Chapter 114 - 111: He Really Loves Physics
「Noon. The Nongyuan Cafeteria at Yan University.」
"Often, the finest ingredients need only the simplest preparation. A dash of dried chili, and the flavor is elevated tenfold..."
"Oh, give me a break, Brother Dong. If you want spicy chicken, just say so. No need to cosplay ’A Bite of China’..."
Chen Nan cut Li Dong off before he could even finish.
"Besides, I really want to go to Cafeteria No. 1. I’ve been craving their pork rib and lotus root soup for ages..."
"Speaking impartially, the pork rib and lotus root soup is definitely better."
Liu Qiang chimed in to support him.
Wang Hao sneered from the side.
"Heh, spicy chicken or pork rib soup, neither can hold a candle to the power of pure carbs."
"The donkey meat sandwiches at the Yannan Cafeteria are the real delicacy..."
The four of them stood at the fork in the road between the Nongyuan and Yannan cafeterias, arguing heatedly over which establishment to grace with their presence for lunch.
"I don’t care. We’re having spicy chicken today. I’ll treat, we have to go..." Li Dong played his trump card.
"Brother Dong, even if you threw money at me, I still wouldn’t..."
"Hey Junior, getting lunch?"
Chen Nan was cut off mid-sentence by a girl’s voice.
A few girls were walking toward them.
One of them had a clean, neat look and wore a pair of black-framed glasses.
She gave a small nod and a greeting to Li Dong.
Li Dong nodded back subconsciously.
"Ah... yeah. Hey, Senior."
The girl didn’t say anything more, chatting and laughing with her friends as they walked into the cafeteria ahead.
The moment the girls’ figures disappeared through the cafeteria entrance.
WHOOSH!
The three animals who had just been passionately defending "donkey meat sandwiches" and "pork rib soup" all turned to look at Li Dong.
Among the magical species that is the male college student, it doesn’t matter if you’re one of Yan University’s chosen few or a master excavator operator from Lanxiang—as long as you’re single.
When your roommate gets approached on the street by a pretty decent-looking member of the opposite sex...
Whether you’re teasing him or just feeling jealous, you will always...
"Oooooooh—"
"Tsk tsk tsk..."
Wang Hao slung an arm around Li Dong’s neck.
"Well, well, well! So that’s why Brother Dong insisted on taking this route! Something’s going on here!"
Chen Nan fanned the flames from the side.
"Exactly! Brother Dong, fess up! When did you hook up with her?"
Liu Qiang immediately betrayed his own principles.
"Brothers, we’re listening to Brother Dong today! Let’s go get spicy chicken!"
Surrounded by these three savages, Li Dong was utterly speechless.
He looked toward the cafeteria entrance, his brow slightly furrowed.
"She just looks familiar, that’s all. I swear, I really don’t know her."
"Tch, who’d believe that!" Wang Hao rolled his eyes.
"Then why would she say hi to you?"
Li Dong racked his brain and finally seemed to remember where he had seen that senior before.
"I remember now! She was the orientation senior who showed me to Dorm 35..."
"Forget about orientation this or that, hurry up and follow them! You may be an ascetic, but we aren’t."
"That senior in the yellow shirt glanced at me just now. She’s obviously into me..."
Wang Hao said shamelessly as he dragged Li Dong into the cafeteria.
Inside the Nongyuan Cafeteria, as far as the eye could see, were Yan University students carrying meal trays.
’The senior with glasses? Heh. The place is full of female upperclassmen with glasses, okay?’
"Sigh, I guess it just wasn’t meant to be..." Liu Qiang sighed, shoveling a mouthful of rice with a look of regret.
"Sometimes having a huge cafeteria isn’t a good thing..." Chen Nan also shook his head helplessly.
Li Dong, on the other hand, couldn’t care less. He had come for the spicy chicken, and with delicious food in front of him, who had time to worry about any seniors?
