Chapter 45: A "Supercomputer" in Every Hand!
The live stream's bullet comments had shifted from their initial, frantic scrolling into a state of stunned, sage-like reverence mixed with blank disbelief.
People had assumed this was the climax of today's broadcast, the ultimate salute He Yu had prepared for Longhai University's "opening ceremony."
However, the drone's camera smoothly ascended, gliding past the futuristic autonomous tram tracks and sweeping over patches of lush, verdant ecological landscapes.
The frame finally came to a standstill.
He Yu's figure reappeared at the center of the lens.
Behind him stood a building whose main structure had just been capped off.
It was a creation that defied simple categorization by any existing architectural vocabulary.
The entire structure was a fluid, silver-white, as if cast in a single piece of liquid metal.
Enormous curved surfaces formed the bulk of the building; there was not a single intrusive pillar, not a single redundant angle. The overall structure presented a full, powerful posture of reaching upward.
It stood quietly in the core area of the campus, reflecting a cold yet scorching brilliance under the sunlight, resembling a massive heart air-dropped from the planet Cybertron, pumping energy into this land.
An oppressive aura that transcended the era surged through the screen and hit the viewers directly.
The bullet comments in the live stream were ignited once again.
[“Holy crap! What is that? A new art museum?”]
[“This design... As an architecture student, I’m kneeling right now. This violates the principles of mechanics! How on earth is this thing supported?”]
[“Don’t ask, just attribute it to future technology!”]
He Yu ignored the clamor in the chat. He simply raised a hand to point at the breathtaking building behind him, showing not a trace of boastfulness on his face, only a calm that bordered on stating a plain fact.
“ Brothers, right here is the upcoming [‘Dragon’s Heart’ Supercomputing Center] of Longhai University.”
‘Dragon’s Heart.’
The moment that name dropped, everyone held their breath.
A supercomputing center?
To ordinary people, that term was as distant as the stars in the sky. It was a forbidden zone belonging to national strategy and the most cutting-edge scientific research fields.
He Yu’s voice came clearly through the audio equipment into everyone's ears. Naturally, this facility was something he had redeemed from the system.
On a campus entirely under his jurisdiction, no one would ever question him.
“According to our blueprint, this building will deploy a nationally supported supercomputing cluster, currently the top tier among domestic universities.”
He paused, seemingly giving the audience time to digest the information.
Then, he dropped a heavy bombshell.
“Its computing power will exceed three times the total of all existing universities combined.”
This sentence used no rhetoric; it was simply a string of cold, precise, and violently extreme data.
Exceeding... the total of all existing universities... by three times!
At this moment, the viewers in the live stream became completely numb.
Their brains' processors seemed to have crashed from overload. From the campus subway to this ‘Dragon’s Heart,’ the hardware strength displayed by Longhai University had completely shattered the public's imaginative limits of what a "university" could be.
This wasn't building a university with money; this was piling immeasurable resources to construct a scientific miracle, a divine monument in the history of education!
Yet, everyone had underestimated He Yu.
Or rather, everyone had underestimated his "madness."
Looking at the faces in the lens that appeared somewhat doting and blank from shock, the corners of He Yu's mouth curved upward for the first time, forming an extremely faint arc.
It wasn't a smile; it was a gleeful, slightly defiant look of someone about to overturn the entire gaming table.
“I know that at other top universities, using supercomputing resources requires layer upon layer of approvals and incurs exorbitant hourly fees.”
His voice wasn't loud, but it cut like a precise surgical scalpel, instantly exposing that well-known yet unchangeable pain point within the domestic higher education system.
Countless graduate students, PhD candidates, and even young faculty members watching the broadcast felt their hearts tighten violently.
The humiliation and helplessness of pulling all-nighters writing reports, begging advisors for signatures, and enduring administrators' grimaces just to apply for a few hours of computing time instantly surged into their minds.
He Yu’s voice continued.
“But here at Longhai University—”
He paused deliberately.
In the entire live stream, the heartbeats of tens of millions of people seemed to be gripped in his palm at that exact moment.
Everyone sensed that a world-shattering moment was about to arrive.
He Yu’s gaze pierced through the lens, looking directly at everyone in front of the screen.
His voice, word by word, was clear and steady, yet carried an unquestionable, sovereign-like power.
“—I promise:”
“Every enrolled student at Longhai University, regardless of their major,”
“Will be granted a free personal account and unlimited access to this supercomputing center,”
“To be used for their studies and research!”
Boom—!
If the previous news was a bomb, then this promise was a hydrogen bomb detonated right at the center of the Chinese academic and technological circles!
The shockwave released by it instantly swept across the entire internet!
Dead silence.
A suffocating dead silence that lasted for several seconds.
Even the bullet comments in the live stream froze.
Immediately afterward, it was a volcanic, completely out-of-control eruption!
[“He’s crazy! Completely crazy! The president is genuinely insane! Every person gets their own supercomputer? What kind of divine treatment is this?!”]
[“I’m crying, I’m actually crying! When I applied to use a supercomputer at my school, I wrote a 30,000-word application report, begged everyone I could, and in the end, it still got rejected! On what grounds?!”]
[“I declare that starting today, He Yu is my only father! Dad! Look at my gaokao scores this year, can I be your son?!”]
[“To the person above, Dad is mine! Nobody touch him!”]
[“This isn’t building a university anymore; this is breeding a bunch of monsters! A bunch of monsters who treat a supercomputer like a personal PC from their very first day of enrollment!”]
He Yu didn't end his declaration there.
He used an even more inflammatory and subversive statement to put the most perfect punctuation mark on this crazy live broadcast.
“In Longhai, supercomputing power will no longer be the privilege of a few top scientists,”
“Instead, it will be standard equipment for every single student!”
Standard equipment!
The phrase was deeply branded into the minds of every viewer like a hot iron.
It completely subverted everyone's understanding of how higher education resources were distributed!
One had to know that at elite institutions like Peking University and Tsinghua University, let alone ordinary students, even many professors and doctoral supervisors found that applying for resources within their campus supercomputing centers was no less difficult than securing a national-level key research project.
It was a strictly controlled strategic resource, viewed as something only accessible to those at the pinnacle of the pyramid.
Yet He Yu had directly turned it into "student standard equipment"!
Just like a cafeteria meal card or a dorm room key—taken for granted, one for every single person.
At that moment, countless students struggling bitterly for their graduate or doctoral entrance exams looked at the programs on their computers that had been running for dozens of hours without yielding results, and then looked at He Yu's outrageously young face on the broadcast. Their eyes instantly turned red.
This kind of sparing-no-cost investment in research hardware, this kind of audacity to treat traditional rules as nothing, left all the elite universities that prided themselves on being the ceiling of Chinese higher education utterly speechless at the exact same time.