194: Chapter 194 The Spark of Civilization: The Local Storage Node Has Been Found

October 30th, 5:36 AM.

Low Entropy Workshop Beijing R&D Center.

The rolling shutter had already descended heavily, and the hallway lights outside squeezed through the gap at the bottom, pressing in a strip of pale light.

Jiang Lin walked out from the innermost side of the shelf, holding a black marker, and added a date to the last metal-lustered seal.

[Thirteenth Transmission]

[Unsealed in the 20th Year]

Similar seals covered the entire loading room.

Fifteen high-strength military-green sealed turnover boxes were stacked in two layers along the wall.

Eight load-bearing pallets steadily occupied the middle area.

In addition, there were six sets of long items tightly pressed down by aviation aluminum alloy frames.

Photovoltaic modules, low-speed fan blades, and folding brackets simply could not fit into any standard box. If one insisted on calling them luggage, even those three carbon-fiber blades, over two meters long, seemed somewhat reluctant to condescend.

Jiang Lin checked to the end of the list and crossed off the last item with his pen.

Twenty-nine independent transportation units, all accounted for.

The two outermost boxes contained three sets of low-temperature germplasm, nutrients, trace elements, water purification membranes, ion-exchange resins, disinfectants, as well as medicines, shoes, and sanitary consumables packaged according to the unsealing year, sealed respectively in inner boxes with independent cold storage and moisture-proof layers.

Near the rolling shutter were the heavy power and mechanical units.

Two sets of high-power inverters, four sets of industrial control cabinets, bundles of oxygen-free copper cables, precision ceramic bearings, high-voltage contactors, silicon carbide power modules, along with a large batch of anti-aging rubber seals pumped to absolute vacuum and sealed in tin-foil bags.

Before the previous return, Jiang Lin had already sat in the Outpost and sentenced all active-service assets to death or reprieve item by item.

Metal storage tanks, titanium alloy pipelines, heavy-duty frames, and machine tool beds could still manage to be used for a while.

But all pump bodies, high-speed motors, energy storage batteries, micron-level filter elements, control mainboards, and anything that relied on rubber to maintain its sealing dignity would be forcibly retired first in this round.

The three dark blue boxes in the middle contained independent thermal interface modules.

Brand-new magnetic pumps, proportional control valves, metal bellows, pressure-relief explosion-proof assemblies, thermal-conductive copper braided tapes, antifreeze water-glycol, high-specific-heat phase-change thermal boxes, and eight high-pressure-resistant collapsible liquid storage bags.

During the twelfth Wasteland expedition, he had already obtained the protocol for the local thermal service package from the underground node [OR-MV-073-04], and this batch of equipment was tailor-made for the next deep contact.

Further inward were the core spare parts for communication, storage, and machinery.

The backup fuselage of a [G-Explorer-C] was ruthlessly dismembered into six mechanical legs, a central load-bearing frame, and two absolutely sealed mission cabins, pressed down with straps on three shock-proof pallets respectively.

Beside it were two complete sets of backup drive chains, three rounds' worth of foot-end wear-resistant consumables, and a whole box of high-precision sensors that could only be purchased with hard currency in the Real World.

The previous Type C was still trapped in the darkness underground in Northeast Seventy-Three in the Wasteland.

If it couldn't come out, this one would be responsible for going in to replace it.

The mobile phone vibrated slightly on the cold workbench.

What Xu Man sent were live photos of the new factory building in Jiangcheng.

The brand-new mobile gantry crane had already risen from the ground and stood firmly. The third low-rebound point on the ground had also just completed re-testing, and the yellow standard workstation line extended straight out of the picture.

The incomplete fuselage of PG-P06 parked at the first-article position, its six legs still lacking outer shells and exposing complex wire harnesses.

Next to it, a new warning sign with yellow characters on a black background was hung.

"Assembly is not an exhibition, do not cross the line"

Someone in the chat group jokingly asked whether this sign was specially meant to guard against those seventeen applicants who claimed to have watched machine videos for a long time and were experienced.

Xu Man coldly replied with two words: "Guarding against you."

After confirming the values in the re-test records, Jiang Lin switched his phone to airplane mode.

On the workbench, a thin kraft paper file bag quietly lay there.

Inside were the three failed drafts of the number field sent by Gu Mingche the day before yesterday.

The derivation calculations that were originally densely packed on the margins had been neatly recopied onto four pages of paper.

The discriminant estimate was supplemented extremely rigorously, and next to the class number loss item, a red circle with deep strokes piercing the paper was drawn.

Last night, Gu Mingche sent a message passing on a word.

