Lin Wei didn’t speak.
He just raised a hand and gently patted the shoulder of an engineer in a white lab coat standing in front of him.
The engineer turned to look at him, his eyes red-rimmed.
Then he turned back and continued staring at the screen.
Time ticked by, second by second.
The counter below the main display ticked past the eighth, ninth, and tenth tests...
All nineteen people remained motionless.
No one cheered, no one high-fived. No one even dared to breathe too loudly, as if a single puff of air could misalign an atom in the flow field.
Finally, after the twelfth verification test concluded, a line of green text appeared on the main screen.
[This round of verification is complete. System entering stable operation phase.]
Elder Zhao slowly reached out, steadying himself on the edge of the main console.
He didn’t say a word, just closed his eyes gently.
That single gesture made the eyes of the few people around him instantly turn red.
"It worked."
It was unclear who spoke first, but the voice was quiet.
More voices followed, but each was deliberately suppressed.
"It worked."
"...It really worked."
"Holy shit, holy fuckin’ shit—"
An engineer in his thirties clamped a hand over his mouth, tears streaming from the corners of his eyes.
Lin Wei took a deep breath.
He walked over and patted Zhang Mo’s shoulder gently.
"You guys carry on."
Then he turned, pushed open the airlock door, and walked out.
In the office.
Lin Wei first pulled out his cellphone and keyed in a number. Just as he was about to hit dial, he suddenly thought of something...
He turned, walked behind his desk, and picked up the receiver of his landline phone.
A few seconds later, the call connected.
There was silence on the other end.
Lin Wei only stated a code.
"0117-A3, touchdown successful."
Still, there was no sound from the other end of the line.
But... Lin Wei could hear the heavy breathing on the other side.
After about ten seconds, the person on the other end finally spoke.
"First, finalize the orders for Hua Wei."
"The mobile phone terminals... put those aside for now. That’s not the priority."
"Focus on the base station category, especially the integrated sensing and communication line."
"You know what to do."
Lin Wei nodded.
"Understood."
He paused, then asked the question that was on his mind.
"Should we inform Li Dong?"
The answer from the other end was almost instantaneous.
"No."
"We can’t reveal anything until everything is fully implemented."
"You know his situation better than I do."
"He must be shielded from the storm outside."
"I understand."
After hanging up, Lin Wei stood up and walked slowly to the massive floor-to-ceiling window in his office.
The night in Shanghai was deep.
On the opposite bank, the skyscrapers of Lujiazui blazed with a reckless brilliance, their reflections on the Huangpu River shattered by the wind into a flowing river of gold foil.
Lin Wei looked up.
Just then, a gust of night wind tore an opening in the dark clouds that had been pressing down for days.
A full moon peeked out from the rift.
Lin Wei stood at the window, silent.
He had worked at National Power Equipment for thirteen years.
He had seen too many clouds.
Layer upon layer, wave after wave, pressing down so hard that the sky was nearly invisible to Huaxia’s entire semiconductor industry.
The people on the outside had no idea that National Power Equipment was the one facing the greatest pressure.
All they knew was that Hua Wei had been sanctioned and their phones had all reverted to 4G.
They cursed on social media, lamented on Douyin, and wrote lengthy essays on Q&A sites analyzing Hua Wei’s "decline."
However, they had no idea...
That Hua Wei’s mobile phone terminals were only ever the tip of the iceberg.
Beneath the surface lay an entire industrial chain breakout, from EDA tools, 7nm-equivalent process technology, and Chiplet 3D stacking, to third-generation semiconductors like gallium nitride and silicon carbide.
It was a qualitative transformation from a patent holder to a rule-setter.
It was a core advantage locked in for 6G ahead of schedule.
It was the first time the nation’s high-end manufacturing industry possessed a truly domestic strategic production line, free from foreign constraints.
And Li Dong’s algorithm was the key that unlocked this production line.
Lin Wei gazed at the moon that had just emerged from the dark clouds and was suddenly reminded of the meeting from over a month ago.
He remembered the number he had given in front of Zhao Fangming, Yao Qizhi, E Weinan, Gao Wen, and all those other top figures from the academic world.
"Three months."
He had calculated that number based on the theoretical computing power of the 2.1 algorithm, using the most conservative engineering timeline.
And the result?
Now, it had been just over a month since that meeting.
He had underestimated Li Dong’s algorithm.
He never imagined that once the algorithm was actually implemented in the lithography machine’s hardware control circuits, resolving the "translation" compatibility issue between the mathematical and engineering levels...
...the 2.1 algorithm would actually... evolve on its own during operation.
The first time Zhang Mo pushed the deviation report, "Measured Performance vs. Theoretical Performance," onto his desk, Lin Wei was completely stunned.
According to the theoretical model Li Dong provided, the 2.1 algorithm should have an equivalent compression rate of about four to five orders of magnitude on Huaxuan’s current hardware platform.
But in practice, monitoring data from two consecutive weeks showed the actual compression rate was... five to six orders of magnitude.
It was nearly a full order of magnitude higher than the theoretical value.
’How is that even mathematically possible?’
Later, it took the entire team two all-nighters of review to figure out the likely reason.
When Li Dong wrote his theoretical proof, he had estimated the remainder term using a standard worst-case scenario assumption.
That is, he assumed the hardware noise was completely uncorrelated white noise.
But in a real immersion chamber, the noise isn’t independent; it possesses strong spatial and temporal correlation structures.
When the algorithm ran, more than half of these "worst-case" assumptions actually canceled each other out.
The mathematical "hidden correlations" were stripped away by the physical hardware itself.
Of course, that alone couldn’t account for such a massive speed-up.
What truly awed Lin Wei was...
The online feedback.
The lithography machine’s sensors spit out flow field data every three microseconds, which the algorithm then used as input to further fine-tune the weight distribution of the substrate.
In other words, for every second the algorithm ran on the real hardware, it was using previous data to perform a micro-session of online learning.
The longer it ran, the more accurate it became.
The more accurate, the faster.
The faster, the more complex the scenarios it could handle.
This process didn’t involve a single line of learning code; it was purely the mathematical degrees of freedom Li Dong had left in the algorithm’s structure being naturally activated.
This wasn’t some "AI awakening" from a sci-fi novel. It was the most romantic positive feedback loop imaginable, occurring between a truly brilliant mathematical algorithm and the physical world.
At the time, Lin Wei had looked at Zhang Mo’s report and said only one thing.
"I guess I haven’t seen it all..."

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