96: Chapter 96 Equipment Debugging: Problems Reappear

The line of light text on the control panel, 'Waiting for Initialization,' still flowed quietly, like a pot with a lid on, with fire smoldering underneath.

Chen Wuwang's finger hovered over the start button, not pressing it immediately. He glanced at Chen Tiezhu, then at Ling Zhenzi.

Neither spoke, but their gazes were fixed on the master console—one staring at the joint pressure values of the mechanical arm, the other with eyes closed, sensing the rhythmic breathing of the Womb Array.

"Ready?" Chen Wuwang asked.

"Conduits aligned, brackets leveled, chip sealed," Chen Tiezhu said, his voice raspy. "If it explodes again now, then it's just fate."

Ling Zhenzi opened his eyes and spat out two words: "Try it."

Chen Wuwang pressed the command.

Hum—

The earth vein induction array beneath the entire Alchemy Workshop jolted violently. The spiritual energy conduits turned from gray to bright, and pale golden energy flowed like blood into the main trunk network.

The three-layer reaction chambers lit up in sequence, the temperature control membrane in the pill refining area emitted a soft white light, and data cascaded across the monitoring screen like a waterfall.

Normal.

Everything was normal for the first five seconds.

At the sixth second, the third mechanical arm on the left wing suddenly twitched, its movement range exceeding the preset trajectory by thirty degrees, nearly colliding with the adjacent herb transport rail.

At the seventh second, a peak fluctuation appeared in the central energy ring. The resonant frequency of the Womb Array plummeted from a stable 12.4 Hz to 8.1, then rebounded to 15.7, like a heart rhythm losing its beat.

At the eighth second, the red alarm light flashed, the master console emitted a sharp buzzing sound, the System automatically tripped, and all equipment powered down.

Dead silence.

Only the gurgling sound of coolant flowing back through the pipes remained.

"Damn it." Chen Tiezhu punched the console, leaving a dent in the metal surface. "Who said 'the frame is closed' just now? That's a load of crap!"

He turned his head to glare at Chen Wuwang, his eyes red.

"I'm not afraid of thirty-seven exploded Pill Furnaces; that's just open fire. What do you call this now? The machine is twitching on its own, the Formation is panting on its own, and it won't even give me an explosion to watch, just playing dead?"

Chen Wuwang didn't move, nor did he retort.

He stood in place, his Mechanical Prosthetic Eye already switched to backend log scanning mode, data streams scrolling rapidly in his field of vision.

"It's not playing dead," he said, his voice low and steady. "The control link has collapsed."

"You certainly see it clearly," Chen Tiezhu sneered. "But why did it collapse? We calibrated it to the micron level, the runes are carved finer than embroidery, and the Spiritual Qi input is as steady as an old ox pulling a cart—which link went wrong?"

Ling Zhenzi ignored him, sitting cross-legged back on the array eye stone platform, hands forming seals, his Divine Sense probing into the Womb Array again.

A moment later, his brows twitched violently.

"The energy coming from the earth vein is fine, but the seventh resonance ring... something's wrong."

He opened his eyes, fingertips wiping the corner of his lips. "It's stealing the rhythm."

"What does that mean?" Chen Wuwang asked.

"It's like a group of people walking; originally their steps were in unison, but then the seventh person suddenly quickened their pace by two steps, and everything behind them became chaotic," Ling Zhenzi said in a deep voice. "The Womb Array is a whole; if one node's breathing isn't synchronized, the entire energy tide collapses."

"The mechanical arm disorder, is that also because the power supply is unstable?" Chen Wuwang quickly deduced.

"Most likely," Ling Zhenzi nodded. "Your System issues commands, but the signal received by the execution end is distorted—the energy waveform has changed, so the movements naturally go awry."

Chen Wuwang was silent for two seconds, then suddenly turned to Chen Tiezhu: "Dismantle the main arm on the left wing, check the rune guide rails."

"I told you to check it earlier!" Chen Tiezhu stood up abruptly, grabbed a wrench, and walked toward the maintenance hatch. "Don't wait for it to report an error itself, let's rip it open!"

Three Worker Ant Mecha slid out of the wall slots, automatically positioning themselves at the connection cabin of the third mechanical arm on the left wing. The hydraulic pliers opened, bolts popped out one by one, and the metal casing was slowly peeled away, revealing the densely packed nanometer-scale rune guide rails inside.

Chen Tiezhu squatted down and scanned the gaps in the rails with a laser rangefinder.

"It's off," he gritted his teeth. "0.18 microns. It shouldn't be off."

"This kind of deviation isn't enough to make the movement off by thirty degrees," Chen Wuwang crouched beside him, his Mechanical Prosthetic Eye magnifying the view. "Unless... the command transmission itself has a delay."

"Then that's not my problem," Chen Tiezhu looked up. "It's your 'Womb' Array swallowing the signal!"

"Stop shifting the blame," Ling Zhenzi scoffed. "My Womb Array can breathe on its own, but it doesn't rewrite code on its own. Did you carve those crappy guide rails wrong?"

"Say that again?" Chen Tiezhu rose abruptly, his wrench clattering to the ground.

"Enough." Chen Wuwang slapped the edge of the maintenance hatch, the alloy steel plate denting in response. "Is arguing useful? Is exploding the furnace useful? Last time during the thirty-seven failures, you two almost fought, and what was the result in the end? Didn't we still have to rely on taking it apart piece by piece, checking it root by root, to get to where we are today?"

Both fell silent simultaneously.

The air grew heavy.

