Jiang Yue dressed very simply today, in a white shirt and black casual pants.
When he stepped onto the podium, the noisy lecture hall fell silent.
There wasn't a hint of the ridiculousness of wearing cat ears from the short video, nor was there the dark, oppressive aura of “Shen Xu” about him.
Standing there, he was simply a handsome, well-proportioned male college student with bright, clear eyes and a calm demeanor.
Jiang Yue calmly plugged his USB drive into the computer and opened the PPT projection.
“Good morning, professors. The title of my thesis is 《Deep Learning Emotion Recognition Model Based on Local Facial Muscle Micro-movement Capture》...”
His voice was steady and clear, carrying through the microphone to every corner of the lecture hall.
The students who had been holding up their phones, ready to record Jiang Yue failing his defense as blackmail material, froze in their tracks.
“...The emotion recognition algorithms currently on the market mostly rely on macroscopic movements of facial features, which can easily be faked or deceived. The entry point of my model lies in the microscopic muscle group tremors that absolutely cannot be controlled by subjective nerves when genuine emotions occur.”
Holding a laser pointer, Jiang Yue calmly broke down the core logic of his algorithm.
On the large screen, dense code logic, neural network architecture diagrams, and hardcore data comparison experiments scrolled by one after another.
Ninety percent of the people present couldn't understand these hieroglyphic-like slides at all, but everyone could clearly feel one thing—an academic dominance based on absolute strength.
The twenty-minute presentation came to an end, transitioning into the most headache-inducing Q&A session.
An elderly professor on the panel, who was notoriously strict, pushed up his glasses and tapped the desk.
“Student Jiang, you cited two foreign literatures in your model. One is a top-tier English journal, which we won't discuss for now.”
“The other is a journal recently published by Ludis University last month, which currently has no Chinese translation in China. If you ran the underlying logic through translation software, many technical terms would be completely wrong. Are you sure you have fully grasped the core data? Or did you just include it to inflate your citation count with something profound?”
The students below instantly perked up. Here it came, the main event was here.
Asking a question based on obscure foreign literature was clearly beyond the scope of a normal defense.
But Jiang Yue merely nodded slightly and leaned closer to the microphone.
Instead of defending himself in Chinese, he spoke directly. In pure, steady, and fluent French, he recited the core paragraph from the fifth page of that French paper.
Then, he seamlessly switched back to Chinese.
“You are right, Professor. Machine translation indeed has issues. For example, on the third line, the machine translated it as ‘facial nerve decrement,’ but the original author's actual context referred to ‘submuscular spasm under specific cortical stimulation.’ If this parameter isn't corrected, the final error rate would be as high as five percent.”
You could hear a pin drop in the lecture hall.
The girls in the back rows, who had been holding up their phones to watch a disaster unfold, quietly stopped recording. One by one, they deleted the draft text “Male Celebrity's Epic Defense Fail” in their chat boxes.
The professors huddled together and whispered among themselves.
Professor Zhang pushed up her reading glasses, the pride in her eyes impossible to hide. “The logic is rigorous, and the model's feasibility is extremely high. You haven't embarrassed our school.”
“Thank you, professors.”
Jiang Yue bowed politely and stepped down from the stage.
In truth, during the summer after his sophomore year, he had found using translation software repeatedly too inefficient while trying to digest an important primary source. So, he had spent a month cramming French on his own, managing to learn most of it.
Less than an hour after the defense ended, a high-energy edited video was pushed to the trending topics.
The hashtag was simple and brutal, cutting straight to the point:
#Jiang Yue's Trilingual Defense. This is the Real Shen Xu!#
The video started with yesterday's tacky anti-fraud promotional video.
Jiang Yue, wearing pink cat ears, looked like he was being forced to work.
Then, the screen flashed and cut to today's defense.
The uploader had thoughtfully added English subtitles to Jiang Yue's fluent French at the bottom of the screen.
When the professional analysis, packed with academic weight, flowed from his mouth, the comment section exploded completely.
“??? My mind is blown! Yesterday he was boing-boing in cat ears, and today he's speaking fluent French at his defense? Just how many faces does Jiang Yue have!”
“Holy crap! I always thought Shen Xu's high IQ in 《Manhunt》 was just acting. Turns out he was playing himself? This eloquence is literally Shen Xu stepping right out of the screen!”
“I'm from Donghai University's School of Computer Science. I can confirm that Jiang Yue is even handsomer in person than in the videos. His grades have always topped the charts; he's just usually too low-key!”
“I suggest the cyber police investigate him! With this IQ, I feel like hacking a traffic system on the side wouldn't be hard at all for him... [doge.jpg]”
“Yesterday: Oppa is so cute, I want to pet his cat ears. Today: Great God Jiang, is my knee-sliding posture standard enough for you?”
These two contrasting images, both visually striking, rushed onto the hot search charts at the same time.
Jiang Yue was no longer just a “newcomer who got a bit popular for playing a villain.” Instead, he had successfully established his gold-standard reputation as the “high-IQ Academic God of the entertainment industry.”
This unique contrast greatly boosted his public appeal and national popularity.
As time passed, by early July, the air in Donghai City was already thick with oppressive summer heat.
Donghai University welcomed its graduation season.
The main avenues were packed with graduates dressed in academic gowns.
All kinds of photo poses were being struck, and the lively chatter of youth echoed beneath the clock tower.
“Brother Yue, move half a step to the left! You're blocking Haozi!”
Lu Ming held up a borrowed DSLR camera, squinting one eye as he shouted at the top of his lungs.
After setting the timer, Lu Ming quickly ran to his reserved spot.
Click.
The frame froze.
In the lens were the four guys from Dorm 307.
Aside from Jiang Yue, Lu Ming, and Chen Haotian, standing on the far right was a short-haired young man with deeply tanned skin—the fourth roommate, Zhao Chengbin.
Zhao Chengbin had been dispatched to another province to work on engineering projects for his entire senior year. Having just stepped off the high-speed train today, he had headed straight to school for graduation photos.
“We haven't seen each other in only a year.”
Zhao Chengbin snatched off his stuffy academic cap and fanned himself vigorously, staring intently at Jiang Yue. “How did our dorm manage to hatch a big star? If I had known, I would've gone to a film set to hand out lunch boxes back then. I really can't stand civil engineering for even another day!”
“Forget about it.”
Lu Ming hooked his arm around Zhao Chengbin's neck and squeezed hard. “With your charcoal complexion, the best you could play is Bandit A—the kind who doesn't even survive until the opening theme song finishes playing.”
Chen Haotian pushed up his black-rimmed glasses and added precisely, “According to mainstream aesthetics, the probability of you making it big in the entertainment industry is lower than 0.01%. I suggest you stick to engineering.”
“Haozi, you bastard! Even you're making fun of me!”
Zhao Chengbin laughed and cursed as he kicked at Chen Haotian's leg, and the three of them immediately started roughhousing.
Jiang Yue stood to the side, watching them play with a slight smile on his lips.
Dressed in his academic gown, he stood generously under the shade of the trees.
Over the past half hour, no fewer than ten groups of people had run over asking for photos, and he had obliged every single one.
“Alright, that's enough.”
Jiang Yue clapped his hands and tossed over a few bottles of ice-cold mineral water, interrupting their bickering.
“Now that the graduation photos are done, we need to clear out the dorm. Tonight is my treat, pick wherever you want to go.”
“Then we definitely have to bleed you dry!”
Lu Ming unscrewed his bottle cap and took a huge gulp of water. “Let's not overcomplicate things. Old Ma's Sichuan Restaurant. Tonight, we drink until we drop!”
Rate on N.U.
