129: Chapter 129 True Gold Fears No Fire

On the morning of July 17th, the first round of recruitment interviews for the Low Entropy Workshop concluded.

Jiang Lin did not make candidates stand in front of a whiteboard to talk big about the future of the robotics industry, nor did he make them use a series of fancy terminology to prove how well they understood algorithms, control, or embodied intelligence.

What the Low Entropy Workshop lacked least right now was direction, nor did it lack core technical routes.

What he needed was a batch of auxiliary nodes capable of dragging prototypes out of the environment of personal workstations and into the rough engineering processes of the Real World.

Therefore, the screening dimension for this round of interviews was very simple.

Could they do dirty and tiring work?

Could they accept rigorous authority boundaries?

When failing, could they write down the process clearly using the most objective data instead of making excuses?

At 1 p.m., Liang Zhixia took a tablet, organized the list of the first batch of successful candidates, and handed it to Jiang Lin.

The list was not long, but it was well-structured.

Three formal employees.

Liang Zhixia was solely responsible for operational coordination and external liaison.

Chen Zhi took over the cumbersome administrative tasks, archives, procurement, document archiving, and physical numbering of prototype assets.

Qiu Yue was responsible for the recruitment backend, initial screening of the public mailbox, candidate tracking sheets, and the diversion processing of external cooperation requests.

Fifteen engineering trial workers.

These included Chen Yan from Beihang, Xu Man's team from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology School of Mechanical Engineering, two graduate students from the Jiangcheng University School of Mechanical Engineering, and the Harbin Institute of Technology master's student who had previously worked on low-temperature inspection chassis troubleshooting.

The remote collaboration pool temporarily had only two people, both of whom had signed strict confidentiality agreements.

One was a Chinese international student from the Cambridge Engineering Department.

One was a PhD student in the control direction from Zhejiang University.

They temporarily did not touch the core control chain of G-01, only participating in peripheral work: log format standardization, tool chain script writing, and standard document template organization.

From the perspective of establishment, the Low Entropy Workshop was still far from mature; it didn't even have a true engineering director, supply chain manager, or quality head.

But at least from this moment on, it was no longer just an underground laboratory where Jiang Lin fought alone.

The internal permissions of the Low Entropy Workshop were divided into four levels.

L0, public information and promotional materials.

L1, physical numbering of prototypes, external multi-angle videos, structural damage records, and test site environmental parameters.

L2, desensitized operation logs, timecode synchronization streams, and abnormal status tags.

L3, core control chain, underlying logic of state machine triggers, parameter generator code, and main source code repository.

When newcomers entered, the highest level they could access was L1.

Trial workers like Chen Yan, who were responsible for underlying test joint debugging, could temporarily access and process L2-level desensitized logs under Jiang Lin's single-authorization.

As for L3, it was visible only to Jiang Lin himself.

After signing the confidentiality agreement, position boundary confirmation form, and data permission confirmation form, Xu Man's team officially entered the engineering assistant trial pool.

After the first batch of people officially entered, the spacious old factory building of the Low Entropy Workshop finally took on the rough prototype of a modern company.

The office area on the second floor still carried a sense of haste from incomplete decoration.

The workstations were not fully installed, the network cables were still exposed outside the cable trays, and the toolboxes had just finished being pasted with yellow and black alternating asset numbers.

The black rubber mats in the test area still carried a pungent burr smell after cutting.

The empty warehouse on the first floor was piled with crushed stones, foam boards, black rubber mats used to simulate terrain, and several heavy engineering transport boxes that had not yet been archived.

But the chaos was being pressed little by little into tables and systems.

Wearing headphones, Chen Yan began to organize the timecode synchronization template of external camera videos and system internal logs frame by frame.

Xu Man's team was assigned to count supplies, checking spare foot ends, connectors, carbon fiber protective shells, and failed prototype boxes in front of the shelves, entering every single item into the ledger established by Chen Zhi.

For the first time in the old factory building, there appeared the sound of a group of people simultaneously pushing a technical project into the company's engineering system.

But once the company started running, another problem originally covered up by the technical halo immediately became bony and concrete.

Money.

Paying wages required money, renting the factory building required money, and buying high-precision torque wrenches required money.

Modifying high-power circuits, laying anti-static floors, purchasing spare parts of special materials, printing weather-resistant labels, purchasing industrial control terminals, renting transport vehicles with shock-absorbing airbags, paying external legal consultation fees...

All of it required money.

At the afternoon briefing, after finishing the onboarding documents, Liang Zhixia casually cast a rough first-month expense sheet onto the screen in front of Jiang Lin.

It was densely listed: formal employee salaries, engineering trial subsidies, internship allowances, and remote collaboration project fees.

Social security, housing provident funds, and basic HR compliance costs.

Old factory rent and industrial utility bills.

First batch of assembly tools, consumables, spare parts inventory, and site safety renovation engineering funds.

Just maintaining this basic operation for a month would conservatively cost over three hundred thousand.

This was still far from the true cost of a mature robotics company.

True mechanical engineers, senior motion control engineers, low-level embedded engineers, supply chain managers, quality heads, and outfield test heads were not yet officially in place.

If multiple verification prototypes were to be tested in parallel in the future, with long-term rentals of special external sites, outsourced CNC machining, and small-batch mold-opening trial production, money would flow out of the account crazily like water from an opened sluice gate.

When Liang Zhixia showed this table to Jiang Lin, her tone was very calm, without deliberately exaggerating the survival anxiety of a start-up company.

She was simply fulfilling her professional reminder obligation as an operations head.

"Boss Jiang, among these people now, formal employee salaries can be paid according to normal standards. Engineering trials and summer internships can go through project subsidies and internship allowances. But no matter how tight we pinch, the cash flow in the company accounts cannot be too thin."

She paused and emphasized:

"The Low Entropy Workshop is not a software company that can run with a computer plus a few servers."

"Once a robotics company starts touching real Real World tests, the money-burning speed of hardware wear and iteration will be astonishingly high."

Jiang Lin looked at the red numbers on the screen without any surprise in his expression.

Writing math papers would not consume expensive aviation aluminum, and doing algorithm deductions in simulation environments did not require buying torque wrenches costing over a thousand yuan each.

But every step G-01 took forward into the Real World meant a batch of new consumable wear and tear, a batch of new spare part purchases, a batch of new failed prototypes warehousing, and concrete engineering service fees one after another.

He indeed held cash flow in his hands right now.

After Jiang Lin added some of his own funds, the account scale was magnified to nearly the million level.

The personal quantitative account ran automatically according to trading sessions and night sessions, with cloud risk control monitored 7 × 24 hours.

A small computing power pool composed of four RTX 3090s was responsible for backtesting, parameter matrix screening, and MPS tool chain iteration.

During those few days in early July, market fluctuations were violent, and strategy net asset value growth was extremely fast.

Net daily profit could exceed twenty thousand, and extreme volatility days even approached thirty thousand.

Thirty thousand a day was a very glamorous number for an eighteen-year-old prospective college student.

But for a hard tech company that had just gathered a team, rented a venue, bought equipment, and prepared to carry out high-intensity hardware testing, it appeared a bit like a drop in the bucket.

It could allow Jiang Lin personally to quickly accumulate early capital.

It could subsidize the chaotic expenses of the first few weeks.

It could allow the Low Entropy Workshop not to bow down and yield a large proportion of shares to those harsh capitals for a few million seed round when just starting out.

But it could not become the long-term main operating cash flow of an entity company.

