82: Chapter 82 The Secret of the Lighter: For the first time, she showed an expression beyond mere wariness.

Bang!

Old Tom slammed his hammer onto the anvil beside the quenching tank. It wasn't wrought iron—it was a newly cast gun barrel. The barrel bounced twice on the anvil's surface, rolled onto the ground, and struck a spray of sparks.

"There are sand holes in this barrel!" He set the hammer down on the corner of the anvil, the sweat beads on his beard reflecting the furnace fire in an orange-red glow. "Who made the sand mold? Daring to pour molten iron without sifting the sand clean?!"

The apprentice shrank back in fear. Old Tom bent down to pick up the gun barrel, holding it up against the furnace fire to inspect it closely—there was a dark hole the size of a needle tip on the inside of the barrel wall, almost invisible to the naked eye. But he saw it. Having forged iron his entire life, he could identify at a glance what was sturdy and what would cause a barrel explosion.

"Smash it and recast it." He tossed the gun barrel back onto the anvil. "Here, substandard parts do not leave the workshop. Remember—the effort you save by skipping an afternoon of sifting sand is a lifetime someone else will pay for on the battlefield."

Lin Mo was passing by the entrance of the Arsenal and happened to hear this. He didn't go in—it was useless for others to interject when Old Tom was disciplining an apprentice. He merely paused at the door for two seconds and added a line to the register in his hand: Gun barrel quality inspection standards need to be written down. Old Tom's naked eye was more accurate than a caliper, but the naked eye couldn't be passed down. After writing it, he continued toward the Intelligence Center.

Meanwhile, at the entrance of the warehouse in the southeast corner of the square, Yang Shitou was struggling with a wooden crate covered in two years of dust. Prying open the lid with a crowbar, he found a piece of Imperial military equipment he had never seen before—the metal casing was covered in dust, with a shallow dent across the surface, as if it had been struck during transport.

"What is this thing?" He carried the instrument out and set it under the sun, wiping the nameplate on the casing with his sleeve—it was high gothic, and he couldn't read a single word.

The Deputy Medical Officer had just come out of the Medical Station to dump disinfectant wastewater and stopped as she passed the warehouse entrance. She stared at the instrument for a full two minutes. It wasn't a casual glance—she had come to a full stop, not even blinking, like an appraiser examining an artifact of unknown origin.

"It's used for detecting the residual concentration of Warp psychic energy in the air."

Her voice wasn't loud, but Yang Shitou nearly dropped the instrument on the ground—not from the volume, but from the shock of what she said.

"W-what is it?"

"A Warp psychic residue detector." She reached out and pointed to the three toggle switches on the side of the instrument. "This is the calibration knob; turn it clockwise to adjust the sensitivity. This is the air intake port; it can draw in air within a thirty-step range for particle analysis. This is the alarm threshold setting; it will buzz if it exceeds the limit." She explained the function of the three switches clearly, then swept a glance at Yang Shitou. "You left it in the corner of the warehouse to gather dust. For these past two years, have you been relying on a broom to check the air quality?"

Yang Shitou opened his mouth. He originally wanted to ask, "Who are you and what right do you have to say that," but he swallowed the words. It wasn't that he didn't dare—it was that she was right. This instrument had been found among the batch of parts from Cassius back then; no one recognized it, so it was tossed into the corner of the warehouse. Two years. For two whole years, they had relied entirely on their eyes, noses, and intuition to judge whether there was Warp contamination in the air.

"I..." Yang Shitou scratched the back of his head. "Then... could you teach me how to use it?"

The Deputy Medical Officer looked at him, pausing for two seconds. During those two seconds, there was no expression on her face. Later, when Yang Shitou recounted this to Lin Mo, he said, "The way she looked at me was like a middle school teacher looking at a student who raised their hand to ask, 'How do you pronounce this word?' It wasn't contempt—it was that she hadn't expected me to actually dare to ask."

"Fine," she said.

Yang Shitou later mentioned this to Lin Mo, still shaking his head. "I wanted to snap back at her right after she said that, but she immediately turned around and explained the function of every button clearly. I couldn't bring myself to curse."

When he said this, he was holding the instrument in the square, performing the first air sampling. The Deputy Medical Officer stood nearby, correcting two of his operational errors—her tone wasn't gentle, but every correction was accompanied by a "Why." It didn't seem like impatience; it was more like she felt that understanding the principles was more important than rote memorization of the operation.

Lin Mo watched the whole process from the window of the Intelligence Center. He didn't go out to help—Yang Shitou was the type of person who needed to figure things out for himself; the more others helped, the more uneasy he felt. He merely added another line to the register: Yang Shitou learning instrument operation; learning speed faster than expected. The Deputy Medical Officer's teaching method is more effective than the Imperial standard training manual. Reason to be investigated: She doesn't teach steps; she teaches principles.

