96: Chapter 96 Two Madmen, and Their Thousand Miracles

Black void.

No boundaries, no up or down, no sound.

Only two spheres of pale golden light, infinitely far apart yet seemingly close, each supporting an independent space.

Lin Xiaoman opens her eyes. In front of her is a rough stone workbench.

The table is covered with things she has never seen before.

Bronze hammers, carving needles, rune etching pens, palm-sized miniature furnaces, and piles of bronze pieces, iron bars, quartz particles, and some kind of dark golden ore powder.

Senior Lu Yan sits opposite.

His silver hair is tied back, his gray long-sleeved shirt is rolled to the elbows, and his forearms are stained with bronze rust.

Those eyes, with gears slowly turning in the pupils, are staring at her, saying nothing.

Lin Xiaoman scans around; besides the workbench and piles of materials, there is nothing.

The darkness swallows everything three steps away.

"Rules."

Senior Lu Yan speaks.

His voice is low and hoarse, with the texture of metal rubbing against metal.

"You are Tier 1, with only passive perception. The mechanisms you build will not possess supernatural power—but the structure, runes, and energy interfaces must be precise enough to activate immediately upon channeling supernatural energy."

He holds up a finger.

"One thousand, without a single flaw."

Lin Xiaoman's eyes widen.

Then the corners of her mouth curve up, revealing the canine tooth on the right side.

"One thousand mechanisms?"

She pats her chest.

"I wrote forty-seven thousand lines of code in three minutes when I was seventeen. One thousand—"

She grabs a bronze hammer and tosses it in her hand.

"A piece of cake."

On the other side.

Before Henry is a crude wooden operating table.

Lying on the table is a "person" condensed from golden light,

features blurred, but the chest rises and falls, the pulse beats, and the open fracture on the left lower leg oozes real blood.

A fishy smell enters his nostrils, the warm smell of rust.

Seraphina stands on the other side of the operating table, golden curls hanging over her shoulders, blue eyes watching him quietly.

"Your Holy Healing Apostle golden light can only heal yourself, not project outward."

She pushes a worn leather instrument bag over.

Opening it—scalpels, hemostats, suture needles and thread, forceps, bandages.

No ECG monitor, no shadowless lamp, no anesthetic.

"One thousand people."

Henry takes the instrument bag, the broken leg of his gold-rimmed glasses still wrapped in that piece of tape.

"Just give me time."

In the trial environment, the first hour.

Lin Xiaoman's first mechanical creation is finished—a palm-sized bronze flying bird, seven-inch wingspan, embedded with a three-layer rune circuit in the abdomen.

Supernatural perception automatically scans, rune completeness 97.3%, interface precision 99.1%.

Senior Lu Yan takes it, flips it over, and puts it down.

"Qualified. Nine hundred ninety-nine to go."

Lin Xiaoman shrugs and picks up the second bronze piece.

This thing is the same principle as coding; once the first pass runs, you just copy it—

No.

You cannot copy.

Code can be copied and pasted with one click, but hitting a bronze piece with a hammer doesn't work that way.

The force, angle, and landing point of every hammer blow depend entirely on "feel."

Each stroke carved by the rune etching pen cannot exceed a 0.3-millimeter margin of error; it depends entirely on her fingers.

No shortcuts, no batch processing, no automated scripts.

Purely manual.

"...Alright."

Lin Xiaoman bites her lip and continues.

On the other side, the one-hundredth patient.

Henry finishes the last stitch.

Trauma debridement, fracture reduction, hemostasis, and bandaging.

Textbook-level operation, with each stitch spacing error within 0.5 millimeters.

One hundred patients, average processing time of four minutes per person.

Very calm.

He looks up at Seraphina. She sits in the corner, smiling, saying nothing.

The 101st patient appears on the operating table.

Henry lowers his head.

Intracranial hemorrhage combined with pneumothorax and pelvic fracture.

No CT, no MRI, no ultrasound.

Only two hands, a stethoscope, and forty years of clinical intuition.

He places his fingers on the patient's carotid artery and closes his eyes.

While counting the pulse, he listens to the respiratory rate—decreased breath sounds on the right, hyper-resonance on percussion, tracheal deviation.

