Day nine.
Afternoon.
The air in the lab was stifling, as if it had frozen in place.
On the blackboard, Professor Wang had drawn an extremely complex problem—an integrated opto-mechatronic system experiment that was well beyond the scope of their curriculum.
A photoresistor to collect the signal.
A thermal diode to act as a threshold switch.
Processed through a complex bridge amplifier circuit.
To ultimately drive a mechanical arm to grab a metal block of a specific temperature.
All sorts of errors compounded one another.
Signal attenuation from optical refraction, delays in thermal sensing, the background noise of the amplifier circuit, and the backlash in the mechanical transmission.
After finishing the diagram, the old man strolled away with his hands behind his back, leaving a total mess behind him.
The six of them gathered around the lab bench.
An hour passed.
They had made almost zero progress.
Zhou Kai’s scratch paper was covered in discarded system equations.
He was trying to cram the errors from all four systems—optical, thermal, mechanical, and electrical—into a single, grand model.
But he had failed.
There were too many variables and the cross-contamination was severe. Every tiny change triggered a chain reaction of collapses in the other three systems.
His brain simply crashed.
Miao Shian held the sensor, unsure of what threshold to set.
Wang Huashao stared at the mechanical arm’s blueprint, completely at a loss. He held a screwdriver in his hand but had no idea where to start.
Lin Yi, who had been resting at the table with her eyes closed,
irritably ran a hand through her hair, messing up her already loose ponytail even more.
She stood up, the chair scraping harshly against the floor with a piercing sound.
Everyone looked at her.
Lin Yi walked to the blackboard.
"All this noise, all these calculations..."
Lin Yi muttered.
She didn’t look at the dense calculations on Zhou Kai’s desk. Instead, she stared intently at the enormous system diagram on the blackboard.
"The optical and thermal systems are together, and then there’s this amplifier circuit..."
Lin Yi’s brow was furrowed, her eyes revealing an intuitive revulsion.
"This isn’t an experiment, it’s just a pain in the ass. All the variables are jumbled together. This problem is impossible to solve."
With her almost unreasonably brilliant intuition, she had keenly sensed the system’s fatal flaw, but the tangled mess was too great for her to find the thread to unravel it.
Just as Zhou Kai was about to speak, intending to refute her intuition with mathematics,
Chen Zhuo, who was sitting diagonally behind Lin Yi, stood up.
He calmly walked to the blackboard.
From the chalk box, he took a piece of white chalk.
He didn’t indulge Lin Yi’s frustration or look at Zhou Kai’s despair. His gaze swept over the diagram on the blackboard.
"You’re right. This is indeed a mess."
Chen Zhuo spoke.
His voice was steady, carrying an undeniable authority that instantly quelled the frustration in the room.
"Old Wang set a trap in the diagram."
With a flick of his wrist, Chen Zhuo’s chalk scored several long lines across the blackboard—crude and savage, yet executed with extreme precision.
He drew a huge X directly over the complex two-stage amplifier circuit that Professor Wang had drawn.
The screech of chalk against the board made everyone’s scalp tingle.
"Chen Zhuo, what are you doing? That’s the core amplification module!"
Zhou Kai’s eyes widened.
"An excessive pursuit of sensitivity will only lead to system collapse."
Chen Zhuo explained his reasoning as he continued to cross things out.
"Engineering doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to be fault-tolerant. This amplification stage has too much background noise. Get rid of it."
"Use a Darlington pair for single-stage amplification. Sacrifice some gain in exchange for absolute stability."
Hearing this,
Lin Yi, who had still been irritably clutching her hair, felt her eyes light up instantly.
In that second, her intuition perfectly connected with Chen Zhuo’s closed-loop logic.
"Then the thermal threshold has to be changed from series to parallel!"
Lin Yi blurted it out, her voice filled with the excitement of a newfound idea.
"Otherwise, with only single-stage amplification, the drive current will never be enough!"
Chen Zhuo didn’t even turn his head.
He firmly tapped the chalk on the thermal trigger section of the diagram.
"Correct."
