Chapter One: Two Thousand Dollars and Seventy-Two Hours

At 2:17 a.m., Shen Yan had $2,008.31 left in his bank account. On the right side of his screen, the deadline for his withdrawal paperwork was six days away. On the left was a two-line email from Professor He Chongshan: “Your spectral-gap conjecture lacks research value. Laboratory funding ends immediately.” Attached was the abstract for next week's international symposium. He Chongshan was listed as first author. Its title—*A Unified Lower Bound for Spectral Gaps in Sparse Random Graphs*—belonged to the work Shen had spent eleven months developing and He had rejected seventeen times. At the bottom of his inbox waited an advertisement: “MU-0 Final Research Lease—Seventy-Two Hours Before Shutdown.”