mc-med Chapter 14 Sadness and Joy
Chapter 14 Sadness and Joy
Su Hao was momentarily stunned, then turned his head away.
The touch on my wrist carried a barely perceptible tremor.
What caught him was the girl in the exam room who stared at him intently with eyes that seemed to want to devour him.
"what?"
Su Hao instinctively tried to pull his hand away; the man's expression was really off.
Judging from his height and facial features, he is most likely a junior high school student.
It's important to understand that while this level of competition doesn't explicitly state an age limit for participation, the difficulty of the exam is considerable, and those sitting in the exam room are mostly top students from prestigious high schools in their second and third years of high school.
Here, Su Hao himself was certainly an anomaly, like someone who had been reduced to a lower dimension, but the junior high school girl in front of him was equally conspicuous.
Su Hao looked her up and down.
She bit her lip hard, her eyes were red, and tears were welling up in them, but she stubbornly refused to let them fall.
It was a despair and pain that could not be described in worldly terms after the soul had been crushed.
She looked at him like that, her eyes pleading and desperate, like a drowning person grabbing a lifeline in a stormy sea.
Ultimately, Su Hao chose the latter over "forcibly breaking free" and "listening to what this unlucky kid is up to."
"Um... is there something you need?"
"Ah... um... that's it."
Lin Shuwan's pale lips twitched violently a few times.
Her throat made a dry, weak grinding sound, but she couldn't even string together a complete word.
How am I supposed to bring this up?!
Does that mean, "Little brat, I spied on you doing your homework, and it caused my moral compass to crumble?"
A tremendous wave of bitterness gripped her throat.
Not only could she not utter a single syllable, but the tears she had been holding back for so long finally burst forth, and they streamed down her face once again.
This scene...
It was quite frustrating for the two people involved, but to uninformed bystanders, the amount of information was terrifying!
Sure enough, the candidates who were packing their things around them instantly erupted in a commotion, with whispers surging like a tsunami!
"Holy crap, why is she crying?"
"I don't know. Judging from the look of it, she probably got rejected on the spot after confessing her feelings."
"Wait! Isn't that Lin Shuwan?! That famous genius girl?!"
I heard that she ruthlessly rejected all the boys in school who were pursuing her in order to focus on her studies, and it turned out that...
She likes this cute boy type?!
Hearing these outrageous remarks, Lin Shuwan shivered violently, as if someone had poured a bucket of ice water over her head, instantly sobering her up.
"These idiots...how could they say such vulgar and shameless things!"
Lin Shuwan was so angry that she trembled all over, her nails digging deeply into her palms.
At this moment, she felt that if she didn't immediately turn around, point her finger at these people, and unleash a torrent of profanities, she would definitely explode on the spot!
But Su Hao's flat voice interrupted her spellcasting animation first.
"Um, those things on your table, I forgot to take them."
Su Hao tapped her desktop with his chin.
There, lying quietly, were several exam paper drafts that were covered in scribbles.
The paper was covered with dense marks of her miserable struggles over the past three hours, like a trapped beast fighting desperately, with no clues and hitting walls everywhere!
"Ah...no! This thing absolutely cannot be exposed!"
If the gossip from everyone just made her angry...
So now, when her proud mathematical talent is being looked at like trash by outsiders, Lin Shuwan feels a deep-seated sense of shame!
This feeling is a hundred times stronger than when everyone spread rumors that I was "rejected after confessing my love"!
Her face flushed bright red instantly, and she lunged forward, like a guard dog protecting its food, using her hands and feet to block the table with her body!
"This is...this is just something I wrote randomly!"
Lin Shuwan's words were incoherent, and she even let out a dry laugh that only made things worse.
"Hahaha!
If I took the test seriously, I would definitely get a perfect score!
My friend insisted on dragging me here today, saying he was afraid to compete alone.
If I answered the questions properly, my friend's ranking would drop by one place. I'm doing this for the sake of our sacred friendship!
The harsh reality is that Lin Shuwan is too aloof and doesn't have a single friend she can talk to at school.
She grabbed the crumpled draft papers and stuffed them haphazardly into her schoolbag like some kind of disgusting trash.
