73: The "hand-rubbing" trio in the rehabilitation room

After several days of nearly harsh, physically and mentally exhausting comprehensive security clearance procedures, high-intensity confidentiality regulation indoctrination, and a series of dazzling neuro-adaptive tests and psychological evaluations, Su Mu was finally led by the agent codenamed "Shadow," "Old Wu," through thick alloy airtight doors requiring multiple verifications of iris, fingerprint, and dynamic passwords, arriving at the rehabilitation isolation room located in the core area of the "Zhulong" base.

The door slid open silently, and a scent mixed with a faint smell of disinfectant, equipment heat dissipation, and an indescribable, weak ozone smell—as if left behind after high-intensity mental activity—rushed to meet her.

The scene before her eyes made Su Mu instantly hold her breath, her heart feeling as if it were being tightly gripped by an invisible hand.

The room was spacious and bright, with constant temperature and humidity. The walls were made of soft, off-white sound-absorbing material, and the floor was covered with soft, non-slip flooring.

Various medical and monitoring devices, whose names she could not name, with precise and futuristic designs, stood like quiet sentries arranged in order along the walls, emitting a low, rhythmic hum.

In the center of the room, Excellence was wearing a loose white rehabilitation suit, sitting on a height-adjustable treatment chair with his back to the door.

He wore a simple headband on his head that looked extremely ridiculous, even somewhat comical—this was the improved (or rather, more dilapidated) version of the "Emotion-Visualization Device" he had previously "hand-crafted" himself, crudely fixed with hot glue, colored wires, and transparent tape, with a few sensors crookedly attached near his forehead and temples.

He was focused intently on a simple circuit on the table in front of him, composed of a breadboard, jumper wires, and several flashing LED lights, muttering something unintelligibly.

The three-color LED light on the device was flashing with a weak, irregular, yet inexplicably cheerful red light, following his unconscious humming.

"He is... measuring happiness..." A Rehabilitation Therapist wearing a blue medical uniform with a gentle expression whispered an explanation to Su Mu, her tone carrying a hint of helplessness and pity.

Su Mu's nose felt sore, her eyes instantly turned red, and her vision became blurred.

She could hardly connect the person before her—behaving childishly, with ignorant eyes, like a big kid grinning at a glowing toy—with the genius boy in her memory who had clear, sharp eyes, lightning-fast thinking, and moved with ease in the laboratory.

Immense heartache and sorrow surged up like a tide, making her almost unable to stand steady. She bit her lower lip hard to keep the sob from escaping.

She took a deep breath, forcing herself to steady her emotions, walked forward a few steps, and tentatively called out in as steady and gentle a voice as possible: "Excellence?"

Excellence seemed to hear the voice, paused for a moment, and then turned his head somewhat sluggishly and slowly.

His gaze was initially blank and unfocused, as if covered by a thin layer of mist, slowly sweeping across his pale and slightly gaunt face.

A few seconds later, that unfocused gaze seemed to struggle to coalesce, landing on Su Mu's face and lingering for a longer time.

Suddenly, his eyes widened slightly, as if a sleeping switch deep in his memory had been accidentally triggered, and a trace of an extremely faint, familiar light flickered deep in his eyes.

"Mon... Monitor?" He hesitantly and slowly spat out the two words. The speaking speed was very slow, and the pronunciation was somewhat unclear, like rusted gears struggling to re-engage, but the faint trace of confirmation and vague familiarity contained within made Su Mu's heart jump violently!

"It's me! It's me! Su Mu!" Huge surprise instantly overwhelmed the composure Su Mu had been trying to maintain. She almost rushed to him, her voice filled with uncontrollable excitement and trembling, and tears finally couldn't help but burst forth. "How... how do you feel? It's so good that you can recognize me!"

She was cautious, not rashly touching him, just eagerly looking into his eyes, trying to capture more signs of lucidity.

Excellence seemed to understand her question, clumsily and somewhat showily raised his hand to point at the ridiculous headband on his head, a simple and even somewhat silly smile appearing on his face: "I am... measuring emotions... see... red light... happy..."

As if to prove his words, the LED light actually cooperated by flashing a weak red light, although the frequency remained chaotic.

Su Mu broke into a smile through her tears, but a deeper, indescribable sorrow and affection welled up in her heart.

She remembered Wang Jianguo's instructions and decided to try to stimulate him using the field he once loved and excelled at the most.

From the equipment bag she brought with her, which had undergone security checks, she took out a specially made, non-networked tablet computer and skillfully brought up some basic circuit schematics and design sketches. One of them was the highly efficient resonant coil design that Excellence had hand-drawn when he was tinkering with wireless energy transmission in the dormitory.

"Excellence, look, do you remember this?" Su Mu handed the tablet to him, pointing at the familiar drawing. "You drew this yourself before, saying you wanted to use it to... um... charge your phone wirelessly, and it could also light up an LED, remember?"

Excellence's attention was drawn over. He frowned slightly, his eyes focused on the screen, seeming to struggle very hard to try to understand the lines and symbols that were once as natural as breathing to him.