Tension pneumothorax.

Save a life first.

He cuts between the second ribs with a scalpel, air hisses out, the pneumothorax is relieved, and breathing is restored.

Next is the intracranial hemorrhage.

His fingers trace the surface of the skull, judging the position and depth of the fracture line by touch—

Difficult.

But he has done more difficult ones.

Twenty-three years ago in the War Zone, in a tin shed, he performed a splenectomy using guitar strings instead of sutures.

Conditions are better than that time.

The three-hundredth patient.

Lin Xiaoman's fingers begin to cramp.

The web of her right hand has swollen into a red bun after three hundred consecutive precision hammer blows.

She cannot hold the carving needle steadily and cuts her palm.

She soaks her hand in the cooling water tank next to the miniature furnace; the chill spreads, and the pain decreases by twenty percent.

She pulls her hand out and continues.

307th—scrapped.

The rune etching pen deviated by 1.2 millimeters at the corner of the second-layer circuit, misaligning the entire energy reservation interface.

Lin Xiaoman throws the waste into the corner; the bronze fragments hit the ground with a hollow, crisp sound.

Continue.

400th—scrapped.

413th—scrapped.

427th—scrapped again.

Her hands are shaking, and the fine motor control of her fingertips is plummeting like a cliff.

The five-hundredth patient.

Lin Xiaoman lies on the workbench, her forehead pressed against the cold stone surface.

In front of her is a bronze beast that is only two-thirds complete; the rune circuit went wrong on the third layer.

Forty-seven scrapped in total.

Materials are decreasing.

Her fingers are swollen like ten carrots.

She does the math—based on the current scrap rate and hand degradation curve, she will be completely unable to continue around the 700th.

Can't finish.

Tears fall onto the bronze surface, dried by the residual heat of the furnace, leaving a faint water stain.

"I can't do it anymore..."

The voice is broken, and there isn't even an echo in the boundless darkness.

Senior Lu Yan sits in the corner, silently turning a gear in his hand, not urging, not comforting.

At the same time.

Henry's hand shakes.

620th patient—a simulated pregnant woman with an abdominal penetrating wound.

The moment Henry sees the wound, a scene explodes in his mind.

War Zone, tin shed, shells.

Isaac's chest stops rising and falling.

The suture needle slips from his fingers and hits the operating table with a ding.

He bends down to pick up the needle, and when he stands up, his vision goes black for a second, his knee knocking against the table leg.

Holy Healing Apostle's golden light surges from his body, repairing the overfatigued muscle fibers and the optic nerves on the verge of spasm.

Heart rate pulls back, and vision is restored.

His hand is still shaking.

Passive ability can repair muscles, but not the mess in his brain.

Lin Xiaoman doesn't know how long she has been lying there.

Tears wash the bronze shavings on the workbench into a turbid stream, dripping down the edge of the table.

In the darkness, only the orange-red fire of the miniature furnace illuminates the tear stains and bronze powder on her face.

Silence for a long time.

"Senior Lu Yan."

She doesn't raise her head, her voice hoarse,

"Did you... do it alone back then?"

The gears stop.

Senior Lu Yan's voice comes from the corner, very soft.

"From birth to death."

Lin Xiaoman sniffles and lifts her face from the workbench.

"One hundred and twenty-seven mechanical beasts, an intelligence network covering the entire continent, all by yourself?"

"No one could help me."

Senior Lu Yan says, the gears in his pupils very slow, almost motionless,

"I find it more comfortable to talk to metal and gears than to people."

Lin Xiaoman stares at him.

A social phobe from the Northern Song Dynasty.

"Then why were you able to make one hundred and twenty-seven of them?"

Silence.

A long one.

So long that Lin Xiaoman thinks he won't answer.

Senior Lu Yan raises his head, and for the first time, a temperature that does not belong to metal emerges in those gear pupils.

"Because every time a mechanical creation is completed—"

He pauses for a beat.

"I am no longer alone."

Tears fall again.

But this time, Lin Xiaoman doesn't lie down.

