Chapter 95: You Didn

Xu Qingzhou had just placed the items on the table when Wang Xiaping pushed the door open, one hand holding a tray of washed grapes and sliced apples.

She set down the fruit plate, glanced at the complex symbols on Xu Qingzhou’s manuscript, and silently marveled, “Don’t stay up too late. Go to sleep early.”

“I’ll sleep after reading some materials,” Xu Qingzhou nodded.

“It’s already this late, and you’re still reading materials? Don’t think your youth means you can ignore your health—I know you’ve been staying up late all month.”

“Did Song Yao tell you?”

“Who cares who told me! Experts say staying up late is slow suicide!”

“Qingzhou, I support your mother,” Xu Shou entered at this moment. “Studying is important, but your body is your capital. If your health breaks down, I won’t be happy even if you win a Nobel Prize.”

“Exactly! You’re so young—why worry so much? Staying up every night.”

October 4, 4:00 p.m.

Read! {

At 3:00 p.m., Xu Shou carried his fishing rod out to fish; Wang Xiaping watched TV in the living room.

For Xu Qingzhou, the first three days of the National Day holiday passed in a flash.

“Only the third day?” Wang Xiaping pulled out her phone and confirmed it was only October 3—meaning four more days remained. She silently marveled at how long the National Day holiday felt.

Chengdu’s temperature was much higher than Beijing’s, but Song Yao still wore the gray coat she’d bought last time. Seeing Xu Qingzhou hadn’t worn the T-shirt she’d bought, she felt a faint disappointment.

“Yeah, your dad went fishing—tonight we’re having fish,” Wang Xiaping said.

October 2: breakfast was slightly worse than the first day, but still good.

Before the fish pond.

“Mom, it’s only the third day,” Xu Qingzhou lounged lazily on the sofa.

Xu Shou smiled lightly. “You sound like a child playing around. This is serious—those are all mathematical formulas.”

Xu Qingzhou shook his head, rested enough, picked up his cup, and returned to his bedroom to keep working. Behind him, Wang Xiaping called out: “Remember to open the window and air it out!”

Currently, he had designed a more complex function based on the properties of the zeta function, naming it f(p).

In the bedroom, two voices whispered quietly.

Xu Qingzhou stepped out of the bedroom, cup in hand, to get water. He spotted the seasoning packet on the table. “New fish hotpot seasoning?”

He was moved, recalling his past self—he had left, abandoning his aging parents. He took a deep breath and smiled, promising: “Dad, Mom, rest easy. I’ll take better care of my health from now on.”

“Exactly!”

“If I could understand them, they wouldn’t be mathematical formulas.”

“Heh. Just the newbie protection period.”

He exhaled slowly, closed his eyes, and his consciousness quickly sank into chaos.

So he wanted to use this function to gradually approach, relaxing the upper bound to c×(log p)^a, where a is a real number greater than 1 but less than 2—first prove this holds, then extend the result to broader ranges.

Watching Xu Qingzhou, who grinned wearily, Wang Xiaping frowned. “You’re on vacation and still won’t go out? Stuck at home all day.”

A middle-aged man wearing a sun hat walked over and asked with a smile: “Old Xu, how’s the catch?”

Xu Qingzhou whistled, flipped through the seasonings, and actually felt hungry—he’d made it himself before, but never as good as his family’s.

“Yeah, caught a glimpse.”

He paused, then remembered something more important: “You didn’t forget the money for buying fish for my dad, right?”

“You understood?” Hearing Song Yao was watching, Wang Xiaping and Xu Shou immediately relaxed, urged Xu Qingzhou to sleep early, and quietly left the room.

“Aren’t we having hotpot tonight?”

Xu Qingzhou tidied up, remembered they’d have hotpot, chose a black T-shirt, and headed out. As agreed, he met them at the entrance of Chengnan Middle School.

Zhang Yuquan was especially energetic, volunteering as the event organizer.

Seeing Ding Jiahui and Guo Zi wearing white clothes, Xu Qingzhou wondered if he’d remembered wrong.

Maybe all of them had been scolded by their parents—starting on the third day, this group of returned college students began planning a class reunion in the group chat.

In these three days, Xu Qingzhou had gone out only once—to buy manuscript paper. The calculations were too heavy.

Although constraints reduced the difficulty, progress remained slow; just defining the f(p) function took two days.

“Achoo!” Xu Shou sneezed. Was his family thinking of him?

Wutong Community.

“It’s open.”

Directly proving a constant c such that for all sufficiently large primes p, the next prime q (the smallest prime greater than p) satisfies q−p ≤ c×log p is extremely difficult.

He added: “Besides, with Song Yao watching, I’ve been jogging twice a week.”

“Right.”

Xu Qingzhou decided to join them too—just to get some fresh air. Song Yao naturally came along.

Xu Shou glanced at the clear bucket and replied simply: “Almost.”

Next door, Xu Qingzhou wrote for a while, then tidied up and lay down to rest. The sheets and pillowcases had just been changed by Wang Xiaping, still faintly scented with laundry detergent.

!.

October 1: Wang Nushi, chairwoman of the Xu family, rose early and prepared a lavish breakfast.

In the master bedroom, Wang Xiaping couldn’t sleep, prodded Xu Shou beside her: “Did you see what was on his desk?”

Guo Zi and Ding Jiahui both wanted to go—class reunions were highly attractive to them.

“Just now, a young guy caught a huge white bream—over ten catties,” the middle-aged man set his empty bucket on the ground and set up his rod beside Xu Shou.

The door closed. The TV in the living room turned off. The sound vanished.

With the TV gone, the surroundings grew quieter—the soft scratch of pen on paper, the low chirping of insects outside the window.

October 3: washing dishes now fell to Xu Qingzhou.

“Circles, squares, all kinds of weird symbols—at first glance, it really looks legit,” Wang Xiaping said.

Xu Qingzhou had slept over an hour on the plane last night, so he wasn’t sleepy at all—he decided to write a bit longer.

“Then why are you wearing white?”

“It looks good,” Ding Jiahui never wasted energy on self-doubt—only questioned others. “Look at you—you don’t even bother to tidy up.”

When the four arrived, the private room held over ten people, lively and noisy.

Xu Qingzhou immediately spotted Zhang Yuquan standing at the front—this guy looked radiant, chatting merrily with classmates, more confident than in high school.

(End of chapter)