novelraw Chapter 6 The Mystery That Only Gets Deeper
Chapter 6 The Mystery That Only Gets Deeper
Zuo Cheng stood in the lobby of the School of Telecommunications, staring at the line of text on the light screen for a full ten seconds.
[Target: Unknown Personnel B]
Mastering Technology: Nanoscale Neural Interface Design (Expert Level)
[Copying costs: 4 points]
Four points, nearly half of his current points. Once spent, he'll only have five left, which will be difficult to recover in the short term.
But this technology is too crucial.
Nanoscale neural interface—the core technology of the patch on his head. If we can understand its design principles, we might be able to figure out how the system is activated.
Zuo Cheng took a deep breath and mentally clicked "copy".
Four points vanished instantly, and a dense stream of information surged into his brain—more intense than ever before. He instinctively grabbed the pillar beside him, beads of sweat forming on his forehead.
The amount of knowledge possessed by an "expert" is no joke.
The information flow lasted for nearly thirty seconds before subsiding. Zuo Cheng slowly loosened his grip on the pillar, closed his eyes, and processed what had flooded in.
The complete design blueprints of the NX-07 nanopatch unfolded in my mind—the molecular structure of each layer of material, the topology of the neural signal acquisition circuit, the bio-coupling mechanism between the patch and the skull surface, the data encoding and wireless transmission protocol stack… everything was crystal clear, down to every single parameter.
Zuo Cheng mentally reviewed the entire design three times over.
Then he frowned.
wrong.
This patch is essentially a sophisticated data collector—it collects neural signals, encodes them, stores them, and periodically transmits them back to Star Technology's servers. Its design is extremely ingenious, and its manufacturing process far surpasses any similar product currently publicly available on BlueStar, yet its functionality is remarkably simple.
Acquire. Encode. Store. Transmit back.
It lacks an AI module, independent computing power, and any mechanism to "generate" anything. More importantly, this patch lacks the ability to write data back into the brain. It can only "read," not "write."
But what about the system?
The system projects light screens into his consciousness, instills knowledge, and generates tasks—all of these are acts of "writing" information into the brain. How could hardware that can only read but not write possibly do all this?
Zuo Cheng opened his eyes and looked at the people from Xingchen Technology in the hall. They were exchanging pleasantries with several teachers from the School of Telecommunications, completely unaware of the student standing in the corner.
The system was not created by patching.
This conclusion is clear and certain. He now possesses the same level of professional knowledge as the core R&D personnel at Star Technology; if the system uses patch functionality, there's no way he wouldn't be able to tell.
Where did that system come from?
Did the implant trigger something latent in his brain during the implantation process? Or was it due to the time travel itself, with the implant merely a coincidental point in time?
Zuo Cheng couldn't understand it.
But he quickly suppressed the thought. There was no point in dwelling on things he couldn't understand. Right now, he was certain of two things: first, the system was real and genuinely helping him become stronger; second, Star Technology's surface mount technology far surpassed publicly available levels, and the company was more sophisticated than he had imagined.
Both of these issues deserve continued attention, but they are not problems to be solved today.
The problem we need to solve today is that 10,000 yuan order from Studio 402.
[The technology radar has entered its 72-hour cooling phase.]
Current points: 5
8 PM, Room 402.
Four people surrounded Chen Hao's laptop, on which was a simulation system technical document sent by the laboratory of the School of Materials Science and Engineering.
"I roughly understand the problem," Zuo Cheng said, pointing to the system architecture diagram on the screen. "Their simulation platform has three modules—signal acquisition, data processing, and result output. The interface protocols between the acquisition module and the processing module are incompatible, so the data is transmitted in a distorted format, and naturally, all the subsequent outputs are wrong."
"Will it be difficult to fix?" Liu Wei asked, rubbing his hands together.
"Rewriting the interface protocol is a lot of work, but there aren't any major technical difficulties." Zuo Cheng looked at Chen Hao. "Haozi, you're more familiar with communication protocols than I am. You'll lead the interface rewriting, and I'll be responsible for optimizing the signal acquisition module—it's something I can easily do, so why not?"
Chen Hao nodded: "Okay, I'll break down the existing API code tonight."
Zhang Lei raised his hand: "What would Liu Wei and I do?"
"You two will be in charge of testing," Zuo Cheng said. "Every time you change a piece of code, you two immediately run data to verify it. I don't want the client to reject it after delivery."
With clear division of labor, the four people each took their assigned positions.
