86: Chapter 86 Scrap iron scattered everywhere can be used to forge national treasures.

Zhao Tiezhu was bare-chested and covered in mud. Standing beside him was the skeletal Song Changming.

Song Changming's eyes were bloodshot, like a wolf that had been starving for three days. Seeing the car come to a stop, Song Changming charged through the mud pits and yanked open the passenger door.

"The blueprints! The quantum gravity blueprints you mentioned!" Ignoring who Lu Chen was, Song Changming reached straight into the car.

Lu Chen slammed the unstamped envelope into Song Changming's chest.

Song Changming tore open the envelope, pulled out the thick engineering drawings, and crouched directly in front of the headlights, his eyes glued to the paper.

After looking at just the structural formulas on the first two pages, Song Changming's fingers began to tremble.

"This... energy ring cross-section... magnetic field constraint equation..." Song Changming jerked his head up, his eyes bloodshot. "Those idiots at ASML couldn't write this even if they spent ten thousand years! Who on earth came up with these blueprints!"

Lu Chen didn't answer him, turning instead to look at the bewildered Zhao Tiezhu standing nearby.

Wei Jianguo walked over as well. He glanced at the blueprints in Song Changming's hands, but just catching a glimpse of the molecular stripping model on them caused Wei Jianguo to freeze in place, his breathing even stopping.

"Old Zhao." Lu Chen called out.

"Here! Go ahead, Factory Director!" Zhao Tiezhu puffed out his mud-splattered chest.

"At daybreak tomorrow, go contact Old Zhang and his group of small business owners." Lu Chen pointed to the empty lot in the distance. "Aren't they bringing people to join us? Tell them to sweep up every single scrap recycling station in Jiangcheng City and within a three-hundred-kilometer radius."

Zhao Tiezhu was stunned. "Collect what?"

"Collect scrap metal." Lu Chen's voice wasn't loud, but it echoed in the night wind. "Broken kitchen knives, waste steel pipes, scrapped farm machinery, rusty screws. As long as it's metal, bring it all to this construction site."

Wei Jianguo pushed up the glasses on the bridge of his nose. He looked at Lu Chen, his voice completely changed in tone.

"Factory Director Lu... do you intend to use that industrial trash as raw material?"

Lu Chen pulled a silver windproof lighter from his pocket and flipped open the lid.

"The foreigners think that if they cut off our supply of special steel, we have to kneel on the ground and wait for death." Lu Chen lit a cigarette and tucked the lighter back into his pocket. "Since they won't sell us good steel..."

Lu Chen exhaled smoke, looking at the dense array of steel bars at the bottom of the pit.

"Then we'll use a pile of junk to forge a national treasure for them."

Northern City High-Tech Development Zone, temporary prefab conference room.

The tin roof rattled in the night wind, and the bare incandescent bulb overhead swung back and forth, casting long, distorted shadows across the room.

People sat on both sides of the long table.

On one side were Wei Jianguo, Wang Shouyi, and Chen Jianming, the three leading authorities in the domestic semiconductor field.

Standing behind them were several top fluid mechanics professors who had just signed on tonight. They were fully equipped, wearing glasses and clutching thick data boards.

On the other side, there was only Song Changming.

He had changed into a blue work uniform that barely counted as clean; the clothes were ill-fitting, with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

But it was no use. That sour, putrid stench, marinated from three years at the Beishan landfill, mixed with the pungent odor of industrial waste, spread throughout the prefab room as the fan rotated.

Wang Shouyi furrowed his brow, reaching out to wave his hand in front of his nose.

Lu Chen pulled out the folding metal chair at the head of the table and sat down.

Da Biao stood at the entrance of the conference room, clutching a steel pipe like an iron tower.

On the table lay several blueprints stained with yellow mud.

Wei Jianguo curled his finger and tapped forcefully on the center of one of the sketches.

"Absurd! This is sheer nonsense!" Wei Jianguo's voice hit the ceiling. He pointed at Song Changming. "Factory Director Lu, I don't care where you found this person. Building a Lithography Machine isn't like playing with mud! A Class 10 cleanroom is the lifeline of the semiconductor industry; there cannot be more than ten dust particles per cubic foot!"

Wei Jianguo stood up and pushed the sketch toward the center of the table.

"Look at this system he drew! No HEPA high-efficiency filters, no ULPA ultra-micro glass fibers! What is he using? Water?" Wei Jianguo's teeth chattered with rage. "Water curtain filtration? Water vapor itself will contaminate the Lithography Machine lenses! With this pipe diameter and flow rate design, as soon as the wind pressure hits, the water curtain will be blown apart instantly. This doesn't even meet the passing grade for an undergraduate fluid mechanics student!"

A fluid mechanics professor nearby pushed up his black-rimmed glasses and chimed in.

"Director Lu. The complete micro-breeze system in ASML's cleanroom is a monopolized patent jointly developed by the US and Germany; it cannot be replicated domestically. This... this Engineer Song's proposal is based entirely on imagination. If we follow his design, on the very first day of assembling the first Lithography Machine, the lenses will be covered in a layer of dust, and tens of billions in investment will go down the drain."

Voices of doubt merged into one.

Song Changming leaned back against the plastic chair, one leg resting on the edge of the seat. He squinted his bloodshot eyes, watching the group of experts opposite him spit with excitement as they spoke.

He didn't interrupt, simply pulling a rusty nail clipper from his pocket and slowly trimming the black mud from under his fingernails.

Lu Chen pulled out the silver lighter, flipped open the lid, and lit a cigarette.

"Are you finished?" Lu Chen exhaled smoke, his voice low.

The conference room fell silent. Wei Jianguo sat back in his chair, his chest still heaving violently.

"Old Song, they're asking you a question." Lu Chen held the cigarette and gestured toward the table.

Song Changming tucked the nail clipper back into his pocket. He stood up, walked to the table, and swept those mud-stained sketches onto the floor.

"A bunch of repeaters who've been dumbed down by memorizing foreign parameters." Song Changming sneered.

Wei Jianguo's face turned livid, and he slammed the table. "What did you say!"

Song Changming didn't even look at him. He bent down, picked up the faded, worn-out canvas bag, and slammed it onto the table with a "bang." He unzipped it and began pulling things out.

Three palm-sized transparent glass plates.

A yellowing IV tube.

A small, rusty computer case fan.

A roll of waterproof raw tape.

Finally, a stainless steel mug covered in brown tea stains, containing more than half a cup of thick, light green liquid.

Looking at this junk, Wang Shouyi laughed in anger. "What are you trying to do? Are you here to play with building blocks for us?"

Song Changming didn't say a word, his hands moving so fast they were a blur.

He used the waterproof tape to stick the three pieces of glass into a triangular conical trough, cut the IV tube, and connected the two ends to the bottom of the glass trough and the computer fan opening, respectively. Then, he unscrewed the lid of the stainless steel mug and poured all of that half-cup of thick, light green liquid into the reservoir at the bottom of the glass trough.

"Old Wei, don't blink."

Song Changming pulled out a wire and stuck it directly into the power strip on the wall.

"Hum..."

The low-quality fan received power and let out a harsh roar. A micro-negative pressure chamber immediately formed inside the glass trough, and immediately after, a scene that made one's scalp tingle appeared.