I'm doing engineering in the instance.

Chapter 64 The Color of the Thermos

Xie Chengzhou came out of the project office and stood by the fence for a while.

The sun had already dipped low, its rays slanting in from the west, casting long, slanted shadows of the scaffolding on the construction site. Each scaffold looked like a series of parallel lines drawn with a pencil—neat, but imprecise. The bulldozers had finished work, their engines silent. The site was much quieter than in the afternoon, save for the occasional clanging of metal as workers packed up their tools in the distance.

He didn't leave immediately.

It wasn't because anything happened, but because he needed some time to let that conversation settle in his mind.

"Let me see your hand."

"It's not a cocoon on a construction site."

"What did you build in there?"

He took his right hand out of his pocket, glanced at the callus on his hand in the afterglow of the setting sun, and then put it back.

Thirty years of construction site experience—he can glean so much from a single callus. Xie Chengzhou has seen many veteran workers on construction sites: those who can determine the age of concrete from its color, those who can estimate the load from the swaying of scaffolding, and those who can determine the pipe diameter from the sound of flowing water. This kind of experience isn't learned; it's honed through years of dedicated time on-site.

Old Meng has this kind of experience.

He had always known that Lao Meng had this kind of experience. He just hadn't expected that the boundaries of this experience were wider than he thought.

He walked out of the construction site, through the side gate of the fence, and went outside.

Outside was a construction access road, with temporary barriers on both sides, and the access road connected to the municipal road at the end. He walked along the access road, which was flooded with water left over from the rain a few days ago. Most of it had dried up, leaving only a few low-lying areas with a shallow film of water, reflecting the color of the setting sun, orange with a touch of red.

He walked about twenty steps and then stopped.

The side window of the prefabricated house at the project site faced the sidewalk. The window was half-open, and you could see the light inside—Old Meng was still there, he hadn't left. The light was the warm yellow of an incandescent bulb, which blended with the orange-red of the sunset outside, creating an indescribable color within the window frame.

He didn't look in that direction any further and kept walking.

There's a row of temporary shelves along the sidewalk where workers store their safety helmets and tools. Before leaving get off work, they leave anything they don't want there to retrieve the next day. The shelves are welded from angle iron and are rusted. On them are several safety helmets, a few pairs of gloves, and a thermos.

Xie Chengzhou glanced at it as he walked over.

Then he stopped.

That thermos, army green, has a shallow dent on the body, the kind that appears after many years of use. It's not deep, but the edge is worn rounded, an old scratch. The lid is a screw-on type, with a ring of anti-slip texture on it, which is badly worn. What was originally a raised texture now feels almost flat to the touch.

He stood in front of that thermos for about three seconds.

Then he remembered.

In the replica of the dam, in the corridor and the equipment room, Old Zhao squatted in the corner, his back to the door, holding a thermos cup in his hand.

He recognized Lao Zhao not by the style or color, but by the way he held the cup—his thumb gripping the lid, while the other four fingers supported the body. He hadn't looked closely at the cup's color at the time.

He's thinking about it now.

Military green.

He wasn't sure. He'd seen Old Zhao's cup many times—in the dungeon, in Source City, in the settlement area. He'd seen Old Zhao hang it on his waist, seen Old Zhao unscrew the lid to drink hot water, seen Old Zhao throw the cup into a puddle to create a disturbance, and seen the metallic sheen peeking out from the dent when a new one appeared on the bottom.

He never paid attention to what color the cup was.

He cares now.

He mentally reviewed the color of the cup on the shelf in front of him: military green, a deep shade, not a bright green, but a muted one, like the color of an old military uniform after many washes. The dent in the cup was on the side, about a third of the way down from the bottom.

Then he went through Old Zhao's cup in his mind: the details he could recall were the fresh dent on the bottom of the cup, its metallic sheen, and how it shone slightly in the flashlight beam. He couldn't remember the color of the cup. He only had a vague impression that it was dark.

Dark-colored.

Not precise enough.

He placed his right hand on the angle iron of the shelf and felt it—it was iron, cool, and had a slightly rusty, rough texture. His gaze remained fixed on the thermos.

He didn't know whose cup it was. There were many workers on the construction site, and military green thermos cups weren't anything special. They were displayed in rows in hardware stores, costing thirty yuan each. They were durable, suitable for everyone, and commonly seen on construction sites.

He knows this.

He also knew about Old Meng's cup—

He paused here for a moment.

Old Meng used a glass cup at the project office for herbal tea, and there was condensation on the cup. He remembered this clearly; he had just seen it this afternoon. But then he recalled an earlier incident when he went to the construction site to find Old Meng. Old Meng wasn't at the project office; he was on-site, by the foundation pit, holding a cup. That cup wasn't a glass cup.

He tried hard to find that scene in his memory.

