Chapter Two: Everyone Else Was Wrong

After finishing her night shift, his mother had sent him a voice message at dawn. “Don’t be nervous. It’s all right if you don’t do well.” No equation had appeared over those words. That was why he listened three times. The final lasted six hours and contained four problems. The first two concerned number theory and combinatorics. The third asked for proof of the convergence boundary of an unfamiliar network. Lin Yan wrote slowly. He loved how a proof settled on paper: every step had to be honest, and no step changed according to the identity of one’s father. The fourth problem, however, was broken. Its initial conditions contradicted each other. Strictly speaking, it had no solution.