"They said the cubic field derivation was crystal clear and complete. If you still feel that it's merely a matter of insufficient degree, you'd better mathematically prove those two words 'merely'."

Jiang Lin put the paper draft into the data box, and the electronic version was copied into three Physics-isolated offline disks respectively.

Inside the folder, the originally scheduled start time was November 1st.

Jiang Lin looked at the screen, his fingers hovering over the keyboard for a moment, deleted the date, and replaced it with a condition.

"Enter after the Outpost resumes long-term operation"

5:59:52 AM.

Jiang Lin fastened the heavy titanium alloy main connecting ring around his waist.

Three high-strength Kevlar tow ropes extended outward from the connecting ring like a cobweb, passing through the load-bearing buckles of each pallet and turnover box, and the ends finally locked back onto the safety harness on his body.

Countdown, zeroed.

The rough concrete floor of the loading room, the pale light under the door seam, and the unread messages on the mobile phone screen were simultaneously swallowed by a huge sense of nothingness, stripped out of his vision.

The tactile sensation under his feet instantly changed to the metal floor of the Outpost's No. 1 assembly room.

Twenty-nine heavy transportation units appeared out of thin air, pressing within the yellow line.

The dim overhead lights of the Outpost abruptly continued the half-flash from before Jiang Lin left.

The tired blades of the ventilator turned the remaining small half-circle, blowing out the Wasteland smell of filter elements, dust, and old engine oil.

Jiang Lin instinctively supported the edge of the cold assembly table.

The muscle memory of his body instantly re-caught the action habits left by the previous forty years. His ankles, knees, and shoulders each recovered their most vigilant positions through fine-tuning.

The main control screen flickered and recovered from the deep blackness.

"Outpost Status: Sealing Lifted"

"External Environment: No New Changes"

"MPS-Agent α: Task Queue Restored"

"OR-MV-073-04: Unconfirmed Forwarding Request"

To the right of the last line of red text, the interval timer was stuck at: 45/47.

Two seconds later, the timer reset to zero.

The request count, like a ghost, jumped from one to two.

Jiang Lin stared at that line of numbers for a few seconds, ignored it, turned around to pull out a crowbar, and cleanly pried open the wooden box of the water treatment unit.

The signal had been waiting underground for forty-seven seconds, and it wouldn't hurt to wait another twelve days.

On the Outpost's end, if even a rusted solenoid valve used for forty years dared to be trusted, then no matter what terrifying amount of data or heat was sent from the underground end, he would definitely not be able to catch it.

The first round of quality inspection reports after the old system was dismantled was uglier than the lifespan prediction table.

Among the seven circulation pumps, the stator insulation of two was severely aged, and the shaft seal of one had begun to leak light green coolant.

The solenoid valve of the main water pipe in the planting room was jammed tightly in the half-open position by scale.

Of the three heavy energy storage battery groups, only one barely passed the low-rate discharge test.

The water purification membrane had long been polluted by heavy metals beyond recognition, far exceeding its design life.

Six capacitors in the old control cabinet swelled up like inflated puffers, ready to burst at any time.

Eye-catching red retirement labels soon covered half of the explosion-proof wall.

Jiang Lin only retained the heavy metal storage tanks, robust pipelines, and the titanium alloy shells of the heat exchangers.

All active running parts were forcibly replaced with new ones.

After the old parts were violently disassembled, they were strictly categorized into red copper, stainless steel, magnetic materials, and electronic waste, and put into storage respectively, not wasting a single bit.

Two brand-new pump bodies were reconnected to the water circulation system, and the third group remained untouched in its sealed packaging as redundancy.

The new water purification membrane was flushed repeatedly with pure water.

The nutrient solution in the planting room was precisely re-formulated using reserve water.

On the ninth day, the first row of vibrant purple plant growth lights lit up on the seedling rack.

On the twelfth day, the four core systems of water treatment, photovoltaic power generation, planting, and assembly ran at full load continuously for a full seventy-two hours.

Jiang Lin only opened one box of recovery-period rations, resealed the rest with waterproof tape, and pushed them back into the depths of the high rack.

The backup motors and sealing components prepared to be activated only in the thirtieth year lay quietly in the low-oxygen cabinet, with the dates on the seals facing outward strikingly.

Until confirming that the rear was stable, Jiang Lin wiped the engine oil off his hands and sat back in front of the main screen.

The underground node [OR-MV-073-04] had stubbornly accumulated 22,058 unconfirmed requests.

The main body code of each request was identical, but the last two bytes were like some strange code, continuously cycling between [17], [18], [19], and [20].

The parsing program left behind by the twelfth expedition was too crude, treating them all as network-layer path hops, and thus failed to obtain a stable parsing result all along.

