From Trash to Treasure: The Sinclair Family's Beloved Genius

But the student council members misunderstood. They thought Summer Beckett was trying to climb the wall.

He lectured, "You want to climb the wall? Do you have any idea how high this is? It’s five meters! We had a student break their leg falling from here once..."

Half an hour later, Summer Beckett walked into the classroom, completely dejected.

The moment he entered the classroom, he saw Chloe Sinclair was still eating something.

A wave of indignation washed over him.

He rushed over, looking for sympathy. "Chloe, why didn’t you help me? The student council wrote my name down."

His dad had donated three of the school’s academic buildings and the stadium, so of course he wasn’t actually worried about getting demerits.

Still, he was thoroughly impressed by Chloe Sinclair’s slick moves.

"I couldn’t have brought you with me."

"Huh?"

Chloe Sinclair said, "You’re too weak."

She had only dared to scale the wall because she had the System’s help.

But Summer Beckett was a different story.

Seeing the hurt look in his eyes, Chloe Sinclair suddenly realized she might have been a bit too blunt.

So she rummaged through her backpack, pulled out a chocolate bar, and handed it to Summer Beckett.

Summer Beckett’s gloomy expression instantly vanished. He accepted it with a wide grin.

During lunch, after finishing the meal her butler had delivered, Chloe Sinclair started scrolling through her phone.

She hadn’t touched her phone at all yesterday, so she had missed a lot of messages.

So now she went through and replied to all of them.

She sent a paper on the three-dimensional quantum Hall effect to Landon Sinclair, and a different paper to Howard Thorne.

It seemed like they were both online, because they replied almost instantly.

——

When Howard Thorne received Chloe Sinclair’s paper, he looked it over and nodded in admiration.

He spent some time working through the paper’s calculations himself and discovered that many of the symbols she used weren’t part of any established notation. Yet, Chloe Sinclair had rigorously proven the derivations for every new symbol that emerged from her formulas.

After finishing the entire paper, Howard Thorne exclaimed in his office at Emberfall University, "Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant!"

The other professors in the office were a little surprised to see the look of sheer delight in his eyes.

After all, Professor Thorne’s academic standing was so high that most scientists couldn’t even hope to catch up to him.

For something to make him this excited, he must have had another breakthrough in his research, right?

"Professor Thorne, did you have a new breakthrough?"

Professor Thorne laughed heartily. "Indeed there is. But it’s not my discovery. It’s the work of a young up-and-comer, and I intend to submit it to the *Mathematics Annual Journal*."

Everyone was stunned.

One of the professors frowned. "Isn’t that aiming a bit high? Why not try submitting to a national journal first?"

Professor Thorne shook his head. "You don’t understand. This young scholar’s paper is going to change the entire field of mathematics."

His words stunned everyone present.

Several professors gasped in disbelief.

Professor Thorne submitted the paper to the editor’s email at the *Mathematics Annual Journal*.

Only then did he explain, "Which of you can solve any of the Millennium Prize Problems?"

The professors stared at him, dumbfounded, before all shaking their heads.

Professor Thorne let out a booming laugh. "Well, what a coincidence. Because my student just did."

Everyone: "!!!"

And just like that, everyone in the mathematics department learned the name Chloe Sinclair.

But what was even more astounding was that even after solving one of the Millennium Prize Problems, her ambitions apparently lay elsewhere.

But that’s a story for another time.

——

Far away in Meridia, a Professor Gilbert noticed a new message in his personal inbox.

He glanced at the sender’s name—some unknown person from Zenthia.

He opened it anyway, and his eyes immediately went wide.

"A Proof of the Hodge Conjecture?"

Gilbert frowned. "Why are people from Zenthia always chasing such pipe dreams?"