When he wrote 'She doesn't teach steps; she teaches principles,' his pen paused for a beat. Back when he was a product manager, the best requirement documents he had written all shared the same characteristic: they didn't just tell the developers 'what to do,' but also explained 'why it should be done, and what problems users would encounter in what scenarios.' The Deputy Medical Officer's train of thought was exactly the same as his requirement documents—it wasn't about completing the task at hand, but about enabling the person taking over to solve problems independently in the future. He had only met one such person on Hope Star.

That person was walking over from the direction of the Medical Station.

The Deputy Medical Officer's name was Lieutenant Alice Vian.

It was the fourth day after the crash, and this was the first time she had formally told Lin Mo. It wasn't deliberate concealment; it was just that the crash, her injuries, questioning the fortifications, working night shifts, optimizing medical supply classification—a string of events piled up, and self-introduction ranked quite low on her priority list.

On the evening of the fourth day, Lin Mo waited for her at the entrance of the Medical Station as she finished her shift. She took off her gloves and nodded at him.

"Lieutenant Alice Vian. Deputy Medical Officer of the Astral Knights' Third Medical Squadron."

"Lin Mo. Archon of Blackstone Town on Hope Star." He extended his hand.

She shook his hand. The handshake lasted half a second longer than the Imperial standard military salute. It wasn't hesitation—she was counting how many types of calluses were on this palm. Those from tactical grip on a gun, those from farm work, those left from holding a pen. She didn't comment immediately after letting go.

"You have three types of calluses on your hand," she said after all. "You don't look like an administrative official from a colony world."

Lin Mo looked down at his palm. "Here, administrative officials also have to go down into the mines to dig iron. There is no position of 'Archon cum miner' in the Imperial establishment, so I had to invent one myself."

The corners of her mouth moved slightly. The movement was too small to count as a smile—but Lin Mo recognized the arc. He had seen it on another Alice's face: when someone developed an interest in something beyond their expectations, but didn't want the other person to notice, the corners of their mouth would have this kind of half-hearted upward curl.

"You said before that you were managing a settlement—you aren't just managing," she said. "You are building."

"What's the difference?"

"Management is maintenance. Building is—" She paused, as if looking for a precise word. "—drawing a template where there is no template."

Lin Mo didn't respond. But he kept these words in his heart for a long time. Four days—it only took her four days to see through what he had been doing for the past few years, yet had never summarized aloud himself.

The afternoon of the fifth day.

Lin Mo finished approving the last material requisition application in the Intelligence Center and walked to the door—his lighter should have been sitting on the windowsill. He reached out to touch it, but it was empty.

He turned around.

The Deputy Medical Officer—Lieutenant Alice Vian—was standing three steps away, holding that silver metal lighter in her hand. She raised it to her eyes, her thumb pressing on the flint wheel, but she didn't press down. She was waiting for his reaction.

"This device," she said, and her thumb finally pressed the flint wheel—a small cluster of flame sprang up, appearing weak yet clear in the afternoon sunlight. "It uses no psychic energy, no batteries, no energy source known to the Empire. How is the fire produced?"

Lin Mo took the lighter from her hand. He pressed the flint wheel, and the flame lit up again. The firelight reflected on both their faces—one from Earth in the year 2024, the other from the Empire in the 31st millennium.

"Friction generates heat. The flint wheel scrapes the flint to produce high-temperature sparks, igniting the oil-soaked cotton wick." He released his thumb, and the fire went out. "On Earth, you can buy one for fifty cents. Nobody back home would ask how it creates fire—it's too common."

"Fifty cents?"

"A currency unit on Earth; it's not important." He handed the lighter back. "You can keep it."

She took the lighter. She didn't put it in her pocket immediately—her thumb pressed the flint wheel: once, twice, three times. Every time the flame lit up, her brows would furrow ever so slightly. It wasn't confusion. It was total concentration, like someone trying to find hidden coordinates in a map they couldn't understand.

She flipped the lighter over to look at the engravings on the bottom. It wasn't an Imperial manufacturing mark—it was a few symbols she had never seen before. That was the original manufacturer's logo of the lighter; Lin Mo couldn't remember what brand it was anymore. But she stared at it for a long time. Three minutes, perhaps longer.

"These symbols," she finally spoke, her fingertip pointing at the engravings on the bottom, "do not belong to any known writing system of the Empire. They are not Eldar runes, not the markings of the Ork tribes. And even—" She paused, "—not any known symbol of Chaos."

"You're eliminating possibilities."

"I am doing classification," she corrected him. "The first step in judging an unknown object is to exclude all known dangerous categories. Of the remaining possibilities, at least half won't be immediately lethal."

Lin Mo looked at her, mentally aligning this statement precisely with the logic he used when doing competitor analysis back in the day—first exclude the impossible, then look for the answer among the remaining options. This woman wasn't appraising an artifact. She was using the process of battlefield threat assessment to analyze a lighter.

