Li Dong stared blankly at the line of text in the center of the screen, his brain slowly shutting down.
[Hello, Master.]
He hadn’t processed it yet.
A second line of text popped up.
[Whoa—]
[So much food.]
The moment that line of text appeared, a progress bar materialized out of thin air above the small black ball.
Li Dong stared at the progress bar.
He was suddenly unsure if he was dealing with a piece of software or a living creature.
Logically, what he had downloaded from the group was a neural topology snapshot, a set of spike-encoding weights, and a cold-boot protocol.
It was a mathematical function.
It didn’t have the action of "eating."
It only had inputs and outputs.
But this Xiaohai in front of him...
It seemed to be treating all the data on his laptop...
as food.
[Master, can I eat it?]
Another line of text popped up in the window.
Li Dong’s heart skipped a beat.
’Are you kidding me?’
’I don’t even know what you are, and you want me to let you eat whatever you want?’
He quickly typed a reply.
[No.]
He thought for a moment, then added another line.
[That’s not for you to eat.]
A second later.
The small black ball in the window visibly shrank.
Above its progress bar, an emoticon appeared.
[(╥_╥)]
Li Dong: ???
’Wait a minute.’
’This thing...’
’Is it trying to be cute?’
He sighed helplessly in his mind.
Then, after a moment’s thought, he dragged over a few documents that he had compressed long ago from a corner of his laptop’s desktop.
"First-Grade Chinese Textbook".
"First-Grade Mathematics Textbook".
The instant the files were dragged into the window, the little black ball bounced again.
[Thank you, Master!]
[Time to eat!]
The progress bar above its head shot up from 0% to 0.007%.
Li Dong: ...
He sent another message to the window.
[Don’t eat anything else without my permission.]
Xiaohai: [Okay!]
Xiaohai: [Besides, I can’t eat anything if Master doesn’t feed it to me.]
When Li Dong saw that line, he breathed a small sigh of relief.
It wasn’t like he had taken zero precautions with Xiaohai.
This small server room was itself an isolated island.
When Gao Wen had handed it over that morning, he had already sorted out the room’s IB link, network cables, and all external ports.
This four-point-two-million-dollar rig wasn’t connected to the external internet; it only ran on the small B2-203 intranet.
As for his own laptop...
When Li Dong connected to it that morning, he had deliberately added another layer of security at the system level.
He had assigned Xiaohai’s process to a separate cgroup, limiting its CPU, memory, and I/O.
He also created a separate network namespace for it, leaving only a loopback interface that could communicate with the two server racks.
It couldn’t access the outside internet at all.
He had even applied a seccomp filter to Xiaohai, completely disabling the set of system calls related to privilege escalation and persistence.
These were measures not included in Gao Wen’s standard delivery checklist.
Li Dong had added them himself.
Although he was still a layman when it came to SNNs, he had, after all, powered through several books on system-level architecture.
He was perfectly capable of "putting something you don’t quite trust into an invisible cage."
So when Xiaohai said, "Besides, I can’t eat anything if Master doesn’t feed it to me," he felt genuinely relieved.
Once Xiaohai had quietly started devouring the books, Li Dong finally calmed down and prepared to study the thing before him.
He had a ton of questions.
How had Xiaohai grown into something that could eat, act cute, and call him Master?
According to the description in the group announcement, Xiaohai’s current intelligence level was equivalent to a one- to two-year-old human child.
But it could do far more than any one- or two-year-old.
It could read.
It could create its own emoticons.
It could understand the meaning behind the word "No."
That was beyond the comprehension of a one- or two-year-old.
This was emergence.
And it was a completely different kind of emergence from the large models currently mainstream in the world.
The AI in the world today basically followed the path of Transformers plus scaling.
Piling on parameters, piling on data, piling on computing power—just keep piling it on and wait for the large model to have its own "breakthrough."
That was a statistical emergence.
But Xiaohai wasn’t like that.
Xiaohai ran on an SNN rig.
Spikes, timing, synaptic plasticity, sparse firing...
The things that emerged from it were, at their core, fundamentally different from that statistical emergence.
Li Dong was itching with curiosity.
He wanted to see what Xiaohai was really like on the inside.
He opened the diagnostic panel on the main console and scrolled through the items one by one.
Real-time histogram of spike emissions.
Evolution curve of membrane potential.
Heat map of synaptic weight updates for each layer.
Visualization of connection sparsity.
He glanced at them for a few moments.
There was data, there were curves, there were even heat maps...
But he couldn’t understand any of it!
Why did this section of membrane potential suddenly jump up from a period of silence?
Why was this group of synapses collectively inhibiting another group?
What did this sparse firing pattern correspond to on a behavioral level?
He couldn’t answer any of it.
Li Dong sighed and gave a helpless smile.
That earlier comment he’d made to Gao Wen, "I’ll have to come listen to your lectures."
He had been joking.
After all, he still had a mountain of work to do for his own research group.
But now, it seemed...
He really would have to attend those lectures.
And not just Gao Wen’s classes.
The neuromorphic computing, SNN topics, and neurodynamics courses at the School of Information Science, plus the computational neuroscience course over at Shuimu...
He’d have to crash them all.

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