By mid-November, the weather in New York had already turned cold, and the rain made it even more biting.
Saturday, Osborn Tower, Harry's private laboratory. The electronic clock read two in the afternoon.
Lin Hai rubbed his aching eyes and swept the twelfth batch of failed seeds into the waste bin. Most waste produced by the experiments would be incinerated directly.
These improved pothos seeds, which should have instantly grown into sharp leaf blades, either remained completely still or grew wildly into a tangle of utterly harmless vines.
"Failed again?" Harry Osborn raised his head from the holographic projector, his blond hair as messy as if it had been hit by a typhoon. A rotating DNA molecular model floated before him, several red markers flashing warning lights.
Lin Hai sighed and picked up a seed. "The amount of energy injected is hard to control. Too much makes it grow wildly; too little fails to activate it."
The laboratory door slid open, and Peter Parker rushed in carrying three cups of coffee and a large bag of snacks, rainwater speckling his glasses. "New York rain just comes out of nowhere! I almost—whoa!" He saw the mess covering the table. "Still no luck?"
"Scientific exploration is ninety-nine failures for every success." Lin Hai accepted the coffee. The perfectly warm latte relaxed his taut nerves slightly. He did not particularly like the stuff, but anything that could keep him awake was useful.
Over the past few weeks, this unusual "research triangle" had spent nearly every weekend in the lab—Harry's resources, Peter's scientific intuition, and Lin Hai's special abilities had produced unexpectedly wonderful results.
Peter leaned over the microscope. "Why does it have to be seeds? Wouldn't it be more convenient to directly control existing plants like you did before?"
Indeed, Lin Hai could directly modify fully grown plants and make them evolve in the direction he wanted, like editing a program. Seeds, on the other hand, were much more troublesome.
For a plant to grow from a seed into a mature form, the changes involved were difficult to direct through external intervention. It was not as simple as editing a program; after making the changes, he still had to hope it would turn out as desired once the process finished running.
"Portability and concealment." Lin Hai pulled a small cloth bag from his backpack and poured out more than a dozen ordinary plant seeds.
"I can't carry potted plants everywhere I go. In an emergency, you can't expect me to pull all kinds of potted plants from my pocket. I'm not Doraemon." He recalled his earlier conflict with Kingpin's men at the clinic.
"I need defensive or offensive methods that can be used immediately. And while mature plants can change in the directions I set for them, they are not strong enough to attack or defend directly." Lin Hai sounded helpless. Nothing seemed to work.
Peter suddenly snapped his fingers. "Wait, have we been going about this the wrong way?"
He pulled up a set of data. "Your previous successful cases were all modifications of living plants. Seeds are dormant; they need to be awakened before they can be modified. The energy consumption of those two steps is too high, which makes them difficult to control."
Lin Hai and Harry widened their eyes at the same time. "Do it in one step!"
Peter continued, "We can implant 'growth instructions' while the seed is still dormant."
"Like a biological chip with preloaded programming..." Lin Hai mused, the energy within him stirring faintly as his thoughts became clearer.
He picked up another pothos seed and closed his eyes. Rather than forcibly injecting energy as before, he focused his thoughts on the life structure deep within the seed. This time, he would preserve its basic structure while adding several "growth instructions."
The seed emitted a faint green glow in his palm, and several nearly invisible patterns appeared on its surface.
"This feels different." Lin Hai opened his eyes and this time fed pure Life Energy into the seed to stimulate its growth.
Under the gaze of three pairs of eyes, the seed sprouted rapidly. But instead of ordinary leaves, its leaves had edges sharp as blades, even glinting with a faint metallic sheen under the lights.
Peter gently touched a leaf with tweezers and immediately scratched himself. "Wow! It's as sharp as a scalpel!" He excitedly shook his finger.
Harry quickly pulled up the scan results. "The cell wall structure has changed. This is incredible! It practically violates the fundamental laws of plant cytology!"
"It doesn't violate them. It expands them. It's like adding a new line of code to an existing genetic sequence, telling it to reinforce the edges of its leaves as it grows." Lin Hai corrected him, then made five more seeds with the same properties. This time, all of them succeeded.
That said, without Lin Hai's energy stimulating it, the seed would never grow into leaves as sharp as blades. That was an unexpected bonus, because even if someone else obtained one of his modified seeds, they would have no way of planting or stimulating it.
Peter suddenly jumped up. "This is basically the little Li flying daggers from Huaxia martial arts! Can you launch the leaves?"
"Not yet. For now, I can only throw them by hand." Lin Hai smiled. "But maybe I'll be able to someday."
Then his phone suddenly vibrated. Gwen Stacy's name appeared on the screen.
"She's messaging you at two-thirty on Saturday afternoon?" Harry raised an eyebrow.
Lin Hai opened the text message: [Before biology class on Monday, can we talk about the "plant energy meridians" you mentioned during free discussion? I looked up some information.]