Jiang Lin's fingers flew, pulling up the local thermal service package protocol brought back from underground, and forcibly mapped these four numbers item by item.

"17 corresponds to: continuous heat reception capacity."

"18 corresponds to: transient heat buffering."

"19 corresponds to: offline caching."

"20 corresponds to: local custody."

When the four numbers were pieced together, that ghost signal which had repeated more than 20,000 times finally translated evaluative questions on the screen.

"How much heat can you continuously take away?"

"How large a transient heat shock can you catch?"

"How much offline data can you safely store?"

"Who is responsible for physical custody?"

The source address of the request was still incomplete.

But this stubborn beast provided enough error-correction redundancy through more than 20,000 retransmissions. The error-correction program written by Jiang Lin pieced together the first address prefix that could pass the hash verification bit by bit from the damaged packet fragments.

"FDSO-2076A"

Jiang Lin's pupils contracted slightly, and he immediately dragged the surviving directory of [PMCU-17] to the side of the screen for comparison.

This number was no small matter.

It had once appeared side by side in the same tier of highest-privilege indexes with top-secret plans of such levels as the heliosphere boundary compression plan, the lunar back-side link disconnection incident, the Mars relay node blockade, and high-dimensional compression backup of civilization data.

Yet in the local directory of the ordinary underground node [OR-MV-073-04], no files starting with FDSO could be found at all.

The role it undertook was more like a humble data post station and Physics isolation interface.

Deep underground in Northeast Seventy-Three Well, something extraordinary was hidden.

That thing was anxiously searching for a container node capable of catching it.

Three days later, howling winds swept across the Wasteland, and next to the wellhead of Northeast Seventy-Three, a temporary isolation shed built of steel plates and composite materials appeared.

Riding an electric motorcycle, Jiang Lin transported the three blue boxes and the first group of storage equipment to this barren land.

During the twelfth expedition, the local maintenance branch he connected was right under this well, which meant that heat didn't need to cross more than seventy kilometers of dangerous Wasteland.

The Outpost only retained remote monitoring permissions, and all Physics interfaces were pressed right next to this well.

The first minimum response model began to be assembled against the background sound of wind and sand beating against the isolation shed.

The No. 1 high-strength liquid storage bag was forcibly stuffed into the old steel frame.

Brand-new magnetic pumps, metal bellows, and two-stage mechanical pressure-relief assemblies were welded into a completely closed loop.

This loop was absolutely isolated in Physics from the wellhead's power supply system and the equipment's cooling system. The controller used a strictly trimmed, verified single-use board card, and the data end only left a single-way transmission optical fiber leading to the external observation terminal.

When applying for the protocol, Jiang Lin deliberately reported each capacity far below the measured value.

"Offline storage declaration: 8TiB"

"Transient heat buffer declaration: 12MJ"

"Continuous heat reception declaration: 4kW"

[Custody Scope Declaration: Test, no external data writes accepted]

As the Enter key was pressed and the request was sent, the originally rigid forty-seven-second countdown reached thirteen before suddenly freezing and halting.

On the terminal inside the isolation shed, a blood-red new instruction popped up.

[THERMAL PULSE: Declare 0.8% of transient capacity]

[TARGET ENERGY: 96kJ]

Without any warning, the new pump inside the isolation shed started on its own, emitting a sharp hiss.

The terminal returned a valve position change record.

Two seconds later, the test pipeline first transmitted a slight vibration, and the inlet temperature immediately rose.

The vanguard of a massive amount of heat was crudely pushed along the underground maintenance network into [OR-MV-073-04], and then, following the test pipeline Jiang Lin had adventurously hooked up in the previous round, it fiercely lunged toward the isolation loop at the wellhead.

The inlet temperature reading of the liquid storage bladder surged from 18.6°C to 19.0°C within two seconds.

The pressure gauge needle violently crossed the green normal working line, and the pressure peak stopped at ninety-two percent of the pressure relief setting value.

The phase change thermal box lit up its first dazzling high-temperature indicator light, and the internal materials frantically absorbed heat.

Ninety-six seconds later, the pulse ended.

The terminal then switched to the storage capacity challenge.

Before declaring, Jiang Lin had already filled the eight-TiB array with incompressible random blocks generated by local noise sources, and submitted the corresponding storage commitment root to the verification end.

The underground node continuously extracted four thousand and ninety-six random addresses, and the controller had to read out the specified data blocks within the prescribed time limit and return them along with the verification path leading to the commitment root for those data blocks.

This time limit was far from enough to temporarily generate the missing shards.

