Reality Programming Association

Chapter 158 -66: Is This Melon Guaranteed to Be Ripe?

“Brother Cos, what took you guys so long? I’ve been waiting forever.”

Her gaze swept across the three of them, her big eyes flashing with the raging fire of pure gossip.

It was as if they weren’t her friends, but three farmers just back from the fields, carrying the freshest, ripest melons.

“So? How did it go? Did you see Professor Ning? Is there some earth-shattering scoop?”

She leaned forward, the hood of her dinosaur pajamas slipping off to reveal two messy buns.

“Hurry up and tell me! I’m dying of suspense!”

The atmosphere in the lounge was a little strange.

Yu Xian didn’t answer right away. He first glanced at Shi Zuozhou, who just shrugged, giving him a look that said, ‘Your call.’

He then turned to Wen Xiao.

Wen Xiao’s hands were clenched tightly around the hem of her shirt, betraying her nervousness. When she met Yu Xian’s questioning gaze, she took a deep breath and nodded firmly.

Her expression was resolute. Yu Xian knew she was telling him that it was okay to speak freely, that Shao Yiyi could be trusted.

As a professional connoisseur of gossip, Shao Yiyi seemed to have keenly picked up on the exchange of glances between them.

“Hey, hey, hey, what’s with all the meaningful looks?”

She eyed the three of them suspiciously, her gaze darting back and forth between their faces.

“What is the big secret? Why all the mystery?”

Shao Yiyi swallowed, her voice dropping unconsciously.

“Don’t tell me… something really happened to Professor Ning, did it?”

Yu Xian sat down in a nearby armchair. He took a deep breath and decided to stop beating around the bush.

“Yiyi, Professor Ning is fine for now, but… he told us some things.”

Yu Xian’s fingers tapped lightly on the back of his phone as he organized his thoughts.

“Regarding the recent series of incidents at the School of Physics—from Professor Gao’s death to the riot at the lab building, and possibly even Professor Ning being reported… there’s a single hand behind all of it.”

“A single hand?” Shao Yiyi sucked in a sharp breath.

“Who? Who has that kind of power?”

“It’s someone you know,” Yu Xian said, looking Shao Yiyi in the eyes and enunciating each word.

“Su Mingyuan.”

For a moment, time in the lounge seemed to stand still.

Shao Yiyi remained leaning forward, frozen on the spot as if hit by a petrification spell.

Her mouth hung open as she stared blankly at Yu Xian, as if she had just heard some unbelievable fairy tale.

A good five or six seconds passed before she managed to ask again, her voice trembling and her eyes vacant.

“Who…?”

“Su Mingyuan,” Yu Xian repeated. It was cruel, but he had to make it clear.

“Your mentor’s junior, Su Mingyuan.”

Shao Yiyi’s expression froze instantly. Yu Xian could understand. This Evil Bun Head had probably been eagerly waiting to hear some gossip about someone else.

She certainly never imagined that this particular piece of gossip would land squarely on her own head.

“How is that possible? Professor Ning… what did he say, exactly?” Shao Yiyi’s voice was shaking.

“Does he have any evidence? He can’t just make a baseless accusation like that and pin such a huge crime on my mentor’s junior, can he?”

Yu Xian looked at Shao Yiyi, knowing she was resisting the truth. He could only state the facts as objectively as possible.

“Professor Ning said that Su Mingyuan went to his office, urged him to retire and stop his research, and warned him that if he didn’t, he would bring about a ‘Torrential Calamity Water.’”

“Torrential… Calamity Water?” Shao Yiyi mumbled to herself.

“And then, the very next day, the obituary for Professor Gao’s suicide was released. After that came the torrential rain, followed by the rumors and riots targeting the School of Physics. The timing is just too perfect.”

Shao Yiyi fell silent.

She lowered her head, her fingers picking at the seams of a throw pillow. After a long moment, she spoke with difficulty.

“But… that’s just suspicion, right? Even though it was strange for my mentor’s junior to visit Professor Ning, you can’t just conclude from that alone that he planned the riot or drove the professor to his death, can you?”

“I know. It’s all just speculation. There’s no direct evidence.”

Yu Xian nodded. He understood. If he hadn’t personally heard the despair in Professor Ning’s voice, he would have found it hard to believe too.

“But, Yiyi, think about it carefully,” Yu Xian said, looking at her.

“Even if Su Mingyuan isn’t the direct mastermind, the fact that he could foresee the ‘Torrential Calamity Water’ and went to warn Professor Ning… what does that tell you?”

“It means…” Shao Yiyi’s eyes were frantic.

“It means he at least knew about it.”

“Exactly.” Yu Xian posed another question.

“Besides, doesn’t the ‘Torrential Calamity Water’ he mentioned align a little too perfectly with the ‘Great Flood’ trigram you divined earlier?”

He stared intently into Shao Yiyi’s eyes.

“Do you think it’s possible that your mentor’s junior also divined this trigram? Or maybe… he knows far more than we do? For example… maybe he knows how to stop this great flood and has already taken action to do so.”

Shao Yiyi’s mouth opened, but her voice was faint, like air escaping a deflating ball.

“That… that’s possible.”

“Speaking of Su Mingyuan’s actions… I don’t know if you all noticed this,” Shi Zuozhou, who had been silent until now, suddenly spoke up, his tone thoughtful.

“I’ve actually always felt that Su Mingyuan has… a strange sort of aversion to modern technology.”

Shi Zuozhou turned to Yu Xian.

“Old Yu, do you remember? At that conference, a guy stood up and questioned whether his ‘Subtraction’ theory was anti-intellectual and anti-science.”

Yu Xian nodded. The scene was still vivid in his memory. The student’s words had been sharp, asking if Su Mingyuan had arrived by horse-drawn carriage, which had drawn laughter from the whole audience.

“Found it. This is the part.”

Shi Zuozhou played a video, a clip from a livestream that had gotten millions of views.

He placed the phone in the middle of the table and turned up the volume.

On the screen, Su Mingyuan stood center stage, looking gentle and refined under the spotlight.

He was smiling, using his incredibly charismatic voice to explain his analogy about “compression.”

“When we compress a high-resolution RAW photo into a JPG, the file size instantly drops to a few megabytes, just a fraction of its original size.”

“So, let me ask you, when you send this compressed photo to your mother, is her happiness diminished because the photo has lost 95% of its data? Obviously not.”

“Because the core information—your smile, your well-being—is perfectly preserved. The 95% that was compressed away is the part with extremely low marginal utility. It’s redundancy with a low ‘signal-to-noise ratio.’ This function is not everyone’s default option, and the development of society and science is the same.”

The video was still playing when Shi Zuozhou hit pause and pointed at Su Mingyuan on the screen.

“I didn’t think much of it at the time, just thought it was some kind of fallacy. But looking back now, his hint was actually very clear.”

Shi Zuozhou looked up at the others.

“I think what he was trying to say is that a lot of cutting-edge technology is actually that ‘low marginal utility’ redundant part. If that’s the case…”

He swallowed and voiced his speculation.

“In his eyes, wouldn’t the physicists who exist to explore that ‘95% redundancy’ be… the biggest wasters of resources?”

Shi Zuozhou’s conjecture left the other three in the lounge in silence.

Could Su Mingyuan really view physics—the discipline dedicated to exploring the truths of the universe, the crown jewel of human intellect—as “redundant”?

If they followed Shi Zuozhou’s logic, Su Mingyuan’s seemingly gentle ‘decluttering’ philosophy was, in essence, a form of extreme technological reactionaryism.

But in that case, it did align perfectly with the demands of the “frenzy of anti-intellectualism.”