I started with a ship full of max-level veterans, and I'm just a complete noob.

"Okay." The sound of a switch being turned on came from the other side of the canvas curtain, and the light on the side of the crew-cut officer went out first.

Jiang Ming turned off his own lamp, plunging the room into complete darkness. Only a sliver of moonlight shone through the window cracks, drawing a thin white line on the ceiling.

He lay down, draped a thin towel over his face to cover his eyes and half of his face, turned over to face the wall, and slowed his breathing.

There was a thud from the military boots on the other side of the curtain, and the crew-cut officer had probably lain down as well, the springs of the cot creaking.

Jiang Ming waited for about five minutes until the breathing next door became even and long before he touched the existence of the bronze-covered book deep in his consciousness.

[The Record of Connections to Heaven, the Scholar's Scroll, and the Psychic Interface are Ready]

He didn't move a single muscle in his body, his breathing remained at the rhythm of sleep, but his consciousness had already sunk into the interface of the name card database.

The person he was looking for tonight wasn't in Qian Xuesen's lineage, but rather a newly unlocked node after Zhou Changlin's Leningrad vacuum metallurgy branch expanded horizontally.

The person corresponding to that node is Nikolai Andreyevich Bogdanov, born in 1901 and died in Moscow in 1950. He was the director of the Laboratory of Magnetic Materials and Pulse Modulation at the Leningrad Electrical Institute, specializing in the magnetic saturation response and loss mechanism of ferrites in high-frequency pulse fields.

The moment the psychic connection was established, the image in my consciousness transformed into an old laboratory filled with oscilloscope tapes and ferrite samples, with the pale winter light of Leningrad visible through the window.

A bald, middle-aged man sat on a bench, holding a fragment of a magnetic core in his hand, examining the distribution of pores inside against the light.

"Comrade Bogdanov," Jiang Ming said in his mind.

The other person turned around, their eyes behind their glasses showing the instinctive wariness and curiosity one has when meeting a stranger, a younger person.

"The relationship between the magnetic saturation inflection point of ferrite in a pulsed modulation field and frequency." Jiang Ming cut straight to the point without any pleasantries. The thirty-minute limit for each session meant he couldn't waste any time on pleasantries. "In your paper published in the Soviet Journal of Electrical Engineering in 1947, the measured data for the inflection point where the permeability decreases sharply with increasing pulse repetition frequency differed from the theoretical model by nearly fifteen percent. Did you later find a way to correct it?"

Bogdanov placed the fragment of the magnetic core on the table, adjusted his glasses, and his gaze towards Jiang Ming changed.

"You've read that paper," he said, his tone not questioning.

"I've read it, and I'm currently facing a specific problem: when the pulse width is compressed to less than two microseconds, the remanence reversal speed of the ferrite core cannot keep up with the modulation signal, resulting in an amplitude dip of about eight percent at the leading edge of the output pulse."

Bogdanov stood up, walked to the blackboard, picked up a piece of chalk, and began to write.

"Is your magnetic core manganese-zinc or nickel-zinc?"

Nickel and zinc.

What was the initial permeability?

"About eight hundred."

As the chalk drew the first formula on the blackboard, a slight sound of someone turning over came from next door.

At that moment, Jiang Ming's breathing rate did not change, his fingers did not move, and his facial muscles remained relaxed in a sleep state.

Beneath the canvas curtain, the crew-cut officer's military boots shifted direction, the bed creaked again, and then fell silent once more.

Jiang Ming consciously drew his attention back to the blackboard. Bogdanov had already finished writing the first line and was deriving the second set of relations.

"The problem with the nickel-zinc system under two-microsecond pulses is not the permeability itself, but that the damping coefficient of the domain wall displacement is underestimated." Bogdanov pointed a chalk mark on a Greek letter in the middle of the formula. "In my 1947 paper, I used the Landau-Lifshitz damping model. Later, in my experiments in 1949, I found that when the rise time of the pulse front is less than five microseconds, the contribution of eddy current loss to damping increases sharply. A correction term proportional to the square of the grain size must be added to the original formula."

He wrote the full form of the correction on the blackboard.

Jiang Ming meticulously memorized every coefficient and exponent in the formula, while simultaneously asking follow-up questions: "What is the critical threshold for grain size? Can the correction term be ignored below this value?"

"Apart from 15 micrometers, the difference is negligible, but can you currently produce nickel-zinc ferrite with uniform grains smaller than 15 micrometers?"

"Not yet. The current sintering temperature control precision is insufficient, and the average grain size is between 20 and 25 micrometers."

Bogdanov put the chalk back in the slot, turned to look at him, and said, "Then you must use this correction factor, otherwise the output amplitude of your pulse modulator will always be 8% to 12% lower than the theoretical value, and the leading edge depression cannot be eliminated."