His fingers trembled slightly in the air unconsciously, as if wanting to simulate the action of soldering.

Time passed minute by minute. The rehabilitation room was exceptionally quiet, and one could only hear the rhythmic ticking of the instruments and his slightly heavy breathing.

Suddenly, his eyes widened a little more, flashing with an extremely weak but real glimmer of focus!

His fingers trembled, pointing somewhat uncontrollably at a certain point on the screen drawing, and a vague but eager sound came from his throat: "Here... not right... resonant frequency... miscalculated... coupling coefficient... needs to be changed... Q value is too high... will... will burn out..."

Although the sentences were fragmented and the logic jumped, the technical terms mentioned—"resonant frequency," "coupling coefficient," "Q value"—as well as the very hidden design flaw pointed out, which indeed existed in the early sketch (a flaw Su Mu only discovered later when she performed simulations herself), made Su Mu instantly overjoyed!

Once it came to technology, and he came into contact with these familiar symbols and concepts, Excellence's severely damaged brain seemed to have truly activated some dormant channels, showing a level of clarity and focus far exceeding his usual state!

"How should it be changed? Will you teach me? Let's fix it together!" Su Mu immediately struck while the iron was hot, her voice filled with encouragement and expectation. She quickly took out paper and pen and spread them on the table.

Thus, in this rehabilitation room filled with high-tech medical equipment, a strange and moving scene appeared: Su Mu and Excellence were head to head, almost lying on the table. One was guiding, questioning, and assisting with recording with great patience, while the other was thinking with extreme difficulty yet exceptionally focused, occasionally using trembling hands to draw some crooked symbols, formula fragments, or partial circuit diagrams on the paper that ordinary people could not understand at all.

The LED light on the Emotion-Visualization Device flickered between red and blue, its color and brightness changing with the intensity of Excellence's thinking and the occasional burst of small "inspiration," like an emotional audience.

Standing outside the rehabilitation room, monitoring the situation inside through one-way glass and multiple sensors, Wang Jianguo showed a slightly satisfied and profound expression on his face.

"Little Zhang," who had been following behind him like a shadow, asked in a low voice: "Chief, can this method... really effectively promote his cognitive recovery? It looks very inefficient and very unstable."

Wang Jianguo's gaze remained on the room, his tone flat yet profound: "Traditional, systematic cognitive rehabilitation training is certainly important, but for his special case of 'information-level trauma,' perhaps this unconventional 'stimulus-response' mode, based on his instinctive interests and residual deep memories, can better reach neural circuits that regular methods cannot activate."

"Whether it works or not, we won't know until we try. What's important is creating this kind of positive connection and stimulation, one that carries emotional projection."

"And..." A faint, imperceptible arc appeared at the corner of his mouth, "Su Mu is a truly clever and talented child. She is inadvertently, and very effectively, helping us verify and 'extract' the potentially valuable 'flashes of inspiration' that may be hidden within Excellence's seemingly chaotic fragments of thought. It's killing two birds with one stone."

A few days later, the peace of the rehabilitation room was broken by a new figure.

Evelyn Li, in her capacity as 'Senior Cognitive Rehabilitation Consultant for the Prophet Foundation,' joined the rehabilitation team after undergoing a series of equally strict reviews and signing agreements.

Wang Jianguo tacitly approved this arrangement, the depth of his eyes flashing with calculation; clearly, he intended to watch coldly to see what game Morpheus Li and his daughter were playing, and what 'unexpected' gains it might bring.

When Evelyn saw Su Mu already present in the rehabilitation room, she was visibly taken aback.

A flash of extremely complex surprise, scrutiny, and a trace of imperceptible wariness swept across her light gray eyes, but she quickly and perfectly masked it.

With an impeccable, professional, and slightly detached smile on her face, she introduced herself to Su Mu and the Rehabilitation Therapist: 'Hello, I am Evelyn Li, commissioned by The Foundation to assist in the cognitive function stimulation and neural remodeling training for Excellence.'

Thus, in this not-particularly-spacious rehabilitation room, a subtle and interesting 'three-person rehabilitation group' was formed.

Su Mu was mainly responsible for technical stimulation and emotional support, using the various basic electronic devices she brought and Excellence's past project sketches to try to awaken his deep memories and logical thinking.

Evelyn brought The Foundation's expensive, sophisticated training system based on the latest cognitive neuroscience theories (including complex visual-motor coordination tasks, advanced pattern recognition software, and transcranial micro-current stimulation instruments), responsible for more 'formal' cognitive remodeling training.

Surrounded in the center, Excellence spent most of his time like a confused, big child who needed to be carefully guided and cared for, his eyes sometimes dazed, sometimes flashing with a brief moment of focus, as he turned sluggishly between the two guides who employed different methods.

Interestingly, the differences soon became apparent.

When Evelyn tried to guide Excellence to use the expensive, flashy, multi-modal cognitive training system, he often showed obvious impatience and resistance.