"Gwen is really interested in you." Peter waggled his eyebrows beside him. "A weekend text from Gwen Stacy, the top student and campus beauty every guy in school dreams about~"
Lin Hai remained expressionless and slipped his phone back into his pocket. "It's just an academic exchange. Anyone with crooked thoughts can go stare at a wall and reflect."
After all, it had been an accidental conversation with Gwen that helped him break through his energy-control bottleneck.
That day in the library, Gwen's incisive questioning of the traditional Chinese medicine concept of "meridians" had forced him to reinterpret his ability system in the language of modern biology. The sparks from that clash between Eastern and Western ways of thinking were more valuable than any laboratory equipment.
Before biology class on Monday.
Lin Hai arrived at the classroom half an hour early and found Gwen already filling the whiteboard with formulas.
"Lin, you're here!" Gwen turned around, her blond ponytail swaying lightly with the motion. "I reorganized the energy flow model you mentioned." She pointed at a string of equations. "If plant energy truly has fixed conduction pathways like you said, then according to..."
Lin Hai was stunned by the rigorous mathematical expressions filling the board. The energy flow he could only vaguely sense had become a precise physical model under Gwen's pen.
"Here." He pointed to part of an equation. "The actual conduction speed is about three times faster than the theoretical value, because the energy is not merely passively diffusing. It is also actively guided."
Gwen's eyes lit up. "Quantum tunneling! I knew conventional models couldn't explain it!"
She suddenly stepped closer, and the faint scent of citrus on her drifted into Lin Hai's nose. "Lin, have you ever considered publishing these theories? They could overturn the entire field of botany."
Lin Hai took half a step back. "These theories aren't mature enough yet. Most of them are only my impressions or guesses. We would need more real experimental data before publishing them." He could not explain that these theories came from his special abilities rather than ordinary experimental discoveries.
Gwen looked at him thoughtfully. "You're always like this. You have astonishing intuitive insights, yet you avoid systematically constructing theory. The ancient people of Huaxia seemed to be the same way. They rarely explained their theories clearly in a systematic language."
She paused before continuing, "There's a science symposium next week. How about becoming my co-presenter? The topic will be <Plant Energy Theory from a Cross-Cultural Perspective>."
Lin Hai opened his mouth to refuse, but Gwen's gaze changed his mind. Working with Gwen meant greater risk of exposure, but it could also be a way to turn the theories brought about by his own abilities into data.
"Okay." He answered briefly, then took a small glass bottle from his bag. Inside were several faintly glowing seeds. "This is for you. Put them by your desk, and they'll purify the air and improve your concentration."
Gwen took the bottle, the seeds glowing faintly in her palm. "They're breathing?"
"All plants breathe. These are just more noticeable." Lin Hai smiled.
During biology class, Lin Hai absentmindedly took notes, but his thoughts drifted toward developing combat plants. The attack seeds of the Flying Leaf Blade Style were already showing promising results, but defensive and control methods were still being explored. He needed a plant that could quickly form a barrier, like the Wall-nut in Plants vs. Zombies.
"Lin Hai? Please answer this question." The teacher's voice pulled him back to reality.
The whole class turned to look at him. Lin Hai stood up blankly, but fortunately Peter whispered a prompt from behind him: "The difference between the light-dependent and light-independent reactions of photosynthesis!"
His fluent answer earned a satisfied nod from the teacher, but Lin Hai noticed Gwen's inquisitive gaze.
After class, Gwen stopped him. "What research have you been doing lately? You're even zoning out during biology."
"Some... um... special plant cultivation. The seeds I gave you last time are part of it." Lin Hai was evasive.
Gwen suddenly lowered her voice. "Harry Osborn applied last week for five kilograms of high-purity nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium compound fertilizer and radioactive isotope-labeled carbon dioxide. Your name was listed as the user."
Her beautiful blue eyes looked directly into Lin Hai's. "Don't worry. I'm applying to become an intern under Professor Connors at Osborn Group. We can apply for corporate internships during the second semester of eleventh grade. As the top student in our grade, it's not strange that I have a little privilege. I happened to see that information in the logistics department while submitting my paperwork.
"But none of that is important. What matters is that I'm curious—what kind of high school research project requires supplies of that level?"
Lin Hai's heartbeat quickened slightly. Gwen was sharper than he had imagined.
"A collaborative project with Osborn Enterprises, about plant adaptability in extreme environments." He chose to tell part of the truth.
"Interesting. Are you free Saturday? My home has a small private laboratory. The equipment isn't as good as Osborn Group's, but it's still much more advanced than the school's." Gwen did not press further, but her eyes told him the matter was far from over.
This was her second invitation.
Lin Hai hesitated for a moment, then nodded. Gwen's father was the commissioner of the New York Police Department, which made him wary, but the allure of conducting scientific research with the top student was even harder to resist.
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