Chapter 34: Creation from the Void, Desktop D Printer in Operation

Two hours later.

Ding-dong!

The doorbell rang.

Lin Xuan pulled the door open.

Two local couriers, carrying a huge cardboard box and sweating profusely, walked into the foyer.

"Mr. Lin, your express delivery."

"It's a bit heavy; where shall I put it for you?"

"Put it in the study. Thanks for your trouble." Lin Xuan pointed to the room deep in the hallway.

The couriers set down the box and left the apartment.

Lin Xuan fetched a utility knife, sliced through the packing tape, and tore off the thick pearl cotton padding.

A square, boxy machine with a silver-gray brushed metal casing was exposed to the air.

A transparent acrylic panel was embedded in the front of the machine, glowing with a cold light from within.

Lin Xuan hugged the bottom of the machine with both hands, exerted force, and lifted it onto the large solid-wood desk.

He connected the power cord and plugged it into the socket.

Xiao Sizi lay on the edge of the desk, poking her head out to inspect the square iron box.

"What is this object? Could it be some kind of iron beast again?"

"This is a D Printer; you can think of it as a magic brush that can draw real objects."

Lin Xuan pressed the switch on the side of the machine.

Vroom—!

A low electric motor startup sound emitted from inside the machine.

A color touch screen on the front lit up.

Lin Xuan turned on the Personal Computer on the desk and entered a large open-source 3D model website.

He typed "Big Wild Goose Pagoda" into the search box.

The page jumped, and hundreds of three-dimensional model files were listed on the screen.

Lin Xuan selected a file with the richest details, where even the roof tiles were modeled clearly, and clicked download.

"Come over, look at the screen." Lin Xuan pulled a chair over.

Xiao Sizi climbed onto the chair.

On the Personal Computer screen, a three-dimensional image of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, entirely gray-white and rotatable 360 degrees, appeared clearly before her eyes.

Lin Xuan opened the Slicing software, imported the Big Wild Goose Pagoda model, and clicked the "Slicing" button on the software.

"The machine cannot understand human speech, nor can it see a complete image."

"We must chop it into pieces."

The Big Wild Goose Pagoda model on the screen instantly transformed.

From the base to the spire, it was horizontally cut into countless extremely thin planes.

A slider appeared on the right side of the software.

Lin Xuan dragged the slider, pulling it from bottom to top.

On the screen, the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, starting from a flat base, stacked layer by layer upwards, finally restoring the complete tower body.

Xiao Sizi watched with her mouth agape.

"You cut this tower... into paper slices?"

"Yes, each layer is only 0.2 millimeters thick, stacked up like a thousand-layer cake."

"That's why it's called Slicing; it's purely literal."

Lin Xuan pulled the USB drive from the Personal Computer and inserted it into the D Printer's read interface.

Outside the Sky Screen.

The Ming Dynasty timeline.

Song Yingxing, the author of The Exploitation of the Works of Nature, dropped his brush onto the Xuan paper.

He suddenly stood up, overturning the chair behind him.

"Divide... stack..."

"Take a seamless whole, dismantle it into countless planes without thickness."

"Then add the planes one by one to reshape the true form!"

He rushed to the desk, grabbed a sheet of white paper, and frantically tore it into thin strips.

"The ultimate path of simplifying the complex! Not human craftsmanship, but the divine power of Arithmetic!"

Song Yingxing was as if mad.

This Additive Manufacturing logic, which reduces a three-dimensional object to a two-dimensional plane and then reassembles it by increasing dimensions, completely shattered the cognitive barrier of this ancient great scientist.

Apartment study.

Lin Xuan tore open the consumable packaging, took out a roll of white PLA Plastic Filament, and hung it on the material rack behind the machine.

He trimmed the filament end, threaded it through the run-out sensor, and inserted it into the Extruder's feed hole.

He clicked "Preheat PLA" on the touch screen.

The nozzle temperature value on the screen began to rise rapidly.

20°C... 100°C... 210°C. The latest chapter is ready! Book lovers, return quickly.

