1950s: After transmigrating into a capitalist, I relied on military industry to achieve a comeback.

The western row of bungalows is a row of gray Soviet-style buildings, with some cracked floor tiles and mottled walls.

The door to dormitory room 117 was wide open, and a strong smell of tobacco mixed with men's sweat wafted out. Inside, three men, all over twenty-five or twenty-six years old, were sitting around a table, discussing something animatedly.

"Old Song, your calculation is too conservative! Although our current steel quality is a bit lacking, the speed of Soviet-style machine tools can definitely be increased! We need to have the fearless spirit of revolution!" The speaker was a square-faced, burly man with a voice as loud as a broken gong.

"Old Gao, that's risking your life! It's science, not just about yelling! Can you afford to pay for the damage if the precision is compromised? That's national property!" The man with gold-rimmed glasses frowned, his face exuding a scholarly air, yet also revealing a stubborn arrogance.

Lin Jiaoyue carried the huge canvas bag and slowly walked through the door of number 117. The bag scraped against the rough cement floor when it hit the ground, making a dull, grating sound. "Hey? Where did this little girl come from?" Gao Jianguo, a square-faced and burly man, was the first to notice the commotion in the corridor. He shook the cigarette in his hand, and ash fell all over his pants.

The three grown men walked to the door in unison.

There stood a little girl in a woolen coat, her skin so white it seemed to glow, in front of the narrow wooden door next to number 117, which was like a pigeon coop.

It was a storage room with only one small window, usually locked tight. Inside, there was only a small bed made of a few planks of wood, and now it was full of dust and broken brooms.

"Comrade, have you come to the wrong place? That's where the brooms are kept." Song Siming, wearing gold-rimmed glasses, adjusted his glasses, his tone carrying a hint of city-man's teasing. "Are you a junior from someone's family visiting relatives? Or is it some professor's daughter who's lost? The guesthouse is to the left outside the school gate. This is the dormitory for the continuing education class; unauthorized personnel are not allowed in."

Lin Jiaoyue didn't speak, but simply took out the rusty key from her pocket and, with a "click," unlocked the padlock on the narrow door right in front of them. The lock opened, and the hinges made a sour "creaking" sound.

The three men looked at each other, their eyes filled with surprise.

"My name is Lin Jiaoyue. I'm a new intern and I live here." Her voice was clear and soft, but it carried a hint of coldness.

"What? A continuing education student?" Gao Jianguo's voice suddenly exploded, his eyes widening. "How old are you? Living in the storage room? This academy is getting more and more outrageous! They're cramming in all sorts of people with connections, even this baby who hasn't been weaned yet is our 'classmate'?"

He looked Lin Jiaoyue up and down, her slender arms and legs seeming as if they could break at any moment. Then he glanced at the huge, heavy-looking canvas bag on the ground and said with a smirk, "Little girl, this is a military factory, a place that builds cannons and tanks, not a game. If you can't move it, just say so. Don't try to carry it yourself. If you hurt your foot, we'll have to write a self-criticism and send you to the clinic."

Chen Mo, who had been leaning against the doorframe without saying a word, frowned. A former reconnaissance soldier, his eyes were sharp. This girl looked too frail; a pampered young lady like her coming to such a harsh place was simply a nuisance.

Lin Jiaoyue turned her head and looked at Gao Jianguo's dismissive "I'm doing this for your own good" look. She politely curled the corners of her mouth, revealing a pair of shallow dimples: "No need to trouble you, Comrade Gao Jianguo. Also, this contains books, not dolls." After saying that, she squatted down slightly and picked up the bag by the handle with her right hand.

Her body, nourished by the spiritual spring water of the space, had already undergone a complete transformation. She focused her energy in her dantian, lowered her wrist, and suddenly exerted force.

"Bang!"

Under the astonished gazes of the three men, whose jaws nearly dropped, she effortlessly lifted the canvas bag, filled with professional books and camouflage metal parts, weighing at least fifty pounds, over the half-foot-high threshold as if it were a chick.

She didn't even take a deep breath as she steadily placed the bag on the rickety wooden bed in the narrow room.

"Squeak—"

The entire wooden bed let out a miserable scream as if it were about to fall apart at any moment.

The corridor was deathly silent.

"My God..." Gao Jianguo finally realized what was happening when the cigarette in his mouth fell out and burned his foot. He jumped up and down, shouting, "Is this girl some kind of superhuman strength? The bag made a loud noise when it hit the ground; it was made of solid metal!"

