Chapter 356 - 294: This Is a Response 60 Years Late

Chapter 356: Chapter 294: This Is a Response 60 Years Late

Li Dong hung up the phone.

He then checked the message he’d just received.

The red notification dot was from the Cyan Dragon Study Group, but oddly, no one had posted anything.

At the very bottom of the chat log, there was only a line of small text and a red packet.

[Andrei Nikolaevich Tikhonov retracted a message]

[Gikhmanov’s Exclusive Red Packet]

Li Dong blinked.

’Gikhmanov’s red packet?’

’What’s that supposed to mean?’

His entire phone call with Teacher E just now had been about the appendix in Gikhmanov’s 1963 paper.

’And now a red packet from him suddenly appears???’

In fact, Li Dong had suspected something like this for a while.

Xiaohai could see his open lecture.

And now, Gikhmanov had listened in on his entire phone call with Teacher E.

’These people aren’t just ’living’ in the chat group.’

’They can see what I’m doing, and they even give me a push in the right direction every now and then.’

And Li Dong actually found this feeling of being guided along reassuring.

’You can’t go wrong following the lead of these titans.’

He didn’t hesitate and tapped open the red packet.

[You have received a token of gratitude from Andrei Nikolaevich Tikhonov]

[Attribute Acquired: Logic +0.1 (Permanent)]

[Description: A response, sixty years overdue.]

[One late night in 1963, a veteran Soviet scholar put down his pen at his desk.]

[At the end of the draft, he sketched out a framework and wrote a short note beside it.]

["Finer work ought to be left to posterity." He did not say this out loud.]

[He tucked it away past the main body of the text, at the very end of the appendix.]

[He must have thought that someday, a pair of eyes would linger upon it.]

[But for sixty years, no one did.]

[But you... you stopped.]

[On his behalf, you took the words buried by time and gave them a voice once more.]

[From now on, the frameworks scattered in the forgotten corners of history, the key insights glossed over by their own authors, will surface in your mind with greater clarity.]

Li Dong stared at the description for a long time.

He could clearly feel his already seamless chains of logic forging an even deeper, more complete circuit.

He subconsciously opened his attribute panel.

[Core Attributes]

Concentration: 0.4

Logic: 0.5

Memory: 0.6 (Memory Palace)

His Logic stat had reached 0.5.

But it seemed no new Derived Skills had appeared.

This confirmed his earlier judgment: a new Derived Skill would only appear at 0.6.

Still, Li Dong wasn’t disappointed.

’You have to eat a meal one bite at a time. No sense in rushing things.’

...

「The next morning.」

Li Dong pushed open the door to the North Building of the School of Chemistry. The room was much livelier than on his last visit.

In front of the main console, Wu Kai and Lu Mingyuan were huddled together, staring at a graph that had just appeared on the screen.

Lu Mingyuan had just taken the high-speed rail back from Shanghai the previous night. He hadn’t even gone home, heading straight for the lab instead.

He heard the door and looked up.

"Li Dong, perfect timing."

Li Dong walked over.

"Teacher Lu, you’re back."

"What’s the word from Huaxuan?"

Lu Mingyuan smiled.

"President Lin went to supervise the site himself for three days."

"The small-scale production line is already set up."

"All the specs on the process sheet are running according to our standards."

"The needle issue is resolved."

Wu Kai added from the side, speaking to Li Dong.

"Take a look at the process sheet Old Lu sent back last night when you get a chance."

Li Dong nodded, pleased.

Just then, the sound of more than one person’s footsteps came from outside the door.

Su Yanqing pushed the door open, carrying a large box filled with several vacuum gauges that needed to be recalibrated after the chamber upgrade.

He looked up, saw Li Dong, and paused for a moment.

"East God."

Li Dong nodded to him.

"Teacher Su."

Su Yanqing placed the box on the large table and glanced at Lu Mingyuan.

"Professor Lu, I’m going to start by dismantling the interface on the chamber."

"After the last upgrade, the chamfer on the inner ring of that one flange wasn’t clean. It’s creating some scattering when the light spot passes over it."

"I’m going to grind it down and reinstall it."

Lu Mingyuan nodded.

"Okay, your call."

Su Yanqing said no more, turning and disappearing behind the equipment.

A moment later, Zhang Yan returned as well.

She wore a backpack and had just finished changing the oil for a set of vacuum pumps, her hands still slick with a bit of it.

Seeing Li Dong in the room, she smiled and nodded to Wu Kai and Lu Mingyuan.

"Teacher, Teacher Lu, East God."

"What brings you here today, East God?"

Li Dong smiled back at her.

"Just came to see how things are going."

Zhang Yan didn’t press the issue. She walked over, glanced at the calibration spectrum on the screen, and frowned slightly. Without a word, she fished a USB drive from her bag and plugged it into the main console.

"Teacher Lu, I re-sorted the data stream from the third floor again last night."

"The index in the previous version had a few empty cells under the polarization section, which were getting dropped during batch processing."

"I’ve filled them in now."

Lu Mingyuan nodded.

"Alright, I’ll merge it into the main branch in a bit."

The last one to arrive was Guo Han.

He had previously emailed Wu Kai to say he’d found an advisor in another group and would be transitioning there for the time being.

Today, as he pushed the door open, he was cradling a dual-channel lock-in amplifier borrowed from the group next door.

Seeing Wu Kai and Lu Mingyuan in the room, Guo Han’s steps faltered noticeably.