Submitting High-Tech to the Nation

In a wasteland, amidst sandstorms, with the fuel gauge on empty, Lin Rui is chased by a dozen mute wolves into a depression, ready to fight for his life. Then, the unplugged, broken radio in the truck bed lights up on its own. A woman's voice comes through: "This is the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Please respond." Her name is Su Wan. In 1992, in the western suburbs of Beijing, a bowl of plain noodles cost eighty cents. She had been sitting on a cold bench at the research institute for half a year when she discovered a dead machine that started ringing in the middle of the night—stuttering, like a knock. The first conversation between the two worlds was Lin Rui shouting out his entire situation: the car is out of gas, there are monsters outside, and there's a box of stones in the truck bed—ones that glow on their own. Su Wan wrote down a term in her notebook, her hand trembling: room-temperature superconductivity. That night, all the lights in the institute came on. The next day, Lin Rui received the first batch of supplies, with a popsicle and a note tucked under the box: Comrade Lin, mind the heat. He looked up at the sky outside the shed, minus twenty degrees, took a bite of the popsicle, feeling the chill from his throat to his heels, and took another bite. Later, the nation made a deal with him. Su Wan said, "It's probably, the nation's fortune." Lin Rui took out the family photo from his chest, pressed it tightly against his heart: "Count my dad in." Two worlds, one filament. What they need to do is not save anyone, but pass on the flame. — Description from novelcodex.org