At this moment, he saw an indescribable arc appear on the corners of her mouth—like a smile, like surprise, like skepticism, yet it wasn't entirely any of them. He blurted out a sentence he hadn't expected himself.

"This is called a lighter. In my hometown, it's a little gadget that's been used for hundreds of years. If you want, I can tell you how it's made."

She closed the lighter. Then she put it into her pocket. The movement was very light—light as if she were afraid of breaking it, or as if she were afraid of losing it.

Then she looked up at him.

"You always say 'my hometown.' Just now you said 'Earth'—it wasn't a metaphor; it was a proper noun." Her gaze didn't leave his face. "You are not from within the Empire, are you?"

Lin Mo was silent for two seconds. In these two seconds, he weighed the risk of telling the truth. Cassius had once warned him—don't easily expose that you come from another timeline. The Imperial Inquisition's tolerance for 'time travelers' was even lower than for xenos. But in Lieutenant Alice Vian's eyes, he saw exactly the same thing as when the other Alice first asked him this question: that wasn't an inquisitor interrogating a suspect; it was a doctor diagnosing a cause of illness. She wanted the truth, not to convict, but to diagnose.

"Correct," he said. "Not within the Empire. Not any star sector you've heard of. In fact, not even humans from this timeline."

She stared at him for a long time. The silence wasn't hesitation—it was digestion. She compared this answer with everything she had observed over the past five days: the self-made weapons in the Arsenal, that flag in the square that didn't belong to the Empire, the steam-powered firearms in the sentries' hands, the wounded in the Medical Station using cloth strips instead of standard bandages—and the trust everyone on this planet had in Lin Mo, which was never built on rank or regulations.

Then she did something that made Lin Mo completely confirm he hadn't misjudged her—she took the lighter out again, glanced at it, and said two words.

"Earth."

Lin Mo's pupils contracted ever so slightly.

"How did you know—"

She didn't answer. She just lit the lighter again, looking at him through the dancing flame. This image remained frozen in Lin Mo's memory for a long time: silver-white hair, ice-blue eyes, a small cluster of orange-yellow flame between them—not like a barrier, but more like a connection.

"You have never said these two words to anyone on Hope Star," she said, her voice lower than before, yet more certain. "You always said 'my hometown,' 'our world.' But just now, what you blurted out was 'Earth'—not a made-up word, but the name you've used for half your life."

"How do you know 'Earth' isn't made up?"

"Because of the tone you used when you said it." She put the lighter back into her pocket for the third time—this time, the movement was even lighter. "It was the same as when you explained the principle of the lighter. It was too precise. Made-up things are vague and leave room for oneself. Your explanation left no room."

Lin Mo didn't speak. He just looked at her face again and again—not out of distrust, but to correct his evaluation model for Imperial soldiers. There was a parameter in his old model: officers trained by the Imperial standard system would trigger defense mechanisms when faced with information beyond their cognition. But Lieutenant Alice Vian didn't. She triggered an analytical process.

"You are evaluating me," she said. It wasn't a question.

"Yes," he admitted frankly. "And you are evaluating me as well."

"I have finished evaluating," she said, turning the lighter in her pocket through the fabric, the metal casing making a slight friction sound. "You are not a Chaos infiltrator. Chaos infiltrators wouldn't use a lighter—they would directly kill anyone who questioned them. Your defense strategy has never been killing. You haven't killed anything—you just record everything in your notebook."

"How did you know I have a notebook?"

"Because I also take notes." She pulled a small leather-bound notebook from her pouch and flipped to a page. "On page sixty-five of my medical log, I've listed a complete inventory—every medical procedure in this settlement that doesn't meet Imperial standards but is undeniably effective. First: using cloth strips instead of standardized bandages; they are softer to the touch, and the healing speed for large-area abrasions increases by twelve percent. Second: storing medicine by injury severity rather than by drug type; it shortens the average time for nurses to retrieve medicine by seven seconds. Seven seconds—on the battlefield, that's a life."

Lin Mo took the notebook and read it from start to finish. The handwriting was neat, and every line included a number, an operational description, comparative data, and a conclusion. Since arriving in the 40K world, this was the first personal record he had seen that matched the structure and rigor of the product analysis documents he used to write.

He closed the notebook and handed it back.

"Do you perform this kind of assessment on every planet you visit?"

"No." She tucked the notebook back into her pouch. "Only on planets that make me spend more than five minutes wondering if they are Chaos outposts."

"How do you rule out Chaos?"

"A lighter." She said, "The power of Chaos comes from the non-material energy of the Warp. A device that creates fire purely through physical principles—no psychic power, no Chaos symbols, no sacrifices—is meaningless in the hands of Chaos. They wouldn't waste time understanding how a lighter works. Something you can figure out in five seconds is something they wouldn't learn to light even in a thousand years, if it didn't rely on psychic power."