「After lunch, the four of them went their separate ways.」
Liu Qiang and Chen Nan, that pair of study fiends, headed straight for the School of Mathematics to sit in on a class. In their own words, "If I go a day without some higher-dimensional algebra, I feel awful."
Wang Hao didn’t have anything else planned for the afternoon, so he returned to the dorm with Li Dong.
As soon as they entered the dorm, Li Dong went to the bathroom, and in that short time, he came out to find Wang Hao sitting in his chair, staring at him with a complicated expression.
That look made Li Dong’s scalp tingle, and he subconsciously took half a step back.
"Haozi, what are you doing? What’s with you? If you have something to say, just say it. Don’t look at me like that!"
Wang Hao held up a copy of *Algebraic Geometry* and said to Li Dong,
"Um... Brother Dong, there’s something I really don’t get. Can you explain it to me?"
For him, asking a peer for help with a math problem was a first, and it was inevitably a bit awkward and damaging to his pride.
But he had one good quality: he knew how to face reality.
Li Dong was strong, and that was a fact. Compared to understanding the material, who gave a damn about face!
"It’s about affine schemes and the Zariski topology on them. I don’t get it."
"I already asked one of the professors in our school about it, and the result was..."
"What was the result?" Li Dong asked curiously.
Wang Hao gritted his teeth and admitted,
"I still didn’t get it."
"The professor said I’m still lacking some foundational intuition in commutative ring theory and homological algebra, so it’s normal that I couldn’t understand it."
"He told me not to rush, since I’m only a freshman and have plenty of time. He told me to go back and review the fundamentals, and then ask him again if I still didn’t understand."
Wang Hao gave a bitter smile.
"But... didn’t you say before that you could build a mapping bridge just by reading Chapter two? So I wanted to ask you..."
Hearing this, realization dawned on Li Dong.
"Oh, that! It’s actually not that hard."
Li Dong pulled over a chair, sat down, and casually grabbed a piece of scratch paper.
"Don’t look at it as pure, dead algebra. You need to add physical, geometric intuition."
Wang Hao immediately perked up his ears, preparing to be baptized by the god of studying.
"Look, in classical algebraic geometry, we study the solution sets of equations—that is, points."
"But Grothendieck’s genius was that he took all the prime ideals of a commutative ring A and directly defined them as a space, Spec(A)."
Li Dong explained as he drew a diagram.
"Don’t think of it as too abstract. Just think of it as a physical field. The elements in the ring A are actually functions on this space, and each prime ideal is a point of physical observation within that field!"
"Think about it, what is the value of a function at this point?"
"Isn’t it just its localization map in the residue field of that prime ideal?"
"As for the Zariski topology, that’s just a way of defining an open cover that’s forced on it to make the continuity of these functions on the space reasonable."
"If you view a closed set as the zero set where a function equals zero, just like the potential energy minima in a physical field, doesn’t the structure sheaf naturally construct itself?"
Li Dong grew more and more animated as he spoke. He felt he was being incredibly considerate, holding nothing back.
He was completely dismantling the problem using the high-dimensional, interdisciplinary thinking he’d gained from his 0.3 attribute and fused Physical Perception.
However, the expression on Wang Hao’s face across from him had already shifted from initial anticipation to confusion, and finally, settled into complete despair.
’He was a pure math competition student!’
’At least the professor had used rigorous mathematical language to explain the localization of a ring to him.’
’But Li Dong? He went straight to physical fields and potential energy minima!’
’Still, this really proved it... Brother Dong truly loved physics more...’
"So? When you look at it this way, combining the two, doesn’t it all become crystal clear in an instant?"
After finishing his explanation, Li Dong looked at Wang Hao with an expectant expression.
Wang Hao nodded blankly.
"Yeah... I get it now. Crystal clear."
With that, he hugged the thick copy of *Algebraic Geometry*, sat back down on his lower bunk like a walking corpse, and hid himself in the shadows of his bed curtain.