152: Chapter 152: 9.9 Yuan with Free Shipping, the Era of a Universal Mirror World Begins!

The next day, 7:00 AM.

The main room of the courtyard house in the Third Ring Road.

Sunlight shone through the floor-to-ceiling windows onto the rosewood desk.

Su Che pushed back his large high-backed chair and stood up. The encrypted terminal screen on the desk was still lit, displaying a local stress model for the armor of the 100,000-ton Luan Niao Mothership.

He walked out of the study, crossed the corridor, and arrived at the dining room.

Lin Waner was wearing light gray loungewear and was placing two white porcelain bowls onto the mahogany dining table.

Inside the bowls was thick, cooked millet porridge. Beside them were two small dishes of side dishes: one with cold dressed shredded kelp, and the other with sliced spiced beef.

Su Che pulled out a chair and sat down, picking up his chopsticks to take a slice of beef and put it in his mouth.

The meat was firm, with a rich spiced aroma.

"I'm not going to Pangu Laboratory this morning." Su Che swallowed the beef and picked up his bowl to take a sip of porridge.

The porcelain spoon in Lin Waner's hand paused.

She looked at Su Che. For some time now, the word "rest" had rarely appeared in his schedule.

"The construction of the underlying engine will take three days, and Dean Liu and his team are grinding through the progress." Su Che put down his chopsticks. "We can't intervene during this time. After we finish eating, I'll take you somewhere."

Lin Waner nodded and lowered her head to continue drinking her porridge.

8:10 AM.

A bulletproof Hongqi SUV drove out of the alley.

There were no police cars escorting it, but undercover vehicles from the Ministry of State Security were scattered three blocks away, accompanying it in sync.

Qin Lan sat in the driver's seat, her hands steadily gripping the steering wheel.

The car did not head toward the western suburbs but instead drove directly onto the highway heading north.

9:30 AM.

The car drove into a military restricted area deep in the Yanshan Mountains.

Along the way, they passed four checkpoints manned by armed soldiers.

The final checkpoint was set between two leveled mountains, with heavy camouflage netting covering the entire valley.

The Hongqi drove into an underground tunnel; the tunnel sloped downward, lit by dim, yellow lights.

Ten minutes later, the car stopped in a massive underground parking lot.

Su Che pushed open the car door and stepped out, with Lin Waner following closely behind, carrying an insulated food container in her hand.

Qin Lan remained in the car to keep watch.

The two walked up to a heavy, explosion-proof isolation door.

Su Che stood still as an infrared beam shot out from the device on the wall, scanning his face.

"Identity confirmed: Su Che; Authorization: Highest." A mechanical electronic voice sounded, and the isolation door slid open to the sides.

Behind the door was a long white corridor, the air filled with the smell of high-concentration disinfectant.

This was Longmai Base, the most core top-secret underground facility of the Dragon Kingdom.

Su Che led Lin Waner to the door of the special care ward at the end of the corridor and pushed it open.

The ward was large and had no windows.

In the center stood an extremely advanced medical life-support pod.

Various pipes and cables of different thicknesses were connected to the pod, and the monitors beside it displayed complex physiological data jumping on the screen.

Inside the medical pod lay an old man with a full head of white hair.

Su Changshan.

A military engineer for the top-secret "Kunlun Alloy" project at Longmai Base, and Su Che's grandfather.

Lin Waner softened her footsteps as she walked over and gently placed the insulated container on the metal bedside table.

She looked at the old man inside the pod; this was her first time seeing Su Che's grandfather face-to-face.

Su Che walked to the other side of the medical pod.

He looked down at the brainwave curve on the screen; the curve was extremely flat, indicating a state of deep hibernation.

"He has lost a lot of weight." Su Che said.

Before, when he first arrived in the capital, his grandfather had spoken to him on the phone once.

When developing the Brain-Computer Interface, Su Che had briefly communicated with his grandfather through a direct neural link.

Later, at the Shennong Base, his grandfather had briefly woken up once, given a few instructions over a remote call, and then lapsed back into a coma.

Through the transparent pod lid, Lin Waner looked at the old man's furrowed face.

"Grandfather will wake up." Lin Waner said softly.

Su Che placed his palm against the cold pod lid.