"Step back a bit, don't touch the glass plate inside or that copper nozzle; it will scald your skin off," Lin Xuan warned.

Xiao Sizi shrank her neck back, both hands gripping the edge of the acrylic panel, her eyes unblinking as she stared into the machine's interior.

Temperature reached the target.

Gears inside the extruder meshed and turned.

White filament was forcibly fed into the heating block.

A drop of transparent, molten plastic filament was squeezed out from the brass nozzle, dripping onto the heated bed.

Lin Xuan clicked "Start Print".

Creak... hum...

The stepper motor emitted a rhythmic mechanical roar.

The belts on the X-axis and Y-axis exerted force simultaneously.

Dragging the heating nozzle, it dropped sharply, stopping just a few tenths of a millimeter above the black glass heated bed.

The nozzle began moving rapidly across the glass plate.

Wherever it passed, an extremely fine white plastic melt line was pressed firmly onto the glass.

The nozzle shuttled back and forth.

Its movements were sharp, without a trace of hesitation.

In just a few minutes, the first-layer outline of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda's square base clearly appeared on the glass plate.

Immediately, the lead screw of the Z-axis emitted an extremely faint "click".

The entire nozzle assembly lifted upward by two-tenths of a millimeter.

The nozzle continued moving, beginning to lay down the second layer.

Xiao Sizi cupped her chin with both hands, her cheeks pressed against the transparent shield.

She even slowed her breathing.

Watching with wide eyes as, on the previously empty glass plate, a white base platform "grew" out of thin air with the back-and-forth wandering of that brass head.

"Lin Xuan..." Xiao Sizi's voice was as faint as a mosquito's buzz, afraid of disturbing the machine's operation, "Is this thread silk?"

"No, it is a plastic extracted from corn starch."

"Why does it draw a grid inside?" Xiao Sizi, sharp-eyed, pointed at the interior of the tower body the nozzle was currently filling.

Lin Xuan answered patiently, "To save material; the shell is made solid, while the inside uses a grid for support, making it equally strong."

Outside the Sky Screen.

Great Tang, Ministry of Works office.

The entire courtyard was deathly silent.

Hundreds of Great Tang's top carpenters, stonemasons, and masons, sitting or standing, resembled statues of clay.

Their mouths hung open, their gazes死死 locked on the brass nozzle spitting white silk within the Sky Screen.

An elderly stone carver with snow-white hair suddenly sank to his knees on the ground.

The chisel in his hand clattered to the floor.

"I have carved stone all my life, smashing with hammers, chipping with chisels."

"Removing the dross, keeping the essence."

Tears rolled down the old craftsman's face as he pointed at the Sky Screen, "One bad strike with the chisel, and the whole stone becomes waste."

"But this machine... it neither strikes nor knocks."

"It builds from nothing, piling up bit by bit!"

"Not a fraction of an error, not a scrap of material wasted!"

The Spring and Autumn and Warring States era space-time.

Before a cliff face in the deep mountains.

The Mohist Grandmaster watched the hair-thin white plastic filament in the Sky Screen being fed into the furnace under the precise meshing of gears.

He watched the brass nozzle, pulled by the belts, trace out perfect right angles and arcs.

"Converting power into extremely pure linear motion."

The Grandmaster extended his hand, sketching the cross-trajectory of the X-axis and Y-axis in the air.

"Straight horizontally and vertically, not a hair's breadth off; this is a stability human hands cannot control."

The Grandmaster raised his head, a raging fire burning in his eyes, "This is mechanism! The absolute constraint brought by the most extreme guide rails and linkages!"

"Building houses with mud and water always carries the risk of collapse."

"Turning stone into water, piling it up with the precision of a hair's breadth."

"This is the Great Dao of mechanical creation!"

The Mohist disciples all knelt and prostrated themselves, worshipping the Sky Screen.

The "subtractive manufacturing" mindset of ancient people for thousands of years was forcibly torn apart by this operating D Printer.

The new industrial concept of "Additive Manufacturing" struck deep into the minds of generations of top craftsmen like a seed.