Chen Mo, who had been observing coldly, narrowed his eyes, his pupils slightly contracting.

A true expert's skill is immediately apparent. That move just now, with perfect coordination of waist and stance, demonstrated extremely professional power generation; it was a display of absolute control over muscle strength, not brute force.

"This young girl is not simple," Chen Mo said in a low voice, his previously dismissive gaze turning serious.

……

A dozen minutes later, Lin Jiaoyue tidied up the small single room.

Although it was only six or seven square meters, she took out a plain tablecloth from the space and spread it on the broken table, and then put an enamel mug on it, instantly giving it a touch of homey warmth.

She didn't close the door because it was too stuffy inside and there were no windows for ventilation. She moved a worn-out little square table to block the doorway, using it as a desk and a makeshift partition to tell people outside: Stop here.

She lit the kerosene lamp she had brought with her, and the dim light shone down, illuminating this small space with a warm glow.

Lin Jiaoyue pulled out a thick, brick-like, all-Russian original edition of "Mechanics of Materials" from her bag, and casually peeled off a White Rabbit milk candy and stuffed it into her mouth.

The rich milky aroma melted on her tongue, and she squinted her eyes happily, her cheeks puffed out like a little hamster eating.

At this moment, she is Jiaojiao, a little girl who loves sweets.

The next second, when her gaze fell on the pages of the book, her eyes instantly turned cold and focused; it was the top engineer, Engineer Lin, who had come online.

Song Siming was carrying an enamel mug to the end of the corridor to get water when he glanced inside as he passed the doorway. He thought to himself: This little girl is probably reading some miscellaneous books or magazines.

At that glance, his feet seemed nailed to the ground, unable to move an inch. In the notebook, Lin Jiaoyue was rapidly deriving a set of equations with her Parker pen, the nib scratching across the paper with a smooth, flowing motion, without the slightest pause.

"...Stress distribution in the autofrettage process of large-caliber artillery barrels?" Song Siming had returned from studying abroad and was fluent in Russian. He immediately recognized the scribbles-like Russian annotations.

This isn't a magazine; it's the latest advanced military textbook from the Soviet Union! Even he struggled to read it.

What horrified him even more was that Lin Jiaoyue's derivation process was extremely smooth, even skipping several complicated intermediate conversions to arrive at the conclusion...

Song Siming quickly did some mental calculations, and his expression changed instantly.

Her conclusion was even more accurate than the result he had calculated last week after studying it for three sleepless nights and using up half a notebook of draft paper! And the path was simpler!

"This...this is impossible..." Song Siming swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing violently, causing the enamel mug in his hand to wobble and spill a few drops of water. Gao Jianguo, hearing the commotion, also came over, his large head poking inside: "Old Song, what are you looking at? You look like you've lost your soul. What's that girl drawing? Is she drawing a comic book?"

"Shut up!" Song Siming hissed, his voice trembling. "This is an advanced application of 'Mechanics of Materials'! She...she's performing pressure verification for tube reinforcement!"

Although Gao Jianguo couldn't read Russian, he could understand Song Siming's horrified expression. Old Song was usually as arrogant as a peacock; when had he ever shown such an expression before?

The small storage room was dimly lit.

Lin Jiaoyue seemed to sense the commotion at the door. She picked up her enamel mug, took a sip of the jujube and goji berry water she had brewed with spiritual spring water from her spatial realm, and without looking up, her slender fingers gently turned a page of her book. Her tone was indifferent, as if she were saying, "The weather is nice today."

"Engineer Song, I overheard you making a lot of noise next door. You might have misread the Fourier transform in the third line of your algorithm. That's a variant for nonlinear stress, not a regular linear one. I suggest you go back and review the notes on page 42 of this book. Don't end up calculating something like the furnace exploding." The voice wasn't loud, but it struck the corridor like a thunderclap.

The air instantly became quiet.

Song Siming's face instantly turned a deep purplish-red, his mouth agape, unable to utter a single word for a long time. He abruptly turned around, not even bothering to get water, and staggered back to his dormitory to flip through his books.

A moment later, the sound of turning pages came from next door, followed by a gasp of shock, and then a deathly silence.

Looking at Lin Jiaoyue's cheeks puffed out as she ate the candy, Gao Jianguo suddenly felt a chill run down his spine.

Lin Jiaoyue smiled slightly and turned another page of her book.

Life in the capital was indeed much more interesting than I had imagined.

……