Room-Temperature Superconductivity

Half an hour later, at a Hunan restaurant.

Jiang Xingye's face was bright red from eating stir-fried pork with chilies, and her lips were nearly swollen, yet her chopsticks never stopped moving.

Lin Xu watched her with an amused expression and said,

"If you can't handle spicy food, then stop eating it. Why torture yourself like this?"

"You don't get it."

Jiang Xingye panted through the heat, then grabbed the coconut milk beside her and chugged a mouthful.

"I'm not torturing myself by eating chilies. I'm torturing you."

"??? What kind of filthy line is that??"

Lin Xu stared at her, dumbfounded.

"You mean you can eat spicy food today, and ice too?"

"No, I mean my mouth is really hot."

"...You really are beyond help... Where did you even get so many dirty jokes??"

Jiang Xingye let out a long breath.

"Graduated with honors from the school of suggestive short-video influencers."

"Alright, I'm full. Let's talk business."

"What are you planning to do about your friend?"

Seeing Jiang Xingye get to the point, Lin Xu stopped beating around the bush as well.

He asked directly,

"How did you handle this sort of thing before? The company has such a huge annual business expense budget. Theoretically, it can't all really be spent on clients, right?"

"No chef leaves the kitchen without stealing a bite. Isn't that some kind of unspoken rule?"

"Calling it an unspoken rule isn't quite right..."

Jiang Xingye shook her head. After pondering for a moment, she said,

"Honestly, it's fine to joke about lining your own pockets, but if someone genuinely wants to skim money from the company, internal audit isn't useless."

"Still, your situation is a little special."

"The benefits you've brought are just too enormous."

"Once this is done, the gains will be so great that nobody will care about such trivial details."

"And the role you play in all this is irreplaceable."

"Unless the internal audit department has lost its mind, they won't make things difficult for you."

"So just keep the money without worrying about it."

"Spend it if you need to. Submit it for reimbursement if you want. Even if you don't, as long as the job gets done, someone will smooth things over for you."

"Makes sense."

Lin Xu nodded in deep agreement.

Though he spent every day rolling through gunfire and danger, when it came to the twists and turns of the workplace, he was still far inferior to Jiang Xingye.

But how did that saying go again?

When you weren't strong enough, you had to talk to people about social etiquette and connections.

When you were strong enough, they had to talk to you about social etiquette and connections.

Lin Xu suddenly stopped worrying about how he should spend those two hundred thousand yuan.

Because he realized that it was only a tiny, tiny fraction of what he was about to gain.

Once the two materials truly entered mass production, no one would care about that little bit of money anymore.

Duh.

The whole of Skyvault Technology will be mine someday. Why the hell am I agonizing over this?!

His heart was clear and unwavering!

A satisfied smile appeared on Lin Xu's face.

"You full? If you are, I'll go pay the bill."

"Getting to eat on the company dime feels great!"

"Wait!"

Jiang Xingye stopped Lin Xu as he was about to get up.

"They sell ice jelly here. Pack up two boxes of ice jelly for me too!"

The meal lasted nearly two hours. By the time they left the restaurant, the sun had completely set.

Even so, for two night owls, it was still early.

The place where they had eaten was not far from the Qinhuai River, so they simply went for a walk by the river to help digest their food.

Walking through the streets of Jinling City, Lin Xu could not help recalling the Jinling City he had seen in Bracelet World.

Enormous light rail systems, holographic projections everywhere, empty streets...

It was truly nothing like the Jinling City of today.

A thought suddenly came to him, and he asked,

"Say, have you ever thought about what Jinling City will look like twenty years from now?"

"No idea."

Jiang Xingye kicked along a little stone that she had apparently dug out of some flower bed, answering casually,

"I'm not originally from Jinling anyway, so I don't have that much attachment to this city. As for the future, I know even less."

"But honestly, China has changed a lot over the past ten or twenty years."

"My hometown is some tiny backwater city. Twenty years ago, it didn't even have a single decent street."

"But when I went home for the Spring Festival this year, new energy vehicles were everywhere. They even had self-driving taxis."

"Give it another twenty years, and maybe we'll even have flying cars."

"Flying cars?"

Lin Xu froze for a moment.

"Shouldn't it be large-scale public transportation instead? Like maglev light rail or something?"

"Flying cars obviously don't conform to reality, do they?"

As soon as Lin Xu finished speaking, Jiang Xingye could not help laughing.

"Wow, you've got the nerve to say flying cars don't conform to reality? And maglev light rail does?"

"It might not seem all that technologically complicated, but construction costs are incredibly high, and it's a typical example of technology with a poor return on investment."

"Otherwise, why wouldn't our country develop it aggressively instead of settling for regular high-speed rail?"

"Look at that maglev line in Pudong. That's a true, fully realized maglev system."

"High-speed, quiet, stable."

"But the problem is, it uses low-temperature superconducting magnetic levitation."

"That one technology alone locks the cost in place."

"If you really want maglev to be rolled out on a large scale, you'll probably have to wait until room-temperature superconducting materials emerge..."

"I see..."

Lin Xu nodded thoughtfully.

He felt that Jiang Xingye had made a lot of sense.

After all, as urban transportation, light rail really was too mediocre.

It was too noisy, and it was not particularly fast either.

Theoretically, it was a technology that would never be deployed on a large scale.

Rather than building elevated light rail for multi-level transportation, it would be better to put more effort into subways.

—But.

In Jinling City twenty years later, light rail truly was the backbone of urban transportation.

Even at nearly midnight, he had seen countless light rail lines operating overhead, with the trains packed full of passengers.

More importantly, just as Jiang Xingye had said, those elevated light rail systems were very quiet.

Room-temperature superconductivity...

Could humanity have already solved the mystery of room-temperature superconductivity twenty years later?

This material could be called the brightest jewel in the crown of materials science. Although people had repeatedly claimed over the past decades that they had plucked it, in reality, no one had ever moved even one step closer.

And twenty years from now...

Could humanity really achieve it?

Lin Xu did not quite dare believe it.

After a brief silence, he asked again,

"So, if humanity really can develop room-temperature superconducting materials, how long do you think it'll take?"

"Who knows?"

Jiang Xingye shrugged.

"You should ask that friend of yours. He's the materials science expert, after all."

"But... if you want my answer, I actually do have something to say."

"Have you seen the news?"

"Wasn't there a report recently saying that the Zhurong Mars probe discovered a special substance on Mars, something suspected to be semimetallic hydrogen?"

"It's not far from true metallic hydrogen—and it was found under normal Martian atmospheric pressure."

"If we ever make something of ourselves and build a Mars landing craft with enough payload capacity, maybe we could send a few scientists and some equipment to Mars."

"If we can use the semimetallic hydrogen on Mars to create genuinely stable metallic hydrogen, then room-temperature superconductivity would be a piece of cake, wouldn't it?"

Mars.

Lin Xu took a deep breath.

Mars again!!