Chapter 66#

Gears of Fate 08#

The teaching time this time was a bit longer than last time. After the broadcast stopped, no one spoke for a while, all thinking about the meaning of the words.

Among the twelve people, the one with the most somber expression was Xue Xin. Just now, he had used the knowledge he learned in class to give a long speech, speculating on the possible teaching content of the “power course,” but he didn’t expect the principles of this place to be completely different from those in books, even worlds apart. This was a magic academy—directly skipping the step of boiling steam with a boiler and turning it into burning magic crystals.

After thinking, they began to discuss. The requirement for this class was actually very simple. But they had to convert the time first. After one class-rest cycle, the clock in this place had made a full circle. Converting to a more universal time unit, we can tentatively assume that one circle of the clock is 24 hours, their class duration is 12 hours, and “the hour hand passing 15 degrees” is one hour.

Every hour, the demand of the conveyor belt changes once. Every two hours, the furnace produces a batch of “refined materials”—which is the large pile of red and black crystals at the furnace mouth right now.

The demand for the first hour is “red heat crystals.” They have to pick out all the red crystals from the crystal pile within an hour and put them on the conveyor belt to let them provide energy for the fortress. Moreover, among the red crystals, only those that generate heat are qualified; those that don’t generate heat are rejects and cannot provide energy, and are harmful and must never be put on the conveyor belt.

In the second hour, pick out all the black crystals that can vibrate and put them on the conveyor belt, and the batch of refined materials piled at the furnace mouth will be considered completely handled. But at this time, a new batch of refined materials is just being sent out waiting to be handled. In this cycle, completing a total of six batches of refined materials is considered to have completed today’s classroom learning task.

Yu Feichen picked up two crystals and held them in his hand. As the broadcast said, the red one had a temperature, and the black one would vibrate. But these stones were slippery, and one had to use three fingers to scoop them up.

Lilia breathed a sigh of relief and said: “This sounds much simpler than yesterday.”

“Not necessarily,” Vincent said. “There are too many of them.”

The furnace itself was already gargantuan, and this pile of refined materials was as high as nearly three people. The volume of each crystal was only thumb-sized, so the quantity was unimaginable.

Yu Feichen also looked at that pile of crystals, his gaze slightly heavy. To be honest, today’s task was harder than yesterday’s. Distinguishing between red and black, whether they were heating up or not, and whether they were vibrating or not was not hard, but humans are not machines and have uncontrollable inertia.

At this time, the female painter Ke An also spoke: “Have you guys heard of that… parable about picking up stones?”

“Which one?”

“I read it in a book when I was a child; I don’t remember it very clearly, I can only recount it from memory.” Ke An said: “Legend has it that among countless pebbles by the sea, there is a priceless pebble that will generate heat. So a person picked up stones by the sea day and night. Every stone he picked up was cold, so he threw it into the sea. This went on for a long, long time, and one day after throwing out a stone, he suddenly burst into tears.”

Lilia: “Why cry?”

“Because the stone he had just picked up was warm, but he had already gotten used to the action of throwing it out. It wasn’t until the stone disappeared into the sea that he felt the residual warmth in his palm. Unfortunately, it was too late.”

After she finished the story, everyone looked at the crystal pile with lingering fear. Xue Xin said: “Muscle memory is terrifying.”

Yu Feichen looked at the time and said: “Get ready.”

Then he examined Anfield beside him; he always had to be dizzy for a while after riding the roller coaster. Anfield was grabbing his wrist to maintain balance, saying: “I’m okay.”

Then Chen Tong said: “I really can’t guarantee that I can pick the right one. How about one of us picks and the other checks?”

“Not enough time,” Yu Feichen vetoed the proposal.

If twelve people worked at full speed, picking all these crystals in two hours was still possible. If half the manpower were taken out to check, the task simply couldn’t be completed. However, there was indeed a type of pre-processing method that could reduce some time.

“We need to pull out one person to first sort the red and black colors. The first sorting should try to distinguish rejects, but it’s not mandatory; it needs to be fast. The sorter will send the pure-colored crystals to the others. The remaining eleven people will stay in place, picking qualified crystals and putting them into the assembly line,” he said.

Vincent said: “Exactly, this can save overall time. Distinguishing red and black is much simpler than distinguishing rejects. To prevent errors in distinguishing rejects on the assembly line, it’s best to have the most careless person among us do the first simple sorting.”

Ke An added: “The crystals added together are quite heavy. This person needs to continuously send pure-colored crystals to the side of each assembly line; it’s better to have someone with more strength.”

Fast-moving, careless, strong.

With these conditions added together, everyone suddenly looked at the sprinting big brother, Chen Tong, in unison.

“What does this mean? Do I look like a careless person?” Chen Tong was greatly puzzled, and as he spoke, his voice spontaneously weakened a bit, “Pick… pick… I’ll pick. I am indeed quite strong.”

Time was limited. After the division of labor was finished, they began to work. In the first hour, they had to finish all the “red heat crystals.” Chen Tong’s first sorting also took time. Others used metal buckets to fill a bucket of multi-colored crystals and sorted them first.

Yu Feichen’s assembly line was next to Anfield’s. After confirming that Anfield wouldn’t fall down while picking, he also began to work. Twenty red heat crystals were quickly picked out and thrown onto the assembly line. The assembly line quickly carried them away, disappearing into the transmission tracks below the floor. He picked twenty, and they were all qualified products; the reject rate was not high.

