24: Chapter 24 The New STC, New Possibilities

Old Tom shut himself in the workshop for a full half-month. He opened that crate of STC data cores and spent several days figuring out how to interface with them. There was no matching reading equipment—he resorted to the most primitive method: removing the core chips, tracing each circuit path under a magnifying glass, and making a mark with charcoal on the edge of a wooden plank for every set of lines counted. By the end, the entire edge of the plank was densely covered with vertical lines and slashes. On the seventh day, he called Lin Mo into the workshop, where a sheet of paper covered in dense charcoal lines lay spread out before him.

Meals were delivered to the door by an apprentice; sleep was taken on a felt mat spread under the workbench. Old Tom's wife came by once. She stood outside the workshop door, listened to the sound of the file inside, then turned and left without knocking—she knew it was useless to knock when her husband was in the middle of work.

During those two weeks, Lin Mo did not rush him once. It wasn't that he wasn't anxious—he knew that speed forced out of haste wasn't real speed. He passed by the workshop door twice a day, morning and evening, listening for the sound of filing and metal clashing inside to confirm Old Tom was still alive, then left. Sometimes when he passed and there was no sound, Lin Mo would stand by the door for a while, not leaving until activity resumed inside. Over those two weeks, Blackstone Town's food consumption was nearing the warning line, but he did not touch anything near that crate of STC cores—that was Old Tom's workbench; he wouldn't disturb another man's workspace. The best way to trust a craftsman was to give him time and quiet, not to repeatedly check his progress.

Old Tom flipped the paper over: on it was a conceptual diagram of a power generation device—lines densely packed, resembling the core structure of some high-energy-density system. It looked like a standard power module from the STC era, but it wasn't a complete engineering drawing; it was more like a technical roadmap. Lin Mo stared at the diagram for a long time. The charcoal lines showed varying depths under the oil lamp's light. Then he asked a question: “How much of this can you understand right now?”

Old Tom was silent for a moment, then pointed with a rough finger to a corner of the diagram: “This drawing isn't complete—it's just the index for this data core. The real engineering drawings are encrypted deeper within the core. It took me seven days to read this one page. To read all the data—with our current equipment and conditions—would take at least several years.”

Lin Mo breathed a sigh of relief. An energy solution that couldn't be implemented for several years—that timeline was reasonable. A year from now, when the steam hammer and improved windmills had pushed Blackstone Town's industrial base to the next stage, perhaps they could just start reading the second page. Old Tom said that if they could fully decipher this data, the energy problem would be greatly alleviated. Lin Mo nodded, not pressing for specifics on how much “greatly” meant—he knew that when Old Tom said such things, he had already made the most conservative estimate.

He had once read a line in a fragment from an Imperial archive—[Humanity expanded among the stars for ten thousand years, yet never truly understood a single planet.] At the time, he hadn't understood. Now, standing on this nameless planet, smelling the sulfur and rust in the air—he understood.

A month later, the first improved steam hammer, modified from STC blueprints, was installed and debugged in Blackstone Town's Arsenal. Its impact force was at least five times stronger than the hand hammer Old Tom had used for most of his life. Old Tom remained silent when he started the machine, but amidst the rumbling of the steam engine, he wore the expression of a blacksmith beholding a mightier blacksmith than himself. The Arsenal apprentices watched from a distance; none dared get too close—every strike of the machine made the ground tremble faintly, as if an iron-skinned beast dwelled beneath the workshop. Only after Old Tom shut off the machine did everyone start breathing again.

In this starry sea, every inhabited planet is an island. The Imperium does not save islands; it only records their coordinates after they have fallen. Lin Mo didn't know if this counted as cold, but he knew that if he wanted to survive, he couldn't count on any reinforcements from beyond the starry sea.

The chaos attention level did not rise because of the STC's unlocking. Lin Mo looked at the settlement, increasingly resembling a real town in the evening sunlight—several new chimneys had appeared on the roofs, the streets were more crowded with figures than before, and the rhythmic forging sounds from the distant Arsenal beat against the evening air like a heartbeat. He knew that once the energy transformation began, the population would continue to expansion like ignited fuel, and the chaos threats beyond the woods wouldn't automatically weaken because of the steam hammer's roar. He silently calculated this equation in his heart—technology, population, threat—all three variables were increasing, but at different rates.

