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

The moment those three words solidified on the cover, Jiang Ming felt as if the boundary of his entire consciousness space had been forcibly pushed outward by a factor of two.

The originally cramped and dimly lit calligraphy library has been transformed into a spacious study, with blank scrolls hanging on all four walls.

The system message indicates that the device is floating in mid-air.

The "From Commoner to Scholar" scroll expands the limit on the number of names on the scroll to ten, and the lineage can be traced back five generations, unfolding in a complete horizontal format.

Five psychic sessions are allowed per day, each lasting thirty minutes.

New feature: Historical fragment query.

Jiang Ming stared at the line of words, but his first thought was not ecstasy.

Five psychic sessions, each lasting thirty minutes.

This means that the amount of directional information he can get from the pioneers every day has more than tripled.

But pioneers only provide directions, not answers.

The more directions he has, the more work he needs to do in reality—calculate, test, and verify.

This thing isn't an automatic answer machine; it's an accelerator.

The faster you run, the harder you crash into the wall.

He calmed his racing heart and first opened the name card database.

Qian Xuesen's gold name card gleamed with a steady light, and the level of trust was marked as "a bond of life and death".

Three name cards, one each from Chen Zhiyuan, Wu Hanzhang, and Lao Sun, were hung side by side, all marked "closest friends," and were gleaming gold.

There are six seats available.

With a maximum of ten participants, spanning five generations, the game unfolds horizontally and comprehensively.

This means that while the vertical path of Theodore von Kármán, which was blocked by the gray seal, remains impassable, the number of his horizontal allies will be unlocked.

He memorized this information and then turned his attention to the new features.

Historical fragment search.

The system prompt is concise: You can view the important historical events, academic breakthroughs, and turning points in the lives of unlocked characters.

Jiang Ming attempted to perform a fragment search on Qian Xuesen's postcard.

Several blurry images appeared in the space of consciousness.

In an American university office, a blackboard is covered with formulas. A Chinese man in a suit stands at the podium, with a row of blond-haired, blue-eyed doctoral students behind him.

This is a clip of Qian Xuesen teaching in the United States.

After a quick glance, Jiang Ming discovered that the fragments only provided background scenes, did not contain any directly usable technical parameters or theoretical derivations, and could not replace psychic dialogue.

Just as he was about to exit, an unusual image suddenly flashed through the corner of his consciousness.

That's not an academic setting.

The scene shows a narrow alley where rain is falling continuously, and the puddles reflect the dim yellow streetlights.

A man in a black short jacket squatted behind a wooden box, fiddling with a small shortwave transmitter.

The key emitted a rapid ticking sound, as if someone was racing against time.

The sound of a car engine could be heard in the distance, along with the sound of leather boots splashing through puddles.

The man in the black coat stuffed a stack of papers into the tin stove, and as the flames leaped up, they illuminated the outline of his profile.

Jiang Ming couldn't see his features clearly, but he saw the man turn around and push the transmitter towards another young man behind him, his lips moving a few times.

There was no sound on the screen.

But Jiang Ming could make out a few words from the lip movements.

"Take your things and head north."

The young man took the transmitter, tucked it under his arm, and bent down to disappear into the rain.

The man in the black coat pulled a bulging canvas bag from his body, faced the approaching leather boots at the alley entrance, and slowly stood up.

The video cuts off here.

A system notification appears.

Historical fragments only provide background information and are not equivalent to spiritual communication; they cannot be used as evidence of reality.

Fragment origin: Horizontal extension and peripheral connections within the network.

Jiang Ming's back was soaked with a layer of cold sweat.

He didn't recognize the man in the black coat, nor did he know the specific time and location of the scene.

However, the appearance of that shortwave transmitter was somewhat similar to the schematic diagram on the frequency band report from the Bureau of Secrecy that Director Wang showed him.

The noise in Northwest China, the old shortwave frequency band, enemy signals being secretly used.

Are the young people and the telegraph machine that were evacuated from this fragment the starting point of that old line?

he does not know.

The Record of Heaven will not give him the answer, but only fragments.

Jiang Ming forced himself to detach himself from that scene and return to the most pressing task at hand.

The three sample tubes have passed the tests, and the Northwest region is waiting for a lifeline.