Su Hao looked at her comical appearance and was speechless.
"What's going on? This person is so pitiful! They seem a bit mentally challenged..."
She is undeniably beautiful and charming, but her interpersonal skills and emotional management are so clumsy that it's almost unbearable to watch.
"Um... I mistook you for someone else! Sorry, I have to go now!"
Faced with immense shame, she chose the most pathetic escape, like a defeated soldier.
Lin Shuwan picked up her schoolbag, turned around hastily, and rushed out with her head down.
However, fate always seems to like to kick someone when they're at their worst.
The desks in the examination room were already spaced far apart, and the aisles were piled with backpacks and luggage that the candidates had carelessly left behind.
thump--!
Lin Shuwan's ankle was tripped by a backpack strap that was sticking out, and she completely lost her balance.
Without any cushioning, she crashed heavily onto the hard ground like a salted fish on a chopping board, making an extremely dull sound.
"Are you alright?"
Su Hao's eye twitched, and he took a few steps forward to check on her condition.
Fortunately, apart from the extremely indecent posture, she didn't seem to be injured.
Su Hao had just breathed a sigh of relief when he heard a faint sound from the ground, as if the person was about to die.
"...Leave me alone."
"what?"
"I'm so embarrassed I want to die... You should just leave, don't worry about me."
Lin Shuwan buried her head tightly in her arms, as if the world couldn't see her unless she looked at it.
The students who had been enjoying the "rejection of a confession" gossip were now gathering around like iron filings attracted by a magnet.
Lin Shuwan was absolutely certain that if the "shame to death" event required triggering factors, then she had absolutely met all the necessary and sufficient conditions at this moment.
"Alright, let's go out first. Didn't you have something to say?"
Su Hao's voice remained calm, devoid of mockery or excessive pity.
With only a few seconds of visual contact on the table, Su Hao's extraordinary brain had already extracted the core information from her draft paper.
Although her derivation completely collapsed in the last step and failed to arrive at the answer, her idea of trying to force a breakthrough using mathematical analysis was extremely impressive.
That problem can obviously be solved by introducing the Minkowski inequality to achieve an extremely elegant proof.
"Although with her current knowledge and computing power, forcibly using such a tool is still too much of a stretch."
But from any perspective, this is a promising talent that should absolutely not be overlooked in this corner.
It's such a pity that I didn't answer a single question on this exam...
Upon hearing Su Hao's completely emotionless question, Lin Shuwan's eyes widened suddenly. She froze for a full three seconds before nodding very slowly and heavily.
.......
"Do you...know my name?"
The benches outside the examination hall were a bit chilly from the autumn wind.
After finally calming her racing heart, Lin Shuwan took a deep breath and looked at Su Hao, asking him a question.
She was trying to reclaim some of the space that belonged to geniuses.
However, what came from the side was a cold, emotionless voice, even tinged with doubt.
"have no idea."
puff--!
A sudden surge of inexplicable grievance rushed into Lin Shuwan's heart!
After all that, it turns out I was the only one who acted like a fool, focusing on the other person unilaterally in the exam room and having my inner monologue go on like a whole drama?
"Lin Shuwan. I am a member of the national math Olympiad team."
She practically gritted her teeth as she announced her name!
Her original intention was to build the last line of defense for the dignity of a genius in front of this cold young man.
He wanted to let the other party know just how famous and talented the person sitting in front of him was, so as to save face!
But after hearing this, Su Hao's expression didn't change at all; he still looked completely indifferent, as if it were none of his business.
After a long while, he seemed to have just finished processing the information, and let out a very perfunctory sigh.
"what!"
Su Hao remembered; he had indeed heard something about it.
He is said to be the youngest member of the national team in recent years and is reportedly a rare talent.
But his soulless "ah" was completely distorted into a different meaning in the extremely sensitive ears of Lin Shuwan.
"I know, I didn't do well on this year's math Olympiad, I bombed it."
Lin Shuwan gritted her teeth and frantically tried to make amends with unwavering determination!
"But this was an unexpected situation. Next year will be different. I will definitely win the gold medal in the Mathematical Olympiad next year!"
