Chapter 49 How Did You Know

Shen Jiang knitted her brow. To be honest, she wasn't afraid of death, but the future Shang Lu described was sheer horror for a young woman. The cockpit of the Crimson Lotus would be filled with pale blue IRGF, and she would suffer from incontinence in a liquid environment—she shuddered just imagining what the others would see when they opened the hatch... She tapped her forehead lightly with her slender index finger and hissed a sharp intake of breath. Damn, this bastard had genuinely scared her.

Shen Jiang desperately wanted to pry open Shang Lu's skull and stir things up with a stick inside to see what sort of bizarre, chaotic thoughts were bouncing around in that scumbag's head. If a person's words and actions were the shell of their soul, then most people's souls looked quite ordinary and standard, smoothed down by the crowd and society until all their sharp edges were gone. Yet hidden amidst this massive flock of smooth eggshells and pebbles was a clawed, bizarrely shaped sea urchin, prickly to the touch at the slightest nudge.

Of course, Shen Jiang was a sea urchin herself, and when sea urchins collided, both sides suffered.

"Have I persuaded you?" Shang Lu asked.

"Do you call this persuading me?" Shen Jiang said. "You're terrifying me."

"I am merely stating facts."

"I salute you as a real man for being able to state the fact that you'll be carved to death by a thousand cuts with such utter calmness," Shen Jiang said. "I can continue to cooperate with your work, but I must win."

Shang Lu paused for a moment.

"I've never lost a single time in my life, big sister here," Shen Jiang said. "Thinking you can make me lose to you is sheer delusion."

Shang Lu cracked a silent, wry smile. Having never lost in her entire life, no wonder her competitive drive was so fierce. But he was different; he had never won once in his entire life.

"Our bet still stands."

With that, Shen Jiang called out to the Calculation Engineering Office, "Everyone, take a short break. I'm going to the restroom."

She unhooked the iEEG-BCI system helmet, hung it on her chair, stood straight, and stretched luxuriously. She glanced sideways at Shang Lu; the latter was sitting quietly just a few meters away, motionless and silent, his eyes covered by the scanner. A sudden, strange little impulse struck her—she wanted to take this opportunity to walk right up and observe him closely, nose-to-nose, taking advantage of his blindness. But Shen Jiang held back.

She withdrew her gaze, turned around, and walked out of the shielded room, then pulled down the circuit breaker on the hallway wall.

Power to the shielded room was instantly cut off. The Calculation Engineering Office and the Operation Engineering Office stationed in the workshop quickly noticed the problem, as both robotic arms lost their signal.

"What? No signal?" 1047 hurried over to the Calculation Engineering Office's workbench, looked down, and confirmed there was indeed no signal.

"It looks like the power over there just went out," an engineer said.

"Damn... How did this happen? Hurry up and get it back online, get it back online. I'll contact Shen Jiang." 1047 stomped his foot. This was a critical moment—a golden opportunity to secure the victory in one go and ruthlessly crush the opposition. Why would the signal cut out all of a sudden?

He placed a call to Shen Jiang, who answered just as she pushed open the door to the adjacent control room.

"I'm in the restroom. Power outage? Alright, I'll check the circuits in a bit. It shouldn't be anything major. Yeah, okay, hanging up now."

Shen Jiang hung up the phone and found the integrated bus for the two sets of BCI system servers in the control room.

This was the terminal end of the BCI system lines. The brain activity gathered by the MEG-BCI and iEEG-BCI systems underwent feature extraction and algorithmic recognition before being converted into operational commands for the robotic arms, and those commands were sent to the workshop from right here. There were two white fiber-optic cables; Shen Jiang pulled them out and swapped their ports.

Line one into port two, line two into port one.

With everything done, Shen Jiang flipped the circuit breaker back up.

The circuit was restored, everything returned to normal, and the two sets of BCI systems rebooted into their initialization states.

"It's back! It's back! It's back!" cheers erupted in the workshop. "The match continues! The match continues!"