For an ambitious robotics company, if all employee salaries for next month and processing fees for the next-generation prototype were gambled on uncontrollable short-term financial trading returns, that was not prudent management.

That was tying a fragile engineering system to the turbulent peak of financial fluctuations.

Jiang Lin would not allow his hardware project to bear such an absurd systemic risk.

Therefore, when the Low Entropy Workshop was established and registered, an official investment intention handed over by the Jiangcheng University Entrepreneurship Office was finally accepted by him.

It was not free shares directly demanded by Jiangcheng University for technology equity participation.

Instead, it entered through the school-affiliated technological achievement transformation fund in the form of a fully market-oriented minority co-investment.

The amount was not large.

One million RMB.

Holding one percent of the shares.

The additional conditions were exceptionally clear: no board seats, no veto power, and no interference in any daily operations and personnel arrangements of the Low Entropy Workshop.

This was not a temporary spur-of-the-moment sum of money.

The Jiangcheng University Entrepreneurship Office had previously completed the investment committee pre-audit through the school-affiliated technological achievement transformation fund, and the investment basis was not written as technology valuation, but as an early financial co-investment into Jiang Lin's personal scientific research reputation, G-01's public verification results, and the future engineering capabilities of the Low Entropy Workshop.

Under Lin Guanlan's advice, Jiang Lin did not directly value the core control chain of G-01 as equity.

All underlying state machines, parameter generators, foot contact models, and trunk source code were first confirmed for original ownership by Jiang Lin personally, and then authorized to the Low Entropy Workshop in the form of an exclusive commercial license.

The company owned commercial operation rights, prototype manufacturing rights, and external testing rights, but the final disposal right of the underlying technology remained locked in Jiang Lin's hands.

What the Jiangcheng University fund entered was the financial equity of the corporate entity of the Low Entropy Workshop, rather than the core technology of G-01 itself.

Thus, the early equity structure of the Low Entropy Workshop was very neatly settled.

Jiang Lin held absolute personal control.

The school-affiliated technological achievement transformation fund symbolically held one percent.

The remaining option pool was not rushed for distribution yet, just reserved in the company articles of association as entrusted holding.

Jiang Lin was waiting—waiting for those people who could truly trudge through the mire with the Low Entropy Workshop and go through the first round of real engineering pressure to appear before sitting down to talk about distribution.

The first batch of usable hard cash in the company accounts was also clearly divided into several large chunks.

That one million from Jiangcheng University, as part of the company's startup cornerstone, was specifically used to cover site rent, basic hardware equipment, legal outsourcing, financial bookkeeping, and the fixed costs of the first batch of personnel.

The cash accumulated by Jiang Lin personally through outsourcing projects and quantitative trading previously was deposited into the company's basic account in batches in the form of capital and shareholder interest-free loans, specifically used to fill the hard wear and tear, consumable procurement, and temporary outsourced processing fees brought by high-intensity prototype testing.

As for the subsequent returns of the quantitative program, they continued to remain in the personal account to accumulate like a snowball, not directly exposed to the company's daily consumption.

It was also on this afternoon that a new email automatically marked as high priority by the system suddenly popped up in the publicly accessible business mailbox of the Low Entropy Workshop.

The sender's address was not a common personal email, but came from an enterprise-certified domain name.

[Hengtai-mining-robotics.com]

The email title was brief and direct, exuding the operational style of a major corporation.

[Temporary Scheme for G-01 Closed Pressure Test]

Sender: Hengtai Mining Intelligent Equipment Co., Ltd., Technical Department.

The other party first used an official tone to express concern over the public videos of the Low Entropy Workshop that had recently sparked heated discussions on the internet, and then changed tone to show off their muscle.

Hengtai possessed a decade of real engineering accumulation and data barriers hard for peers to match in the fields of harsh environment inspection in underground mines, unmanned deep exploration after mine collapses, and complex gravel slope mobile platforms.

The email threw out a bait at the end.

If the Low Entropy Workshop had the intention to verify its own technology, Hengtai was willing to mobilize internal precious resources within forty-eight hours to provide G-01 with a rare closed-environment pressure test opportunity.

The test location was set at Hengtai's heavily guarded joint testing ground for mining equipment located in the remote suburbs of Jiangcheng.

Test simulation scenario: Underground No. 3 Mine Gravel Collapse Area.

The test items were detailed enough to make one's scalp tingle.

Including a thirty-seven-degree damp cinder steep slope, broken sleeper area, gravel floating slope, low-illuminance lateral narrow passage, foggy and slippery environment, and simulated inspection target point located at the top of the slope.

Three documents were heavily attached to the email.

[G-01_Closed_Pressure_Test_Temporary_Scheme.pdf]

[Site_Safety_and_Disclaimer_Notice.pdf]

[Technical_Cooperation_Framework_Agreement_Draft.docx]

Qiu Yue, who was processing information in the background, immediately became alert upon seeing the words "Technical Cooperation Framework Agreement".

Following the workflow formulated by Liang Zhixia, Qiu Yue first completed virus scanning, macro disabling, hash archiving, and read-only preview on the isolated machine, and only after confirming there were no embedded scripts did she synchronize the text content into the internal meeting system.

Ten minutes later, Lin Guanlan, having received the notification, quickly logged into the internal meeting system remotely.

Zhou Minglan also came online simultaneously to stand by.

At this point, the external legal team of the Low Entropy Workshop officially entered the workflow.

Lin Guanlan appeared on the screen and directly clicked open that trap-filled "Technical Cooperation Framework Agreement Draft".

Twenty-seven pages.

Her gaze was sharp, and she flipped through the pages very quickly.

Page one, conventional main body information.

Page two, standard confidentiality clauses.

Page three, test schedule and logistical support.

When she flipped to page seven, the metal pen in her hand stopped at Article 5.3.

Zhou Minglan reacted extremely quickly, immediately capturing that segment of text and enlarging it to the center of the screen.

[All algorithm optimization iterations, model parameter corrections, underlying control strategy adjustments, test method innovations, any derivative results, and subsequent commercial adaptation plans generated by Party B based on the test site, original point cloud environmental data, mine-unique samples, actual working condition parameters, Party A personnel guidance experience, Party A historical accident record database, on-site non-standard layouts, and all other cooperative resources provided by Party A shall be deemed as joint research and development results of both parties. Without the written consent of Party A, Party B shall not independently apply for intellectual property rights, publish public academic or technical reports, use for commercial testing in third-party similar competitive scenarios, or provide any similar inspection services to the outside world.]

Staring at the screen, Liang Zhixia's expression suddenly darkened.

This was by no means an ordinary test agreement providing a venue.

The other party wanted to use the right to use a physical site of a mere few hundred square meters to directly lock down all future commercial evolution paths of the Low Entropy Workshop facing mines and complex terrain scenarios.

This was equivalent to Hengtai lending a dirt slope, while the Low Entropy Workshop had to hand over the technological dividends of the next ten years.

Lin Guanlan did not flare up immediately; she let out a sneer and continued flipping forward.

The subsequent clauses were simply appalling.

All original control logs, multi-sensor fusion data, internal fault records, and technical rectification reports generated during the test period must be unconditionally and completely submitted to Party A for archiving.

Party A could grandiosely request Party B to provide control strategy code descriptions, key state machine parameter definitions, and even the most core module interface documents at any time based on safety review needs.

What was even more overbearing was that any test videos, data screenshots, and test results must be double-audited and confirmed by Party A's public relations department and technical department before external disclosure.