Fifteen years ago, Su Changshan left behind the space coordinates for the Lagrange L2 point. Those coordinates pointed to the edge of the Solar System, toward the observers of a higher-dimensional civilization.

Su Changshan had spent his entire life grinding away at Longmai Base, all to secure a glimmer of hope for the Dragon Kingdom.

"The guests from the sky have already started knocking on the door." Su Che looked at his grandfather's tightly closed eyes. "The storm in Xiang Province was just a probe. Sooner or later, I will pilot the luan bird to those coordinates you left behind to see clearly."

He withdrew his hand.

The two stayed quietly in the ward for half an hour, without unnecessary words, just keeping him company.

10:45 AM.

Su Che led Lin Waner out of the special care ward, and the explosion-proof isolation door closed behind them.

1:00 PM.

B2 level of Pangu Laboratory.

The air in the hall seemed a bit thick. Liu Huaqiang and fourteen researchers were grinding away at the control console.

On the main screen, a 3D wireframe model of the Earth was slowly rotating, with a blue progress bar showing 35%.

Su Che walked into the hall, pulled over a swivel chair, and sat down in front of the main console.

Liu Huaqiang turned his head; his eye sockets were dark, and his black-rimmed glasses were covered in fingerprints.

"Su Che, the surrounding terrain of Pangu Laboratory has been fully mapped."

He pointed at the screen. "The Yiren AI Core is currently pulling global geographic survey data, and the physics engine's gravitational constants and fluid dynamics formulas have all been nested."

Su Che looked at the data stream on the screen and nodded. "Maintain the progress."

Jiang Yingxue walked in from the side door, her military boots clicking against the alloy floor.

She was holding a tactical tablet, walked to Su Che's side, and slapped the tablet onto the desk.

"Capital from Wall Street has moved." Jiang Yingxue pulled out a chair and sat down. "The seven largest tech giants in Silicon Valley have jointly formed the 'Oasis' consortium. They have booked Madison Square Garden in New York and are preparing to hold a global press conference tomorrow."

Su Che took the tablet and swiped his fingers across the screen.

"They are going to release a VR headset device called 'Oasis-X'." Jiang Yingxue pointed to a leaked photo on the tablet. "It's priced at $300. They intend to use a price war to seize the underlying gateway to the next generation of the internet, binding the virtual assets and social relationships of global netizens to the servers of the Eagle Sauce."

Su Che looked at the leaked photo: a bulky black headset with thick data cables.

"$300?" Su Che pushed the tablet back. "Too expensive."

He pulled over the keyboard, and the familiar mechanical voice in his mind sounded right on time.

[Ding! Host's desire for civilian technology exchange detected, side quest triggered!]

[Mission Name: Dimensional Reduction Strike, Starting with a Pair of Glasses!]

[Mission Content: Silicon Valley attempts to monopolize the virtual reality gateway. Please develop a civilian Mirror World consumer-grade terminal to completely shatter the 'Oasis' myth!]

[Mission Reward: 6000 Skill Points, unlock exchange permissions for consumer-grade reality overlay technology, lightweight AR optical technology, and civilian real-time data mapping technology. Requires 3000 exchange points.]

[Current accumulated Skill Points of the Host: 95,000 points. Exchange?]

Su Che looked at the numbers at the bottom of the panel.

"Exchange."

[Ding! 3000 Skill Points consumed, related core technologies exchanged.]

[Current accumulated Skill Points of the Host: 92,000 points.]

[System Prompt: Supporting auxiliary technologies/blueprints/schemes have not been exchanged. Includes: Consumer-grade AR glasses blueprints (500 exchange points), civilian Mirror World data compression algorithm (300 exchange points), low-power display module design (200 exchange points). Total exchange points: 1000.]

"Exchange all."

[Ding! 1000 Skill Points consumed.]

[Current accumulated Skill Points of the Host: 91,000 points.]

Massive civilian hardware design schemes flooded into his conscious space.

Su Che opened his eyes and created a new document on the terminal, naming it "Star Sea - Holographic Glasses."

He didn't need bulky headsets, didn't need thick data cables, and certainly didn't need an external power source.

He was going to teach the capitalists of Silicon Valley a lesson in the consumer market.

"Qin Lan." Su Che called out without lifting his head.

