160: Chapter 160 No Rash Adversity Agreement

At dawn, the wind outside the Outpost died down.

The red sand was pinned to the surface by the night's low temperature, presenting a brief calmness across the distant Wasteland.

This calmness was naturally not gentleness; rather, it felt more like a giant machine temporarily stopping its roar between two breakdowns.

It could restart at any moment, and this time it would not notify anyone in advance.

Jiang Lin stood inside Assembly Room Number One, facing the G-Explorer-C whose outer shell had not yet been fully closed.

On the assembly table, the mechanical legs, foot-end sensors, low-frequency vibration pickups, thermal infrared modules, magnetometers, communication relay interfaces, and disposable environmental recording box racks were laid out in separate zones, like all the organs left behind by a yet-to-heal surgery.

White labels were pasted beneath every component, bearing handwriting in his consistent style.

[Type B Fifteenth Winter Expedition: Front-Right Foot Contact Confidence Plummeted]

[Edge of Old Fissure Mouth: High Probability of Rubble Slippage]

[Thin-Shell Surface: Risk of Supporting Polygon Failure]

[Relay Link: Signal-to-Noise Ratio Critical at Seventy Kilometers]

[Fissure Probing: Optical Fiber Friction Causing High-Frequency Image Jitter]

[PMCU-17 Excavation Period: Non-Homogeneous Cementation of Collapse Body, Strong Disturbances Prohibited]

G-Explorer-C did not grow out of inspiration; rather, it grew out of the countless moments of hesitation, pausing, detouring, and near-loss-of-contact experienced by G-Explorer-B.

These resumes exchanged for ruins and lessons were far heavier than any design blueprint.

Therefore, if Type B's mission was to arrive, then Type C's core proposition was—determining when to stop.

Jiang Lin pulled over a blank sheet of paper and wrote the core logic of G-Explorer-C at the very top.

Principle One: Reject Rash Advancement.

This was by no means a slogan, but an instruction that had to be carved into the underlying layer of the state machine.

Faced with the abnormal collapse of Northeast Seventy-Three, the machine's bravery was worthless.

It only needed to crouch low when surface contact became abnormal, retreat when communication links fluctuated, pause when thermal infrared results were unstable, and refuse to advance when discontinuities appeared in the foot-end pressure distribution.

It was best to appear timid.

It was best to make onlookers feel it wasn't aggressive enough.

It was best if every step looked like a waste of time.

Because on a thin-shell surface, the cost of advancing one step further could mean the disappearance of equipment, samples, records, and subsequent paths together, leaving behind not even a single log available for review.

Jiang Lin pulled up the expedition logs of the Type B machine.

The footage of the previous round at Northeast Seventy-Three appeared on the screen once again.

He began to watch it frame by frame.

This was a rule he set for himself: every review of a perilous situation had to be walked through again with the same patience as back then, and he was not allowed to muddle through with the mindset of "I know the result so I can skip it."

Everything was as usual in the drone's overhead view; the grayish-white rubble slope cast a soft reflection under the low-angle sunlight, looking almost peaceful.

But when the Type B's front-right foot stepped down, the contact confidence instantly plummeted from 92 to 61.

Immediately afterward, the middle-right foot rebound was delayed, and the chassis inclinometer captured a minor side tilt of 0.4°.

That time, the machine stopped, relying on the emergency protocol that was still very crude back then.

Jiang Lin remembered sitting in this assembly room, separated by dozens of kilometers of relay links, watching the image refresh with a four-second signal delay, his palms covered in sweat.

Four seconds.

On a thin-shell surface, four seconds were enough for a machine, along with all the evidence it carried, to sink into the darkness thirty meters below.

That time, it stopped at the edge of the collapse, missing it by less than half a meter.

Jiang Lin later measured the actual cavity depth of that terrain.

If the machine had taken that step forward back then, the fall height would have been enough to completely destroy the entire main control and storage system the moment it touched the ground, along with more than a dozen hours of raw data accumulated along that entire section of the path.

The sinister nature of the Wasteland lay precisely here.

It knew how to disguise itself with gentle rubble, until the weight crushed the brittle shell, only then revealing the abyss beneath.

It never issued warnings in advance; its silence itself was part of the trap.

Jiang Lin cropped out that log and set it as the mandatory trigger standard for G-Explorer-C.

[Trigger Item: Local Plummet in Contact Confidence]

Condition One: Contact confidence of any foot-end is twenty-five percentage points lower than the historical path average.