She grabs the bronze hammer; her swollen fingers cannot close, so she tears a strip of cloth from under the workbench and ties the hammer handle to her palm.

Tighten.

The cloth embeds into the swollen flesh, making her gasp in pain.

One hammer.

The first dent appears on the surface of the bronze piece.

Another hammer.

Each hammer blow is accompanied by a muffled groan.

501st.

Henry stands straight again.

His hand is still shaking.

He lowers his head and stares at those trembling palms for three seconds.

These hands have held the pens for two hundred and thirty-seven papers, held the base of a Nobel Prize trophy, and held the scalpels for over twenty thousand surgeries.

Now they are shaking.

Because he is tired?

No.

Because when Isaac fell, these hands did nothing.

Holy Healing Apostle's golden light can self-heal, but it cannot save people.

Then use the knife.

Henry closes his eyes.

When he opens them again—

His hand stops shaking, not repaired by the passive ability, but suppressed by himself.

Sixty-two years of willpower crushed it.

Pick up the suture needle.

621st.

Suturing, hemostasis, drainage, spacing error 0.3 millimeters, even more accurate than his peak state.

999th.

Lin Xiaoman's fingers no longer look like their original shape.

The cloth strip is wrapped in seven layers, and under each layer are blood scabs and swollen flesh.

Three fingernails are broken, and bronze shavings are embedded in the flesh and cannot be picked out.

But her eyes are terrifyingly bright.

The silver-blue data stream deep in her pupils is no longer passive scanning, but active calculation.

Before every hammer blow, the optimal force, angle, and landing point are already marked on her retina.

This is not a supernatural ability.

This is the experience she fed on with the failure of five hundred creations.

1000th.

The bronze mechanical tiger.

The last rune nut is twisted into the abdomen by her blood-stained fingers, and with a click, the circuit closes.

Supernatural perception full-frequency scan—

Rune completeness: 100%.

Energy reservation interface alignment precision: 100%.

Lin Xiaoman puts the mechanical tiger on the ground.

Behind her, one thousand mechanical creations are arranged in the darkness.

Birds, beasts, fish, snakes, insects, puppets.

The cold light of copper and iron connects into a piece, like a silent army.

In each rune circuit, her tears and blood are soaked.

At the same moment.

Henry finishes the last stitch.

The 1000th patient's breathing changes from rapid to steady.

The abdominal incision is closed, the drainage tube is unobstructed, and vital signs are stable.

He straightens his waist.

His shirt was soaked through three times and dried by body temperature three times, the front stiff like a thin layer of armor.

Standing straight.

Two trial spaces.

Two seniors.

Senior Lu Yan looks at the thousand silent mechanical creations and smiles.

Seraphina looks at Henry's hands that no longer tremble and also smiles.

Two figures turn into golden light simultaneously.

Surging in.

Altar plaza.

Two rays of golden light burst from the branches of the ancient tree, intersecting in mid-air, exploding into a huge light and shadow—

Flames supporting the stars.

totem of spark.

The two suspended bodies descend slowly in the golden light. The moment their feet touch the stone bricks, the golden light in all the cracks of the ground surges simultaneously.

Lin Xiaoman opens her eyes.

The silver-blue data stream deep in her pupils has changed.

It is no longer a passive incoming information flood, but an active, aggressive, supernatural signal that can directly invade any electronic equipment and mechanical structure.

Henry opens his eyes.

In the palms of his hands, a pale golden halo is radiating outward at a speed visible to the naked eye.

Not self-healing.

It is projecting outward.

Su Chen leans against the ancient tree, his mask hanging at his waist.

Looking at the two, the arc of his mouth is very light.

The system panel pops up two lines of text—

"Lin Xiaoman: Tier 2 Watcher. Sequence: Mechanical Ascension. Active ability unlocked: Supernatural Data Intrusion + Mechanical Beast Control."

"Henry Bernstein: Tier 2 Watcher. Sequence: Holy Healing Apostle. Active ability unlocked: Battlefield Domain Healing + Life Barrier."

"Authenticity + 800. Current authenticity: 9200 / 10000."

Su Chen turns the notebook to a new page.

He writes a line.

"Distance to LV3—still 800 points short."