181: New Visitors and the "Ecological Assessment" Controversy

With the completion of the main structure of the "Homeland," the forward-looking decision-making team shifted their focus toward long-term survival and development strategies.

To further enhance the base's self-sufficiency under extreme conditions, strengthen its external concealment, and optimize the internal ecological environment to benefit the physical and mental health of personnel, a large-scale ecological cycle system optimization plan, codenamed "Deep Green," was officially launched with the final approval of Wang Jianguo.

This plan aims to comprehensively upgrade and close-loop optimize the air, water, food production, and waste treatment systems within the "Homeland."

It introduces more advanced vertical farming, hydroponic technology, artificial light regulation systems, and efficient microbial degradation units.

The goal is to build the "Homeland" into an "Ecological Fortress" that is nearly fully self-circulating, minimizes reliance on the outside world, and can maximize the elimination of its own traces of existence.

However, the preliminary environmental baseline survey and system design for the "Deep Green" plan involve extremely complex and cutting-edge professional fields, far beyond what the existing scientific research capabilities within the "Homeland" could independently complete.

After intense internal discussion and risk assessment, Wang Jianguo finally cautiously approved a risk-controlled plan: inviting a very small-scale, strictly vetted external expert team to enter the carefully demarcated non-core area on the periphery of the "Homeland" to conduct short-term, goal-oriented on-site inspections and data collection, providing key basic parameters for the subsequent system design led by internal personnel.

Strict Screening and Access

The process of opening this small gap to the outside world was like walking on thin ice.

The security department utilized every available resource to conduct multiple rounds of nearly harsh background checks on potential partner institutions and expert candidates, extending the scope of investigation to their three generations of ancestors, academic trajectories, financial dealings, social networks, and even unknown quirks.

Ultimately, a small team of three, led by Professor Chen Jing, a professor of ecology from a top domestic university, stood out through the layers of screening and obtained this precious and temporary "entry ticket."

Professor Chen Jing, aged around forty-five or forty-six, was thin and had a neat short haircut.

Her features were distinct, and her gaze was sharp enough to pierce through appearances to the essence.

She is a recognized authority in the field of extreme environment ecological restoration and biosphere circulation technology.

The two assistants she led were a young, taciturn PhD student focused on data modeling, and an experienced, agile field sampling engineer.

Their official task was to conduct baseline surveys of the geology, hydrology, soil, and biodiversity of the mountain area where the "Homeland" is located, and to assess its potential and risks for carrying a high-intensity ecological cycle system.

Ripples Appear: Curiosity and Scrutiny

The arrival of Professor Chen Jing's team was like a pebble thrown into a calm lake, stirring up subtle ripples in the isolated daily life of the "Homeland."

For most of the personnel who had lived here for a long time, this was a rare opportunity to have close contact with living counterparts from the "outside world," and the air was filled with an atmosphere mixed with curiosity, caution, and even a hint of unease.

For Excellence, this was an even more unprecedented and novel experience.

It was his first time seeing so many "strange faces from the outside" (even though there were only three) all at once, especially the strange-looking, cold, metallic instruments they carried—soil profile samplers that could penetrate several meters underground, portable spectrometers capable of analyzing trace elements in water, exquisitely designed insect traps, and air particulate collectors—all of which made his heart, full of desire for exploration, restless.

Like a kitten that had seen something fresh, he couldn't help but want to lean in to see what was going on.

He often slipped away to the peripheral area where the expert team was working when Su Mu wasn't paying attention, squatting outside the safety distance, eyes wide open, staring intently at the operation of those instruments, his little face filled with question marks like "What is this?" and "How do you use it?"

"Excellence, come back! Don't disturb the professor's work!"

Su Mu had to drag her little "follower" back time and again, unable to laugh or cry, warning him softly.

"Those are precision instruments, very expensive. You can't break them."

Professor Chen Jing seemed to cast an extra, brief yet meaningful glance at this boy who was clearly out of place with the base's atmosphere, his eyes clear and filled with unusual focus.

But she didn't say anything more, just continued to focus on the work at hand.

Her style of doing things was extremely professional, efficient, and serious, and her communication with her assistants was so concise that it was almost limited to terminology and data, revealing a typical academic rigor.

An Encounter in the Greenhouse: The Collision of Intuition and Professionalism

One afternoon, Excellence was conducting his daily "Energy Linguistics" practice session in the "Greenhouse."

