Chapter 90: The Unsolved Beam of Light

Du Qiu woke up.

The time doesn’t seem right!

How could he have woken up so quickly?

Du Qiu hurriedly checked the time: 6:00 a.m., on the dot.

Eh, it’s already six o’clock? That means the time is up. But why does he feel like it hasn’t been long since his descent?

Du Qiu thought for a moment and began to review the footage recorded by the cameras he had set up.

When he saw that he had only entered deep sleep at ten past ten, he felt slightly surprised. It usually takes precisely five minutes.

Then, he saw a beam of light flash across the crystal pillow at 2:10 a.m., and his mouth fell open in astonishment.

Du Qiu remembered very clearly that when he first used the crystal pillow, because he always dreamt of traveling the starry skies and it eased his headache, he had recorded the process with a camera.

At the time, there wasn’t any abnormal state at all.

Could this time be due to using the replica crystal pillow?

Du Qiu took note of this idea and decided to try using the original crystal pillow that evening to see if the same light would appear.

He picked up the crystal pillow and examined it carefully, but his eyes couldn’t discern any changes.

Hmm, take it to the company later and have a look with the scanning tunneling microscope to see if there are any changes. How did this light come into being?

It appears necessary to purchase some more detection equipment in the future, to monitor his body’s state externally after he enters a dream, and to collect some bodily parameters to see if there are any changes occurring.

…

Early in the morning, as soon as he got to the office, Qin Yun came knocking.

“President Du, representatives from the three companies have all arrived in Magic City. They called to ask when the patent briefing will be held.”

“Oh, they arrived so quickly. That’s fine. Arrange it for one o’clock this afternoon at the nearby Hyatt Hotel. Rent a meeting room.”

“Got it.”

“By the way, our Dream Technology’s Germany R&D center has already been registered, right? Notify Rein Leinar that they should accompany me to meet the representatives of those three factories this afternoon. They might need to give us some extra support.”

“Hmm, since it’s about patent negotiations, should Kim Zhenan also attend?”

“Yes, Kim Zhenan prepared the patent licensing agreement text himself.”

Qin Yun said with some anticipation, “I wonder how much we will be able to earn from this patent. The subsequent payments from Huading Group haven’t arrived, and our funds are very tight.”

Du Qiu frowned and said, “We are going to earn a significant amount of money this time. The series of offshore companies you registered before will soon have capital flow. I didn’t expect such a big corporation as Huading Group to run into trouble. However, according to Chen Tao, even if they didn’t have issues now, they probably would have in the future, and by then it might be too late to save them.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t do my job well enough, which led to this situation,” Qin Yun said, feeling she hadn’t fulfilled her responsibility as the financial director.

“How could I blame you? I was the one spending too aggressively; even if you wanted to, you couldn’t have stopped me. Alright, let’s not talk about this anymore. Prepare well for the meeting.”

Once Qin Yun left, Du Qiu quickly headed to the laboratory.

Du Qiu’s lab was becoming more and more like something out of science fiction. Not only was the door equipped with an automatic facial recognition system, but even some of the routine tests were performed by automatic devices.

For example, to inspect the crystal pillow’s basic situation, all Du Qiu had to do was place it in the corresponding position on this device.

The device would initiate the necessary testing equipment to inspect the crystal pillow and produce a test report.

In the future, if Du Qiu provided it with mobility and language capabilities, it could be considered a robotic assistant.

Of course, the intelligence program was certainly not sufficient, since there was no sufficiently small yet high-performance chip and storage device to ensure the running of intelligent programs.

With breakthroughs in new materials, Du Qiu had begun to refocus on the field of intelligent machinery.

Now, the chips in the industrial robots of the automated production lines designed by Du Qiu were the best he could buy at a reasonable price.

Thankfully, Du Qiu’s software was excellent, allowing the production line to perform well.

But Du Qiu was not satisfied.

Shortly after, the automatic testing device printed out the routine inspection report, and Du Qiu looked it over only to find that the data showed everything was normal.

He then used a scanning tunneling microscope to examine it personally, and subsequently, he noticed that the patterns seemed to have slight changes compared to before.

After he finished copying the original, he always felt that the patterns seemed slightly different from the original. Now, these differences seemed to have vanished.

It appeared that use had caused the patterns to change, influenced undoubtedly by the light.

But what was that light, and how was it produced?

Du Qiu thought about it for a while, then gave up.

After all, this involved consciousness technology, an area of study that was almost non-existent on Blue Star.

Of course, there were people studying brain-controlled machinery on Blue Star, and some progress had been made.

However, those were based on brainwaves.

Du Qiu would bet that the patterns on the crystal pillow could not be driven by brainwaves.

Du Qiu was a pragmatist. When he could not theorize or understand something, he would set it aside and focus on what he could achieve with technology.

Just like when he copied the crystal pillow, if he intended to understand the principles before manufacturing, he would never have succeeded.

Just by simply copying the patterns onto the crystal pillow, everything became successful.

Having confirmed there were no other changes to the crystal pillow, Du Qiu was relieved.

For safety, he decided to replicate another crystal pillow.

The morning passed, and Du Qiu, with practiced ease, successfully replicated another crystal pillow.

Now in the lab, there were two crystal cubes without patterns, which Du Qiu put into the storage safety box.

The whole lab and the factory area were secured by an upgraded version of Du Qiu’s alert network, making sure that any unauthorized touch would trigger an immediate alarm.

After lunch, Du Qiu, along with a group of people, arrived at the Hyatt Hotel. Kim Zhenan had already arrived in the meeting room ahead of time.

She didn’t expect Du Qiu to be ready to sell the licensing rights to the carbon fiber patent, which had only just been applied for. She was curious about how much he would ask for.

The representatives from the three companies were present. Zheng Yuanhua, the general manager of Shenyang New Materials, Xu Chen, the general manager of Hongwei Materials, and the relatively new private enterprise’s chairman, Ding Shengnan, were in attendance.

“Gentlemen, thank you very much for taking time out of your busy schedules to attend this patent licensing meeting. I am the inventor, Du Qiu, and I will give you all a briefing on the patent.”

Du Qiu spent an hour briefly introducing the manufacturing process. Of course, he explained it in general terms, then asked if there were any questions.

Ding Shengnan raised his hand to ask, “Excuse me, I have a question,” he nodded to Zheng and Xu from the other two companies before continuing, “May we see the actual product of the carbon fiber produced by the production line? Or is your presentation just theoretical?”

“Of course, you can see the actual product, and you will witness the carbon fiber being manufactured on-site. You may even calculate the cost yourselves to see if it is indeed as I stated in my report, 3,000 yuan per ton.”

“When can we see the site?” asked Zheng Yuanhua.

“So, you have no questions about the report, you just want to see the actual site and the product, right?”

“Yes, Dr. Du, seeing is believing, and it’s more convincing than anything else,” Xu Chen said with a smile.

“Alright, since that is the case, I will take you to the site for a visit.”

The fifth update! Will anyone ask me to add more?