When the last verification path closed, all four thousand and ninety-six challenges were passed.

Immediately afterward, the three verification results were written onto the terminal screen.

[THERMAL CAPACITY: ACCEPTED (Thermal Capacity Proof: Accepted)]

[STORAGE CAPACITY: ACCEPTED (Storage Capacity Proof: Accepted)]

[CUSTODY SCOPE: REJECTED (Custody Scope: Rejected)]

The test node had successfully proven that it had a good appetite, but because it refused to swallow anything substantive in the protocol, that patron deep underground also coldly refused to hand the things over.

Forty-seven seconds later, that initial stubborn request surfaced on the screen like a ghost once again.

Jiang Lin turned off the new pump, wiped the cold sweat from his forehead, and began inspecting the pipelines section by section.

The first round of violent capacity proof had not damaged any hardware components, which meant that the only things truly requiring game theory and modification were that final custody scope protocol.

He unpacked the [Custody Scope] field and selected five already defined permission primitives from the standard dictionary of [OR-MV-073-04].

[Write Mode: Append Only]

[Execution Permission: Forbidden]

[Source Readback: Forbidden]

[Addressing Range: Designated Isolation Zone]

[Capacity Limit Reached: Physical Disconnection]

Viewed individually, these restrictions were all within the permissible range of the protocol, but they had never been pieced together into a custody method before.

Jiang Lin locked the five constraints into a single-use control board, and then had the observation terminal add a human-readable name line to this set of machine permissions.

[Custody Scope: Receive Isolation Replicas Only]

What was truly submitted to the underground node were the preceding five machine constraints, while this line of Chinese was only responsible for display.

If the underground protocol rejected any single one of them, the takeover action would end right here.

If all five were accepted, the external node could only append data to the wellhead storage area physically isolated from the Outpost main system, could not allow the contents within to execute, could not re-read data from the writing end, and could not cross the designated boundaries to look for other storage spaces.

For the next full five-plus months, that request occurring once every forty-seven seconds remained hanging on the right side of the main screen like a tireless pendulum.

Jiang Lin was not idle either.

Three failed drafts of the numerical domain were moved from the sealed document box to the left side of the workbench.

During those fragmented times waiting for the temperature plateau to slowly recede and for the verification array to regularly reboot, there was enough time for him to slowly deduce several columns of brand-new estimation formulas beside the discriminant using a carbon paper board.

The mathematics on the Wasteland had become his tranquilizer to combat the monotony and high pressure.

Along the wellhead slope, he managed to blast through the mountains and rocks to clear out a massive independent area.

Eight high-strength liquid storage bladders fully unfolded like the stomach pouches of a giant beast, each embedded into heavy old metal frameworks painstakingly transported from the Outpost, and deeply buried underground to utilize the permafrost layer to shave off thermal fluctuations caused by day-and-night temperature differences.

The titanium alloy shell of the heat exchanger left from the previous round was re-pickled and pressure-tested for leaks.

The three newly brought sets of expensive pumps, control valves, and pressure protection components were forcibly split into three independent loops that did not share pressure and served as backups for each other.

The phase change thermal boxes were lined up against the thick isolation wall; when the materials on the left began to melt and absorb heat under high temperatures, the right side still retained an absolutely safe and complete margin.

The data end retreated even further and more cautiously than this.

The online read disks, cold-backup solid-state drives, and high-density tape libraries were stored separately in three independent fireproof and explosion-proof compartments.

All verification equipment was hardware-locked to only read that designated external write area.

Every time the optical shutter at the data entrance completed a tiny transmission, it would physically disconnect with a click.

If the connection needed to be restored, no code could do it; Jiang Lin had to put on a protective suit and personally replace the single-use interface board.

On the one hundred and forty-seventh day, he intentionally unplugged the power cable of one pump group.

The massive thermal load instantly surged like rushing water, being intelligently and thrillingly redistributed between the other two loops.

On the one hundred and sixty-second day, he physically smashed a hard drive in the offline cache area.

The verification task instantly stopped in front of the defective shards, throwing frantic errors, but it never crossed the permission boundary he had set to demand even a single byte of supplementary space from the Outpost main storage.

On the one hundred and eightieth day.

The independent node completed the final round of load testing that was perversely rigorous.

The backup pumps, control boards, and hoses sealed five months ago still lay quietly on the shelves; not a single piece had been unsealed in advance to rush progress.

Jiang Lin sat back down in front of the terminal, took a deep breath, and re-submitted the capacity declaration.

[Offline Storage: 96TiB]

[Transient Thermal Buffer: 64MJ]

[Continuous Thermal Reception: 18kW]

[Custody Scope: Receive Isolation Replicas Only]

The screen flickered.