Chen Wuwang stared at that line of "Waiting for Initialization" that hadn't gone out yet, his voice dropping a few degrees: "We aren't here to prove who is right and who is wrong. We are here to make this thing live."

He paused, looking at Chen Tiezhu: "Go lead the team, dismantle all three sections of the main arm guide rails, re-calibrate them with lasers, and get the error down to under 0.05 microns."

He turned to Ling Zhenzi: "You redraw the core rune seal of the seventh resonance ring, add a synchronization frequency-locking spell, and stabilize the energy tide first."

"That's just suppressing the fire," Ling Zhenzi reminded. "The root cause isn't here."

"I know," Chen Wuwang nodded. "But right now, we have to make it breathe in unison first."

The two stopped arguing and took action.

Chen Tiezhu led the team to dismantle the mechanical arms, the Worker Ant Mecha transported components, sparks flew at the scene, and the sound of metal friction was constant.

Ling Zhenzi sat cross-legged at the array center, his fingertips condensing threads of spiritual power, redrawing the main runes on the seventh resonance ring inch by inch.

Every stroke required using his essence blood as a guide, and sweat soon seeped from his temples; a small cut also split at the corner of his mouth, and blood trickled down his chin.

First restart.

System loaded, energy fed in.

The mechanical arm's movements returned to smoothness, but three seconds later, the temperature curve in the pill refining area surged sharply, the protective membrane turned red, the Womb Array lost balance again, and the System forced a shutdown.

Second time.

The guide rails Chen Tiezhu had just calibrated were slightly off again; although within tolerance, Ling Zhenzi still sensed the energy waveform jitter and actively cut the connection.

Third time.

All parameters were normal, running until the eleventh second, when the pill refining area suddenly burst out with a high-pressure steam, the safety valve opened automatically, and the whole System stalled again.

"Three consecutive losses." Chen Tiezhu sat on the floor, back against the cooling box, his chest heaving violently. "My hands are almost worn to sparks, and it still won't acknowledge it."

Ling Zhenzi didn't speak, sitting on the array platform, his face as pale as paper, his fingertips trembling, clearly having exhausted his Divine Sense.

Chen Wuwang stood before the master console, his Mechanical Prosthetic Eye still reviewing the failure logs.

Among hundreds of error messages, one appeared repeatedly: [Command response delay | Node 7-3 | Error time: 0.003 seconds]

Very small.

But in a high-speed operating System, three-thousandths of a second is enough to cause movement misalignment, energy accumulation, and chain collapse.

"It's not a hardware problem," he suddenly spoke.

Both raised their eyes.

"And it's not a problem with the Spirit Array itself," Chen Wuwang pointed at the log. "It's the interaction that went wrong. Our mechanical System sends commands by the 'second', but the Womb Array's breathing cycle is in 'Hz'; it doesn't follow seconds, it breathes at its own frequency."

"So..." Ling Zhenzi narrowed his eyes. "We are forcibly making a person keep up with a donkey's pace?"

"Something like that," Chen Wuwang nodded. "We thought that calibrating the physical structure would achieve synchronization, but we ignored that—it is a living 'Womb' Array, not a dead machine. We have to make it willing to follow us, not force it."

Chen Tiezhu listened, half-understanding, but he grasped the main point: "So... we still have to change it?"

"Change it." Chen Wuwang's gaze fell on the control panel. "Fourth loading, run at reduced frequency, only start at fifty percent load. Don't seek speed, seek stability first."

"Are you crazy?" Chen Tiezhu looked up abruptly. "Reduced frequency? What's the difference between that and not turning it on?"

"The difference is—" Chen Wuwang turned, taking a piece of twisted, deformed metal from the storage cabinet, numbered 'CJ-01'.

He placed the fragment on the master console, and the projection expanded.

"This is the corpse of the first-generation Pill Furnace," his voice was not high. "Thirty-seven exploded furnaces, and the last time it exploded, only this piece of iron was left. At that time, you said, 'I'm done with this'."

Chen Tiezhu didn't speak.

"But you came back the next day," Chen Wuwang looked at him. "Hands full of burns, squatting in the ruins digging for parts, saying 'try it one more time'."

He looked at Ling Zhenzi again: "You are the same. Others cursed you as a traitor to the Dao, saying you turned the Formation into a circus, but you didn't leave either."

Both were silent.

"We are not people who have never failed," Chen Wuwang withdrew his gaze, his voice dropping. "We are people who have crawled out of every single exploded furnace."

He pressed the control key, and the interface switched to low-frequency mode.

"Fourth loading, start."

Electric current flooded into the conduits again, the reaction chambers lit up slowly; this time, the light was much softer.

The mechanical arms moved lightly and slowly, their movements precise but slow.

The breathing frequency of the Womb Array gradually synchronized with the commands, and the fluctuations of the seventh resonance ring tended to stabilize.

The green lights on the monitoring station lit up one by one.

The progress bar advanced: 10%, 30%, 50%...

Chen Tiezhu squatted beside the maintenance hatch, his hands covered in coolant and metal shavings, his eyes fixed on the data stream.

Ling Zhenzi closed his eyes to regulate his breath, the blood at the corner of his mouth not yet dry, but his Divine Sense probed into the depths of the Womb Array once again.

Chen Wuwang stood before the central console, his fingers resting on the start lever, his gaze locked on the progress bar.

60%... 70%...

It wasn't over yet.

And it couldn't be over.

Outside, the wind passed through the high windows, blowing an uncollected drawing, making it rustle.

On that paper, a sketch of the next-generation mecha energy core was drawn, and a line of small text was written in the corner: [Pending verification | Needs to coordinate with the Womb Array].