And once any equipment damage or derivative accidents occurred within the site, the responsibility would be entirely borne unilaterally by Party B.

Lin Guanlan stopped the document heavily right there.

"Typical, arrogant, habitual Party A clauses."

The voice coming through the screen was as cold as ice.

"They played a thoroughly despicable word game. They stuffed the venue, samples, personnel experience, historical records, and even the arrangement of a few stones into the broad big pocket of cooperative resources. Then, using this pocket as a fulcrum, they reverse-overrode and forcibly annexed all the algorithm optimizations and control strategy adjustments you generated during the testing."

Liang Zhixia furrowed her brow and confirmed, "In other words, as long as G-01 runs on that artificial slope of theirs once, after that, whenever we make software upgrades aimed at mining scenarios ourselves, they can take this contract and claim they own the intellectual property rights?"

"Not just a share, they can even claim dominant control."

Lin Guanlan leaned back in her chair with a sharp gaze.

"The greatest value of such rogue clauses in practical operation is often not necessarily winning a lawsuit in court, but manufacturing protracted commercial disputes. For a fledgling startup like yours, a dispute involving the ownership of core IP is enough to scare away all investors, creating fatal blockages in financing, delivery, procurement, and public opinion."

She turned her head and looked at Jiang Lin through the camera.

"My formal legal advice is to cut off all sources of data contamination: do not receive any raw point cloud data provided by them, do not receive the so-called historical accident records of Underground Shaft No. 3, and do not receive any working condition parameter packages. Accept only a pure physical testing ground, and never allow a single byte of their reproducible digital assets to enter the internal system of the Low Entropy Workshop."

Jiang Lin looked at the bullying clauses on the screen, his expression devoid of anger as he merely nodded.

"Rewrite everything."

Lin Guanlan confirmed, "Focusing on Article 5.3?"

"Not just Article 5.3, the data archiving clauses, code review clauses, and publicity restriction clauses—overturn and rewrite them all."

Jiang Lin's fingers tapped gently on the desktop.

"The Low Entropy Workshop is not an outsourcing software company sustained by selling labor. We do not do customized development, we do not sell the underlying control chain, we do not sell parameter generators, and even less will we provide any explanations regarding control strategies."

"Hengtai can only provide a closed physical testing ground, and we only provide a demonstration of the platform's maneuverability. That is what is called reciprocity."

"If the test passes, what they obtain is merely the right of first negotiation for the next round of business cooperation."

"If the test fails, and G-01 crashes on their venue, all hardware losses and failure risks will be borne by the Low Entropy Workshop itself. We do not need them to take responsibility, nor will we allow them to intervene."

Liang Zhixia reminded him with some concern, "But Boss Jiang, they mentioned in the email that they can provide high-precision point clouds of the complex terrain of Underground Shaft No. 3, as well as a detailed database of gravel particle size distribution. From a purely engineering perspective, this real data is indeed very valuable for us to optimize the model, and it can save a lot of preliminary groping time."

"No need."

Jiang Lin refused without the slightest hesitation.

"If you accept their data, our system will no longer be clean. To guard against legal risks, we would have to expend a massive amount of energy doing physical data isolation, ownership explanations, hash sealing, and even irrecoverable destruction after testing. What is even more troublesome is that once our machine performs well in similar terrains in the future, we would also fall into the quagmire of how to prove that subsequent optimizations were not generated based on the data they provided. This is too troublesome; the losses outweigh the gains."

Jiang Lin looked at the G-01 prototype before him, his gaze resolute.

"The system we developed does not need to rely on memorizing question banks in advance to cope with an exam. Reply to them: on the day of the test, do not send any data, and do not need any 3D mapping; just set up that slope directly."

Liang Zhixia immediately opened the draft box of the company's email, her hands hovering over the keyboard.

Lin Guanlan was responsible for controlling a tough but impregnable legal stance.

Zhou Minglan quickly supplemented and defined the boundary vocabulary of technical assets online.

Jiang Lin finally confirmed the technical bottom line.

Fifteen minutes later, a rigorously worded, neither servile nor overbearing final reply was officially sent from the company email of the Low Entropy Workshop.

Liang Zhixia looked at the sent backup in the outbox and couldn't help rubbing her tight glabella.

"Boss Jiang, this reply is too tough. They are used to acting like lords and masters, and might feel that a startup like us without even a mass-production workshop is far too ignorant of the immensity of heaven and earth. What if they flip out directly and cancel the test?"

"Then we won't test."

Jiang Lin was staring at a freshly completed motor torque overload test data on the screen without even raising his head.

Liang Zhixia was stunned, unable to respond for a long while.

Jiang Lin closed his laptop and raised his head to look at her.

"Zhixia, mines are not the only landing scenario for embodied intelligence."

"If we don't go to Hengtai's high-specification testing ground, we can completely find a wasteland ourselves. A 37-degree gravel slope, hiring an excavator to dig and pile simultaneously, can be built in two days. An abandoned quarry can also be found in the remote suburbs around Jiangcheng, and finding an unfinished building site to slightly modify it can still test out the data we want."

"I admit that the real mine operation data in the hands of major factories is indeed valuable and can save us some detours. But it is definitely not equal to the lifeline of the Low Entropy Workshop, and even less is it worth us trading our underlying architecture for it."

Liang Zhixia stood in place, suddenly realizing that she had been led astray once again by the compromise inertia of the weak cultivated over the past few years of struggling in the real business world.

In the past, she had seen too many struggling early-stage hardware projects in various incubators.

In order to get a real-scenario testing opportunity, to acquire a batch of industry operation data even if outdated, and to allow a leading major factory to hang a logo on their business plan as a nominal endorsement, those startup teams were willing to cede extremely exaggerated rights and interests in contracts, and even spare no hesitation in handing over part of the core code they had painstakingly worked out on a silver platter.

Over time, she also subconsciously defaulted that major factories controlling scenarios and data resources naturally possessed a dominant position of life and death over others.

But Jiang Lin was not one of those ordinary entrepreneurs driven to a dead end by financial pressure.

Nor was the Low Entropy Workshop some exquisite toy cobbled together by ordinary university research groups specifically to defraud national scientific research funds and blind investors.

They truly craved real extreme testing scenarios.

But they were definitely not in such dire straits that they had to hand over the underlying control chain that secured their livelihood as a pledge of loyalty.

Hengtai wanted to use its resource advantage to forcibly look at their trump cards.

But the attitude of the Low Entropy Workshop was very clear.

If terms couldn't be negotiated, we could flip the poker table over directly.

At 5:27 PM.

Hengtai replied.

Two letters came all at once.

The first came from the business department.

The phrasing was still superficially polite, but clearly carried hesitation, dissatisfaction, and pressure.

They stated that the Low Entropy Workshop's understanding of open cooperation was too conservative and narrow, and hoped that both parties could, in a grand attitude of mutual benefit and win-win, conduct further, more constructive communication regarding technical achievement sharing, underlying test data archiving, and subsequent in-depth commercial cooperation.

This stalling email full of diplomatic rhetoric was entirely within Lin Guanlan's expectations.

The real variable was in the second reply that popped up three minutes later.

The sender was not the bureaucratic business department.

But rather Professor Xu Mingchuan, deputy chief engineer of the technical department of Hengtai Mining Intelligent Equipment Co., Ltd.

The body of the email did not have those hollow and pretentious conventional phrases.

