The red digits on the large screen flickered to 02:59:59.
The temperature in the training center seemed a little higher than when the competition first began.
A few hundred people were walking around, talking, and breathing in an enclosed space.
The central air conditioning vents blew cold air continuously, but they couldn’t quell the slowly building agitation.
A sharp SMACK echoed from a workbench up ahead and to the left.
A young man from another province’s team had slammed the screwdriver in his hand hard onto the tabletop.
Before him stood a frame pieced together from thin metal rods, with four deep-blue solar panels fastened to it with tape.
A pair of red and black wires led from the back of the panels to a yellow multimeter.
On the multimeter’s liquid crystal display, the black digits were frozen at 0.32.
They refused to budge.
"0.32 volts."
The young man stared at the screen, his voice a little hoarse.
A young woman beside him leaned over for a look, then glanced up at the industrial lights dozens of feet overhead.
"We’ve already connected all four panels in series. Why is the voltage so low? Are the wires not connected properly?"
She reached out and fiddled with the alligator clip at the connection point.
"The wires are fine."
The young man shoved the screwdriver aside.
"The light isn’t strong enough. These lights look bright, but the diffusion is too great. Barely any energy is reaching the tabletop."
"So what do we do?"
"I don’t know." The young man ran a frustrated hand through his hair.
"We don’t even have 0.5 volts. The light bulb’s threshold voltage is 2 volts. This much power can’t even get us over the starting line."
Similar conversations and commotions began to pop up in every corner of the hall.
The teams using fans on their wind turbines found that the rotors only managed the occasional half-turn in the faint breeze, their multimeter readings hovering in the tenths of a volt.
The initial thrill of grabbing the high-end materials had been slowly ground away over the past two hours.
In its place was the dawning panic of realizing their plans, rooted in basic physics, were being stymied by the environment.
In this specific space and under these specific conditions, their high-end equipment had become a pile of useless junk, incapable of meeting the required thresholds.
The noise in the hall grew more and more chaotic.
Some began rummaging through the bottoms of their metal cases, trying to find alternative solutions.
Others ran to find the patrolling judges, asking if the equipment was faulty.
By contrast, the area around Chen Zhuo’s workbench was quiet.
Chen Zhuo was poring over his written plan, searching for any potential flaws.
Zhou Kai’s black pen moved across a sheet of scratch paper.
The page was already crammed with dense arrays of numbers and symbols.
He had drawn a closed magnetic circuit model, and beside it, he’d written out the calculus equation for magnetic flux.
The tip of his pen scratched across the paper with a soft RUSTLE.
He paused, glancing at the required target voltage of 2.5V, then at the thermoelectric cooler lying nearby.
He crossed out a turns ratio he had just calculated and wrote a new line of equations underneath.
He Gui sat at the side of the workbench.
To get a better look at the green, fingernail-sized ferrite toroid in his hand, he was bent over so low that his face almost touched the tabletop.
He was holding two thin copper wires.
The wires were coated in a transparent insulating enamel that gleamed faintly under the lights.
He needed to wind both wires around the tiny toroid simultaneously and evenly.
They couldn’t cross.
They couldn’t overlap.
The windings had to lie flush against one another, with no gaps.
He Gui’s breathing was deliberately slow.
Pinching the two wires between his right thumb and forefinger, he threaded them through the center of the toroid and pulled them taut.
Then, he rotated the toroid with his left hand and threaded the wires through again with his right.
His movements were stiff. He had to pause after each loop to check the wires’ alignment.
Wang Huashao was working on a white breadboard.
It was covered in a neat grid of small holes.
He held a small, black component with three metal pins: an NPN-type transistor.
He carefully examined the component’s flat face to identify the emitter, base, and collector pins.
He aligned the three pins with holes on the breadboard and pressed it in firmly.
Next, he picked up a color-banded resistor.
Brown, black, red, gold.
He mentally recited its resistance value, bent the resistor’s leads, and plugged it into the holes next to the transistor.
Having done this, he looked up and glanced at He Gui.
"Haven’t you finished winding it yet?"
He Gui didn’t look up, nor did he answer.
He remained in his stiff posture, slowly threading the wires.
Miao Shian sat beside Wang Huashao. He pushed up his gold-rimmed glasses, the red and black probes in his hands held steady against the ends of a resistor.
The multimeter beeped intermittently. He arranged the tested components on the tabletop in neat little grids, sorted by their actual resistance values.
At the very edge of the workbench,
Lin Yi sat on a steel-tube folding chair.
Her back was slightly hunched, her elbows propped on the tabletop, her chin resting on the back of her hand.
In her left hand, she held a length of enameled wire. With a folded piece of fine-grit sandpaper in her right, she clamped down on the end of the wire.
She pulled it through.
And again.
A fine powder drifted onto the natural-wood-colored tabletop.
She scraped slowly.
Her gaze was unfocused, fixed absently on a dark scratch on the tabletop.
The surrounding arguments, the footsteps, even the sound of the boy at the next table slamming his fist on the table.
To her, it all faded into a kind of background white noise.
It was mindless, mechanical labor.
The activity in her cerebral cortex dropped to a minimum.
Her breathing was steady and deep.
Her body entered a relaxed, almost dormant state.
Time continued to flow.
On the large screen, the red digits changed to 01:45:00.

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