February 5, C.E. 71.
The plaque for the 811 Special Tactical Research Institute had not even been mounted on the wall when Xu Yanqiu had already spent a full forty-eight hours on the second basement level of the materials laboratory building.
He had not slept the day the Spark Data arrived.
Disassembly reports covered three tables. He had circled seventeen sections of the G Weapons' Phase-Shift Armor parameters in red, each accompanied by a scrawled note.
When Lin Yuan pushed open the laboratory door, Xu Yanqiu was hunched over the whiteboard, already on his third color of marker.
"Professor Xu."
"Stay right there." Xu Yanqiu did not look back. "I'm calculating the matching range for your Ceramic Steel's thermal expansion coefficient. Don't interrupt me."
Lin Yuan leaned against the doorframe, fingers interlaced before him, and did not press him.
Thirty seconds later, Xu Yanqiu redrew a circle on the whiteboard and turned around.
His eyes were bloodshot, and his lab coat bore coffee stains from who knew when, but his gaze seemed charged with electricity.
"This thing of yours follows a completely different path from existing Mobile Suit technology."
"I know."
"No, you don't." Xu Yanqiu tossed the marker onto the table, walked up to Lin Yuan, and jabbed a finger through the air. "What is the entire C.E. world's logic for Mobile Suit armor? Lightweight, high mobility, Phase-Shift. The thinner the armor, the better; the more precise the energy supply, the better. Pilots survive through reaction speed and control skill."
"And then?"
"And then you tell me you want to slap a material three times heavier than current armor onto a Mobile Suit." Xu Yanqiu raised his voice half an octave. "Do you know what three times heavier means? The thrust-to-weight ratio gets cut in half, mobility plummets, energy consumption doubles, and every joint actuator has to be redesigned."
Lin Yuan did not argue.
He walked to the whiteboard, picked up another marker, and wrote a line beside Xu Yanqiu's circle.
East Asia has no ace pilots.
Xu Yanqiu looked at those words. His mouth opened, then closed again.
"PLANT has Coordinators." Lin Yuan set down the marker and turned to face him. "Their reaction speeds are three to five times those of Naturals, and their spatial awareness is overwhelmingly superior. The Atlantic Federation has Enhanced Humans, pushing the human body to its limits through drugs and neural modification."
"What does East Asia have?"
Xu Yanqiu did not answer.
"East Asia has four billion Naturals, the world's greatest heavy industrial capacity, and the ability to smelt thirty million tons of steel and two million tons of rare earths every year."
Lin Yuan tapped the whiteboard with a finger.
"I don't need an elf that can dance through the sky. I need an ordinary soldier to climb inside, take three Beam Rifle shots and still remain standing, then shove a cannon barrel in the enemy machine's face before it can react."
The laboratory fell silent for several seconds.
Xu Yanqiu rubbed his chin, his gaze settling on the thermal expansion coefficient range on the whiteboard.
"You're going for volume."
"Yes."
"You're not building one superhero. You're building a hundred iron coffins to drown the enemy."
"Iron coffin isn't exactly an auspicious description." The corner of Lin Yuan's mouth twitched. "But the idea is right."
Xu Yanqiu turned around, walked to another table, and opened a G Weapons armor disassembly report.
"I've already seen the core weakness of Phase-Shift Armor. Its defense against kinetic weapons depends on energy supply. Once the stored power runs out, it's just an ordinary alloy shell. Your Ceramic Steel doesn't work that way, does it?"
"Ceramic Steel provides passive defense. It does not need energy to maintain it. The material's physical structure itself can withstand high temperatures and kinetic impacts. The price is weight."
"How much?"
"For the same protected area, roughly 2.7 times the weight of Phase-Shift Armor."
Xu Yanqiu's brow furrowed. His fingers tapped the edge of the report several times.
"What about mass-production feasibility? Industrial smelting procedures, nano-ceramic composite processing, crystallization temperature control—I've looked over the basic proposal you gave me, but do you understand the distance between a laboratory and a production line?"
"That's your job."
Xu Yanqiu raised his head and stared at Lin Yuan.
"I'll give you the direction and principles." Lin Yuan's pace of speech did not change. "You turn it into an industrial product East Asia can produce reliably every month. Whatever equipment, personnel, or budget you need, make a list and I'll sign it."
Xu Yanqiu closed the report and pressed his palm against its cover.