Lin Mo was silent for a long time, then did something he hadn't fully anticipated himself—he pulled the psychic resonance crystal with silver veins from his pocket and held it up to the sunlight.

"What about this? What was the result of your assessment?"

She glanced at the crystal, then looked into Lin Mo's eyes.

"This is what you really wanted to ask." She paused. "Before I answer you, tell me first—who gave you this crystal?"

"Another Alice."

She nodded slightly. The movement was minimal, like a door that had just been cracked open.

"The energy frequency of this crystal is paired with the one I carry. The psychic resonance crystals of the Astral Knights medical squadron are never single units—they are produced in batches of two, assigned to two medical officers in the same squadron." She pulled her own out from under her collar—it was identical in shape to the one in Lin Mo's hand, though the veins were a slightly bluer color. "The two crystals resonate with each other within thirty paces. I lost consciousness during the crash, but the first thing I felt when I woke up wasn't pain. It was more like a vibration. Coming from—"

She looked into Lin Mo's eyes, leaving the sentence unfinished.

"From the vibration of the crystal in the other Alice's hand." Lin Mo finished for her, "So you knew she was still alive on the crashed ship."

"I didn't know she was alive. I only knew the crystal was still functioning—and only her psychic power could activate it." The Deputy Medical Officer tucked the crystal back into her collar. "That is why I didn't request an emergency evacuation. By protocol, I should have contacted a nearby Imperial outpost for help on the first day. But I didn't."

"Why?"

"Because I was waiting for her to come find me." She looked at Lin Mo. "She turned off her communicator. In the records of the Imperial Department of Military Affairs, Lieutenant Alice Vian is already dead. But my crystal told me she was still alive—living on the path she chose for herself. I wanted to know why."

"Have you found the answer?"

"Almost."

Alice walked over from the other side of the square. She held two recovery assessment reports for the crash survivors, her pace steady and orderly—but when she was ten steps from the entrance of the Intelligence Center, she paused. It wasn't because something had happened; it was because her psychic perception detected the resonance frequency of the matching crystal. In that second of stopping, she used her psychic power to do two things: confirm the Deputy Medical Officer's vital signs were stable, and confirm that Lin Mo was not in danger. Then she continued walking forward.

"Deputy Medical Officer Vian suggests transferring the navigator to the Blackstone Town Medical Station ahead of schedule." She stood before Lin Mo and handed over the report. "The rib fracture is lighter than estimated, but the navigator's psychic perception system suffered residual Warp shock during the crash—it requires psychic purification. The shielded treatment room at the Medical Station is more secure than the temporary tent in the swamp."

As she said this, she saw the lighter held in the other Alice's hand. She recognized it. It was Lin Mo's lighter. That night, when Lin Mo first handed her a peppermint and lit the lighter for her, she had asked: "Do people on Earth all use such small things to make fire?" Lin Mo said yes, and that no one back home thought it was any great invention; it was as common as a piece of candy—both sweet, both warm, and easily bought anywhere. She hadn't said anything at the time, but she had folded the peppermint wrapper and tucked it into her medical log. That wrapper should still be in the inner page of the notebook now.

At this moment, another silver-haired woman wearing the Astral Knights medical uniform stood before her, holding an identical lighter. Alice's brain completed two sets of comparisons in 0.3 seconds: the first set, uniform serial number, military rank, age, and organizational affiliation. The second set, the way the lighter was held in her hand, the angle of her thumb pressing on the flint wheel, and the look in her eyes when she looked at the lighter.

The result of the second set of comparisons made Alice perform an action: she flipped to the last page of the recovery assessment report, pulled a charcoal pencil from her pocket, and quickly wrote three lines in the blank space—regarding the requirements for psychic isolation during the navigator's transfer. Then she handed the report and the lighter together to the Deputy Medical Officer.

"I've attached my preliminary opinions on the transfer conditions to the back of the report." She said, "Read it first—you are the attending medical officer, your judgment takes priority."

The Deputy Medical Officer took the report. She didn't decline, didn't offer pleasantries. She scanned the contents and looked up at Alice.

"Your prioritization has changed." She said. It wasn't a question. "Back in the Legion, you placed regulations ahead of clinical judgment."

"In the Legion's field hospital, regulations were the only mechanism that could ensure nine doctors could treat sixty wounded simultaneously without errors." Alice said, "But this is not a field hospital. I know the name of every wounded person here."

"Regulations are not wrong."

"Regulations are not wrong. But they were written for the battlefield—not for home."

The Deputy Medical Officer was silent for a few seconds. Then she clipped the report together and pressed the lighter again with her thumb—the flame lit up, flickering between the two of them for a moment.

"Can I keep this?"

"You can keep it." Alice said, "On Hope Star, everyone will have one sooner or later. Just like peppermint candy."