For the next three days, dormitory 402 practically became a small operations room. Chen Hao's keyboard clattered from morning till night, Zuo Cheng reconstructed the entire data preprocessing workflow in the signal acquisition module, and Zhang Lei and Liu Wei took turns running test data, shouting out the results after each set was completed.
There were two mishaps in the middle.
The first problem was that Chen Hao's rewritten interface protocol would lose packets in high-concurrency scenarios. Zuo Cheng spent half an hour helping him locate the problem as a buffer overflow, which was solved by changing a single parameter.
The second one was even more tricky—the raw data provided by the client contained a batch of outliers, not noise, but systematic biases caused by hardware drift in the acquisition equipment itself. This wasn't mentioned at all in the documentation; Zuo Cheng discovered it while running the data.
"If we don't handle these outliers, the simulation results will never match." Zuo Cheng frowned and thought for a moment. "I'll write an adaptive calibration algorithm to allow the system to automatically identify and correct hardware drift during runtime."
"Isn't this beyond their needs?" Liu Wei asked. "They only paid us ten thousand yuan to fix the interface."
"We've fixed it, but if the simulation results are still off, the client's first suspicion will be that we fixed it incorrectly." Zuo Cheng shook his head. "Let's fix the root cause now, so we can avoid a lot of trouble later."
He finished writing the calibration algorithm that night. The code wasn't long, but the logic was ingenious. After reading it, Chen Hao was stunned for a long time, then pushed up his glasses and said, "Brother Cheng, are you sure you studied electrical engineering and not computer science?"
On the fourth day, the project was delivered.
The head of that lab in the School of Materials Science and Engineering was Sun Yan, an associate professor in his early thirties who was so exhausted by his research project that he was practically bald. When he got the repaired simulation system, he immediately ran a set of data, and the moment he saw the output, he jumped up from his chair.
"The data matches! It all matches!" He stared wide-eyed, checking repeatedly. "No—it's even better than the previous best result; the error is 40% lower! How did you do that?"
"I discovered a hardware drift issue and added a calibration module as a quick fix," Zuo Cheng said.
Sun Yan stared at him for several seconds, as if he were looking at an alien.
"Could you grant our lab a long-term license to use this calibration algorithm? Fees will be charged separately."
Zuo Cheng and Chen Hao exchanged a glance.
"Sure. As for the licensing fee, just name your price; anything reasonable will do."
In the end, Sun Yan paid an additional 8,000 yuan for the algorithm licensing fee. Adding this to the original 10,000 yuan, the total revenue from this deal was 18,000 yuan.
When the four of them came out of the materials science lab, Liu Wei's legs were practically floating: "Eighteen thousand... that's four thousand five each! Cheng-ge, are you a reincarnation of the God of Wealth?"
"Don't get too excited yet." Zuo Cheng put his phone in his pocket. "If this deal goes well, word will spread. There will only be more and more orders, but the work will get harder and harder. Sooner or later, the four of us won't be enough."
Zhang Lei slapped his thigh: "Then let's recruit people! Huazhong University of Science and Technology has so many top-notch engineering students, let's poach a few."
"No rush, let's focus on these first orders and establish a good reputation."
Zuo Cheng's mind was already wandering further ahead. Studio 402 currently provides campus-level technical services, with limited profits and a low ceiling. But if they could expand their business beyond the campus—to enterprise-level technical consulting and product prototype development—that would be a market of a completely different scale.
He needs more technological reserves and more blades.
On the system panel, the outline of the fourth leaf has emerged—"Embedded System Design," with gray veins faintly visible, as if waiting for the next task to illuminate it.
Back in his dorm, Zuo Cheng turned on his phone and found an unread message.
It was sent by Yu Ying at 2 PM.
"Zuo Cheng, I have some news for you—Professor Lin mentioned your name at the college's teaching and research meeting today, saying your channel modeling scheme has the potential to win a provincial-level excellent graduation thesis award. Also, the college has a collaborative project selection next week with Lanwan Communications, and Professor Lin recommended you to participate in the selection and defense. You should know Lanwan Communications, right? They're one of the top five telecommunications operators in China."
Zuo Cheng stared at the message, his finger hovering over the screen for two seconds.
Blue Bay Communications.
In his previous life, he applied to this company after graduation, but failed the written test.
And now, this company has proactively offered him a collaborative project.
He replied to Yu Ying with two words: "Received."
Then I turned off my phone and looked out the window.
The campus lights twinkled under the night sky, while the distant city skyline blurred into a dark golden ribbon of light.
The road is opening up step by step.