He would either stare blankly at the complex instruction manual and start drifting off or falling asleep shortly after, or he would simply treat the precision control sticks or sensors as new toys, taking them apart to study the internal circuitry (often resulting in the system crashing and requiring emergency repairs by engineers).

Although Evelyn always maintained professional patience and a smile, the slightly furrowed brows and occasionally accelerated speaking pace betrayed her inner frustration.

However, when Su Mu took out those 'hand-crafted' devices that looked rough, simple, and even somewhat shabby—such as simple electromagnets made with paper cups and copper wire, vibration sensors built with piezoelectric ceramic sheets and op-amps, or even just a few magnets and coils—Excellence would often show a much stronger interest.

He would tilt his head and fumble with them with clumsy fingers; although his coordination was poor, his eyes would hold a bit more curiosity and the light of trying to understand.

Once, Evelyn brought a neurofeedback training headset worth hundreds of thousands, claimed to be able to accurately monitor and provide feedback on alpha brainwave states.

Excellence wore it for less than five minutes before he started to lose focus, constantly twisting his body because he felt 'it squeezed his head and hurt' and 'the abstract patterns on the screen didn't look good.'

Watching from the side, Su Mu felt helpless and had to take a capacitive proximity sensor from her toolkit, which she had made on the fly out of cardboard, aluminum foil, and an electret microphone taken from an old pair of headphones.

Seeing this, Excellence perked up and played with it with great interest for over half an hour, even trying to use it to measure the temperature change of the steaming coffee Evelyn had brought (which, unsurprisingly, ended up burning out the sensor).

Seeing her high-end equipment being ignored while that simple 'hand-crafted toy' attracted all of Excellence's attention, a hint of embarrassment and confusion appeared on Evelyn's flawless professional expression that she couldn't hide.

Watching from the side, Su Mu couldn't help but turn her head away, her shoulders slightly shaking as she tried to stifle a laugh.

Even Xiao Zhang, who was guarding outside the door and observing through the surveillance, had the corners of his mouth twitch almost imperceptibly on his eternal iceberg face.

An even more surprising and puzzling phenomenon occurred when Su Mu and Evelyn were both beside Excellence.

That already unreliable 'Emotion-Visualization Device' of Excellence's would often show even stranger and harder-to-explain reactions.

Sometimes it would flash a red light representing 'happy' and a blue light representing 'depressed' simultaneously, as if his emotions were in a state of contradictory intertwining.

Sometimes the red and blue lights would flash alternately at high speeds, at a frequency so fast it was dizzying, as if he were engaged in some kind of logically chaotic, intense ideological struggle.

In the most exaggerated instance, while Su Mu was patiently explaining the application of a basic Ohm's Law and Evelyn was simultaneously trying to guide him through a spatial memory task, the LED lights on the device suddenly flashed wildly, and then with a soft 'poof,' a wisp of faint blue smoke emerged—it actually... almost short-circuited and burned out!

'Sigh... This broken device really needs a complete repair, or we should just throw it away...' Su Mu sighed helplessly, carefully dismantling the simple headband to check the messy circuitry inside and the Arduino Nano board that was already a bit hot, her face full of wry amusement.

Standing on the side, Evelyn looked thoughtfully at the 'failed work' emitting blue smoke, then looked at Excellence, who appeared blank and completely unaware of what had happened.

A sharp and thoughtful light flashed in her light gray eyes.

She quietly took out a disguised, lipstick-sized micro-recorder and quickly and covertly recorded the detailed phenomena of this anomalous event and the environmental parameters at the time (including the distance of both people from Excellence, the type of activity being performed, and even the subtle changes in ambient temperature and humidity).

Like other phenomena she had observed before, these anomalous data were classified as highly suspicious 'atypical neural stress response' samples that required key analysis, encrypted, and sent back to The Foundation headquarters via a special channel.

Morpheus Li attached great importance to such reports, believing that this might be a manifestation of the deeper interaction between the 'pandora' fragments and the host's consciousness.

Thus, in this special rehabilitation room that seemed calm but was actually undercurrent-ridden, under the interweaving of two different philosophies and different guiding methods, and under the gaze of multiple eyes behind the surveillance screens, Excellence's rehabilitation training proceeded slowly and continuously in a subtle and peculiar way.

He was like a crystal wrapped in heavy fog, shattered and then barely glued back together, occasionally refracting a faint but amazing light from the unknown depths.

No one noticed that during an unconscious, doodle-like scribbling, Excellence had outlined a seemingly meaningless, chaotic curve in the most inconspicuous corner of the paper filled with broken formulas and sketches.

When the local morphological features of that curve were enlarged, after Fourier transform and topological analysis, they actually presented a surprising similarity—far exceeding random coincidence—to a certain highly simplified mathematical model describing the probability cloud distribution of the quantum tunneling effect.

This insignificant detail, like a small stone thrown into a deep lake, had not yet caused any ripples, but it might herald that something... beyond current understanding was brewing deep at the bottom of the lake.