[The technical cooperation framework agreement draft from the business department will not serve as a prerequisite for this test for the time being. Tomorrow at 9:00 AM, the Hengtai Jiangcheng Suburban Joint Testing Ground will be cleared. Only the safety test confirmation sheet and data boundary memorandum will be signed on-site.]

[Tomorrow at 9:00 AM, the Hengtai Jiangcheng Suburban Joint Testing Ground will be cleared.]

[Open the 37-degree gravel slope for single-machine closed pressure testing.]

[Our side will not provide any raw point clouds.]

[Our side will not provide any historical accident records.]

[There is no rehearsal on-site, no adaptation time will be given, go straight up the slope for a blind test.]

The last line of words was spaced out alone, resembling a gauntlet thrown down.

[I want to see with my own eyes whether this G-01 is really the kind of thing you bragged about in your video.]

After reading this email filled with gunpowder smoke, Lin Guanlan looked up at Jiang Lin, the corners of her mouth rarely hooking up into an arc.

"The opposing side has changed generals. This Vice Chief Engineer Xu, who comes from a technical background, is much more pragmatic than those suited men in their business department who only know how to play word games."

The next morning.

The sky of Jiangcheng was somewhat gray and murky, and the air exuded sultry heat.

There were not many people following the car to the Hengtai testing ground.

Among the first batch of fifteen trial-position personnel just signed by the Low Entropy Workshop, the vast majority were left behind at the base camp of the old factory building.

That was likewise a tough battle.

They needed to set up the sample receiving area in advance, plan log archiving forms, debug video slicing templates, prepare hardware damage record sheets, and build a post-test review meeting environment.

The ones truly brought to the frontline site were only a forward team streamlined to the absolute extreme.

Liang Zhixia was responsible for on-site process control and all external communication and coordination.

Chen Zhi was responsible for signing for paper documents, checking hardware transportation manifests, and real-time archiving of on-site materials.

Lin Guanlan, acting as the external brain, closely monitored the legal boundaries throughout the entire process to prevent the other party from trapping them in talk.

Zhou Minglan was responsible for the real-time recording of technical asset boundaries online.

Chen Yan, carrying the equipment, was responsible for setting up external video recording and ensuring strict timecode synchronization with G-01's operation logs.

Xu Man brought two of the most nimble-handed team members and several large boxes of tools, responsible for replacing backup toe-ends at any time, recording structural component damage, and physically sealing completely scrapped samples when necessary.

Jiang Lin himself was only responsible for that most core thing.

Letting G-01 walk step by step across that 37-degree gravel slope.

Before departure, Liang Zhixia conducted an on-site discipline briefing according to procedure.

The content was actually not complicated.

All accompanying personnel were prohibited from entering the slope test area, touching the G-01 core control terminal, taking unauthorized footage privately, exchanging documents with Hengtai personnel, and making oral commitments regarding any technical cooperation matters on-site.

Jiang Lin did not want the Low Entropy Workshop to turn into the kind of place in the future where as soon as a prototype ran successfully, everyone crowded around to take pictures, confusing external public relations video material with serious engineering records.

At 8:40.

The rented car drove out of the urban area of Jiangcheng and finally arrived at the joint testing ground for mining equipment located in the remote suburbs of Jiangcheng by Hengtai.

One side of the testing ground closely hugged the old site of a huge abandoned and hollowed-out quarry, the exposed rock layers resembling a ferocious wound torn open on the earth, carrying a desolate industrial oppressive feeling.

On the other side was a continuous stretch of grayish-white low factory buildings, with towering tower cranes standing quietly.

G-01 was secured inside a black aviation transport box.

On the outside of the box body, temporary yellow-background black-letter labels printed overnight by the Low Entropy Workshop last night were conspicuously pasted.

[G-01 C | Non-Production Environment Core Testing Prototype]

[Warning: Human-machine shared space under energized state is prohibited]

[Warning: Unauthorized disassembly of the cabin cover is prohibited]

[Warning: Connection of any external data cables is prohibited]

[Supreme Principle: Physical emergency stop has higher priority than anything else]

As soon as she got out of the car, Xu Man quickly entered the working state with two team members.

They popped open the metal latches of the spare parts box, quickly confirming the backup white POM toe-ends inside, rolls of red heat-shrink tubing, thick industrial cable ties, calibrated torque wrenches, and a stack of blank numbered labels inside.

Chen Yan quickly set up high-frame-rate external video recording equipment in the designated area, aiming the lens at the public timecode sign that had long been erected at the edge of the venue, and began recording the synchronization reference signal.

Inside the isolation belt of the testing ground, more than a dozen people were already standing.

In addition to technicians wearing work clothes, there were also several cameras debugging their positions.

At the head was a middle-aged man around fifty years old.

He had a very short buzz cut, and long-term wind and sun exposure made his skin appear dark and rough, with lines at the corners of his eyes as if stained by coal ash.

He wore a Hengtai dark blue frontline work uniform that was washed somewhat whitish with worn collars, and a yellow safety helmet was casually tucked under his arm.

Seeing Jiang Lin and his party approaching, he strode forward and extended a hand covered in calluses and with thick knuckles.

"Professor Xu Mingchuan."

"Jiang Lin."

The two hands shook briefly and forcefully.

Professor Xu Mingchuan withdrew his hand, his sharp gaze sweeping over that black aviation transport box.

"Mr. Jiang, let's get the ugly talk out of the way first. Those videos you posted online of crossing wooden board obstacles in the laboratory—I watched them, and they were very wonderful. But to be honest, in front of a real underground cave-in area, that can only be considered child's play."

Jiang Lin calmly nodded in recognition.

Professor Xu Mingchuan turned around, pointing to the huge test slope in the distance surrounded by red and white warning lines.

"The pile of gravel after an underground cave-in is not those regular geometric shapes in your laboratory. Once the cinder absorbs water, it will collapse like a mire; broken cross ties hide steel nails that will jam mechanical joints; and metal corners will cut your exposed wire harnesses like blades. On this slope, the surface is definitely not a continuous smooth curved surface, but a pile of contact points that will deform, slip, and collapse due to stress at any time."

Jiang Lin followed his fingers to look into the distance.

That was a huge artificially harsh terrain, a monster piled up from industrial waste.

The overall inclination angle was close to 37 degrees.

The bottom layer was coarse stone, and the surface was mixed with wet cinder, wood chips, broken sleepers, fist-sized floating stones, and a few sections of rusted angle steel.

The left side of the slope was deliberately narrowed to form an oblique narrow channel, with the width at its narrowest point visually estimated to be less than forty centimeters, posing extremely high demands on the fuselage size.

The right side looked gentle, but was actually a locally loose and collapsed area deliberately arranged.

Viewed from a distance, it looked very flat, but in reality, it was full of hollow, loose soil inside. As long as sufficient pressure was applied to the toe-end, it would sink deep instantly.

At the highest point of the slope top, an eye-catching orange target box was placed, which was the endpoint of the simulated inspection mission.

Several low-illumination industrial lights shone from the side rear, the light being scattered by the industrial spray equipment around the venue, and a grayish-white humid mist lingered above the entire slope.

It was very dirty, very messy, and filled with unpredictable destructive power.

Jiang Lin took a look, then turned his head to say to Professor Xu Mingchuan, "That is why I am standing here today."

Professor Xu Mingchuan was slightly startled, and for the first time, he seriously sized up this overly young person in charge with the gaze of scrutinizing a peer.

At this moment, a business person in charge wearing a crisp white shirt and shiny polished leather shoes came over with a full smile, trying to ease the atmosphere.