They locked eyes in the square for about a second. One holding the lighter, the other holding the report and charcoal pencil. Lin Mo watched the whole process from the window of the Intelligence Center—he saw the medical officer of Blackstone Town say something to the Deputy Medical Officer of the Astral Knights, and he recognized the lip movements: This thing will be in everyone's hands on Hope Star sooner or later.

He suddenly realized that this might be the first time Alice had voluntarily given something that belonged to this world to another person—not handing it over for them to use, but handing it over for them to keep.

The golden light at the edge of his vision became a bit clearer at this moment.

It wasn't a complete picture, nor was it a coherent narrative—it was a distribution of temperature. Lin Mo saw some kind of particles floating between the two Alices, not like psychic power, nor like dust, but more like something he didn't know how to measure. A fragmented scene flashed through his perception: a sealed medical pod, under silver-white lights, with two women standing on either side of an operating table. It was not a subordinate relationship between lead surgeon and assistant, but a tacit understanding where both people knew exactly what to do next. Their lips were moving, but he couldn't hear the sound.

The mirror of the emperor was telling him: these two women with the same name would one day complete something together in the same operating room. He couldn't see the full picture of that event yet. But he saw those floating particles—an intruder from one world smelling the same unfamiliar scent on another intruder.

The flame of that lighter was not being used to light a lamp at this moment. It was passing something that could not be defined by military rank or regulations between two women who came from the same Legion but were walking on different paths.

The golden light faded slower than any time before. It wasn't that the amount of information was large, but the information density was too high. So high that Lin Mo had to break it into several pieces in his mind to slowly digest it.

He turned back to the table and wrote a line in the register, his handwriting lighter than usual—so light that he wasn't even sure himself if he should record this: "It is recommended that both Lieutenant Vians be jointly responsible for the optimization of the battlefield medical system. Their professional differences might yield more valuable solutions than consensus."

He read the line twice. It was only when reading it the second time that he realized he had used the title "Vian." Not Alice. Vian.

Subconsciously, he had already categorized these two women with the same name into the same group. This type of person is called "someone who knows what they are doing and doesn't use their rank to pressure others." There might be many such people in the Astral Knights, but on Hope Star, he had only met two so far.

He flipped to the next page and sketched a few strokes of the defensive deployment map. He stopped halfway through—outside the window in the square, the two Alices had already separated, each going their own way. One went to the Medical Station, and the other walked toward the Arsenal.

He put down the charcoal pencil, went out, and walked toward the Arsenal. He wanted to see something.

Old Tom was squatting by the cooling pool in the iron smelting workshop, holding a mug of ale. Every afternoon at this time, it was his break after checking the transmission mechanism of the forging hammer. The ale was brewed by Aunt Zhang; from the Blackstone Village era until now, it had always tasted the same.

His eyes didn't rest while he drank—he scanned the operational status of every machine. The speed of the steam engine, the stroke of the forging hammer, the water temperature of the cooling pool, the flame color of the tempering furnace. If any machine's sound was even slightly off, his ears could single it out from the noise of the entire workshop.

Then he saw the silver-haired woman.

She was squatting on the other side of the cooling pool, holding a small silver object in her hand—not standard Imperial equipment, it looked like some kind of manual ignition device. She had taken it apart. The casing, flint wheel, flint, and cotton wick were arranged neatly on the concrete edge of the cooling pool. The way she studied these parts wasn't just looking—it was comparing. She compared the structure of the flint wheel to the transmission gears of the forging hammer, and examined the fingernail-sized flint device against the steam engine igniter designed by Old Tom.

Old Tom's mug of ale stopped at his lips. It wasn't surprise—it was that this posture reminded him of something.

"What are you comparing?" He spoke, his voice as coarse as a grinding wheel against iron.

"Coefficient of friction." She didn't even look up. "Your steam engine igniter, the flint wheel diameter is nineteen times that of this—" She pointed to the disassembled flint wheel, "—but the ignition success rate is less than a third of this one. It's not a material problem; it's that the angle of the friction grooves on the surface of the flint wheel is wrong. You're using a sixty-degree cross-hatch pattern—you should use a forty-five-degree unidirectional pattern. By concentrating the friction in one direction, the spark density can be increased by at least forty percent."

The ale in Old Tom's hand nearly spilled. It wasn't because she pointed out the problem that had taken him three months to figure out. It was because she had spent—he glanced at the clock on the workshop wall—less than a quarter of an hour, squatting by the cooling pool with only a disassembled lighter in her hand, to expose the core flaw of the ignition system he had been designing for half a year.

"Have you seen a steam engine before?" He asked.

"No."

"Then how did you know the groove angle was wrong?"

"The principle of friction generating heat doesn't change." She held the flint wheel up to the furnace fire. "No matter how many times you enlarge the friction surface, the physical laws of spark generation are the same. Temperature, speed, angle—three variables determine the temperature of each spark. You only controlled the first two."

