Zhou Kai listened to the sounds.
He picked up a piece of braised pork and put it in his mouth.
’He suddenly felt that the rule Chen Zhuo had set last night was like a layer of bulletproof glass.’
’Without this glass, his hand holding the chopsticks would probably be shaking right now.’
Lin Yi ate very slowly.
Her eyes were half-closed, and she was clearly exhausted.
Her chopsticks idly poked at the vegetables on her plate. She would take a couple of bites, then have to stop and yawn.
Miao Shian’s table manners were refined; he chewed slowly and thoroughly.
As for He Gui, he dutifully ate every last bit of food on his plate until it was spotless.
Twenty minutes.
Lunch was over.
「1:10 PM.」
There were still fifty minutes until the afternoon lab exam.
The six of them walked out of the cafeteria.
They didn’t go back to the bus, nor did they wander around the athletic field.
Chen Zhuo led them to the integrated lab building where the afternoon exam would be held.
In the first-floor lobby, there was a long row of wooden benches for people to rest on.
The lobby wasn’t crowded at the moment; it was very quiet.
"Sit down."
Chen Zhuo pointed at the benches.
The six of them sat down in a row.
Their backs against the wall.
"Close your eyes."
Chen Zhuo’s voice was very soft.
"Whether you can fall asleep or not, don’t think about anything involving numbers. Just empty your mind."
The moment Lin Yi’s head touched the wall, her breathing became heavy.
Wang Huashao leaned back against the chair, his long legs stretched out, and a few moments later, he also started snoring faintly.
Zhou Kai crossed his hands over his abdomen, his chin slightly tucked.
Chen Zhuo sat at the very end of the bench.
He didn’t close his eyes.
His gaze was fixed on the open space outside the lobby, which was washed out white by the sunlight.
’The clockwork in his mind was slowly, painstakingly, winding itself tight again.’
「1:45 PM.」
A flurry of chaotic footsteps echoed from the hallway.
The break was over.
Teams from the other provinces began pouring into the lab building one after another.
After stewing over lunch, many of their faces had turned grim.
It was the lingering annoyance and dejection from discovering their mistakes when they compared answers from the morning session.
This feeling was like a slow-acting poison, gradually corroding their mindset.
Chen Zhuo stood up.
He patted He Gui’s shoulder, who was next to him.
Everyone opened their eyes and stood up.
After more than half an hour of forced rest and a carbohydrate boost, though a deep-seated exhaustion remained, the redness in their eyes had faded considerably, and their gazes were focused once more.
"Let’s go."
The announcement system in the hallway came to life.
It reminded the candidates to proceed to the laboratories and prepare for the afternoon’s individual practical lab exam.
The group straightened up.
They washed their faces with cold water in the restroom.
The jolt of cold water instantly chased away their grogginess, waking them up completely.
1:50 PM.
The lab building.
The doors to the various physics labs were already open.
The security check in the afternoon was even stricter than in the morning.
Other than an ID card and exam admission ticket, no stationery was allowed inside.
Pens, scratch paper, rulers, and even erasers would all be provided by the lab.
Chen Zhuo walked into the examination room.
He found the spot he had scouted out yesterday, by the aisle on the right side.
The lab now looked completely different from how empty it had been yesterday afternoon.
On every lab bench sat a square, blue plastic tray.
Next to each tray was a thick exam paper.
The air in the exam room faintly smelled of rosin and metal.
Chen Zhuo pulled out a chair and sat down.
He didn’t look at the paper.
His calm gaze fell upon the contents of the blue plastic tray.
Inside, there was no neatly packaged black plastic experiment kit.
No advanced testing instruments with LCD screens.
No standard binding posts for easy connection.
Instead, the tray was filled with a disorderly jumble of extremely primitive, basic components.
A few thin copper wires of varying lengths, with only a small bit of insulation stripped from the ends.
An ordinary soldering iron with a plastic handle, along with its crude wire stand.
A palm-sized white breadboard, densely covered with sockets.
A few loose carbon film resistors, their color bands somewhat faded.
Two ceramic capacitors.
A black, eight-pin integrated circuit chip with no model number printed on it, its pins pressed into a piece of anti-static foam.
A small roll of solder wire and a small, shriveled yellow sponge.
Beside them were a few bare lenses not mounted in any holders, their edges not even finely polished and still a little rough.
A simple laser pointer, attached to a metal clip with a rubber band.
That was all the equipment.
A very faint stir of commotion began to ripple through the exam room.
It was a suppressed confusion and helplessness.
A boy sitting in front of Chen Zhuo and to his left was clearly from a top-tier high school accustomed to using high-end, complete experiment kits.
He stared at the pile of junk in the tray.
His hand hovered in mid-air for a long moment, not knowing where to begin.
He was used to plugging wires into red and black binding posts and reading numbers off a screen.
He had never encountered a bare chip without a datasheet, let alone known the internal connection rules of a breadboard.
Faced with a bare lens, he didn’t even know how to make it stand steadily on the tabletop, much less how to align it coaxially.
The geniuses, accustomed to foolproof operations, were momentarily short-circuiting when faced with the primitive, coarse reality of physics.
「2:00 PM.」
The electric bell rang right on time.
"You may begin."
The proctor’s voice echoed in the quiet laboratory.
Most people immediately flipped open their exam papers, trying to find instructions within the questions on how to assemble this junk.
Chen Zhuo did not flip open his paper.
He reached out his right hand without any hesitation.
He picked up the black power plug of the soldering iron at the corner of the desk and plugged it precisely into the power outlet under the table.
Then, he picked up the small, shriveled yellow sponge from the tray.
He stood up and walked to the sink at the edge of the lab.
He turned on the tap.
Water poured onto the sponge, and the shriveled thing instantly absorbed it, swelling up.
Chen Zhuo squeezed it with one hand, wringing out the excess water until the sponge reached a perfect state: damp but not dripping.
He walked back to his seat and placed the sponge on the edge of the tray.
By now, the soldering iron had begun to heat up.
Chen Zhuo picked up the soldering iron.
With his other hand, he pulled over a length of rosin-core solder wire.
The tip of the iron touched the solder wire.
No awkwardness, no hesitation.
A wisp of white smoke instantly rose, accompanied by the unique, slightly acrid aroma of melting rosin that wafted past Chen Zhuo’s nose.
Chen Zhuo flicked his wrist.
He quickly wiped the tip twice on the freshly dampened sponge.
"TSS~"
A small puff of steam hissed up.
The excess oxide layer on the soldering iron’s tip was wiped away, revealing a bright, silvery, uniform coating of tin.
Chen Zhuo placed the prepared soldering iron back on its wire stand.
After doing all this.
While everyone else in the exam room was still staring blankly at the loose components or flipping through the paper trying to understand the principles...
...Chen Zhuo calmly reached for the bare, undocumented eight-pin chip.
This was a daily routine they had repeated countless times at Jinling Laboratory, facing that pile of scrap metal and junk.
No high-end kits.
The essence of physics has always begun with these most primitive, loose components.
Chen Zhuo turned to the first page of the exam paper.

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