Eldest Uncle Wang Xiangbing stood helpless before the inverted paper cups on the bench. Shang Lu had missed the target twice in a row; any fool could see he wasn't suited for this, and if the match continued, it would likely end in a crushing defeat. Yet the Operation Engineering Office couldn't come up with any solutions. Wang Xiangbing thought of the Six Meridians Divine Sword from Jin Yong's martial arts novels—regrettably, he didn't know that technique, or else he could secretly strike out, exerting invisible force to knock over the paper cups the moment the robotic arm tossed the stones, instead of standing there like a fool staring at them, hoping to knock them down with his gaze alone—fall, fall, fall, fall, fall, fall!

Suddenly, with a sharp "Thump!", a paper cup toppled over.

Holy crap.

Wang Xiangbing blinked in astonishment. Did he really possess such miraculous divine powers? He snapped back to reality an instant later: the robotic arm had hit the paper cup, and the strike was both precise and accurate.

Immediately afterward, the second paper cup went down. A hit again! Wang Xiangbing slapped his thigh and leaped up.

Before he could say anything else, the robotic arm tossed the final stone, striking the target as precisely as a shooting star. Three hits out of three, smooth as flowing water, taking a total of only ten seconds—a mid-game massive comeback! This was what you called a mid-game massive comeback! Wang Xiangbing waved his fist in excitement. Hitting one was a stroke of luck, hitting two was sheer fortune, but hitting three meant holding your head high and exhaling in triumph.

In contrast, over at the Calculation Engineering Office, the first robotic arm suddenly acted up, missing three consecutive targets and throwing every single one straight toward 1047. Judging by 1047's positioning, it was hard not to suspect it was intentional.

1047 clutched his hard hat, staring with wide, blank eyes and a bewildered expression.

Wang Xiangbing stood on the opposite side and gave him a thumbs-up, the gesture clearly conveying: Professional! Absolutely professional!

"I hit all five targets," Shen Jiang said. "How about you?"

"Missed all five," Shang Lu said. "What dance would you like me to do? There's still time for me to learn."

"A striptease."

"The base commander will blast me out and then sentence me to weeding the entire Nanshan lawn three times over," Shang Lu said. "Leader, if you want to get rid of me, you could choose a different method."

"Then what can you do?"

"I know military boxing," Shang Lu answered honestly.

Shen Jiang couldn't help laughing out loud. "Hahahahaha, you're going to perform military boxing on stage during the New Year's Eve gala? Supervisor, are you here to wreck the show? Hahahaha—"

"I can lead the guys from the Operation Engineering Office to do it together," Shang Lu said.

The excited Operation Engineering Office had no idea they had just been sold out by their director without a single blink.

"Everyone knows military boxing. Pick something with more character," Shen Jiang said. "Something nobody else has seen."

Character?

Something nobody else had seen?

Shang Lu pondered for a moment, and a brilliantly distinctive idea popped into his head. He could guarantee that besides the Operation Engineering Office, absolutely no one else had ever witnessed it, and it would be earth-shattering and unprecedented.

After the match ended, 1047 came looking for Shen Jiang with a deeply perplexed expression on his face. He was so immersed in thought that he walked right into a pillar and apologized to it.

"This... how could this be possible?" 1047 muttered to himself. "How is this even possible?"

"Victory and defeat are common matters in military affairs," Shen Jiang said, taking it in stride.

"Why did your performance drop off a cliff in the second half?" 1047 asked. "It was like you turned into a completely different person. That wasn't your level at all."

"Headache," Shen Jiang said. "It's always like this when I have a headache."

1047 sighed. "It was my misjudgment. I underestimated the capabilities of the Operation Engineering Office. I never expected the MEG-BCI system to possess such powerful control capabilities. It's bizarre; almost all the literature says MEG can't handle complex, delicate work. What's going on here? Could it be that the materials I consulted are all outdated?"

"What kind of things have you been reading?"

1047 reminisced, "Quite a lot actually. I basically read everything I could find. I remember a very detailed article titled *Feasibility Analysis of MEG-BCI Systems in Constructing Giant Mecha Control Systems under Current Technical Conditions*..."

"'The Developmental Predicament of MEG-BCI Systems under the Rabin-Shang Judgment Framework,'" Shen Jiang recited. She blinked. "If I'm not mistaken, you must have also read *Functional Analysis of Non-Invasive Brain-Computer System Modules*."

"Holy crap... How do you know?"

(End of this chapter)