Old Tom was silent for a good while. He placed the ale mug on the edge of the pool and picked up the disassembled flint wheel with his calloused hands. He looked at it against the furnace fire for a long time—he wasn't looking at the grooves of the flint wheel, but at his own igniter design drawings. Those drawings had spun through his mind dozens of times, and he had never been able to figure out why the success rate wouldn't go up. He had tried different steels, different grinding wheels, different speeds—but he had never thought of changing the grooves from sixty degrees to forty-five degrees.

"Do you know how long you just spent telling me the problem I couldn't figure out for half a year?" He didn't look up.

"A quarter of an hour." She paused. "Using someone else's mistakes as a reference is faster than making mistakes yourself and then summarizing them. Your igniter design is not wrong—it just lacked a reference object."

"A reference object?"

"A point of reference with the same principle but different scale." She put the lighter parts back together one by one and pressed the flint wheel with her thumb—the flame lit up. "This is it."

Old Tom watched her close the lighter. The corners of his mouth under his beard twitched a few times—others might just think his lips were trembling, but Lin Mo knew what it was. It was Old Tom's style of shock: not saying it with words, but saying it with the length of his silence.

"You are the second one." Old Tom finally spoke.

"The second what?"

"The second person to enter my workshop who doesn't ask 'How much does this machine cost,' but only asks 'How much more can the transmission efficiency be improved?'" He pointed in the direction of the square outside the window. "The first one—is right now in that building, deploying the defense of the entire planet."

When saying this, he didn't look at Lin Mo—he didn't even know Lin Mo was standing at the workshop entrance. He simply stood up, tapped his pipe against the anvil, shaking out a few sparks. The sparks fell into the stagnant water by the pool and hissed out. Then, he bent down, rummaged through the tin cabinet under the workbench to find the blueprint for the steam engine igniter he had been drawing for half a year, and spread it out on the anvil. The blueprint was full of modifications—pencil marks, charcoal marks, and even one spot scraped away with a fingernail.

"Forty-five-degree unidirectional grain," he said to the Deputy Medical Officer. "Tell me more specifically—where should the grain start? How deep should it be?"

The Deputy Medical Officer stood up and walked to the anvil, tracing a line on the blueprint with her fingertip.

"From here, radiating outward from the central axis of the spark wheel, at forty-five degrees. The grain depth shouldn't exceed three percent of the wheel diameter; too deep will actually lower the spark temperature. And one more thing—" She pointed to the igniter's fixed axle on the blueprint. "The sliding bearing used for this fixed axle should be replaced with a rolling bearing. The friction loss of sliding bearings during high-speed rotation is the second biggest reason for your ignition failures—the first is the grain, as I mentioned just now."

"Replace sliding bearing with rolling bearing…" Old Tom put the pipe back in his mouth, took a puff, and quickly made two marks on the blueprint—grain modification and bearing replacement. "Where did you learn all this?"

"Not at the Astral Knights," the Deputy Medical Officer said, putting the lighter back in her pocket. "It was after a crash, at a frontier outpost that could only survive on one crate of emergency supplies for two months. Power there was maintained by manual generators, and the generator rotor bearings wore out too quickly, so we took the wheel axles from medical carts to replace them—rolling bearings are nearly three times more durable than sliding bearings. Later, I reclassified the bearing types for all equipment, not according to Imperial standards, but according to my own."

"Classified by what?" Old Tom asked.

"By rotation speed and load. Rolling for high speed and high load, sliding for low speed and low load." She paused. "The Adeptus Mechanicus never classifies them this way. Because the Empire's classification standards are designed for standardized production—not for making every machine at a remote outpost last a little longer."

Old Tom stared at her for a long time. The pipe slowly tilted in his mouth—he had forgotten to smoke.

Then he picked up the ruined gun barrel—which was still hot on the anvil just a moment ago—and handed it to her.

"Sand holes. This is the seventeenth one I've scrapped," he said. "Can you see where the problem is?"

She took the gun barrel and examined it closely against the furnace fire. Her posture was exactly the same as Old Tom's just now—but she was not a blacksmith; she was a medical officer.

"The hidden holes on the inner wall of the barrel become stress concentration points when a bullet is fired," she said. "The first shot, cracks start to form. The second shot, the cracks extend to the middle of the barrel wall. The third shot—"

"Barrel explosion," Old Tom finished for her. "As a medical officer, how do you know the process of a barrel explosion?"

