The motor didn’t turn.
The polished brass gear didn’t move an inch.
Then.
TSSS~
An extremely faint, unusual sound.
On the breadboard.
A small resistor connecting the sensor to the main circuit let out a wisp of blue-tinged smoke.
Accompanied by a pungent, burnt smell.
The relay clicked open.
The system completely shut down.
The lab instantly fell deathly silent.
Six people stood gathered around the workbench.
Staring at the smoking, half-finished prototype.
Zhou Kai’s brows were knitted tightly together.
"What happened? My logic gate calculations were perfect. The voltage was exactly right."
Miao Shian was also stunned.
"I set my sensor’s resistance to the standard threshold, too. It triggered just fine when I tested it by itself."
Wang Huashao clutched his hair.
"My gear didn’t even budge!"
From a corner of the room.
Professor Wang walked over slowly, holding his enamel mug.
He wasn’t angry.
His tone of voice didn’t even waver.
He placed the mug on a nearby table.
He casually picked up the multimeter probes and poked at the two ends of the burnt resistor.
"Zhou Kai, your logic circuit is indeed perfect. The output is 5V."
Professor Wang’s voice echoed in the quiet lab.
"But did you ask Miao Shian how much driving current his relay needs? Your filter capacitor diverted the current."
Zhou Kai froze.
"Miao Shian, you set your sensor’s sensitivity extremely high."
Professor Wang looked at Miao Shian.
"But did you consider that Zhou Kai’s complex circuit would generate a brief current surge the moment it was switched on?
That surge blew right through your high-sensitivity threshold, causing the resistor to overload."
Finally, Professor Wang turned to Wang Huashao.
"Your gear is polished like a work of art, and that double-lever system is very clever."
"But you didn’t even bother to ask Chen Zhuo what the startup torque of that crappy motor is."
"The mechanical structure you designed is too heavy. It can’t drive it."
Professor Wang tossed the probes onto the table.
CLACK.
"This isn’t what you call system integration."
Professor Wang looked at this group of the province’s smartest middle schoolers.
His gaze was calm, yet it was like a sharp scalpel, cutting their pride to ribbons.
"You’re creating a Frankenstein’s monster. Each of you is just looking down, building your own perfect little block."
"But not a single one of you has looked up to see the big picture."
"Chen Zhuo."
Professor Wang called him out.
"You’re the captain. You delegated the tasks well."
"But you only managed the data, not the people."
"You let them pursue their own little slice of perfection, but you ignored the friction between those slices."
"You’re missing a central brain to coordinate the whole project and forcefully cut back on individual perfectionism."
"And you’re missing a central hub to calculate all the cross-system errors."
"At the national finals..."
Professor Wang picked up his mug and turned to leave.
"If you try to piece together a large-scale project with this ’every-man-for-himself’ attitude..."
"The moment you turn it on, it’ll blow up."
"Clean up the table."
"We’re having an early dinner today, then it’s off to evening self-study."
The wooden door closed.
Only the faint smell of something burnt lingered in the lab.
No one spoke.
It was a sense of defeat far deeper than simply being unable to solve a problem.
「The next three days.」
The projects in Physics Lab One became bizarre and varied.
Professor Wang no longer just gave them circuit boards.
All sorts of crude, even defective, pieces of lab equipment were brought in.
Day six: darkroom optics.
In a completely dark environment, they had to assemble an interferometer using a set of scratched lenses and a low-quality laser pointer to find faint diffraction fringes.
Day seven: thermal limits.
Using a crude calorimeter with no insulation whatsoever, they had to calculate the specific heat capacity of a tiny metal block.
They had to combat the massive heat-loss error caused by air convection.
Day eight: non-standard mechanics.
Using a rusty spring and a high-friction pulley, they had to measure torque in a non-uniform gravitational field.
During those few days, the team’s atmosphere underwent a fundamental transformation.
Chen Zhuo had changed.
He was no longer just a service-oriented captain who only managed the aggregate data.
He began to take real control of the team.
He realized that managing a group of geniuses was completely different from managing Wang Yang and the others before.
He couldn’t just let them do as they pleased.
He had to use cold, hard data and absolute standards to restrain them.
Physical engineering required things to be rugged and durable, not a forced mishmash of six fragile works of art.