"Vacuum hot-press furnaces, at least four. Borrowing one set of nanoscale powder preparation equipment from Germany won't be enough; we need two. The screening of rare-earth alloys requires upgraded spectrometers. The current precision is short by an entire order of magnitude."
"What else?"
"People. I need six PhDs in metallurgy, not the kind who only write papers—people who have spent more than ten years working on industrial lines. And I need structural mechanics specialists. Ceramic Steel's brittle fracture patterns are completely different from metal matrices. We need to rebuild the failure models from scratch."
"Give me the list today."
Xu Yanqiu stared at him for three seconds.
"Lin Yuan, where the hell did you get this stuff?"
"Not important."
"Not important?" Xu Yanqiu's voice rose sharply. "You hand me a formula that violates thirty years of my materials science experience, tell me it'll work, then say the source isn't important?"
"Professor Xu." Lin Yuan stepped before him, lowering his voice slightly. "You've run the preliminary verification data. You can judge the feasibility yourself. Whether it's real or fake, you know better than I do."
Xu Yanqiu's fingers loosened from the report cover.
He turned toward the small test furnace in the corner. Residual heat from the verification run two days earlier still lingered in the chamber, and a dark gray film had solidified along the walls of the alloy crucible.
"The verification data did pass." He admitted it. "But that was a small sample under laboratory conditions. Industrial mass production is another matter entirely."
"That's why I brought you over from the Materials Bureau."
The door opened, and Sheng Lan walked in with a signed memorandum in hand.
"Director, the first batch of equipment transfer applications has been submitted, but the Power Institute has stalled approval for two vacuum hot-press furnaces. The signatory is Director Wei from the Power Institute's Equipment Division. Also, the Electronics Research Institute has refused to release Zhou Boyuan. Their reason is that he is currently handling the United Army communications system upgrade project and cannot be reassigned midway."
Lin Yuan took the memorandum and glanced through it.
"What is Director Wei's relationship with Luo Qiming?"
"They attended military academy in the same class and worked together for three years."
"Write it down."
Sheng Lan made a mark in her notebook.
"I'll handle Zhou Boyuan personally. Use the equipment we have for now. Professor Xu, can your small furnace produce the first batch of samples?"
Xu Yanqiu had already turned back to the whiteboard, another marker in his hand.
"Give me seventy-two hours."
"Too long."
"Are you teaching me how to run experiments?" Xu Yanqiu did not turn around, irritation in his voice.
"Forty-eight hours."
"Get out. You're ruining my train of thought."
Lin Yuan turned toward the door. As he passed Sheng Lan, he gave her a quiet instruction.
"Add Director Wei's stalled approval to the list. When Luo Qiming's relationship map is ready, deal with them together."
"Understood."
The two left the laboratory building. The fluorescent lights in the corridor buzzed overhead.
Sheng Lan opened her notebook and glanced at what she had just written.
"Director, you've experienced Xu Yanqiu's temperament firsthand now."
"As long as he delivers results, I don't care about his temper."
"What if he really produces a sample in forty-eight hours?"
Lin Yuan walked ahead without slowing.
"If he does, let the entire East Asian Army know that from now on, their soldiers will no longer have to go to war in armor made of paper."
Sheng Lan closed her notebook and quickened her pace to follow him.
Forty-six hours later.
On the second basement level of the 811 Institute's materials laboratory building, Xu Yanqiu removed a palm-sized dark gray metal plate from the furnace chamber.
Its surface was rough, its edges marked by obvious stress fractures, and its crystal structure uneven.
Yet the hardness tester's reading jumped three times before finally stabilizing on a number that left Xu Yanqiu silent for a full minute.
He picked up the phone.
"Lin Yuan, get your ass over here."
"It worked?"
"A half-finished product came out. The crystallization is unstable, and mass production is still a hundred thousand miles away. But its hardness rating is forty-seven percent higher than the base material of Phase-Shift Armor."
The other end of the line was quiet for two seconds.
"Professor Xu, do you believe it now?"
Xu Yanqiu looked at the ugly metal plate in his hand, his voice hoarse.
"Believe what? Believe that a twenty-four-year-old brat has something in his hands that can rewrite the rules of war?"
He raised the metal plate beneath the light, its dark gray surface reflecting a fine, dense sheen.
"I believe it. But you need to give me time to turn this piece of junk into something that can go onto a battlefield."
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