"Because when I treat casualties from barrel explosions, I never just stitch up the wounds," she said, handing the barrel back. "When I remove shrapnel from a casualty's arm, I look at the fracture surface of the shrapnel. The grain of the fracture can trace the starting point of the explosion—there's nothing wrong with the bullets; it's always hidden damage or micro-pores inside the gun barrel. You blacksmiths see the sand holes in the gun barrel; I see the cross-section of the shrapnel taken out of the casualty's wound. We aren't looking at the same thing, but we are looking for the same cause. The Adeptus Mechanicus textbooks cover engineering materials—but the textbooks only teach theory; they don't describe what shrapnel looks like when it's pulled out of a human body."

Old Tom pulled the pipe from his mouth. This time he didn't speak—he turned and walked to the sink, knocked the pipe clean, tucked it into his pocket, and then pulled a small metal clip from his collar. It was very old, and the markings on it had been worn smooth. After a long while, he said:

"I've been a blacksmith for fifty years. In those fifty years, I've lost count of the people who have come into this workshop, complained that I have too many rules, and treated me like a madman. There are also a few who have respected me as an old craftsman. But you are the third person who could point out two design flaws in one afternoon and provide solutions along with them."

He pointed to the discarded gun barrel on the corner of the anvil—it had already cooled down, and the rust on its surface shimmered with dark red spots in the residual light of the furnace.

"That pipe, the last of the seventeen scraps—I've never thrown it away. It's not because I'm reluctant to waste the iron. It's because I want to keep it to remind myself: some problems can be seen with the naked eye, while others require the brain of a different profession to be seen." He put the pipe back in his mouth and took a puff. "You're right. Forty-five-degree grain, change the bearings to rolling ones. I'll change it right now."

He walked two steps away, then stopped and looked back at the Deputy Medical Officer.

"What's your name?"

"Lieutenant Alice Vian."

"Vian." He nodded—the exact same address used when Alice called her earlier, though he couldn't possibly know about that. He simply naturally omitted the military rank and given name. "Tomorrow morning, after I finish modifying the igniter—come and take a look."

"Alright."

Old Tom walked back into the depths of the workshop. Outside the workshop, the two Alices went their separate ways again—one went to the Medical Station for re-examination of casualties, and the other stayed by the cooling pool of the Arsenal, taking apart the lighter again and using charcoal to draw sketches of the transmission structure on the edge of the pool.

Lin Mo stood at the workshop entrance for a long time. He didn't go in to interrupt—not just because it wasn't necessary, but because he suddenly realized something: that lighter had done in one day what he had been doing since he arrived at Hope Star—acting as a comparison piece. A little item that proved "another method can also work."

Old Tom used the lighter's grain to improve the steam engine ignition system, just as he used Earth's product management logic to reform Hope Star's administrative management. The Deputy Medical Officer used the lighter's friction principle to interpret mechanical transmission, just as he used Earth's industrial thinking to reform Hope Star's weapon manufacturing.

What he saw was no longer two Alices. It was a pattern.

In this pattern, the lighter, mints, requirement documents, forty-five-degree unidirectional grain, and rolling bearings—these things all shared one attribute: they all came from a system that was completely different from the Empire, yet equally effective. And this system was slowly seeping into the fabric of this world, through him, through Alice, through the Deputy Medical Officer, through Old Tom—through everyone willing to squat down and carefully examine a spark wheel nineteen times smaller than the Imperial standard against the furnace fire.

The gold at the edge of his vision appeared again—clearer than ever before.

This time it wasn't a temperature distribution. It was a clear image: a starship engine. It wasn't an Imperial standard design—its ignition system was surrounded by a circle of forty-five-degree unidirectional grain spark wheels, identical in structure to the one Old Tom was going to modify tomorrow, just thousands of times larger. When the engine started, what surged out wasn't the blue light mist of a psychic resonator—it was orange-red flames, like that small cluster lit by the lighter, magnified tens of thousands of times.

Three characters were engraved on the engine casing—Hope Star.

The image faded. Lin Mo found himself still standing at the workshop entrance, holding the registration book. He turned to a new page and wrote a line with charcoal—the handwriting was very heavy this time:

"Old Tom's rolling bearing modification schedule: three days. Fourth day, launch the steam engine new ignition system test. If successful, include it in the planet-wide standardized technology catalog. Long-term direction: feasibility pre-research for autonomous starship engine production."

When writing the four characters [Starship Engine], his pen tip paused for a beat. Building a starship on Hope Star—a few years ago, if he had said that, people would have thought he was crazy. But now he didn't think so.

The starting point of this Arsenal was a blacksmith shop and a flintlock gun. The starting point of this Medical Station was a tarpaulin tent and a crate of emergency medicine. And at this moment, two women wearing the same legion uniform were walking back and forth between the Arsenal and the Medical Station—one teaching Yang Shitou how to use the Chaos detector, the other drawing sketches of transmission structures by the cooling pool.

The scale of the starting point and the scale of the end point have never had a linear relationship.

The only thing that matters is: is there anyone willing to squat down, face the furnace fire, and carefully look at a spark wheel nineteen times smaller than the Imperial standard.

At night.