Condition Two: Feedback difference between adjacent feet exceeds the dynamic threshold.

Condition Three: Chassis inclination change exceeds zero point three degrees with no corresponding terrain slope explanation.

Condition Four: Low-frequency echo attenuation rate deviates from the current surface model threshold.

In the action list, there was no option to continue observing.

In District Seventy-Three, the most fatal illusion was "take one more step and see."

These four words had killed too many explorations, not because the people walking were foolish, but because at such moments, humans would always instinctively believe that this step should be fine, whereas machines should not be allowed to possess such wishful thinking.

When detouring around the old fissure mouth, the Type B machine had recorded an abnormal attenuation of low-frequency resonance; a cavity that swallowed echoes seemed to lurk beneath the surface.

For this reason, the Type C machine's chassis was retrofitted with a crude yet sensitive low-frequency piezoelectric pickup.

It would share timestamps with foot-end pressure, IMU, thermal infrared, and magnetometers—four channels, at the exact same moment, mutually verifying and mutually debunking one another.

Jiang Lin added a second principle to the log—[A single anomaly does not constitute evidence.]

[All anomalies must cross-verify at the same time point across at least two physical channels, otherwise they shall all be treated as environmental noise.]

MPS-Agent α timely popped up supplementary suggestions at the edge of the screen. Jiang Lin glanced at them, pressed confirm, and casually added a restriction, establishing a complete set of evidence grading.

E0: Single anomaly, no action significance.

E1: Dual-channel weak anomaly, only distant observation permitted.

E2: Triple-channel overlap, deployment of disposable recording box permitted.

E3: Anomaly matches historical coordinates/time sequence, establish candidate point.

E4: Physical sample, historical cache, and current anomaly closed, set as next-stage target (direct awakening still not permitted).

If a machine only knew how to discover anomalies, it would easily degenerate into a trap inducing humans to take risks.

It had to understand that discovery did not equal authorization.

8:16 AM.

The first round of hardware assembly for G-Explorer-C was completed.

Four main load-bearing legs together with two low-profile stabilizing legs were all connected.

The foot ends were widened and coated on the outside with an easily wearable composite sacrificial layer.

Jiang Lin intentionally sacrificed durability, turning the foot ends into a crude pen dedicated to rubbing and printing the true stress feedback of the surface.

As the mechanical feet rose and fell, the screen drew out a smooth curve.

Jiang Lin remained unmoved.

He brought over three specially made test plates: a compacted sandy soil plate, a rubble slip plate, and a thin-shell composite plate replicated over months of effort.

The surface layer looked sturdy, but cavities were distributed across the bottom layer.

When making this plate, he deliberately simulated three different thicknesses of surface shells, corresponding respectively to the geological characteristics of the outer periphery, middle ring, and core zone of the collapsed area he calculated.

The Type C machine passed the first two plates steadily, and was able to autonomously reduce speed and shift its center of gravity backward in response to rubble slippage.

On the third step of stepping onto the third plate, a micro-fracture imperceptible to the naked eye occurred on the surface layer.

The pressure curve collapsed briefly, the chassis tilted by 0.28°, and low-frequency attenuation was abnormal.

The state machine popped up a yellow prompt.

[Suspected Thin-Shell Surface]

[Recommendation: Pause]

G-Explorer-C stopped.

Jiang Lin looked at the screen, his brows slightly knitted.

Still not enough.

If this were Northeast Seventy-Three, zero point two eight degrees might already be too late.

He opened the threshold table and lowered the chassis inclination trigger threshold from zero point three degrees to zero point two five degrees.

Just as he was preparing to retest, MPS-Agent α popped up a prompt on the screen.

This was the first time in this round of debugging that it actively raised a dissenting opinion regarding his threshold adjustment.

[Prompt: Lowering the chassis inclination trigger threshold to 0.25° is projected to increase the false trigger rate on normal rubble roads by about 18%.]

[Impact: Average travel speed decreases, path recalculation count increases, relay window occupation time rises.]

[Recommendation: Maintain 0.30°, and incorporate low-frequency echoes, foot-end pressure distribution, and IMU data into dual-channel re-verification to reduce false alarms.]

Jiang Lin stared at these lines of words and paused for a few seconds.

He knew MPS-Agent α had not calculated incorrectly.

Viewed from the default loss function, what it provided was indeed a statistically superior solution.

False alarm rate, advancement speed, energy consumption, relay window, and path recalculation cost were all calculated by it in the same table.