Inside the darkroom.
Zhou Kai, holding a flashlight, was rapidly scribbling complex calculus equations for light path deflection on a piece of scratch paper.
Trying to calculate the position of the interference fringe that had vanished due to the scratched lens.
Chen Zhuo walked over.
He reached out and pressed down on Zhou Kai’s pen.
"Brother Kai."
"Your calculus model is perfect, but the refractive index of this piece of glass we have is not uniform at all."
"Your perfect model won’t work here."
Zhou Kai looked up, his brows furrowed.
"Then how do we find it?"
"Use a linear approximation."
Chen Zhuo took the pen and drew a crude straight line on the paper.
"Forget about accuracy to two decimal places. Expand the margin of error to five percent and just do a grid search of this area."
Zhou Kai stared at the line for two seconds, then nodded.
"Okay."
At the thermodynamics workbench.
Miao Shian was carefully heating the metal block with an alcohol lamp, trying to control the temperature at an absolute equilibrium point.
If there was even the slightest draft, he would stop and readjust.
Chen Zhuo walked over.
"Miao Shian, don’t aim for a constant temperature."
Chen Zhuo glanced at the thermometer.
"This crappy calorimeter can’t hold its temperature at all."
"Just heat it to the maximum temperature, put it in, record the cooling curve, and then use extrapolation to calculate the heat loss."
Miao Shian paused for a moment, then gave a gentle smile.
"Understood."
At the mechanics workbench.
Wang Huashao held a piece of sandpaper, aggressively sanding the rusty pulley bearing.
"This piece of crap has too much friction! The formula doesn’t fit at all!"
Chen Zhuo took the sandpaper from his hand.
"Stop sanding. The more you sand, the wider the clearance will get."
"Mechanical systems don’t need to be as precise as a watch."
"Keep this friction. Treat it as a constant and plug it directly into the torque equation."
Throughout this grueling process,
Chen Zhuo never used a harsh tone to criticize anyone.
He simply used objective data and the most pragmatic compromises.
Bit by bit, he whittled away the pride and individual heroism in the hearts of these geniuses.
And then there was Lin Yi.
She was still her usual, languid self.
Watching Chen Zhuo struggle to mold this plate of loose sand into a single brick.
She didn’t like to manage things, but she had an inexplicable faith in Chen Zhuo’s ability to handle any fallout.
Zhou Kai held his pen, his brows knitted, still instinctively resisting Chen Zhuo’s conservative linear approximation with its five percent margin of error.
Sitting beside him, bored out of her mind and dangling the cheap lens in a sliver of light leaking in from outside, Lin Yi yawned.
She casually tossed the lens onto the workbench with a soft clink.
"Stop beating your head against the wall, deputy captain."
Lin Yi’s voice, lazy and tinged with a natural teasing quality, echoed in the dim lab.
"No matter how perfect your set of calculus equations is,"
She pointed at the lens on the table.
"it can’t save this piece of junk glass that has the transparency of a beer bottle bottom."
Zhou Kai froze for a second, his pen hovering in his hand.
Lin Yi jutted her chin toward Chen Zhuo’s scratch paper, the one with the approximation on it.
"The tolerance range he gave you is the absolute limit for this pile of junk."
"Just listen to him. Sweep along that line he drew, and you’ll definitely find the fringe."
"If you keep dawdling, there’ll be nothing left of the sweet and sour pork ribs in the cafeteria tonight but the bones."
Hearing the vivid and ego-crushing "beer bottle bottom" comparison, and then Lin Yi’s signature food-motivated nagging,
Zhou Kai glanced at the ridiculously low-quality lens on the table.
Then he glanced at Chen Zhuo, who was still calmly waiting for him to confirm the data.
The tension that had been gripping Zhou Kai suddenly melted away.
He gave a resigned smile.
And completely let go of his perfectionist obsession.
"Fine."
Zhou Kai decisively crossed out the string of complex calculus formulas on his paper.
"Let’s go with Chen Zhuo’s approximation. Let’s get this done so we can make it in time for the sweet and sour pork ribs."
With the endorsement from an intuitive genius like Lin Yi,
combined with Chen Zhuo’s impeccable underlying logic,
the friction within the team began to decrease at an astonishing rate.

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