When Lin Mo finished approving the last batch of supply allocation forms, the oil in the lamp was almost exhausted. He pressed down the wick—the flame flickered and stabilized at a dimmer brightness. Then he heard a knock on the door.

It was the Deputy Medical Officer. She placed the lighter on the table.

"The inspection is complete," she said.

"Old Tom's igniter?"

"Your lighter." She turned the lighter over, bottom side up—the scratches next to the original factory logo had been removed by her using some method, and the logo was much clearer than before. "The original factory logo has seven symbols in total. I made rubbings and compared them all night—none of them match any known Imperial writing system. But the last symbol, this one in the bottom right corner—it follows the same type of symmetry rule in its structure as the stitching on your square flag."

Lin Mo looked at her.

"You are using text comparison methods to trace the original civilization of the lighter."

"Not trace," she corrected. "Confirm. Confirm that you do not belong to any known branch of human civilization—Imperial, Dark Age, Golden Age, Adeptus Mechanicus, or Merchant Fleet era. Your Earth is not in any of the Empire's archives. This gave me a reason to set aside my concerns." She pushed the lighter back to him. "You are not an illegal settler within the Empire. You come from a human civilization the Empire has never encountered. Until a suitable legal framework is found—I will not report anything about you to the Imperial Department of Military Affairs."

Lin Mo picked up the lighter and spun it halfway between his fingers.

"If you don't report it—that's disobeying military orders."

"I am not disobeying military orders. The military regulations of the Astral Knights only require medical officers to report findings that pose a threat to the Empire. And my clinical judgment is—" She stood up, walked to the door, and stopped at the doorframe. "A man who can use a lighter to make people stay, rather than to light a cigarette, poses no threat to the Empire."

"And what about you?" Lin Mo spoke before she could say the last word. "What do you think he used to make you stay? Speak according to your own judgment."

She stood in the shadow of the doorframe for a moment.

"The color of the flame. The Empire's fire is blue—psychic, plasma, Warp energy—it's all cold blue light. Your lighter burns with an orange-yellow fire. That color, I have never seen on any Imperial weapon or engine. And its temperature is three times higher than blue fire."

"Orange flames are hotter than blue ones," Lin Mo said. "That's common knowledge on Earth. Blue fire is a sign of complete combustion—its temperature is actually not as high as the incomplete combustion of orange fire."

"On your Earth, you call this kind of thing—" She took out her psychic resonance crystal from her pocket; the crystal shimmered with a faint blue light under the oil lamp. "—common knowledge."

"Yes. Common knowledge, just as universal as mints."

She lowered her hand, and the lighter in her pocket made a soft sound. She pushed open the door and walked into the night of the square.

Lin Mo sat under the oil lamp, watching the original factory logo on the lighter gradually become clear in the lamplight. Then he heard it—not a knock, not footsteps, not the wind.

It was the Chaos residue detector in the square, sounding a buzz.

The first sound was very low, as if it had just touched the lowest threshold of the alarm. He was familiar with the sensitivity Yang Shitou had set today—the lowest level meant that the concentration of Chaos particles in the air had just crossed the lower limit of the normal value. But it still rang.

The second sound came five seconds shorter than the first.

He stuffed the lighter into his pocket and pushed open the door of the Intelligence Center. The night wind blew from the direction of the swamp, carrying a scent he had never smelled in the nearly five years he had lived under this sky—not stinking, not burnt. It was more like the fishy sweetness of rust dissolved in water.

He looked up at the night sky. The brightest star was still in its original position. But it around it—on the circle of the firmament that should have been pitch black—tiny, extremely faint specks of light appeared. It wasn't the fog reflecting moonlight. It was light emitting from within the fog itself. The color was not blue.

It was deep purple.

The color of Chaos.

He opened the registration book and wrote three characters on the latest page—

"It has arrived."

The gold at the edge of his vision didn't flicker this time—it was like a needle, pricking the side of his pupil. The image was very short: in the mist at the edge of the swamp, something was moving toward Blackstone Town. Not one. A whole swarm. And the psychic resonance crystal in his pocket—in the last half-frame before the image vanished—radiated a temperature he had never felt before.

It wasn't a warning temperature.

It was a prepared temperature.

That was no ordinary flame.

It was a man who had traveled from Earth fifty thousand years in the future,

The only thing left in his pocket, something that required no translation and no explanation from Imperial regulations,

A small cluster of warmth and strangeness that the whole universe would recognize.

When the intruder from another world placed it into the palm of another Alice,

What he handed over was a small thing,

And also the first piece of a larger puzzle—

At that time, even he himself might not have known the full picture of the puzzle.

But if Chaos smelled the scent of this cluster of flames,

He would be the first person to stand at the edge of the swamp and light the lighter.

Because in this world, orange fire is hotter than blue fire.

And hotter fire is born to burn Chaos.