Hearing Old Man Jiang’s quote, the man did not suspect him of trying to pull some “broken-window effect” trick. He paid up readily. Then he watched as Old Man Jiang rummaged through a pile of odds and ends, dug out a scrap motor, dismantled its casing, and took out several gears of different sizes. He picked up a file and a grinding wheel, adjusted their dimensions a little, smeared on some grease, and fitted them in. They actually meshed perfectly!
With a few swift motions, Old Man Jiang reassembled the prosthetic. To the man, who had already begun moving the artificial limb, he said,
“I marked all the gears. Use it without worry. If there’s a problem, come find me again!”
“I still trust Doctor Jiang’s craftsmanship.” After a couple of polite words, the man hurried off, apparently in a rush to get back to work. Watching him stride away, Feng Xue finally sidled up to Old Man Jiang and asked in a low voice,
“Doctor Jiang, are motor gears like that really reliable?”
“Heh! Try it yourself and you’ll know, won’t you?” Hearing Feng Xue’s question, Old Man Jiang casually picked out a few parts from the trash heap and, right there on the spot, cobbled together a similar prosthetic structure for Feng Xue, leaving only five empty gear slots. His meaning was obvious.
Feng Xue frowned, but still copied Doctor Jiang’s earlier method, selecting several suitable gears from a heap of scrap motors. Yet he soon discovered that the gears varied in material, precision, and degree of wear. Once installed, they either jammed solid or loosened and slipped. When he finally managed to grind one to a usable size, it turned twice and then was directly scrapped.
“I told you motor gears weren’t strong enough, didn’t I?” After trying several times, Feng Xue finally shook his head. According to the data in his database, the strength of these motor gears hovered around d10 at best, nowhere near the load-bearing standard for industrial prosthetics.
Old Man Jiang glanced at him and said nothing. He simply dismantled the failed work, picked up a few gears from the ones Feng Xue had rejected, gave them a quick grind, and the thing actually started moving at once!
Feng Xue’s eyes widened. He took the component, removed the gears again, checked them from beginning to end, then put them back in. Damn it, there really was nothing wrong.
But then he found a few more scrap motors, took apart gears of the exact same type, measured them again and again with calipers, confirmed that there was not the slightest difference, and only then fitted them in. This time, it did move, but after just a couple of turns, the gears shattered.
Now Feng Xue fell silent. When it came to technical matters, if you couldn’t do it, you had to admit it.
Holding in a breath, he waited quietly. Soon, another chance to practice arrived.
This time, the visitor was a poor man who wanted an artificial limb for heavy manual labor. His budget was only 100 points. That amount was barely enough to cover the material cost of a one-star prosthetic; installing one would mean losing the labor fee. Wanting a two-star prosthetic was, to some extent, wishful thinking.
This was different from Feng Xue’s cheap six-hundred-yuan model. Feng Xue had a flesh-type ability and was aiming to restore his physical body; as long as it could satisfy the corresponding indicators of a body on the information level, nothing else mattered. But this man intended to do heavy manual labor. Even if he possessed flesh source energy, there was no way he could assimilate it.
Old Man Jiang, however, did not care about any of that. He accepted the deposit, turned, and burrowed into the workshop. Using coils dismantled from an engine, he manually wound an electromagnetic actuator. Then he used the kind of piezoelectric ceramic pieces found in disposable lighters to cobble together a tactile sensing system. Finally, he wrapped it in a layer of artificial skin boiled down from reducing agent and discarded Holy Grails. Including the major expenses—the hydraulic rod and control components—the cost was actually only 70 points!
Although it looked like scrap picked out of a junkyard, once it was connected to the testing equipment, good grief, its benchmark score nearly reached three-star level!
Feng Xue’s scalp went numb from watching this whole display, but he still tried to imitate it. They were clearly the same procedures, the same materials, yet what he produced was a tragic mess. Forget piezoelectric touch sensing—even the electromagnetic actuator’s output was two whole grades lower!
But why?
If someone said his coils were not wound tightly enough or evenly enough, or that there was a problem with the arrangement of the piezoelectric ceramic particles, he would accept it. But the issue was that he had replicated almost every operation of the old man’s one-to-one. In fact, because of the movement precision provided by the Phantom Dragon Soul chip, he was confident his coils were wound even more neatly than the old man’s. Yet the things he made still showed such a huge gap. It was hard for him not to suspect that he had overlooked something.
Such things happened seven or eight times in a single short day. By the time dusk descended, Feng Xue had completely lost the ambition he had possessed that morning to show off his skills. The only thing left in his mind was a repeated “why.”
Watching Feng Xue sink into self-doubt over there, Old Man Jiang slowly took a sip of “Mantianxing,” then said,
“I told you long ago, you wanted to run before you’d learned how to walk. Technique isn’t some rigid formula. It’s perceptive. It requires imagination. Even with the same coil, there will be subtle deviations, especially with junkyard-scavenged stuff like this. Deformation and damage are common, and even the tiniest difference, once accumulated, will magnify that sense of discord.
“In your eyes, they’re two identical copper wires. But the moment I touch them, I know where one has deformed from being stretched, and where another has lost material from being scraped. Why don’t I use a machine when I wind coils? Because only by passing them through my hands can I know how to compensate for the defects in the copper wire through the density and tension of the winding, thereby making the overall operation harmonious.
“The same goes for those gears. You copied my arrangement order, but you didn’t understand why I arranged them that way. You also didn’t know that although we were both using scrap gears, even gears with the same model number will differ in degree of wear because of differences in service life and usage.
“These details are extremely minute. Ordinary instruments may not even be able to detect them. Your talent isn’t bad, and your hands-on ability is strong, but precisely because of that, you should be learning step by step instead of staring at these crude methods of mine…”
At this point, Old Man Jiang took another gulp of tea steeped from tea dregs, revealing a somewhat self-mocking smile.
“Or let’s look at it from another angle. If crude methods really could be reproduced just by replicating the process one hundred percent, those big companies would have improved their production techniques long ago. Maybe they’d even have registered a few patents.
“Or do you think a process that a newcomer like you, who has studied for less than a month, can reproduce is something a big company’s automated production lines couldn’t copy? Or do you think those capitalists who squeeze people dry down to the marrow would look down on this tiny bit of profit?”
“…”
Hearing the old man say this, Feng Xue could not help showing a hint of shame on his face. He nodded and said,
“I was arrogant. I’ll count today’s losses as what I owe. Later, I’ll definitely pay you back…”
“What are you talking about! Losses? What losses! Even if they don’t meet the standard for sale, they at least count as preprocessed materials! Oh, right, since your hands-on ability is so strong, I’ll leave everything in that white-waste pile over there to you! Take out all the useful parts inside! For every twenty portions of materials, I’ll exchange one portion of the same standard-spec material for you. Use them to practice first. I’ll help you sell anything above two-star. Forget the one-star stuff; those things are better off thrown into the furnace!”