Chen Tong’s movement was also very fast, and in only ten minutes, he brought everyone buckets of red pure-colored crystals. Everyone’s attention was highly concentrated on the stones in their hands. This work was mentally taxing, and even Chen Tong spontaneously fell silent. The classroom was in dead silence, with only the sound of crystals colliding, the humming of the magic conductor furnace, and the friction sound of the conveyor belt.

The material of the conveyor belt was extremely special, a kind of dark, rough-surfaced soft metal, not a material Yu Feichen had ever seen, like sandpaper strengthened tens of thousands of times. Chen Tong finished more than a dozen trips and was staring at the conveyor belt in a daze while resting. Suddenly, he had a bout of curiosity and touched the conveyor belt with his pinky finger like a flash of lightning. He let out a scream, and a hole the size of a soybean had already been gouged out of his pinky, bleeding profusely.

Xue Xin shook his head helplessly at the big brother’s curiosity: “The surface of this magic stone is too smooth, and it’s a bit difficult for us to hold it. To move them, the surface of the conveyor belt has to be made of high-friction material… plus it’s moving so fast, it’s very lethal. Brother Chen, don’t touch it anymore.”

Chen Tong grimaced and learned a lesson, repeatedly saying he would never move randomly again.

After that was a long silence, and heat. The magic conductor furnace radiated heat outward like a heart, but they all remembered the school rule of “no improper dress” and only dared to loosen their tight cuffs a bit. In only half an hour, Lilia’s short curly hair was already wet and stuck to her forehead.

Yu Feichen was fine; his emotions had always been steady, and this kind of person usually isn’t afraid of heat.

But he always felt something was pressing on his heart, like a layer of ominous shadow.

Was something overlooked? But he looked around, and everyone was working in an order; there was nothing wrong. On the contrary, the more he wanted to investigate, the less he could find the source of that premonition, only feeling that something was indeed wrong.

At the same time, his picking didn’t stop. He took one out of the bucket, confirmed the temperature, and put it on the conveyor belt. The crystal was quickly carried away by the conveyor belt, and then he repeated the next, the next…

One action after another was mechanically repeated, making one feel as if they had become a mechanical arm on an assembly line that only knew simple work. There had already been hundreds, and he hadn’t encountered a single reject yet; it seemed the qualification rate of the refined products was very high.

But the higher the qualification rate, the stronger the inertia formed by the mechanical actions, and once an error occurred—

He stared at his point-to-point movement, his gaze gradually sinking, and the shadow in his heart also gradually magnified.

Until a scream suddenly came from Eight-legs’ side!

Yu Feichen snapped his head in that direction.

“I threw it wrong!” Eight-legs’ action of throwing the stone stopped halfway, his face deathly pale.

The premonition of danger suddenly magnified and was completely reified. Yu Feichen blurted out: “Don’t move!”

Eight-legs heard it, but the action had already been done before the brain could think. That wrongly picked stone hadn’t been carried far yet. He suddenly reached out to grab it, the five fingers of his left hand hooking down, cupping that slightly cool red stone.

But his hand was suddenly dragged forward by the high-friction conveyor belt.

A short shout came from Eight-legs’ mouth. The conveyor belt rolled forward rapidly, and his whole body was carried by his left hand, half-rolling and half-tumbling onto the conveyor belt in a distorted posture.

Yu Feichen was the first to rush over, and Chen Tong followed shortly after.

“Don’t move!” Yu Feichen said again. But Eight-legs couldn’t care about anything anymore. To escape from the conveyor belt, his whole body was twisting crazily. He was incredibly strong, and the conveyor belt speed was too fast; in a blink of an eye, he had rolled to the end. Fortunately, at this time, the two of them arrived simultaneously, grabbing Eight-legs’ arms and shoulders from both sides.

In the next second, Vincent also rushed over, and the three of them worked together to restrain him and lift his whole body up.

But the unformed scream in Eight-legs’ mouth suddenly grew louder. After his body stopped moving in synchronization with the conveyor belt, the coarse metal surface quickly rubbed past his legs that remained on the conveyor belt. The clothes were rubbed away in an instant, and the next moment the flesh and blood were also scraped off, revealing white bones.

Extreme pain stimulated him to arch his back, which again made his originally lifted body re-contact the surface of the conveyor belt, instantly increasing the friction.

In the next second, there was nothing left on the conveyor belt.

The broken body was pushed and wrapped by the rapidly advancing conveyor belt and disappeared at the underground transmission port. Only Chen Tong was in a daze, staring at an arm in his hand. The wound on his pinky finger was still bleeding. A little bit more, and he would have had such an end.

Another vivid life disappeared into the mechanical structure that didn’t allow any errors. His name was Charaststras. Because it was too hard to pronounce, everyone called him “Mr. Eight-legs.”

Xue Xin painfully buried his face in his hands, saying hoarsely: “I told you, don’t touch the conveyor belt…”

But it’s too late to say anything now.

Yu Feichen turned back silently and met Anfield’s gaze as he watched from afar. Anfield had already cleared his head from the dizziness, lowering his eyes, and suddenly pointed to Ke An on his right.

At this moment, Yu Feichen completely realized what that ominous premonition actually was. Realized… just how big a mistake they had made.

He said hoarsely: “Don’t put stones directly on the conveyor belt from now on. Put them in an empty bucket first, and pour them into the conveyor belt only when there’s a bucketful.”

This way, once an error occurs, there’s still a chance for remedy.

Adding such a simple step could have avoided Eight-legs’ tragedy, but before the accident happened, no one had thought of it.

Before starting, Ke An out of kindness told a well-known parable to warn everyone, and everyone naturally did what happened in the story, picking one and throwing one—and eventually repeated the mistake in the parable.

More terrifying than the body’s inertia is the heart’s inertia; humans are not machines, after all.