"Mr. Jiang, seeing is believing. Actually, regarding that matter of the contract yesterday, our internal team discussed it later afterwards, and the clauses can still..."

Lin Guanlan's gaze turned cold, and she stepped forward by half a step, blocking precisely in front and to the side of Jiang Lin.

"The invitation issued by your esteemed side today is a closed pressure test. All negotiations involving business terms will by no means be discussed at the test site."

The professional fake smile on the business person in charge's face instantly froze, and he rubbed his fingers somewhat awkwardly.

Professor Xu Mingchuan impatiently glanced at that business person: "Once at the venue, talk only about technology. Test the machine first, everything else is bullshit."

Before officially opening the box, both parties confirmed the physical boundaries of the test once more according to the red lines set by last night's email.

Lin Guanlan pushed the two-page 《Single Closed Pressure Test Confirmation Form》 to the center of the desktop.

This test does not constitute a joint research and development project; Party A shall not claim co-ownership of Party B's algorithms, control strategies, parameter generators, testing methods, or subsequent commercialization adaptation plans; operational logs independently collected by Party B shall belong to Party B; Party A shall only obtain desensitized passing conclusions and external observable exception summaries.

Only after both parties sign and seal the document is G-01 allowed to be unpacked.

In addition, Lin Guanlan requested that Hengtai's cameras only film the slope panorama and test results, and must not aim at Jiang Lin's control terminal, fuselage interfaces, hatch interior, foot-end sensor wiring, or on-site repair processes.

As for Low Entropy Workshop's own external video, it would be archived throughout the entire process as the original footage solely usable for subsequent technical reviews.

After thus determining the boundaries acceptable to both parties, the slope test area was cleared.

All onlookers retreated into the observation area.

G-01 was carefully lifted out of the black shock-proof foam by Xu Man's team and steadily placed on that mud-stained concrete slab at the starting point.

When G-01 was truly exposed to the daylight, several Hengtai operation control engineers at the scene who originally held a wait-and-see and spectating mindset visibly froze for a moment.

In the public videos, they had already seen this small white monster.

But when it was truly placed before their eyes, the feeling it gave people was completely different.

Its body was covered with unmasked, rough engineering traces.

On its six originally pristine white POM foot-ends, they were filled with scratches and dents left by deep friction.

The originally exposed wire harnesses were now wrapped in thick black flame-retardant fabric sleeves, secured with industrial cable ties every few centimeters, and at several key moving positions prone to bending and wear, red heat-shrink tubing was also wrapped as a danger mark.

On the sides of the fuselage that were previously fairly smooth and clean, several pieces of industrial tape handwritten with internal component numbers were pasted crisscross.

[ IMU - B2 ]

[ FOOT - LF-03 ]

[ FOOT - RM-02 ]

[ MOTOR - RR-05 ]

[ E - STOP BUS ]

These details lacked the slightest bit of exquisiteness from sci-fi movies, instead making it look like a doomsday engineering prototype that had been repeatedly disassembled and overhauled in ruins, repeatedly smashed from heights, and forcibly pieced back together from the mud of failure by the obsession of engineers.

Its entire body exuded a resilience capable of withstanding heavy hammer blows.

The first round was the standard reproduction slope.

That is to say, the obstacles on the slope maintained the original layout plan from when the email was sent.

No temporary water injection to increase slickness.

No newly added floating stones hidden under the soil.

No temporary changes to the positions of major obstacles.

G-01's six legs stood steadily at the starting point.

Jiang Lin retreated to the observation area behind the warning line, holding the heavy control terminal with both hands.

On that screen, there was no fancy three-dimensional panoramic rendering interface made to please investors, and no cool progress bars.

There were only lines of constantly jumping data fields representing the underlying status of the machine.

[ contact _ confidence ] (Contact Confidence)

[ phase _ window ] (Gait Phase Window)

[ yaw _ rate _ d ] (Yaw Rate Derivative)

[ motor _ current _ slope ] (Motor Current Slope)

[ safety _ state ] (Safety State Machine)

[ terrain _ rebuild _ pending ] (Terrain Rebuild Pending)

"Start."

Jiang Lin remotely pressed the autonomous test start command.

The motor buzzing sound rang out, and G-01 started.

It took its first step forward.

The speed was very slow.

So slow that several Hengtai engineers in the observation area showed subtle expressions bordering on contempt.

There was no cheetah-like running.

No showy jumping.

No pretty gait like that of bionic animals.

Facing the unknown on this harsh thirty-seven-degree gravel slope, every single action of its was like a blind person probing with a white cane at the edge of a cliff.

The foot-end slowly descended.

Pausing for a fraction of a second, the servo motor applied micro-pressure.

The underlying algorithm frantically calculated the feedback torque, confirming that the contact surface would not slip.

Only when the contact confidence met the standard did it dare to slowly transfer its center of gravity.

When climbing to the second section of the slope, a crisis emerged.

G-01's right front foot happened to step on the edge of a floating stone half-buried in the soil.

As the center of gravity pressed down, that floating stone could not bear the weight and suddenly rolled downward gently by a few centimeters.

This minute physical displacement instantly caused G-01's fuselage to tilt and deflect to the right by about four degrees.

On the terminal screen in Jiang Lin's hand, the [ yaw _ rate _ d ] field instantly spiked, and a dazzling red warning flashed.

A sharp-eyed Hengtai engineer couldn't help whispering: "Oh no, it's starting to yaw, it's going to flip over."

But G-01's control system did not, like conventional industrial robots, rely on increasing output power to forcefully resist this deflection force.

It made a response within milliseconds.

Actively cutting off the propulsion command for that leg, it instantly reduced speed.

The originally suspended left middle foot slammed onto the ground ahead of schedule, and the left rear foot subsequently adjusted its angle to press downward firmly.

The structural advantages of the hexapod platform were brought into play; through rapid adjustment, the system's support gained a crucial redundant point.

The fuselage's deflection trend was forcibly halted and did not continue to worsen or expand.

Subsequently, the system recalculated the gravity distribution and once again cut into a safe support phase.

It stabilized its posture, bypassed the loose floating stone, and continued to climb upward.

Five minutes and thirty-one seconds.

G-01 safely reached the top of the slope and steadily stopped thirty centimeters in front of the orange target box.

The first round of standard testing passed.

Professor Xu Mingchuan lowered his head to stare at the industrial tablet in his hand, repeatedly dragging the playback recording from just now, and suddenly raised his head to ask loudly: "Mr. Jiang, when it was passing through the middle section just now, why didn't it take the right path, which was obviously shorter and had fewer obstacles?"

Jiang Lin shifted his gaze from the terminal to the slope and answered very crisply: "Because its system determined that the surface contact state on the right is unstable."

"It doesn't have eyes, how did it figure that out?" Professor Xu Mingchuan pursued the question.

"Because it stepped it out." Jiang Lin said.

Professor Xu Mingchuan's gaze narrowed.

Jiang Lin looked at the slope as if stating a law of Physics.

"In unstructured and highly complex terrain, LiDAR and cameras can only provide macroscopic reference assistance. The light and shadow in a mine will lie, the color of the soil will lie, and the reflection of puddles will lie even more."

"Whether a section of slope can withstand the weight of a machine weighing tens of kilograms cannot be relied upon by looking. It must be confirmed step by step through the real mechanical contact chain transmitted back by the foot-end sensors."

He turned his head and looked at Professor Xu Mingchuan.