Qin Lan walked over quickly.

"Go to the logistics supply warehouse and find me a pair of ordinary myopia glasses frames, the cheaper the better." Su Che's fingers tapped on the keyboard. "Also, get a few micro OLED screen components, basic optical lenses, a civilian Bluetooth communication module, and the most common low-power microcontroller on the market."

Qin Lan noted down the list and turned to leave.

Jiang Yingxue leaned back in her chair, watching Su Che dragging circuit diagrams all over the screen.

"Are you hand-crafting a VR device?" Jiang Yingxue asked.

"Not VR, but AR holographic overlay." Su Che dragged the design for the low-power display module into the main framework. "I want to turn the gateway to the Mirror World into a pair of ordinary black-rimmed glasses, weighing less than 30 grams, powered by human bioelectricity and ambient light."

Twenty minutes later, Qin Lan returned carrying a black plastic bag and dumped the parts inside onto the console.

Su Che picked up the black plastic frames and manually snapped off the two myopia lenses, throwing them into the trash can.

He walked to the precision micro-carving machine at the back of the B2 level.

He cut off the redundant ribbon cables from the edges of the micro OLED screens and, using lightweight AR optical technology, pressed the screens together with the basic optical lenses to form two extremely thin, transparent display films.

Returning to the console, Su Che used the Pangu Laboratory's micro-welding probe to solder the civilian Bluetooth module and the microcontroller inside the temple arms of the frames.

He called up the civilian Mirror World data compression algorithm he had just exchanged and burned it directly into the microcontroller via a data cable.

The entire process took less than two hours.

Su Che unplugged the data cable and picked up the ordinary-looking black-rimmed glasses.

He handed the glasses to Jiang Yingxue.

"Put them on."

Jiang Yingxue took the glasses and perched them on the bridge of her nose.

The moment she opened her eyes, her body jerked backward, and her hands instinctively grabbed the edge of the table.

In her field of vision, the originally cluttered B2 level hall had completely changed.

The physical reality still existed, but in the air, countless semi-transparent data panels were floating.

The operational status, temperature, and energy consumption of every device were all directly overlaid on top of the equipment as visualized 3D charts.

She turned her head to look at Su Che.

Above Su Che's head floated a concise identity identifier, with a virtual Yiren AI assistant projection beside it.

There was no lag, no sense of dizziness.

Reality and the digital world were perfectly fused within this 30-gram pair of plastic glasses.

Jiang Yingxue took off the glasses and stared at the plastic frames in her hand.

"What is the cost of this thing?" Jiang Yingxue asked.

Su Che took the glasses and tossed them onto the table.

"The material cost is less than four yuan." Su Che pulled over the keyboard and packed and encrypted the full set of mass-production blueprints and algorithm packages. "There is no technical barrier. No lithography machine is needed. Find any electronics factory in the south; as long as they have an injection molding machine and a pick-and-place machine, they can manufacture it."

He sent the encrypted files to Jiang Yingxue's terminal.

"Send the blueprints to the electronics manufacturing enterprises under the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission. Prepare an initial stock of 50 million pairs, priced at 9.9 yuan with free shipping. At the same time the Silicon Valley press conference is held the day after tomorrow, we will launch it globally."

Jiang Yingxue looked at the files received on her terminal and looked up at Su Che.

9.9 yuan with free shipping—selling overseas plus shipping costs would definitely mean a loss.

But so what!

What mattered was to take those Silicon Valley tech giants who had poured tens of billions of dollars into R&D and directly drown them in the sewer.

"They want to build hegemony in the virtual world." Su Che picked up the water glass beside him and took a sip. "I'm going to flip the table and the bowls along with them."

Liu Huaqiang had heard the entire process from the side; he pushed up his black-rimmed glasses and continued to bury his head in typing the code for the underlying engine.

Su Che crossed his legs, feeling rarely at ease.

Once the underlying construction of the Mirror World was complete.

These 50 million pairs of 9.9-yuan glasses would become the channel for global netizens to flood into the Mirror World.

The massive amount of user emotional value would be converted into countless Skill Points, filling up the system's Skill Point panel.

The space Dry Dock for the 100,000-ton interstellar mothership would depend on this wave of leeks.