Recently, Evelyn began guiding him to try applying "Perception" to more complex life forms, such as plants.

Evelyn's theory was that although plants do not have developed nervous systems like animals, their life activities (photosynthesis, water transport, stress response) are also accompanied by extremely weak bioelectricity and energy field changes, making them excellent objects for practicing fine "Perception" and weak energy interaction.

Excellence chose an apple sapling that had just been transplanted and was still looking a bit wilted.

He closed his eyes and carefully unfolded his "Holographic Sensing," trying to "read" the "state" of the sapling.

In his "Perception," the energy field emitted by the sapling seemed a bit "dim" and "disordered," as if shrouded in a faint layer of "fatigue" and "discomfort."

He had a sudden idea and tried to mobilize a trace of C-field energy, which he understood as representing "joy" and "vitality," extremely gently, like blowing air, slowly "wrapping" it toward the sapling, while silently muttering in his heart: "Little tree, little tree, cheer up quickly. The sun is good here, the water is sweet, and the monitor will even sing to you..." (Although Su Mu hadn't promised to sing to him).

Just as he was fully focused on conducting this seemingly "childish" communication ritual, a calm, wave-less voice with a cold aura sounded behind him:

"What are you doing?"

Excellence was so startled that his whole body shuddered, and the weak energy field he had just condensed instantly dissipated.

He turned his head abruptly and saw Professor Chen Jing standing at the entrance of the "Greenhouse," watching him and the unresponsive sapling in front of him calmly with her sharp gaze.

"I... I..." Excellence stammered, his little face flushed red, as if he had been caught doing something bad.

"I wasn't doing anything... just... just looking at it... it seems a bit unhappy... I... I was cheering it on..."

He explained incoherently, feeling that the reason sounded silly even to himself.

Professor Chen Jing neither showed a surprised expression nor made a mockery.

She walked forward a few steps, approached the apple sapling, reached out a gloved finger, gently touched the leaf, and carefully looked at the soil moisture and light conditions.

Then, she turned her gaze back to Excellence, her tone still flat, but the content of what she said made Evelyn, who had quietly followed and was preparing to rescue him, feel a sudden tightness in her heart:

"Judging the stress state and vitality level of plants by observing bioelectric frequency feedback and weak biological field characteristics?"

She paused slightly, seemingly looking for more accurate words.

"A... very intuitive, non-standardized method. Interesting."

This sentence sounded like an objective description of an uncommon phenomenon by an expert, with precise wording and even a hint of academic discussion.

But to Evelyn's ears, it was like a thunderclap!

How could an ordinary ecologist so naturally and professionally summarize Excellence's seemingly childish behavior as "bioelectric frequency feedback" and "biological field characteristics"?

Moreover, she used "intuition" and "non-standardized," rather than "messing around" or "meaningless"!

This indicated that she not only saw the trick but was even aware of this type of "non-standard" "Perception" method, or at least was not repulsed or surprised by it!

Evelyn immediately stepped forward, a polite and distant smile on her face, skillfully blocking the space between Excellence and Professor Chen Jing, and took over the conversation: "Professor Chen, you laugh. The child is just playing around, he has a rich imagination. Have you looked at the soil sample data here?"

She quickly steered the topic back to work.

Professor Chen Jing looked deeply at Evelyn, her gaze seeming to penetrate the human heart, but she did not pursue the questioning, just nodded faintly: "I have looked at the data preliminarily, and some findings are very interesting. Let's continue our work."

After speaking, she turned and left the "Greenhouse," as if the episode had never happened.

Undercurrents: The Warning of Geomagnetic Anomalies

This brief yet information-packed encounter set off alarm bells in Evelyn's heart.

She immediately strengthened the monitoring level of all activities of Professor Chen Jing's team, including their communication content (even though they used lines provided by the base that were strictly monitored), sampling locations, and even snippets of private conversations.

A few days later, Professor Chen Jing's team submitted a preliminary environmental assessment report of several hundred pages.

The report was detailed, the data was precise, the analytical logic was rigorous, and the suggestions put forward were highly professional and constructive, fully meeting the standards that a top expert team should have, without any flaws.

However, during an informal technical exchange that seemed casual with an engineer responsible for geological survey at the base, Professor Chen Jing mentioned a "small discovery" in a chat-like, nonchalant tone.

She said that while conducting groundwater sampling in a valley about 1.5 kilometers northeast of the base, the high-precision geomagnetic detector carried by her team captured a kind of "extremely weak but unusually stable geomagnetic anomaly signal that has subtle differences from the surrounding background field."