"The final line of defense determining whether it can continue walking in the collapse zone is never the eyes on top of its head, but the soles of its feet."

Upon hearing these words, those Hengtai operation control engineers behind Professor Xu Mingchuan who previously wore contemptuous expressions reined in their looks and exchanged somewhat shocked glances with each other.

For the second round, Professor Xu Mingchuan grabbed the walkie-talkie and waved toward the other end of the site.

Two site workers wearing tall rubber rainboots carried two heavy plastic buckets and laboriously climbed up the slope.

They unceremoniously splashed the turbid muddy water in the buckets onto the mandatory path in the middle section of G-01.

The mixed layer of wet coal cinder, fly ash, and clay quickly turned into a sticky black mud puddle with zero support after absorbing water.

Seeing this scene, Liang Zhixia immediately took a step forward and spoke in a cold voice: "Chief Engineer Xu, splashing water on-site has already severely exceeded the test plan established in yesterday's email."

"General Manager Liang, isn't it just a bit of mud? Your machine is so powerful, it will definitely be fine." Professor Xu Mingchuan brushed it off vaguely.

The business head who had just suffered a setback seized the opportunity and immediately ran out to smooth things over: "Director Liang, don't get excited; we are also doing this to simulate the most realistic working conditions. Of course, if Low Entropy Workshop feels unconfident and is afraid of breaking the machine, we can take a step back..."

"Okay."

Jiang Lin spoke, interrupting the business person's hypocritical mediation.

Liang Zhixia turned her head and looked at Jiang Lin with some worry.

Because this terrain looked unstable even for a person to walk on.

Jiang Lin ignored the business person and directly said to Zhou Minglan beside her: "Minglan, record this. Confirm it as a temporary intensification of extreme working conditions for the second round. This round's performance will not be counted toward the baseline pass rate evaluation of the original plan, but only as an extreme sample to explore the system's compressive boundaries."

Zhou Minglan immediately tapped the keyboard online, generating a legally binding on-site memorandum.

[09:52, Party A arbitrarily and temporarily added wet coal cinder mud pits. Party B confirms acceptance of this challenge, but explicitly declares that this round's results will not be counted toward the original plan's pass rate assessment, serving only as an extreme pressure boundary test sample.]

Thus, the mud-caked G-01 was moved back to the starting point.

It started again.

This time, it ran into big trouble.

When climbing to one-third of the slope, its right front foot fell into that newly created mud puddle.

The mud surface collapsed instantly.

When the algorithm command requested to lift the leg, that foot did not pull out immediately; instead, it was sucked by the viscous slush and was half a beat slow.

On the terminal screen, the feedback torque contact curve instantly showed an abnormal double-peak waveform.

A Hengtai engineer with rich mining experience blurted out: "Oh no, the foot is trapped."

Because the right front foot was snared, G-01's upward momentum caused the fuselage to begin undergoing a dangerous slight twist.

The load current slope of the main drive motor skyrocketed in a straight line, severely deviating from the safe working window.

If this were an industrial machine that only knew how to rigidly execute forward commands according to a preset gait trajectory, the most common reaction at this time would be to desperately continue lifting the leg and forcefully increasing the motor torque in an attempt to pull the leg out.

This would be equivalent to deducing a minor obstruction problem into a major disaster leading to total loss of control.

The result usually is that the foot-end slips completely, the fuselage loses balance, flips sideways, and smashes into the ground.

Subsequently, the safety rope pulls tight in an emergency, and the test is declared a failure.

But G-01 did not do this.

It unexpectedly stopped.

Not because of a crash or freeze caused by system overload.

But a brief, active silence after massive calculations.

0.6 seconds.

On Jiang Lin's terminal, the [ safety _ state ] status indicator light instantly jumped from green [ NORMAL ] to red, cutting into [ REPHASE ] (re-phasing).

The command was issued.

The suspended left middle foot quickly released and landed, the right middle foot forcefully pressed downward to compact, and the originally loose support phase on the rear side tightened instantly.

Through posture transfer, more than half of the fuselage load borne by the leg stuck in the mud at the front was cleverly unloaded.

Immediately following, the trapped right front foot did not choose to pull out violently and forcibly; instead, it first made a minimum-angle unloading action in the mud to break the negative pressure vacuum of the mud, and then the motor drove the joints to perform an extremely high-frequency lateral micro-swing.

Black mud splashed everywhere.

Accompanied by a teeth-gritting friction sound, that scarred white foot-end miraculously pulled itself out from the coal cinder.

The entire movement was just like an old miner trudging through muddy ground who, after discovering his shoe was trapped, carefully shook his ankle to pull the shoe out.

Not only did it not flip over, but it instead utilized the reaction force of this micro-swing to re-enter the forward support phase, continuing to climb upward tenaciously.

The second round took eight minutes and forty-four seconds.

Passed again.

This time, the business person finally shut up.

As for those professional Hengtai engineers who originally held a spectating mindset, they had all squeezed to the very front row at this moment, staring fixedly at G-01's mud-stained foot-ends.

Professor Xu Mingchuan did not say a word; he replayed the action of trapping the foot, unloading force, micro-swinging, and pulling out on the tablet—which lasted only a few seconds—and watched it back and forth three times.

When the third time ended, he raised his head, his eyes revealing suppressed enthusiasm.

"Mr. Jiang, what if I now request to clear the site and not let you watch the subsequent slope layout process?"

The first two rounds of testing examined anti-disturbance and extrication actions.

What Professor Xu Mingchuan truly wanted to see was not whether it could pull its foot out of the mud, but whether it could judge for itself which step should not be trodden when it did not know the answer.

Liang Zhixia furrowed her brow and was about to open her mouth to refute.

But Jiang Lin heard the difference in Professor Xu Mingchuan's tone.

Inside it, there was no commercial provocation, no deliberate making things difficult, only an old engineer's nearly harsh seriousness and eagerness towards technology.

"A mine collapse zone is a blind box," Professor Xu Mingchuan explained, "No one can draw a map for the machine in advance, and no one can tell you in advance which stone is loose, which sleeper hides a void underneath, or which patch of coal cinder will be fatal once it absorbs full water."

He looked straight at Jiang Lin.

"In the public videos you posted online, what cared someone like me who has spent half a lifetime working on mine equipment the most was not how high it jumped, or what complex obstacle boards it crossed."

"It was that brief avoidance pause after encountering resistance at 1 minute and 12 seconds in the video."

"That pause represented that it has a brain, rather than being a machine that only knows how to rigidly execute commands according to code."

Professor Xu Mingchuan took a deep breath.

"Director Jiang, I want to see a true blind test."

The edge of the site instantly quieted down.

Blind test.

This meant that in the following time, Jiang Lin could not watch the site's rearrangement process.

Could not pre-estimate the passage route of the slope in his mind.

Could not receive any LiDAR point cloud data.

Could not let the machine perform any form of three-dimensional mapping in advance.

It could only let G-01, like a blindfolded soldier thrown into a minefield, rely entirely on its own sensor fusion algorithm and the real-time physical contact feedback of every single footstep after entering the field to complete support judgment, route correction, and instability avoidance within milliseconds.

This was definitely not within the test items confirmed in yesterday's emails by both parties.

But this was what those people in Hengtai who knew the ropes truly wanted to see.

They wanted to see what trump card Low Entropy Workshop was hiding.

Jiang Lin glanced at the slope, and then glanced at the mud-covered G-01.

"Okay."

Liang Zhixia wanted to speak to stop him: "Director Jiang, the risk of a blind test is too high; what if the core board gets smashed?"