According to that set of weights, 0.30° was more reasonable than 0.25°.

But Northeast Seventy-Three was not an ordinary Wasteland.

On an ordinary rubble road, the cost of a false alarm was a pause of thirty seconds to several minutes, a path recalculation, a bit of battery power, and the waste of a relay window.

Yet on a thin-shell surface, the cost of a missed alarm was equipment, samples, data, along with all the evidence accumulated along that path, sinking together into the darkness a dozen meters or even thirty meters below.

These two were not the same category of cost.

They could not be compressed into the same average.

Jiang Lin typed out the new task weights in the terminal.

[Revision: Under the Northeast Seventy-Three task mode, the missed alarm cost weight is raised to the highest level.]

[Principle: High false alarms are permitted, low-probability fatal missed alarms are not permitted.]

Afterwards, he retained 0.25°.

MPS-Agent α did not pop up objections again, merely appending a row of gray notes next to the threshold table.

[The current threshold is no longer globally statistically optimal, but optimal for the task safety boundary.]

Looking at this line of text, Jiang Lin instead felt reassured.

This was the tool he needed.

It did not make decisions for him, nor did it pretend to understand fear.

It simply told him honestly: "You are deviating from the default optimal solution."

And what Jiang Lin needed to do was to personally change that default when necessary.

Tools were responsible for calculation.

Humans were responsible for defining what could not be gambled on.

Step three.

Brief collapse.

Chassis inclination zero point two eight degrees.

Low-frequency anomaly.

G-Explorer-C immediately lowered its posture, its six legs expanding outward, its fuselage hugging close to the surface like a black arthropod that suddenly lowered its body.

Screen prompts updated.

[Warning: Suspected Thin-Shell Surface]

[Action: Stop Advancing]

[Action: Expand Support]

[Action: Request Retreat Path]

Jiang Lin did not nod and continued to watch.

Thirty seconds later, the system automatically generated a retreat path.

G-Explorer-C stepped back one step.

But when retreating, the middle-right foot stepped onto the edge area previously disturbed by the front foot, and the contact confidence fluctuated again.

The state machine halted.

[Retreat Path Unstable]

[Recommendation: Wait in Place for Manual Decision]

Jiang Lin raised his hand to press the keyboard and paused for a few seconds.

Then, he deleted the line "Wait in Place for Manual Decision".

Changing it to—[Action: Write contact mark, low-profile lateral shift to the nearest undisturbed stable support point.]

[Restriction: Lateral shift must not exceed two step lengths; a secondary anomaly immediately triggers prone posture in place, stopping all active displacement.]

The reason was very simple.

At the Northeast Seventy-Three site, manual decisions might slow down due to image delay, communication noise, and psychological pressure.

The machine could not wait on the edge of danger for him to have a flash of insight.

It needed to move itself out of the dangerous support surface first within the rules.

Waiting was itself a form of adventure, only it was cloaked in the guise of caution.

He retested.

This time, after triggering the anomaly on the thin-shell plate, G-Explorer-C shifted laterally with a low profile, avoiding the previously disturbed area and retreating back to the safe plate surface.

Passed.

Jiang Lin wrote in the log: [Revision: Retreat is not simple backing up.]

[On a thin-shell surface, backing up may step back into the support zone destroyed by itself.]

[Low-profile lateral shift should be permitted, prioritizing the search for an undisturbed stable support surface.]

At the end of the log, he drew a simple schematic diagram: forward footprints, backward footprints, and lateral shift footprints, where the backward footprints crushed the leading-edge thin shell.

What Type C needed to solve was the danger created by the retreat itself—the act of escaping, if not done cleverly enough, was in itself a form of suicide.

10:40 AM.

Communication relay testing began.

R-01 to R-06 were awakened in sequence.

Inside the Outpost assembly room, a simulated link was temporarily set up.

Jiang Lin deliberately added latency, weak signals, packet loss, directional obstruction, and short-duration link breaks.

What he wanted was not an ideal link, but one that would expose all flaws on the real Wasteland.

R-01 stable.

R-02 stable.

R-03 experienced a reconnection delay under a high packet loss environment.

MPS-Agent α highlighted it in yellow.

Jiang Lin did not immediately declare it scrapped.

He repeated the test for five rounds.

Recurred in the third round, recurred in the fifth round, R-03 was demoted.

Not because it was necessarily broken.

But because it could not be placed in a critical position within the expedition link.

