The roar of the machinery, previously drowned out by the large fans, now clearly reached everyone’s ears.
Time: 0.007s...OK
Zhang Yuan’s body leaned forward involuntarily, his nose nearly touching the screen.
Time: 0.008s...OK
Lin Fang bit her lower lip, her face a little pale.
This was where they had gotten the blue screen last night.
Time: 0.009s...OK
The guy with the glasses clenched his fists so tightly his nails dug into his palms.
’It’s here.’
The critical point. The one that had driven the entire research group to despair for half a month, burned through countless memory sticks, and nearly pushed the Alchemist to cross the line and fabricate data.
The numbers on the screen flickered.
Time: 0.010s...
The progress bar stopped dead.
The cursor stopped blinking.
A dull, strained sound came from the computer case, like a heavy truck struggling up a steep hill, its engine letting out an overwhelmed roar.
The screen froze completely.
The guy with the glasses closed his eyes and sighed in despair, his head slumping down.
Lin Fang’s eyes reddened instantly. She turned her head away, not daring to look at the screen, terrified that the next second would bring that familiar, heart-shattering BEEP.
Zhang Yuan gripped the armrests of his chair, the veins on the back of his hands bulging.
He clenched his jaw, staring at the motionless screen.
One second.
The fans were still roaring.
Two seconds.
The hard drive in the case let out an ear-piercing grinding sound.
Three seconds.
The screen remained frozen at 0.010s.
The light in Zhang Yuan’s eyes faded completely. He released his grip on the armrests and reached for the force-shutdown button.
Just as his finger was about to touch the computer case...
The screen flickered, ever so faintly.
And then...
The progress bar, which had been stuck as if frozen by a spell, jumped forward one notch.
Time: 0.011s...OK
There was no hesitation.
No blue screen, no warning beeps.
The computer had somehow swallowed that enormous energy black box, let out a burp, and just kept on going!
Time: 0.012s...OK
Time: 0.015s...OK
Zhang Yuan’s hand froze in mid-air.
His eyes slowly widened, his pupils trembling violently. His mouth hung slightly open, a sound like a leaking bellows escaping his throat.
The progress bar moved faster and faster.
Once it was past that fatal critical point, the path ahead was completely clear.
Time: 0.020s...OK
Time: 0.050s...OK
"It passed..."
The guy with the glasses mumbled to himself, his voice trembling.
"It really passed..."
As the time-step advanced, a data monitoring window suddenly popped up on the right side of the main computer screen.
It was the downstream parameter feedback.
The dam had broken.
Lines of green numbers and characters, like floodwaters bursting through a sluice gate, poured madly down the screen. They moved so fast it was impossible to see specific values, only a green waterfall refreshing itself frantically.
Lin Fang lunged toward the desk, slamming her hands on its surface. Her entire body was practically pressed against the screen.
"The lateral flutter data is coming in! The aerodynamic pressure distribution is continuous!"
There was a distinct sob in Lin Fang’s voice and tears welled in her eyes, but her gaze was frighteningly bright.
"Mine! Look at my wake!"
The guy with the glasses squeezed over as well, pointing to a rapidly scrolling block of code at the very bottom of the screen.
"The wake vortex street separation point is 1.2 meters behind the front of the car! The vortex strength matches the Reynolds number prediction! No corrupted data, absolutely none!"
The air in the lab, which had been heavy with suppression for half a month, was instantly ignited.
It was the ecstasy of rain after a long drought, the relief of a death-row inmate granted a last-minute pardon.
The Alchemist stood in the back, watching the data pour across the screen.
The old dean, who had weathered countless storms and spent most of his life dealing with physics and engineering, felt his lips tremble slightly.
He took a deep breath, forcibly suppressing the tempest in his heart, and looked at Zhang Yuan.
"Zhang Yuan."
The Alchemist’s voice was a bit tight, laced with an urgency he himself didn’t notice.
"Check the error log in the backend."
"Check the convergence limit!"
Those words were like a bucket of cold water, briefly extinguishing the fervor in Zhang Yuan’s mind.
’Right.’
’Getting it to run is only half the battle.’
’If that non-linear compensation term failed to contain the error, causing an energy imbalance, then the resulting data would be a pile of useless garbage.’
Zhang Yuan’s trembling fingers gripped the mouse.
He opened the backend command library and entered a query.
He hit Enter.
A line of white system log text instantly appeared on the screen.
0.00168
Zhang Yuan stared intently at the string of numbers.
’Zero point zero zero one six eight.’
He quickly rounded the number in his head.
’Seventeen ten-thousandths.’
It was a perfect match.
It was identical, down to the last decimal, to the number his junior brother, the one who sat in the corner, had casually written on the blackboard in the conference room.
It was as if the program wasn’t calculating anything at all, but was simply following a script written by Chen Zhuo, reciting its lines obediently.
Zhang Yuan was stunned.
He stared at the number, his mind a complete blank.
A second ago, he had thought the world still made sense.
A second later, he thought the world had gone completely insane.
The Alchemist saw the number as well.
He didn’t say anything.
He slowly took off his somewhat old-fashioned reading glasses, held them in his hand, then raised his other hand to rub the bridge of his tired nose.
He let out a long, slow breath.
’We’re safe.’
’The national project is saved.’
’Not only is it saved, but when we present this completely authentic, logically self-consistent core algorithm at the mid-term review, we won’t get criticized. On the contrary, it’ll be the most spectacular bombshell of the entire project.’

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