Jiang Lin raised his hand to interrupt her, his gaze looking straight at Professor Xu Mingchuan: "True gold is not afraid of fire; okay."

Ten minutes later, according to the agreement, all frontline personnel of Low Entropy Workshop including Jiang Lin turned around collectively, turning their backs to that massive test slope.

Behind them came the clamor of Hengtai workers urgently rearranging the site.

The swishing sound of overturning buckets.

The sound of heavy gravel rolling and sliding down.

The muffled sound of thick logs being dragged across rough ground.

As well as the piercing sound of metal structural components smashing heavily onto stones.

Jiang Lin stood quietly, lowering his head to carefully inspect the resting state data of various sensors on the terminal.

Liang Zhixia stood beside him, her heart beating rapidly, completely unable to calm down.

G-01's public videos were indeed strong.

The anti-interference performance of the first two rounds just now was also truly stunning.

But a blind test was different.

It would nakedly test whether this hexapod platform composed of steel and code possessed the generalization ability to face the unknown world.

After a long and agonizing twenty minutes.

Professor Xu Mingchuan walked back to the observation area.

"Layout complete, we can begin."

Jiang Lin turned around.

The slope before his eyes, which was already rugged originally, was completely unrecognizable.

The relatively gentle path in the middle section that could barely pass before had been completely destroyed.

Several huge floating stones were embedded obliquely into the coal cinder at tricky angles, forming hidden stumbling posts one after another.

The originally narrow passage entrance on the left was jammed by two crossed broken logs.

The terrifying loose collapse zone on the right was thinly covered by workers with a layer of black crushed coal.

Visually speaking, it actually looked smoother and safer than the previous muddy ground.

The orange target box at the top of the slope was moved backward by half a meter, forcing the machine to crawl to the very edge.

In the middle and upper section of the slope, a freshly dug horizontal hidden trench lay across it.

The edges of the trench were jagged, and looking at it from the horizontal angle of the observation area, it was completely impossible to tell how deep it actually was.

This was the malice of the mining engineers.

G-01 was placed back into the starting point.

Blind test, begin.

First step, contact stable, normal.

Second step, center of gravity transfer smooth, normal.

Third step, one foot tip stepped on the extremely loose crushed coal layer, causing a slight slip.

The system intervened instantly, and the body posture was corrected amidst the shaking.

When the fourth step was taken, everyone held their breath.

Because G-01 did not choose to take the relatively centered route from the previous round.

It paused slightly, and unexpectedly chose a diagonal line further to the left that seemed to take a longer detour.

"It is no longer taking the shortest path." Professor Xu Mingchuan's eyes flickered slightly as he stared fixedly at the white machine.

An engineer nearby couldn't help whispering in exclamation: "Is it actively avoiding that loose collapse zone on the right?"

No one could answer this question.

Because G-01, having been deprived of the permission for advance mapping, was simply unable to avoid traps through a god-eye-view map.

There was only one truth.

Through the extremely sensitive contact feedback of the previous few steps, and through the subtle changes in torque and current, it acutely perceived that in that seemingly flat area on the right, the underground support force was extremely weak, and the force curve of the foot tip pressing in was incorrect.

It judged that it was a trap.

Sixth step, the front-left foot reached forward and touched the edge of the broken log stuck at the narrow passage entrance.

Due to the decayed and slippery surface of the wood, the contact confidence level failed to reach the safety threshold, and confirmation failed.

G-01 did not force exertion.

It decisively withdrew its front-left foot.

Retreated ten centimeters, adjusted the angle, and planted its foot again.

Due to the support point being too narrow, it failed again.

If it were an ordinary algorithm, the third time it would definitely continue trying the same coordinate point due to an infinite loop.

But G-01 did not.

After two failures, it shifted its entire body to the right by a very small angle extremely slowly, and then extended its front-right foot to probe an imperceptible rock support point behind the broken log.

Its movements were extremely slow.

So slow that a trace of undisguised sarcasm appeared on the face of the layman business head once again.

He felt that this machine was ridiculously clumsy.

But Professor Xu Mingchuan did not urge, and not a single one of the dozen or so technicians behind him let out a sneer.

Because those who had truly descended into the mines and personally experienced cave-in rescue operations all knew that in a hellish place like that which could trigger secondary collapses at any moment, being able to steady oneself and survive was the greatest skill.

A few minutes later, G-01 laboriously crossed the broken log obstacle and officially entered the most dangerous hidden trench area in the middle section.

Just at the moment its rear-right foot crossed the trench edge and landed to bear weight.

The slope suddenly collapsed.

It was not the kind of grand, large-scale landslide.

Right under its feet, a small local patch of gravel and soil couldn't withstand the pressure and suddenly slid downward by more than a dozen centimeters.

But on a thirty-seven-degree inclination, this tiny slip was fatal.

It instantly destroyed the machine's balance baseline, causing the angular velocity of the body's lateral yaw to soar like a rocket.

On Jiang Lin's terminal screen.

[yaw_rate_d] instantly jumped to blood red.

[motor_current_slope] reported severe abnormalities simultaneously due to the motor frantically performing reverse work.

[contact_confidence] plummeted off a cliff.

[phase_window] was directly torn apart, and the gait entered an extremely dangerous uncontrollable sector.

Three out of four life-or-death underlying signals were hit instantly within half a second.

The highest-level safety state machine was forcibly triggered.

Amidst a burst of rapid motor locking sounds, G-01 abruptly stopped on the thirty-seven-degree slope.

One second.

Two seconds.

Someone at the scene couldn't help whispering: "We're done for, has the underlying logic jammed?"

No one answered, and everyone's heart rose to their throat.

The third second.

G-01 moved.

Contrary to everyone's expectations, it did not continue desperately climbing upwards to find support like a dying struggle.

Accompanied by the low humming of the servo motors, it retreated half a step backward.

This abnormal action made several senior motion control engineers at the scene suddenly raise their heads simultaneously, their faces full of shock.

In the underlying control logic of all climbing robots, retreating while going uphill easily causes the center of gravity to tilt backward irreversibly, and is often directly regarded as a physical failure by the master control system.

But G-01 was not.

Utilizing this incredible half-step retreat, it pulled its tottering body back from the edge of that fatal hidden trench.

Decisively releasing the already airborne front-left foot, it utilized the weight of the backward-tilted body to firmly press the middle-right foot and rear-right foot back into the coal cinder. Using this as a fulcrum, it abruptly forced the deviated body posture back into the green safety threshold zone.

Subsequently, it changed direction and chose to detour around a sturdier rock on the right side of the hidden trench.

This was not the theoretically optimal path that a computer could calculate.

Nor was it the mathematical shortest path of a straight line between two points.

Even less was it the smooth and good-looking path meant for investors to see.

It even appeared excessively conservative, ugly, and clumsy.

But it survived and bypassed it.

The final three meters; the slope was steep to the extreme.

G-01 ground its way up inch by inch, almost hugging the ground.

The white foot tips pressed down solidly time and time again.

The algorithm frantically calculated and confirmed the support force time and time again.

Time and time again, it rejected those tempting positions that looked visually faster but whose physical contact state was judged to be untrustworthy.

Nine minutes and fifty-six seconds.

Accompanied by the final exertion of the spindle motor, G-01 successfully reached the top of the slope.

The scarred white POM foot tips stopped steadily in front of the orange target box.