He wrote on the label: [R-03: Non-critical forwarding, must not serve as the main relay for the fissure mouth.]

This was also one of the lessons the Wasteland gave him.

Equipment did not need to be strictly black or white.

Either good or bad.

More often than not, they were in a gray state.

Usable, but cannot be used for critical links.

Can power on, but cannot independently undertake a closed loop.

Can record, but cannot serve as the sole evidence.

In an engineering system, the most dangerous thing was not broken equipment.

Broken equipment was very easy to kick out.

The most dangerous thing was equipment that looked basically fine.

They will, at some worst moment, feed erroneous readings into your chain of judgment, and you won't even realize at first where the problem lies.

Because it has been right nine times out of ten, you have grown accustomed to trusting it.

He recalled Zhao Chengyu's half-joking remark during military training: "I can take charge of standing on the sidelines and raising some useless but very sharp questions."

If Zhao Chengyu were standing in this assembly room right now, watching Jiang Lin shake his head at a relay node with a test pass rate as high as 83%, he would probably think this person was being a bit hypercritical.

Yet the sharpest questions are never on the lips, but in that seventeen percent failure rate.

That seventeen percent is enough to completely shatter the entire chain of evidence at a critical moment.

Noon.

Jiang Lin did not rest, only drank half a cup of warm water, and took a couple of bites of a cold potato pancake.

Continuously lowering his head to adjust the wire harness made the back of his neck stiff, and his right index finger was scratched by the edge of a connector, leaving a shallow cut.

He applied adhesive tape, put his gloves back on, and placed four disposable environmental recording boxes on the table.

E-01, E-02, E-03, and E-04.

Each one was set to automatically enter a silent recording state after deployment.

No wireless transmission, no complex self-checks, no active positioning.

They were like four stones that could write.

After being thrown into cracks, near the edges of utility tunnels, or close to the fractures of cooling pipelines, they were responsible for only one thing.

Jotting down what happened there.

Temperature, humidity, air pressure, magnetic field, vibration, once every ten seconds.

If they could be recovered, they were evidence.

If they could not be recovered, they would be left underground as the cost of silence.

Jiang Lin picked up E-01 and pasted a piece of paper on its outer shell.

"If it cannot be recovered after deployment, do not take secondary risks."

This wasn't written for the recording boxes to see.

It was written for himself to see.

He also pasted on E-02: "Recording failure does not equal mission failure."

E-03: "Equipment loss does not equal evidence loss; paths, coordinates, and deployment conditions are also evidence."

E-04: "Do not sacrifice safety boundaries just to prove a hypothesis."

After the four recording boxes were pasted, they looked somewhat comical.

Like four small iron blocks covered in warnings.

But Jiang Lin did not laugh.

He knew very well that decades of Wasteland time would alter a person's judgment.

When he first entered the Wasteland, he could maintain restraint.

Ten years later, twenty years later, after failure upon failure, people would begin to return empty-handed with frustration.

Hating that wasn't enough; they would hate not being able to confirm things.

Thus, step by step, they would approach danger.

These four pieces of paper were the cooling procedure he had left in advance for his future self.

Just like how if the number three engine of Artemis I did not reach the required temperature, it had to stop.

A person must also have their own stopping conditions.

And it was best to write down this condition beforehand, stamp it in this clear-headed morning before being scorched by desire, so that his future self, whose willpower had been worn thin by loneliness and obsession, could not easily tear it up.

At two in the afternoon, Jiang Lin opened the blank flowchart and began writing the cooling bypass in reverse into a set of rejection procedures.

Rule One: "Do not collect from pressurized pipelines with unknown status."

Rule Two: "Do not damage pipe walls that are still under stress."

Rule Three: "Do not expand cracks, do not cut main load-bearing structures."

Rule Four: "Only collect exposed remnants that have naturally fractured, detached from the pressure path, and do not affect collapse stability."

Rule Five: "Samples shall not directly enter the living quarters."

Rule Six: "Sample numbers must include coordinates, depth, contact method, sampling tools, and photos before and after sampling."

Rule Seven: "Upon any suspected active fluids, abnormal odors, temperature fluctuations, or pressure differential changes, stop immediately."

After writing the seven rules, he began to write down the actual sampling targets.

Crystalline residues, inner wall deposits, pipe wall cross-sections, outer ablation layers, micro-structured diversion layers, and fracture thermal fatigue marks.

These things sounded small.

