Daniel Hayes dragged his suitcase down the street at a leisurely pace, taking in the city with fresh eyes.Everything felt different now. In his previous life, the passing cars and endless pedestrians would have grated on him. Now, even without knowing what the future held, joy bubbled up inside him.His former advisor's call came quickly, the familiar booming voice just as Daniel remembered it."Daniel Hayes! Heard you gave Robert Sterling hell. Well done!""Dr. Vance!" Daniel replied politely.Elias Vance had been his doctoral advisor before moving to Kingsley University six months ago. Even after the school assigned Daniel a new advisor, Dr. Vance had looked out for him.Dr. Vance kept going. "I called the school about your experiment, and you know what Robert Sterling told me? He said it doesn't matter whether you did the experiment or not. What matters is that the data is fake and wrong.""Can you believe that logic? Experimental fraud and experimental error are not the same thin

Daniel Hayes felt reasonably satisfied with the studio apartment he'd rented. Affordable, clean, comfortable, and close to campus. His two female roommates seemed easy enough to get along with, too.He didn't move in right away. He was still waiting for his classmate to forward the rest of his belongings: clothes, bedding, and all the miscellaneous odds and ends. Once everything arrived, he'd make the move.Having a place to stay settled his nerves considerably.The next morning, he headed over to the university to explore and get his bearings before classes started.Kingsley University was enormous. Calling it a university city rather than just a campus wasn't an exaggeration at all. Walking from the College of Natural Sciences on the west side all the way to the massive sports complex on the east, then looping around to the main gate on the south side left his legs nearly numb. Still, the completely unfamiliar surroundings brought a strange sense of novelty and anticipation.After g

The third-order Kawahara-type equation really was brutal.Even when a result was already known in outline, writing out the intermediate steps took time. Writing them out carefully enough to compare them, test substitutions, and look for a hidden pattern took even longer. It was the sort of problem that punished impatience.Daniel Hayes stayed in the study room until nine that night. He only realized how late it was when hunger stopped being background noise and started demanding attention. His shoulders were stiff, his fingers were stained with ink, and the stack of draft paper beside him had grown thick enough to look like a minor dissertation. He packed up, stepped out into the evening air, and found a roadside stall to deal with dinner. The food was cheap, hot, and greasy in exactly the way a long day of mental labor required.After that, he headed back to the budget hostel where he had been staying. The room was cramped, the desk was barely more than a narrow board pushed against

"You absolutely have to do your doctorate in mathematics.""I'll talk to the university and push through a special application. There's already a policy allowing someone with a physics master's degree to pursue a math PhD.""If we handle it as a special case, you can still enroll in March. Staying in physics would be such a waste..."George Monroe kept going, one earnest sentence after another. There was no mistaking the sincerity. He was not posturing, not making a joke, not testing the waters for sport. He genuinely believed he had just stumbled across a rare kind of talent and was scrambling to save it before the wrong discipline swallowed it.Standing nearby, Kevin Shaw's face had already gone dark.This was shameless.Poaching a student in public, and doing it right in front of him, was almost impressively rude.Off to the side, Brandon Brooks and Chris Fly were clearly enjoying themselves. A mathematics professor trying to poach a physics doctoral student was funny enough. A mat

Daniel Hayes naturally cared about the public disciplinary announcement Aldridge University had released.But he'd known about it well in advance.With time to mentally prepare, and having even gone through that whole "suicide" ordeal, his mindset had long since stabilized. After all, he wasn't the original occupant of this body. His emotional attachment to Aldridge University existed only in borrowed memories.He was about to enroll at Kingsley University and begin a new chapter as a doctoral student.Sure, in theory it meant an extra year or two of study, but the accumulated knowledge mattered just as much. That "Intellect" stat in the system needed knowledge to level up anyway.Spending an extra year or two on his doctorate, building up his academic foundation, might actually help raise his Intellect.If anything, he thought Aldridge had taken too long to post the announcement.He'd assumed it had gone up ages ago and he simply hadn't bothered t