The alarm indicator lights on the side of the body that were originally flashing a dazzling yellow light quietly returned to the dim green representing safety as the six legs landed steadily.

On the terminal screen in Jiang Lin's hand, a line of green characters popped up.

[TARGET_REACHED]

Professor Xu Mingchuan slowly took off his yellow hard hat, using his rough fingers to forcefully wipe away the cold sweat seeping from his forehead.

He raised his head, looking at the shabby-looking white hexapod machine at the top of the slope, and exclaimed with a hoarse voice: "This thing is fucking brilliant."

Within half an hour after the blind test ended, Hengtai's attitude underwent an earth-shattering transformation.

Under the temporarily erected sunshade, Hengtai's technical team immediately proposed and strongly requested to view that portion of the complete underlying logs when G-01 retreated at the edge of the hidden trench just now.

They urgently wanted to know how that system completed disaster judgment within milliseconds.

Lin Guanlan did not speak; she strictly adhered to the boundaries of legal affairs, only turning her inquiring gaze toward Jiang Lin.

Jiang Lin closed the terminal lid without hesitation.

"It was stated very clearly in yesterday's email that the complete underlying control logs will never be leaked."

That business head finally grew anxious, frowning and raising his volume: "Mr. Jiang, everyone has seen the result. But we at least need to know the specific logic of how it made judgments in those few seconds just now, right? Otherwise, how do you expect our internal evaluation committee to push forward the subsequent large-scale cooperation plans?"

Jiang Lin didn't even glance at him.

He merely opened his tablet, pulled up a desensitized report template that had been preset last night and was clean of any core code, and pushed it to the middle of the table.

"What you can obtain is only these four types of information."

"First, the external working condition description of the test just now."

"Second, the final pass and fail judgment conclusion."

"Third, the desensitized external observable mechanical abnormality candidate list."

"Fourth, based on this blind test, the safety recommendations we provide regarding the site access conditions for the next stage."

The business head was furious and still wanted to use his identity as Party A to suppress people: "President Jiang, you hiding things like this..."

Professor Xu Mingchuan suddenly raised his hand, crudely stopping the business head's endless chatter.

He stared at Jiang Lin: "How soon can this desensitized report be given to the technical department?"

"Before three o'clock this afternoon." Jiang Lin replied.

"Can the next round of testing go directly into the real abandoned roadway?" Professor Xu Mingchuan's eyes were full of anticipation.

"We still cannot enter the real production roadway directly." Jiang Lin calmly poured a basin of cold water.

Professor Xu Mingchuan frowned deeply, obviously dissatisfied with this answer.

Jiang Lin looked at the old engineer, with no concession of talking business for business in his tone, only the extreme sobriety belonging to a technical helmsman.

"Chief Engineer Xu, what it passed today was merely a artificially constructed closed reproduced site blind test. This result can only prove that G-01 is qualified to enter the next round of unmanned closed roadway testing that is closer to a real mining environment."

"But this by no means means that it has proven itself capable of ignoring safety standards and directly charging into a genuinely active producing mine."

"Nor does it prove that its current system stability can safely approach living miners on duty, or directly undertake complex real inspection tasks."

The business head finally couldn't help chiming in again, his tone carrying a merchant's eagerness for quick success and instant benefits: "Mr. Jiang, implementing technology to make money always requires efficiency. Since you have already passed the thirty-seven-degree blind test slope so brilliantly, this is already the industry's number one gimmick. Why not strike while the iron is hot and push for implementation promotion directly? Once we enter the real roadway, tomorrow's headlines will be ours."

Jiang Lin raised his head, giving the business head a look as if looking at an idiot.

"I have never said we don't pursue speed; what I said is that we will never skip levels in testing."

He extended his index finger and pushed the tablet on the table forward a little more.

"Low Entropy Workshop has its own evolutionary rhythm. In the next round, we can go to the abandoned roadway to verify dark environments and dust interference."

"The round after that is a continuous fatigue test lasting dozens of hours in a closed unmanned roadway."

"Then, and only then, comes the simulated inspection task under protective measures."

"Only after that can we strive for a field trial run under extremely low-risk conditions during the production suspension maintenance window."

"Until all data forms a perfect closed loop, finally, will we sit down to discuss large-scale deployment in real production roadways."

Looking at Professor Xu Mingchuan, Jiang Lin said with ringing voice: "As long as you can provide the site, every round of testing can be arranged at the fastest speed. Low Entropy Workshop will never delay progress."

"However, the publicly announced conclusions of each round of testing can only strictly cover the safety boundaries it has truly verified with its physical body. Not a single extra word of boasting is allowed."

Zhou Minglan, who was responsible for real-time recording of technical asset boundaries, looked at Jiang Lin's resolute profile, indescribable emotions churning in her heart.

Over the past few years, she had seen too many full-of-hot-air founder companies in the venture capital and tech circles.

Those people, as long as their model slightly passed the passing line in simulation software, couldn't wait to hire PR to write their PPTs into industry firsts and disruptive breakthroughs.

As long as a prototype ran steadily in a flat, closed venue for ten minutes, they would dare to loudly claim externally that it already possessed the conditions for comprehensive commercial implementation.

If an algorithmic model merely ran through once with cleaned experimental data, they would write the business plan sent to investors as already having the conditions for large-scale mass production deployment, lacking only money.

Yet Jiang Lin was completely not this kind of person.

He had just used a blind test method to make G-01 forcefully conquer the thirty-seven-degree gravel and mud slope in front of a group of the most picky mining equipment engineers.

If it were any normal entrepreneur, at this moment they would have already taken this heaven-defying achievement—enough to blow up the whole internet—to ask for investments and sign exclusive agreements.

Yet he calmly suppressed everyone's fanaticism, insisting on taking the most boring, longest, and safest engineering iteration route.

Eleven forty at noon.

In the senior conference room of Hengtai's office building, the air conditioning was running strong.

The business head ultimately failed to resist the temptation of performance, taking the initiative to speak up and proposing the hope that Hengtai could immediately sign an exclusive mining scenario cooperation letter of intent with Low Entropy Workshop carrying a huge advance payment.

Lin Guanlan didn't even give Jiang Lin the chance to open his mouth to refuse.

She directly and neatly closed the black leather folder in front of her.

"Low Entropy Workshop formally accepts your party's invitation for the next round of unmanned closed roadway testing."

"But we do not accept any form of scenario exclusivity agreements."

"We do not accept any joint ownership clauses for R&D results."

"We do not accept source code audits under any name."

"We do not accept core log delivery of any level."

"Even less do we accept disclosure of the underlying architecture of the control chain in any form."

She coldly swept her gaze across the Hengtai executives opposite the conference table.

"Hengtai can choose to agree to these conditions and enter our next round of testing list. Or you can feel aggrieved and choose to end today's cooperation right here."

The business head's face looked as ugly as if he had eaten a blowfly, indescribably terrible.

This had completely subverted the humble posture of an ordinary Party B begging grandfathers and grandmothers for help and pulling sponsorships.

At least at this moment, in this conference room, things like testing qualifications were no longer unilaterally dispensed out as charity by Hengtai, which held the resources.

That muddy G-01, with those heart-stopping nine minutes and fifty-six seconds just now, forcefully reshuffled and rewrote the underlying power relationship at this negotiating table.

It was not Hengtai showing great mercy by giving Low Entropy Workshop a chance.

Rather, the massive Hengtai was striving hard to try and become one of the first batch of partners of Low Entropy Workshop—a rising star with terrifying technological potential—in real, highly complex scenarios.