But they would tell Jiang Lin what that outer-ring high-pressure phase-change cooling network had actually experienced.

Was it a uniform shutdown?

Was it a localized overload?

Was it a bypass line failure?

Was it an active freezing of the core area?

Or was the entire thermal management system dragged forcibly to collapse at the end of the Star Tide Cataclysm?

If PMCU-17 was likened to a severed nerve, then the cooling pipeline was the blood vessel.

The nerve told him what the system remembered last.

The blood vessel told him how the system died in the end.

Four-thirty in the afternoon.

G-Explorer-C stood up as a complete unit for the first time.

The six mechanical legs slowly extended, their feet touching the ground, the fuselage lifted, and the joints emitted a low electrical hum.

On the screen, the attitude curve stabilized in the green zone.

Jiang Lin stood three meters away, watching this machine.

It was rougher than G-01, and uglier than G-01.

The outer shell was not completely covered, and interfaces were directly exposed in many places for easy maintenance.

The wire harnesses were tied into several bundles by external sheaths, like temporarily mended tendons.

The foot ends were somewhat clumsily wide.

The fuselage was low, the posture conservative, without any sense of beautiful speed.

But it was very well-suited for the Wasteland.

Jiang Lin inputted the first command.

"Move straight forward at low speed, three meters."

G-Explorer-C began to move.

One step, pause, contact, record.

Another step, another pause.

For a full three meters, it took forty-one seconds.

If placed in any robot competition, this speed would be ridiculously slow.

But looking at the contact curve on the screen, Jiang Lin's expression was very calm.

Slowness was correct.

At Northeast Seventy-Three, speed had no meaning.

The first round of straight-line movement passed.

The second round: gravel simulation.

The third round: thin-shell simulation.

The fourth round: low-temperature startup.

The fifth round: communication delay injection.

During every test, Jiang Lin was looking for when it should stop, rather than whether it could continue.

When testing reached the sixth round, G-Explorer-C developed a minor problem.

Nine minutes after the low-temperature startup, a 0.8-second drift occurred in the pressure array of the right rear auxiliary leg.

The drift was not large.

If it were an ordinary test, it could even be ignored.

But Jiang Lin chose to replay the data.

He discovered that the drift occurred after a slight increase in joint motor load, during the process of the wire harness temperature returning from minus twelve degrees to minus eight degrees.

It wasn't that the sensor was broken.

Rather, the wire harness underwent slight deformation during the low-temperature recovery process, causing the connector to produce a contact resistance fluctuation.

If it were at Northeast Seventy-Three, this kind of drift might be misjudged as an abnormal surface rebound.

Or worse, filtered out by the system as normal noise.

It would quietly deceive the entire judgment chain with an all-normal posture, until one time, this deception happened to overlap with a real collapse signal, causing the two to cancel each other out and disguising a fatal warning as a negligible piece of electronic noise.

Jiang Lin turned off the power, dismantled the right rear auxiliary leg wire harness, re-secured it, added a thermal insulation pad, and adjusted the stress angle of the connector.

Re-tested.

The drift disappeared.

He wrote in the log — — "Low-temperature recovery phase wire harness deformation will disguise itself as foot pressure drift."

"All foot abnormalities must be checked synchronously with wire harness temperature changes."

This is why G-Explorer-C must be repeatedly tested before the expedition.

Not to prove it was perfect.

But to understand in advance how it would lie.

A machine that never lied did not exist; the only difference was whether you had caught its method of lying in advance.

Five-twenty in the evening.

Jiang Lin stood before the assembly bench and did the most counter-intuitive thing of the day.

He superimposed three test environments—the gravel sliding plate, the thin-shell composite plate, and the cryogenic chamber—manually creating a compound operating condition far exceeding the true expected difficulty of Northeast Seventy-Three.

He wanted to intentionally make G-Explorer-C lose once, and to lose in an indoor environment he could completely control, rather than leaving it to lose out on the Wasteland.

Under the compound operating conditions, the machine triggered a thin-shell early warning upon taking its very first step.

Lowering posture, expanding supports, the cryogenic chamber started working simultaneously, and the temperature inside the chamber dropped at a rate of three degrees per minute, simulating the extreme situation of a sudden drop at night in Northeast Seventy-Three.

At the seventh minute, due to the superposition of low temperature and load, the output power of the joint motor on the right front primary load-bearing leg fell below the preset lower limit.

This was not a test item designed by Jiang Lin — — this was a real, unexpected failure.