The golden shimmer at the edge of his vision flickered almost imperceptibly.

It wasn't data, not parameters—it was a line of poetry. As if someone had crumpled a sheet of writing into a ball and stuffed it into his mind. He didn't have time to unfold it, only catching a single line:

[Mountains fold, streams twist—I doubt there's a road; Willows darken, blossoms brighten—another village appears.]

—Lu You, “Visiting a Village West of the Mountains.” He was momentarily stunned—why would there be poetry from Earth in the Emperor's memories?

A steam hammer roared, rewriting Blackstone Town's industrial history.

Old Tom stood before it, not smiling.

Old Tom's days trapped in the STC data core entered their second week. His mental state shifted from initial excitement to anxiety, then from anxiety to silence. Every evening when Lin Mo passed the workshop, he could hear sounds from within—not hammering, not machine tools, but the rustle of turning pages and charcoal scraping on paper, occasionally interspersed with Old Tom's low, almost self-directed mutterings, as if he were speaking to the lines on the diagrams. Old Tom was teaching himself, learning from knowledge left on paper by humanity ten thousand years ago—he had dug out a few old mechanical engineering textbooks from the dust-covered reference books in the workshop, studying STC encrypted data while simultaneously brushing up on foundational theory.

At the end of the second week, Old Tom posted a note on the workshop door: “I'm still here. Research not done. Don't worry.” The handwriting was sloppy, like a line of social signaling squeezed out by someone trapped by a problem for too long. When Lin Mo saw the note, he smiled—this was the first time Old Tom had proactively reported his status to the outside world. Though only twelve characters, it at least meant he was alive and his mind was still working—someone truly stumped wouldn't have the energy to write a note. Lin Mo took the note off the door, folded it, put it in his pocket, and kept it as a record of this period.

During Old Tom's second week struggling with the STC data, a small thing happened in Blackstone Town—a stray dog had been lingering on the town's edge for days, so thin its ribs stuck out one by one. In the end, an old man living at the town's entrance took it in. The old man fed it half a ration bread. After eating, the dog didn't leave but squatted by the threshold. This matter had nothing to do with Lin Mo, but when he heard about it, he fell silent for a moment.

At a time when food rations were strictly limited and every extra mouth meant extra burden, someone was still willing to take in a stray dog. Wang Defu later said it wasn't kindness—in this damned universe, if you can hold onto something warm, you hold onto it. Lin Mo didn't comment on that statement. But he knew Wang Defu was right.

After more than ten consecutive hours of reading STC data, Old Tom's eyes had begun to redden, dry tear stains seeping from their corners. His fingers trembled slightly on the diagram, not from fatigue—it was a blacksmith's physical reaction when facing a technical specification he had never seen before. Lin Mo stood behind him, not rushing him, just pushing the oil lamp a few inches closer to Old Tom to concentrate the light better. When the first complete, usable circuit diagram finally appeared in the data, Old Tom's finger paused on the paper. Then he extracted that portion of data, set it aside separately, and marked it with charcoal on the edge: “Confirmed.”

The Arsenal chimney in the distance was still smoking, its black smoke trailing a long grey tail across the evening sky. They hadn't waited for Imperial reinforcements, hadn't waited for the chaos forces to retreat—what they got was a process parameter sheet that could improve metalworking precision by one grade under error-free conditions. Lin Mo took the data slate Old Tom handed him and glanced at the timestamp—a forging standard from the era of the Great Crusade. The Imperial industrial level from over ten thousand years ago was a full grade higher than the current Imperial standard. He noted this data in his mind—not because of the parameters themselves, but because it meant the Imperium had not only failed to progress over ten millennia, it had lost far too much.

*The next STC blueprint better be energy-related.

The mirror of the emperor's golden shimmer flickered at the edge of his vision,

No prompt, no system message—

—Lin Mo's Self-Observation of Multi-Track Advancement Mode

What he didn't notice was that his shadow, cast on the ground behind him, stretched into a shape not belonging to a human.

Night deepened. The lights of Blackstone Town went out one by one, leaving only the torches on the watchtowers swaying in the wind. He stood by the window for a while, then returned to the table to continue writing his plans.

He silently calculated in his mind: how many days' worth of food reserves remained, how much ammunition had been consumed, how many people were needed for the next patrol. These numbers meshed in his mind like gears, each one linked to three others—change one, and everything had to be recalculated.