He must use all five spiritual insights brought by the scholar's scroll wisely.

Jiang Ming took a deep breath and began allocating his psychic quota for the day.

For the first time, he connected with early pioneers of vacuum tubes and radar, inquiring about the stress limit at the glass seal of the sample tube under low-temperature conditions.

The pioneer of the hot industry has provided guidance: at temperatures below -30 degrees Celsius, the shrinkage difference between Kovar alloy and glass will create micro-cracks in the sealing seams, so an extremely thin layer of low-temperature buffer adhesive must be pre-applied to the sealing surface.

The second time, he contacted the female pioneer of precision instruments to inquire about the impact of vibration frequency during long-distance railway transportation of sample tubes on the pin solder joints.

The female pioneer pointed out that the low-frequency impact generated by the joints of the train tracks is between three and five hertz, which is exactly the dangerous frequency range of glass resonance. The tubes must be suspended and fixed, and cannot make hard contact with any rigid support.

The third time, he consulted with colleagues in the materials science field to confirm whether there was a risk of oxidation in the pins of the encapsulated sample tubes during repeated temperature cycling.

My colleague spoke quickly: The outer layer of the lead wire must be coated with paraffin wax for sealing, and then wiped clean with an alcohol swab after arriving at the test site.

On the fourth and fifth occasions, he pressed the vacuum tube pioneers and female pioneers for the predicted parameters in the anti-interference test, as well as the direction of the decay curve of emission efficiency in low temperature environment.

When all five attempts at spiritual communication were completed, Jiang Ming's manila notebook was already filled with six pages.

He opened his eyes, and the gray-white morning light was already shining through the window.

The sound of a bugle call, signaling the start of reveille, came from next door to the single dormitory.

Jiang Ming put on his coat, tucked his notebook into his inner pocket, and strode towards Workshop No. 1.

In the workshop, three official military anti-jamming electron tubes, numbered Top Secret A01, A02, and A03, are neatly arranged in a white porcelain dish.

Xiao Zhao had already closed the top-secret ledger, locked it in the iron cabinet, and placed a handwritten parameter card next to each pipe.

Old Sun and Big Liu were wiping fingerprints and oil stains off the surface of the tube with dry cotton cloth.

Jiang Ming walked to the control panel, took out the ledger again, and turned to the page for test preparation.

"Engineer Wu, when can the sample tube be delivered?"

Wu Hanzhang walked over from behind, carrying a teacup, and slammed a printed shipping application form onto the stage.

"Director Zhang said that the railway bureau has already coordinated the loading of the boxcars, and they will be loaded and dispatched the day after tomorrow afternoon."

Jiang Ming looked at the contents of the "Shipping Packaging" section on the form: standard wooden crate, lined with cotton wadding, and bound with wire.

He reached under the countertop and pulled out a small cardboard box.

That was the file box used when we sent evidence of Liu Shouxin to the security department for inspection. There was a wad of yellowed cotton inside.

He pulled out the cotton and looked at it under the light for three seconds.

Cotton fibers look like tiny white hairs under the light, and once they become statically charged, they fly in all directions.

"This thing can't be used to insert tubes."

Jiang Ming threw the cotton back into the drawer and turned to look at Wu Hanzhang.

"If cotton fibers get stuck to the high-vacuum sealed interface, it may leak air when you open the box in the Northwest."

"Wooden boxes won't work either, because the vibrations from the railway joints will be transmitted through the wooden boards to the tube shell, and the frequency will hit the glass resonant area."

Wu Hanzhang held his teacup in mid-air, unable to put it down for a moment, and his expression gradually changed.

"Then what do you suggest we use to package it?"

Jiang Ming looked at the three electron tubes on the control panel that held half the lives of the entire workshop, turned the transportation application form over, and drew a sketch on the back.

"We need to make a suspended shockproof box, and the pipes cannot touch the box wall."

Before he had even finished the last stroke of his pencil, Wu Hanzhang had already started cursing.

"You're drawing so readily, but do we have rubber pads, spring sets, or shock-absorbing foam in our workshop?"

Jiang Ming put the pencil back in his pocket and looked at the workbench covered in sweat and rust.

"If there's nothing available, we'll find a substitute. This isn't the first time."