The screen alarm suddenly turned red.

"Right front leg: joint motor output abnormal"

"Posture stability: marginal"

"Recommendation: Power off the right front drive and enter five-foot degraded support"

Jiang Lin's heartbeat skipped a beat.

For a moment, he almost wanted to rush straight up and reach out to steady that slowly tilting machine.

That was a nearly instinctive urge to protect something he had assembled with his own hands.

But he held back.

He stared at the screen, forcing himself to complete a calm judgment within those fraction of a second.

This was not the site at Northeast Seventy-Three, but indoors.

Powering down wouldn't cause any real loss.

And if he reached out to steady it now, he would never know whether the machine's self-protection logic could catch this failure without human intervention.

Three seconds later, G-Explorer-C's own degradation protocol activated.

The five intact legs, following general degradation rules, combined into a posture combination that Jiang Lin had not separately named, sharing the load of the failed joint.

The fuselage slowly, clumsily, yet steadily crouched down, like an injured beast refusing to fall to the ground, pressing itself safely onto the ground.

No rollovers, no drops, no sensor components damaged by impact.

The assembly room was silent for a few seconds.

Only then did Jiang Lin walk over, squat down, and reach out to touch the failed joint.

The outer shell temperature was icy, and the internal motor had safely powered down.

He checked for a long time, and finally found that the cooling rate of the cryogenic chamber exceeded the original motor selection specifications of this leg—a purely hardware margin issue, not a flaw in design logic.

This problem could not be solved by writing code more cautiously.

It could only be discovered by letting it make errors earlier.

He stood up, his back having exuded a layer of thin sweat due to the tension of those past few seconds, flowing down his spine and sticking to his close-fitting clothes, cold like a trickling stream.

Yet he didn't wipe it away.

Instead, he immediately wrote down the most important entry of the day in the log.

"Right front leg joint motor low-temperature margin insufficient; selection defect recorded, existing spare parts at the Outpost can be replaced."

"Supplementary principle: The purpose of indoor testing is to let it lose here, rather than losing at Northeast Seventy-Three."

"Any 'accidental failure,' if it occurs in a controllable environment, is intelligence obtained for free."

Six in the evening.

The wind outside the Outpost rose again.

This time the sandstorm was finer, striking the outer baffles like fine needles.

Jiang Lin stood in the assembly room, watching G-Explorer-C complete the final round of thin-shell surface testing.

Trigger anomaly, lower posture, expand supports, replay contact matrix, lateral retreat.

Write virtual markers, recalculate path, no request for manual hazard confirmation throughout the entire process.

Passed.

MPS-Agent α generated a stage report on the screen.

"G-Explorer-C Phase I testing completed"

"Expedition capability: uncertified"

"Evidence collection capability: preliminary pass"

"Mandatory retreat protocol: preliminary pass"

"Thin-shell surface conservative strategy: preliminary pass"

"Low-temperature wire harness drift issue: corrected"

"Right front leg joint motor low-temperature margin issue: recorded, pending spare parts replacement"

"Recommendation: Enter Phase II — — joint testing of relay link and recording box deployment"

Looking at the line stating expedition capability uncertified, Jiang Lin instead felt reassured.

The system didn't give a pretty conclusion just because of a few rounds of indoor testing.

This showed it was still honest.

At night, the Outpost entered low-power mode.

In the assembly room, only a row of lights above the workbench remained lit.

G-Explorer-C lay flat on the lifting platform, like a black mechanical bug retracting its limbs and waiting for the next command.

The maintenance mark on its right front leg had not yet been wiped away.

That was the only wound he hadn't hidden today, but instead deliberately preserved.

He wanted to make sure that every time he passed by it, he would remember what mistake this leg made today.

Jiang Lin sat beside it, opened his paper notebook, and wrote only three paragraphs.

"G-Explorer-C is not meant to reach TM-7."

"Being able to accurately draw the boundary where one cannot advance further, even if returning empty-handed, is considered completing the mission."

"A machine that knows how to stop can enter Seventy-Three."

Outside the Outpost, the sandstorm brushed past the armor baffles.

In the distance, the wind turbine units rotated at low speed; the seven percent efficiency loss on the blades hadn't been fixed yet, and he re-recorded this matter at the very top of tomorrow's checklist.

Power supply always ranked first; this rule would not change just because a machine that could concede defeat on its own had been built today.

On the status screen, the total pre-expedition verification progress for G-Explorer-C stopped at sixty-two percent.