106: Chapter 106 The Final Verdict

Su Bai pushed open the heavy psychokinetic shielding door. Cold air mixed with the scent of paper and trace amounts of ozone rushed to meet him, and dozens of rows of high-density spirit-inscribed bookshelves stretched from the floor all the way to the ceiling. He followed the index to the special materials section, then came to a stop.

Someone was already occupying the spot he was looking for.

A young woman was crouching between the bookshelves, wearing the white robes of a Temple researcher. Her hair was casually tied back with a card-making pen, with a few stray strands falling by her ears. Two heavy dark circles hung beneath her eyes, and her lips moved slightly, as if she were talking to herself. Spread out on the floor in front of her were at least twenty Space Folding blueprints, each with a number circled in red in the bottom right corner.

Su Bai glanced at them—the highest one was forty-seven percent. Energy utilization rate.

"Not right... still not right..." She bit her lip, her fingers tracing rapidly over the blueprints. "If I remove this node after the seventh layer of folding... the conductivity goes up, but the stability will collapse..."

Su Bai crouched down and took a look at the blueprint on top. On the fourth layer circuit of the Space Folding framework, the material purification process was written as the standard three-stage method—grinding, sieving, and magical infusion. The textbook process. But this process had a fatal flaw: the grinding stage produced micron-level metal debris residue, and the residual debris would block the microscopic nodes of the circuit during magical infusion. In other words, the material was impure.

"The blockage in your fourth-layer circuit nodes isn't a problem with the Space Folding," Su Bai said. "It's because the grinding medium is too coarse during purification. Switch to cyclonic fluid separation and grind to the nanoscale before infusion; the energy utilization rate will at least double."

The woman's fingers stopped in mid-air. She raised her head, her bloodshot eyes staring straight at Su Bai. "What did you just say?"

"Cyclonic fluid separation, nanoscale."

"Nanoscale? The standard three-stage method's grinding precision can only reach the micron level—the entire Temple only has three pieces of equipment for nanoscale, and the reservation schedule is already booked two months out—"

"No equipment needed." Su Bai stood up and walked to the card-making bench nearby. On the bench sat a set of basic forging tools. A forging hammer, a small sample of formless spirit sand, and a few bottles of common grinding fluid. He picked up the forging hammer.

"What are you doing—that's my sample—" Su Bai ignored her, and the forging hammer fell.

Clang! With the first strike, the formless spirit sand sample shattered into uniform fine grains beneath the hammer face, the sound crisp, like jade striking jade.

Clang! With the second strike, the fine grains were further pulverized, and he used the rebound force of the hammer face to turn the particles over.

Clang! With the third strike, the pulverized sand grains began to emit an extremely faint silver fluorescence—the signal that impurities were being physically stripped away.

Clang! With the fourth strike, the fluorescence stabilized, and the diameter of all the sand grains dropped to a level indistinguishable to the naked eye.

Clang! The fifth strike. He withdrew the hammer.

The entire forging bench was silent. That piece of formless spirit sand sample, originally only the size of a fingernail, had turned into an extremely thin, evenly spread layer of silver fine powder. Every grain of powder was emitting a stable fluorescence; none were too large, none were too dim.

He placed the forging hammer back in its original position. "One hundred percent purity. Test it."

The woman's hands were trembling. She picked up a Mental Power probe and carefully touched it to the surface of the powder. The magic reading on the probe began to jump—thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety-two, ninety-seven, one hundred.

The probe emitted a short, sharp beep. [Sample Purity: 100.00%] [Impurity Residue: Not Detected]

She stared at that line of text for a full five seconds. Then she raised her head, the confusion gone from her bloodshot eyes. In its place was a familiar expression that Su Bai had seen many times on Lin Weiwei's face—the expression of an ant placed in front of a world map.

"Who—who are you?"

"Su Bai, a disciple of Li Qingyue."

"You're that person who makes magical girl card—?" She opened her mouth, the expression on her face jumping in an instant from shock to a more subtle state. "Wait, that forging technique you just used—what force did you use during the fourth strike? Why were the impurities stripped away only at that stage? In the conventional process, the stage for stripping impurities is the second grinding phase—"

"Because the specific surface area of nanoscale particles is too large," Su Bai said. "If you strip them a strike earlier, the particles will re-aggregate. You have to strip them at the exact strike where the particle size crosses the nanoscale threshold; only then will the van der Waals force between the impurities and the main material drop to its minimum."

She was silent for about three seconds. Then she sprang up from the floor.

"My name is Researcher Yun Zhi. I am a senior researcher at the Temple's Core Materials Research Institute. My main focus is energy loss control in Space Folding circuits. I've been stuck on this project for several months—that cyclonic fluid separation you mentioned, and the nanoscale grinding threshold—could you demonstrate it again!"

That last sentence was no longer a request; it was a kind of impatience bordering on piety.

Kyubey poked its head out from Su Bai's shoulder. "Su Bai. Her research project shares a common base material requirement with your Substitute Module. The nanoscale purification precision of formless spirit sand is exactly the parameter you need."

"I know."

"So you are helping yourself while helping her."

"This is called a win-win cooperation."

"It could also be called taking advantage of the situation."

"Shut up."

"Okay."

Researcher Yun Zhi had already moved a thick stack of documents from the experimental bench. The dark circles were still heavy, but the light in her eyes no longer looked like that of someone who hadn't slept for days. She sat down at the card-making bench and opened her notebook with the posture of a good student attending their first class.

"Su Bai—Junior Brother Su? Student Su? Master Su—how should I address you?"

"Just call me by my name."

"Okay Su Bai! That van der Waals force you mentioned—does a similar intermolecular force also exist in the node gaps within the Space Folding circuit? If I adjust the angle of the seventh layer of folding from forty-five degrees to—"

"Thirty-seven degrees. Forty-five degrees will cause stress concentration on nanoscale materials."

"Thirty-seven degrees—does the calculation model for conductivity need to change as well—"

"The basic formula doesn't need to change. But the coupling coefficient cannot use the standard value." Su Bai pulled a blank sheet of scrap paper from her desk and casually wrote down a few lines of equations. "The standard value is 3.0. The internal surface area of nanoscale materials increases by at least two orders of magnitude, so the actual coupling coefficient will jump to about 9.7. Substitute this number and recalculate the expansion efficiency."

Researcher Yun Zhi took the scrap paper, her gaze scanning from the first line of equations to the last, her pupils dilating line by line.

"9.7—then if I design it using this parameter from the very beginning—"

"The energy utilization rate of your blueprint wouldn't be forty-seven percent."

"What would it be?"

Su Bai handed her the card-making pen. Researcher Yun Zhi took the pen, her fingers moving rapidly across the paper, numbers jumping out line after line. The pen tip moved faster and faster, then stopped. The tip poked into the paper, and the ink bled out into a small spot.

"...Ninety-one percent."

Her voice was so soft it was almost inaudible.