Chen Zhuo’s voice remained as calm as a machine’s.
"Change the thermal sensors to parallel. If the light isn’t enough, the heat will make up for it. Set the activation temperature to 45 degrees."
The chalk continued down the board,
arriving at the section for the mechanical arm.
"Cut two degrees of freedom. Only vertical grasping."
"One more joint means double the error. Wang Huashao, build the arm according to a single-joint diagram. Put two drops of oil where the gears mesh to minimize the friction coefficient."
Chen Zhuo stood before the blackboard.
He was no longer just a student solving a problem, but a chief engineer in control of the entire project.
He was excising the malignant tumors.
He was rebuilding order.
"The Darlington pair."
Chen Zhuo issued commands while writing clean, concise parameters on the board.
"Set the amplification factor to 1000, base resistor at 47 kΩ, and a 10% fault tolerance."
"Zhou Kai."
Chen Zhuo called out his name.
"Forget deriving the thermal equations. Use empirical values from a lookup table. Use a 10 kΩ voltage divider resistor."
"Miao Shian."
"Don’t tune the optical lens to an absolute focus. Increase the tolerance to 5%. It’s fine as long as the photogate can receive the edge of the signal."
The chalk tapped twice, hard, at the end of the circuit path on the blackboard.
Chen Zhuo turned his head and looked at He Gui, who was sitting in the corner.
"He Gui."
"All the ribbon cables and basic soldering are yours."
Chen Zhuo’s expression turned serious.
"Remember, the ground lines for the control circuit and the motor drive must be run completely separately. Do a single-point ground at the end."
"The current backlash when the mechanical arm starts up is terrifying. We absolutely cannot let even a single milliamp of interference get into our main line."
He Gui subconsciously sat up straight.
He didn’t feel any resistance to the tedious task; on the contrary, these clear, firm requirements gave him an unprecedented sense of confidence.
"Okay, leave it to me. I’ll use shielded cables for the main control line."
He Gui nodded seriously.
Five minutes.
Chen Zhuo put down the chalk.
He clapped the dust from his hands.
On the blackboard,
a perfect industrial blueprint had taken shape—its flaws first sensed by Lin Yi’s intuition, its redundancies then surgically removed by Chen Zhuo, with all fault tolerances perfectly allocated.
It was complete.
Zhou Kai stood there.
The pen in his hand was finally lowered.
He looked at Lin Yi, who was sitting in her chair with an excited smile playing on her lips, and then at Chen Zhuo, who stood before the blackboard, as calm as still water.
He suddenly understood.
There was no need for any more debate.
Lin Yi could keenly smell trouble, but Chen Zhuo was the one who could solve that trouble cleanly and efficiently, rebuilding it into an engine.
Willingly, Zhou Kai stepped back into an implementation role.
"Roger that."
He pulled out his chair and began efficiently calculating the simplified empirical values Chen Zhuo had laid out.
Miao Shian picked up a multimeter.
Wang Huashao picked up his screwdriver.
At that moment, their team finally clicked into place.
The days that followed were like a montage on fast-forward.
Physics Lab 1 transformed into a perfectly coordinated industrial assembly line.
There was no more pointless chatter.
Only the rhythmic SIZZLE of the soldering iron.
Only the smooth WHIR of meshing gears.
Whenever they were given a complex "black box" problem,
Lin Yi, with her beast-like intuition, would see through the system’s weaknesses and potential architecture at a glance.
Then she would push the paper to the middle of the table.
Chen Zhuo would take over.
He would coldly wield the scalpel of engineering, cutting away academic redundancies, filling in parameters, and assigning fault tolerances.
Zhou Kai would handle the localized, complex mathematical calculations.
Miao Shian would perform the precision soldering.
Wang Huashao would build the physical framework.
And He Gui would monitor the data feedback from the multimeter in real time.
The number of failures plummeted.
Their first-try success rate upon powering up reached a terrifyingly high level.
These six people.
In this simple laboratory.
Over the course of fourteen days.
Had forged themselves into a razor-sharp blade.

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