some current events, and read them out to his grandfather, word for word.
He remembered that when he lived at his grandfather’s house as a child, his grandfather loved to read the newspaper. There was even a small room dedicated to stacking them.
Later, after smartphones came out, Chen Lin told him that the information on a phone was faster and more abundant than in a newspaper. So now, every time he visited his grandfather, Chen Lin would read him the news from his phone for a while.
Around 10:30, he went into the kitchen, took out the leftovers his eldest aunt had left in the fridge yesterday, and heated them up. Then, using the ingredients he had just bought, he made scrambled eggs with tomato and braised eggplant with green peppers.
Once the meal was ready, Chen Lin and the caregiver carefully helped the elderly couple to the dining table.
The four of them sat around the table and began to eat.
His grandmother had no problem eating. She had a great appetite and ate heartily.
His grandfather’s hands, however, were trembling more severely than they had six months ago. He kept trying to pick up food with his chopsticks but couldn’t manage.
The caregiver was about to step forward to help him with the food, but Chen Lin stopped her.
"I’ll do it."
He put down his own bowl and chopsticks and focused entirely on taking care of his grandfather.
Whatever dish his grandfather’s gaze fell upon, he would pick it up and place it in his grandfather’s bowl.
Only after his grandfather had eaten his fill did Chen Lin pick up his own, now slightly cold, bowl of rice and quickly start eating.
After the meal, the elderly couple went back to their room for an afternoon nap. Chen Lin cleared the dishes, also preparing to say his goodbyes and head home.
"Lin," his grandfather suddenly called out to him.
He gestured for the caregiver to take a red envelope from the TV stand drawer and hand it to him.
With trembling hands, his grandfather caressed the red envelope before holding it out to Chen Lin.
"Take it, take it..."
Chen Lin quickly waved his hands in refusal. "Grandpa, you don’t have to. I can earn my own money now."
But his grandfather wouldn’t listen or take no for an answer. He just stubbornly held up the red envelope, repeating the same words, "Just take it, just take it..."
His grandmother, standing by, also chimed in, "That’s right. Studying in high school is so tough, what’s this about earning money? Take it and buy yourself something nice to eat."
Chen Lin sighed softly to himself.
’I’ll just take the red envelope for now,’ he thought. ’Later, I’ll talk to Mom about using the money to buy a new appliance for Grandpa and Grandma.’
Having made up his mind, he no longer refused. He reached out and took the heavy red envelope from his grandfather’s hand.
However, the moment his fingertips touched the red envelope, Chen Lin’s body suddenly went stiff.
A series of cold system prompts popped up before his eyes.
[Host has been detected receiving a red envelope from an elder!]
[For a child, saving is the best form of financial planning!]
[Task Requirement: Receive and save red envelopes from elders, accumulating over 2,000 yuan!]
[Reward Title: Little Financial Planner]
[Little Financial Planner: Your net worth increases by 10% every month!]
...
[It has been determined that the Host has already received and saved over 2,000 yuan from elders’ red envelopes!]
[Task Complete! Reward has been distributed!]
Walking out of his grandparents’ building, Chen Lin opened the system to check. Sure enough, he had a new title:
[Little Financial Planner: Your net worth increases by 10% every month! (Current Net Worth: 32,832.5) (Time until next net worth increase: 155:57:31)]
An idea instantly popped into Chen Lin’s head: ’No hesitation! I’m using a Little Red Flower to enhance this title right now!’