The first verification first applied a continuous thermal load of eighteen kilowatts.

The inlet temperatures of the three loops rose simultaneously, stabilizing in their respective control intervals a few minutes later.

The local state machine switched the pump group combination every forty minutes, applying the thermal load to the three independent loops in turn.

The underground node kept its eyes fixed only on the total reception value, and the eighteen kilowatts did not drop for a single moment.

Six hours later, the continuous thermal reception verification ended.

The terminal then switched to the storage capacity challenge.

The underground node continuously extracted four thousand and ninety-six unpredictable addresses from the ninety-six TiB address space, requesting the storage array to return the corresponding data blocks and verification paths within the prescribed time limit.

The green verification lights lit up row by row to the end of the cabinet, and all random challenges were closed.

The final item was the sixty-four megajoule transient thermal pulse.

The inlet temperatures of the three loops rose sharply one after another, and the alarm sounded through the isolation shed.

From left to right, the phase change thermal boxes, like a lit fuse, quickly entered the plateau region where the materials melted.

The pressure gauge trembled frantically one millimeter below the red safety line, yet firmly held its ground throughout.

Eighty seconds later, the transient thermal pulse abruptly ended.

[THERMAL CAPACITY: ACCEPTED]

[STORAGE CAPACITY: ACCEPTED]

[CUSTODY SCOPE: CONDITIONAL (Custody Scope: Conditional Acceptance)]

For the third item, the underground system had actually compromised, retaining the isolation replica restrictions Jiang Lin had added himself.

Without the slightest hesitation, a tiny manifest of only sixty-four kilobytes pierced into the single-use memory like lightning in an instant.

Within one-tenth of a second after completing the transmission, the entrance optical shutter made a crisp click, and a heavy physical blade gate dropped from above, severing the optical path between this single-use memory and the underground writing end.

Jiang Lin let out a foul breath, pulled out the memory, and turned to walk into another isolation room that had never been connected to [OR-MV-073-04].

The first four pages of the file were densely packed with verification roots, shard numbers, and grim damage status codes.

When the fifth page slowly unfolded on the screen, an incomplete outer ring topology map composed of thirty-two nodes emerged.

Among them, thirty nodes were already in a dead-gray unresponsive state.

[OR-MV-073-04], this Wasteland rest stop, was one of the only two nodes still breathing.

And the other node was located beneath an even deeper abyss of this Wasteland.

[CIVILIZATION_FIRE_ARCHIVE / OUTER_CACHE-07]

[Civilization Fire Archive / External Cache Area-07]

[Current Status: Frozen Preservation]

[Main Communication Link: Disconnected / Lost Contact]

[Local Replica Data: Completeness 0.73 (Critical)]

[Pending Handover Object: Confirmed Qualified Local Custody Node]

At the end of the manifest was attached an underground route map 3.7 kilometers long.

This route, like a desperate blind snake, continuously passed through nine dangerous maintenance areas long marked as severely failed, and its destination stopped at a box without any name.

Jiang Lin expressionlessly overlaid this route onto the old underground map of Northeast Seventy-Three that he possessed.

That heavy isolation door, which G-Explorer-C had barely squeezed through from the bottom gap but had never truly managed to open, lay right across the first section of the rescue route.

He brought up the remote monitoring screen of the machine.

Behind the door, it was still an impenetrable pitch black.

However, just on the third second after the capacity verification passed.

In the darkness to the left of the door frame, a dark red indicator light snapped on with a pop.

Two seconds later, the second one lit up.

Another two seconds later, the third one.

The dark red light, as if endowed with life, extended all the way north along the deep underground passageway.

Lamp after lamp, it re-outlined a road in the ruins that had been buried for who knows how many centuries.

[G-Explorer-C], which was sustaining its life by connecting to the low-power power supply line of the maintenance port, instantly exited sleep mode.

Lowering its damaged fuselage, its six mechanical foot ends pressed firmly against the ground again, its six sets of joint drives powered up sequentially, and a muffled hum emanated from the reducers.

From inside the door frame, the sound of massive gears meshing and metal tearing echoed out.

On the structural scan diagram, that heavy mechanical lock, jammed for who knows how many years, retreated inward by twelve millimeters amidst the roaring noise, paused for a moment, and then retreated another twelve millimeters.

At the upper right corner of the main screen.

That countdown which had tortured Jiang Lin for over half a year and jumped once every forty-seven seconds finally hit zero.

The request that had perhaps repeated here for many years did not appear again.

What appeared was only a new status.

[Local Custody Node Found]

[Waiting for Handover]