"There's one more question," Jiang Ming asked in the remaining time, posing his second crucial question. "When the repetition frequency increases from 1 kHz to 5 kHz, the core temperature rise causes Curie point drift. Do you have any empirical formulas for temperature compensation in your measured data?"

Bogdanov returned to the bench and sat down, pulling out a strip of paper from a stack on the table. It was covered with hand-drawn curves in red and blue.

"For every 10 degrees Celsius increase, the saturation magnetic flux density decreases by about 0.35 percent. This is a linear approximation of the nickel-zinc system in the range of room temperature to 150 degrees Celsius. Above 150 degrees Celsius, nonlinear terms begin to appear. I got sick before I could finish the high-temperature measurements."

He pointed out the key data points on the paper tape to Jiang Ming one by one with his finger, and Jiang Ming engraved each value into his memory.

[Spiritual Communication Time Remaining: Four Minutes]

When the system prompt appeared, Jiang Ming had already memorized all the complete parameters of the magnetic domain wall damping correction formula, the critical value of grain size, the eddy current contribution coefficient, and the linear approximation of temperature drift.

"Thank you, Comrade Bogdanov."

"Young man," Bogdanov stood up, rolled up the paper strip, and stuffed it back into the pile of papers, "What are you making? Anything that uses pulse magnetic saturation is either a radar modulator or a pulse power source. Do you need this over there?"

The psychic connection broke as soon as those words were spoken, and the Leningrad laboratory in my consciousness vanished as quickly as a faded photograph.

Jiang Ming felt the hard board of the cot pressing against his back again, the slight dampness of the towel on his face, and the cold air seeping in through the window cracks brushing against his ear.

The breathing next door remained even.

He didn't move, remaining in his side-lying position. He mentally went through all the formulas and data he had just memorized, making sure nothing was missing, and then slowly pulled his consciousness back from the heightened state of psychic activity to the edge of normal sleep.

Tomorrow morning at six o'clock, the flat-headed clerk will get up on time to wash up and then wait for him outside the door to go to the cafeteria for breakfast together.

Before that, he had to turn the data he had obtained that night into a plausible draft before dawn, and the source had to be able to withstand questioning from Fang Xudong and Wu Hanzhang.

The damping correction term can be packaged into an equivalent model derived by analogy from a melting temperature curve on a page of Ivanov's notebook.

The temperature compensation coefficient can be seen as an extension of an exercise in Qian Xuesen's thermodynamics and statistics course at Caltech.

The relationship between grain size and eddy current loss can be attributed to the back-calculation of the measured data of the Yuanlei No. 1 exhaust furnace by Laboratory 502.

Three sources, three independent rationale, together form a complete initial draft of a design memorandum for pulse modulation magnetic saturation.

Jiang Ming opened his eyes in the darkness. The thin line of moonlight had moved from the ceiling to the top of the wall, indicating that about two hours had passed.

He needed paper and pen, but they were on the table, which was on the side of the curtain near the window, less than two meters from the cot.

The flat-headed clerk's hearing was trained in the military; any noise that exceeded the normal range of turning over in sleep could wake him up.

Jiang Ming slowly removed the towel from his face and placed it next to the pillow. Then, using his left hand to support himself on the bed board, he slowly raised his upper body, controlling the movement of each joint within a range that would not make the springs of the cot make a sound.

He wasn't wearing shoes when his feet touched the ground; the soles of his socks were icy cold against the concrete, but they made no sound.

He walked to the table in two steps, took a sharpened pencil out of the pencil case, and then pulled out three sheets of graph paper from the drawer. The whole process was completed in less than ten seconds.

After returning to his cot, he placed the manuscript paper on his overcoat above his knees and began to write by the sliver of moonlight filtering through the window, the pen tip making almost no sound on the paper.

Damping correction coefficient, eddy current contribution factor, grain size threshold, and temperature drift compensation are four sets of data arranged on graph paper, with the derivation path and source of reference marked next to them.

When he finished writing the last line, the moonlight outside the window was already covered by clouds, and the room was completely dark. He could only confirm from memory that the pencil had not written off-center.

Jiang Ming folded the three sheets of paper in half, stuffed them into the canvas tool bag under his pillow, lay back down, and pulled a towel over his face.

There are less than three hours until dawn.

After breakfast, once inside Research Lab 502, the three sheets of paper written during the night would become a pulse magnetic saturation design memo "casually derived" from Ivanov's notes, measured data from the Yuanlei No. 1 exhaust furnace, and Qian Xuesen's homework assignments.

At least until Fang Xudong and Wu Hanzhang pressed for answers, it had to look like something that truly grew out of the human world.