However, Su Hao didn't follow up on her words at all; he was calculating something else entirely.
"This person is participating next year too. We'll probably run into them at the selection trials; consider them a cautionary tale."
"But what exactly did you come to me for..." Su Hao forcefully steered the conversation back to the main topic.
"Ah! No! Look at this."
Now that her pride has been completely shattered today, she no longer intends to put on airs as a genius girl.
Lin Shuwan decisively took out the pile of crumpled draft paper from her schoolbag and spread it on the bench.
What do you think of this proof approach?
Su Hao's gaze sharpened slightly as it fell upon the messy calculations.
Just as he had predicted from that fleeting glimpse, it was an extremely tricky yet incredibly brilliant angle.
"The general direction is correct. However, when we got here..."
Su Hao reached out and took the pen from her hand with remarkable ease. He placed the paper on the wooden board of the bench and began to write equations in the blank space.
Two young men, who were absolutely geniuses in the field of mathematics, squatted down next to each other like two street thugs, solving problems.
The scene was so comical that passing students would occasionally cast strange glances at it, and some even pointed and made sarcastic remarks.
But the moment Su Hao put pen to paper, Lin Shuwan had already entered a state of flow, and the world around her seemed to suddenly become quiet.
rustling.
"Look, you defined the vector space as the L^2 norm here, which is quite intuitive. But you overlooked the fact that the boundary conditions do not converge under the constraint of this inequality."
Su Hao's voice was not loud, and his speech was not fast. As he wrote, he casually pointed out the dead end that she had spent three hours trying to get out of.
The brushstrokes flow freely, like a great river rushing to the sea, a natural and effortless process.
Finally, the deduction led to a crossroads that completely diverged from Lin Shuwan's own conclusions.
"The idea of treating $sqrt{a^2 + 1}$ as the norm of the vector $(a, 1)$ is indeed very good."
However, if you try to directly apply Minkowski's inequality here, you'll get stuck.
Su Hao shook his head, and with a cold straight line drawn on the paper, he crossed out her formula.
Then, he wrote a completely new, almost divinely inspired equation in the blank space.
"Let's think about it from another perspective. The essence of the triangle inequality between vectors, in Hilbert space..."
The moment Su Hao wrote down that line of equations, all the surrounding noise seemed to be instantly cut off by a pair of invisible giant hands!
The wind has stopped!
The footsteps of passersby disappeared!
boom--!
Lin Shuwan felt as if a thunderbolt had exploded in her mind.
Her once clear eyes now looked as if she had seen a ghost, staring intently at the equation on the paper, her eyes almost bursting out of their sockets!
My scalp is splitting open!!
In that instant, every hair on my body stood on end like steel needles!
She was an extremely intelligent person to begin with, and there was no need for Su Hao to explain things clearly.
The moment that crucial transition formula appeared on the paper, the previously stuck logical gears in her mind suddenly started meshing and turning wildly!
She watched helplessly as her incomplete idea was being completed in a devastating way through the hands of others.
Moreover, it was a perfect form that far exceeded her initial expectations, full of violent aesthetics and ultimate elegance!
Lin Shuwan squatted there blankly, her body stiff, her heart filled with mixed feelings of sorrow and joy.
The good news is that her almost stubborn intuition was right; the path to the truth was open!
Tragically, without Su Hao, she could never have written such a divine deduction on her own!
She gasped, staring at Su Hao in disbelief.
That little brat, he only glanced at her draft paper!
Just a few seconds!
He actually saw through her failed proof process, all the logical dead ends, clearly from beginning to end, and even ran through a flawless alternative in his mind?!
Is this guy even human?!
The dramatic difference in perspective creates a terrifying tension.
In Su Hao's eyes, this was nothing more than pointing out a wrong answer, which was perfectly reasonable.
But in Lin Shuwan's worldview, this was a cosmic Big Bang that crushed pride!
Now that things have come to this, she has no choice but to admit it.
The casually dressed elementary school student holding a child's pen in front of her was the first high wall that Lin Shuwan had encountered in her short life of just over ten years.
No, it wasn't even a wall; it was the Himalayas, a mountain range she might never be able to cross in her entire life!