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Once the birthday had passed, his parents and Chloe all left the base, and reality gradually returned to its usual track.
Every time the base's people worked overtime, they felt like they were drifting on a cruise ship across a receding hairline, forced to keep constant watch over their remaining hair.
Their hard work wasn't without reward.
Under their stewardship, Crimson Typhoon had already carried out two tests smoothly, gathering a vast amount of precious data, and was about to undergo its third.
Every night the base blazed with light, many people watching the enormous Crimson Typhoon at its center through their office windows while they threw themselves into their research work with full passion.
Ryan's mood lately, though, wasn't very good, all because of that new model Chloe had given him.
This was another bootleg model.
He'd noticed a year ago that bootleg Scrappers existed on the market, but he hadn't expected the bootleggers to update this fast. They'd gone and manufactured a Crimson Typhoon for him too.
It left him feeling like someone had been mooching off him for free.
He'd been willing to let others mooch off him before, but that was because those people could bring him greater heat. Addy, for instance.
On the surface they were mooching off him, but in truth he was mooching off them right back. In terms of aims, the two sides were arriving at the same destination by different roads.
This time, though, was different. These bootleg merchants brought him no heat whatsoever, and were instead lying on top of him and sucking his blood. How could that be tolerated?
He promptly lodged a complaint with Patricia, arguing that these people had not only mooched off him but off Aegis Industrial as well, and demanding a strict crackdown on domestic mech model piracy.
It had to be understood that the image copyright for Scrapper belonged to him, and the image copyright for Crimson Typhoon belonged to Aegis Industrial.
This left Patricia caught between laughter and tears, but Ryan's reasoning did count as a righteous cause, so she could only agree.
And so, at the same time as Crimson Typhoon's new round of testing got underway, a sweeping campaign against pirated models rolled out across the country in parallel.
The black-hearted bootleg factories that produced the market's main supply were quickly struck down. Not only did they have to cough up their illegal earnings, they had to compensate for additional losses on top of that.
Seeing this, the remaining small-time bootleggers didn't dare reach out their hands anymore, some even ordering their downstream buyers to destroy all their stock.
Overnight, pirated mech models across the country vanished without a trace.
When countless netizens learned of this, their first reaction was to plead for official models to be released.
"Sob sob sob, I only just found out the models I've been buying all this time were bootlegs. If official ones come out, I'm definitely buying!"
"So that Typhoon and Scrapper can gulp down a little more engine oil in their daily lives, hurry up and put out official models, we'll definitely buy them! sobbing"
From this single campaign alone, Ryan was projected to receive over thirty million in sky-high compensation, which went to show just how enormous these people's business had been.
Ryan's mood took an immediate turn for the better.
Not because of the thirty million still trickling into his account, though, and not because he'd struck a blow against piracy, but because after the birthday party plus the piracy upheaval, the research progress on the system's fourth project had finally passed ten percent.
The system, silent for most of the year, sent a notification.
The project's material could be made public.
That alone lifted his spirits.
Whether it was because of some marginal-effect principle or not, he didn't know, but his acquisition of Summon Points had gradually slowed.
Over this past year and more, people seemed to have gradually grown used to this genius who periodically stood up and filled their entire field of view, and their astonishment at him had grown smaller and smaller.
Especially after Crimson Typhoon's latest round of frenzied harvesting, these leeks seemed to have lost a bit of their will to keep growing.
Now he could only hope the new technology would pull a little more weight, otherwise he'd have to go out and try singing, dancing, and rapping.
Opening the system panel in his dorm, Ryan excitedly clicked into the first material directory.
Going by past experience, the first piece of technical material disclosed was usually the foundation on which the black tech was built.
Crimson Typhoon's liquid neural connection, for instance, or MOSS's underlying architecture code.
And the technology's displayed name this time was...
Micro Photoacoustic Imaging Detector.
???
What was this thing?
This was the first time Ryan had seen a technology in the system that he didn't understand.
For a moment he couldn't even recall what this system was supposed to do.
He took another look at the accompanying explanation underneath it.
"This micro detector is a medical imaging system. Through pulsed laser light invisible to the naked eye, it irradiates biological tissue continuously and repeatedly, detecting the photoacoustic signals generated in the corresponding tissue's optical absorption regions, acquiring the optical absorption characteristic information of that biological tissue, and reconstructing an image of the optical absorption distribution within the tissue from this signal, thereby achieving non-invasive, non-ionizing, damage-free-grade biomedical imaging."
Only upon reading this did realization dawn on Ryan. This was actually a medical technology, no wonder he had no impression of it.
The fields he'd mainly researched before were mechs and brain-machine interfaces. He naturally had no real grasp of cutting-edge medical technology of this sort, having at most seen it a few times in journals and periodicals.
But that did nothing to dampen his profound interest in this technology.
From that explanation alone, he'd already caught a thick whiff of black tech in the air.
Reading further down, the explanation the system gave introduced this technology's general capabilities in greater depth.
"This system can image individual cells inside the body under normal lighting conditions, perform high-resolution imaging of blood vessel morphology, and analyze the composition of different tissues and bodily fluids inside the body, along with functional detection..."
By the time he read this far, Ryan was already stunned.
His hands were even trembling a little.
He hadn't had this feeling in a long time, not even when he'd seen Crimson Typhoon.
Imaging a single living, actively functioning cell inside a living body. What did that mean?
It meant that from now on, they'd be able to directly observe the operational process of a cell inside a living organism.
Put grandly, this was a key to unlocking the mysteries of life.
Though there was no telling yet how many doors this key could open, without a doubt, it was a key.
Technology like this, put modestly, applied to medicine, would directly render ninety-nine percent of current medical imaging systems obsolete.
X-rays, CT scans, whatever they were.
In the face of technology like this, they were all little juniors.
Medical imaging of the past, set against this photoacoustic imaging technology, not only fell short in precision, it lagged far behind in application scenarios and functionality as well.
It had to be understood that this was a micro imaging system. In the sample schematics, the device Ryan saw was only the size of a human head.
Compared with the CT machines in hospitals, a system like this was just too convenient by half.
And its conditions for use were extremely low. It required no darkroom and no specially arranged setting. As long as the machine was plugged in, it could be used in a normal lighting environment.
If it could be manufactured at low cost, then in the future you could even place one on every single ambulance, and give a patient a scan the moment you arrived on the scene.
That way, without needing to return to the hospital, you could precisely learn a patient's physical condition, and arrange preparations at the hospital in advance from right there in the ambulance.
And its prospects didn't stop at just this little bit...
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