Old Meng stood at the edge of the excavation pit, looking down at something. The cup in his hand hung on his fingers, not held, but hooked, his index and middle fingers hooking the handle—if there was a handle—or perhaps hooking the edge of the lid. He remembered that gesture, but he couldn't recall the color of the cup.

All he remembered was that the cup was small and dark in color.

Dark-colored.

He removed his hand from the shelf, took the memo out of his pocket, turned to a new page, and wrote:

"Old Meng's Thermos Cup, Military Green, To be verified."

He stared at the line of text for two seconds, then capped the pen, reopened it, and drew a line over the text.

It wasn't a crossout, but a pause after a moment of hesitation—the pen paused on the paper, drew a faint horizontal line, and then he removed the pen.

He didn't know what he was thinking.

He stood there for a while, letting the question swirl in his mind.

Engineers follow a fixed process for problem-solving: identifying anomalies → collecting data → building models → drawing conclusions → guiding decision-making. Each step has clear inputs and outputs, and each conclusion must be supported by data; steps cannot be skipped, and decisions cannot be based on intuition. This process is the most solid foundation he has built from twelve years of construction site experience, having been used in the tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia, on the red soil of African mines, and in the information market of Yuan City.

But there's a prerequisite for this process: you need to know what problem you're dealing with.

He doesn't know now.

All he knew was that Lao Meng had used the word "inside," and that Lao Meng had noticed the callus on his hand wasn't from a construction site. Lao Meng asked, "What did you build inside?" Then Lao Meng moved on, as if nothing had happened.

This is not a problem that can be solved using engineering processes.

He put the matter in his mind for a moment, feeling its weight. It wasn't heavy, but it had a texture, like a small pebble in the palm of his hand—not uncomfortable, but you could feel it there.

Then he saw the thermos.

Army green thermos cups are common on construction sites. Old Zhao's cup is dark, but he hasn't confirmed it's army green. Old Meng picked up a dark-colored cup on site, but he didn't see it clearly. Two dark-colored, one army green—three vague impressions, none of them precise.

He closed the memo and put it back in his pocket.

There's a rule in engineering: a judgment without measurement data isn't a judgment, it's a guess. Guesses can't be included in reports, can't be used as a basis for decision-making, and can't guide the next step of construction.

He knew this rule.

He also knew that, according to this rule, he shouldn't have written that line in the memo.

He crossed out the line of text, but didn't tear out the page.

He walked toward the municipal road. The puddles on the sidewalk vibrated slightly with his footsteps. The orange-red reflection of the sunset broke in the puddles, then gathered again, and then broke again.

He didn't look back at the window of the project office.

He simply went through Old Zhao's cup in his mind again while walking.

The bottom of the cup has a new dent, a metallic sheen, and shines slightly under a flashlight.

The cup was dark in color, but he couldn't remember exactly what color it was.

He walked to the intersection of the municipal road and the sidewalk and stopped by the roadside.

There were cars on the road. The evening rush hour had just begun; the traffic wasn't dense, but it wasn't sparse either. Car headlights turned on one by one, illuminating the road surface as two orange-yellow strips of light. There was a shoe repair stall by the roadside. The stall owner, an old man, was packing up his stall, slowly and skillfully placing his tools one by one into a tin box. Each tool was placed in a fixed position; he didn't need to look, his hands knew where to put it.

Xie Chengzhou glanced at the old man, then looked away.

He took the memo out of his pocket and turned to the page he had just read.

"Old Meng's Thermos Cup, Military Green, To be verified."

There was a faint horizontal line above the text, which he had drawn himself. He looked at the line, thought for a moment, and then wrote another line below it:

"Old Zhao's Thermos Cup - Color - To be verified"

He closed the memo.

Two items are marked "to be verified." One belongs to Lao Meng, and the other to Lao Zhao. He doesn't know if there's any connection between these two "to be verified" items. All he knows is that he wants to know if the two cups are the same model and color.

This is not an important issue.

He knew this wasn't an important issue.

But he wrote it down.

He had worked on construction sites for twelve years and had witnessed this feeling many times—an inexplicable connection between one detail and another. This inexplicable connection was due to insufficient data, not a lack of correlation. Most of the time, this feeling was useless; it was the brain overfitting, searching for patterns in noise, and finding false patterns.

But sometimes, that feeling is real.

One thing he learned on the construction site was: write down your feelings, and then wait. Not wait for an answer, but wait for data. Once you have enough data, then determine whether the feeling is real or not.

He put the memo back in his pocket and headed towards his residence.

A night breeze blew in from the intersection, carrying the smells of diesel fuel and the fumes from roadside stalls. It was a very tangible urban smell, unpleasant, but real. He took a deep breath, letting the aroma mask the fishy smell of the dam surface in the dungeon.

It covered most of it, but not completely.

He made a mental note of this: next time he sees Lao Zhao, he'll take a look at that cup.

It wasn't for any particular reason, he just wanted to know.