She added that the characteristics of this signal were "somewhat similar" to the signals she recorded at the edge of an ore vein when participating in a national-level high-radioactivity associated mineral exploration project many years ago.

She "kindly" reminded that although the probability was extremely low, the possibility of an unknown, weakly radioactive geological structure existing underground in that area could not be ruled out, and suggested that the base side "should arrange a more in-depth survey" to "exclude any potential geological safety risks."

This information was immediately recorded by the intelligence personnel responsible for monitoring and reported to Evelyn and Wang Jianguo.

The moment Evelyn heard the report, a layer of cold sweat broke out on her back!

The valley direction pointed out by Professor Chen Jing pointed exactly to the area where one of the most secret backup emergency exits of the "Homeland" was located!

That exit was deeply hidden inside the mountain, and its shielding measures used special composite wave-absorbing materials and active cancellation technology, which theoretically could perfectly avoid conventional detection.

But no technology could be perfect; perhaps there was an extremely weak, specific energy or magnetic field leakage!

Was the "geomagnetic anomaly" claimed by Professor Chen Jing a coincidence, or a highly clever, precise probe wrapped in professional clothing?

Was she really discovering an anomaly out of academic rigor and professional ethics, or was she using the name of a "reminder" to carry out "confirmation," intending to verify the guesses she or the forces behind her had about some of the core secret facilities of the "Homeland"?

The Banquet of Probing and Counter-Measures

Wang Jianguo made a decisive decision not to be passively guessing.

He ordered a small-scale, relaxed achievement exchange meeting to be arranged on the grounds of thanking the expert team for their hard work and further exchanging assessment findings.

The location was set in the leisure meeting room with a beautiful environment adjacent to the "Greenhouse."

It was nominally a thank-you exchange, but actually a carefully arranged "Hongmen Banquet" to observe and evaluate the true intentions of Professor Chen Jing and her team at close range.

The security department made careful deployments.

The attendees were all core backbone members, and the inside and outside of the venue were filled with invisible surveillance.

Even the waiters were specially trained agents, keeping an eye on the slightest behavior and conversation.

Excellence was also specially permitted, accompanied by Su Mu, to "observe" in the glass corridor outside the venue.

Su Mu warned him that he could only watch quietly, not make any noise, and not run around.

After the meeting started, the adults sat around the long table, various data charts and terrain diagrams were projected on the wall, discussing technical terms that Excellence completely couldn't understand, such as "soil bearing capacity," "hydrological cycle efficiency," and "biological community stability."

At first, Excellence was watching the colorful charts and Professor Chen Jing's eloquent appearance with interest, but soon, the child's nature made him feel a bit bored and stuffy.

He quietly took out his precious portable "Energy Encoder" (a learning tool modified by Evelyn, which can receive and display analog signals of energy fluctuations in specific frequency bands) with a cracked screen from his pocket.

He turned it on listlessly, subconsciously pointing the sensor toward the venue, and began to practice identifying the basic "energy letters" that Evelyn taught him—the environmental energy fields of different frequencies and intensities.

He didn't know that his seemingly casual move, the sensor captured not just the background environmental energy noise, but also the indescribable "information ripples" emitted by the extremely weak but real biological fields and conscious activities of everyone in the venue (especially Professor Chen Jing) when they were focused on thinking or experiencing emotional fluctuations.

The Calm Before the Storm

The exchange meeting proceeded in a superficially friendly and professional atmosphere.

Professor Chen Jing answered fluently and performed impeccably.

However, Evelyn and Wang Jianguo felt a deep, immense pressure from her occasionally glancing at the direction where Excellence was outside the window, that quick, hard-to-capture look containing a hint of exploration and deep thought, and from the nearly perfect caution and smoothness she deliberately maintained when answering certain key questions.

Excellence squatted in the corner of the corridor, bowing his head and fiddling with his "toy," the waveform on the screen jumping messily.

He didn't know that he might have inadvertently become a special "sensor" in this silent contest that even he himself hadn't realized.

An underlying current was quietly accelerating under the surface of the "Homeland," which seemed to have returned to calm.

Was the arrival of Professor Chen Jing the hope sown for the "Deep Green" plan, or the prelude to a new, even more difficult-to-guard-against storm brought to the "Homeland"?

The answer might be hidden under that seemingly calm exchange meeting, hidden in the waveform chart jumping in the child's hand.