The air in the Forge Lab smelled like melted flux and caffeine.
It was just past 2:00 a.m., and everyone was still awake, hunched over workbenches under the hum of fluorescent lights. Scattered between the soldering iron, wire spools, and resistors was the heart of their current obsession — a palm-sized green board no bigger than a playing card.
The BlueFire Prototype.
Lan Jie adjusted her magnifying goggles and placed the final SMD capacitor with surgical precision. She looked up, her voice hoarse but excited.
"All components seated. Let's test it."
Li Wei nodded. "Power it up."
They connected the USB cable, fingers crossed. The board drew current. A flicker of light blinked on one of the tiny onboard LEDs.
"It's alive," Yanyue whispered.
Proof of Concept
Li Wei connected the BlueFire board to their test rig: an old keyboard, a numeric display, and a custom terminal on ForgeShell Lite.
He uploaded the firmware they had spent the past week optimizing — 512 lines of hand-coded assembly, enough to control digital input/output, memory paging, and perform basic computations.
He typed:
scss
Copy
Editinit_bf(); display("HELLO");
The seven-segment display flickered to life.
H. E. L. L. O.
Everyone stared at it like it had just spoken back.
"It works," Lan Jie said, stunned. "It actually works."
"It's barely smarter than a calculator," Li Wei said, grinning. "But this... this is step one."
Their own logic controller. Low-speed, low-power, but entirely homegrown. Unlike imported boards that cost $15–$20, this cost them under $3 in materials — and could be manufactured locally.
"We can run this off solar," Yanyue said, already sketching use cases. "For rural villages. Schools. Even vending machines."
Documentation Day
The next three days were spent doing what Li Wei hated most — writing documentation.
Each subsystem had to be explained:
Clock cycle timing
GPIO mapping
Memory address ranges
Error code references
Li Wei and Lan Jie took turns writing and diagramming. Meanwhile, Yanyue worked on creating a slick digital brochure and demo video using her old phone.
By the end of the week, they had:
A working logic board (BlueFire v0.1)
A user manual
An open dev forum
A basic SDK for scripting input/output behavior
They were ready for a soft launch.
Local Demo Day
Instead of flashy online ads, Li Wei went old-school.
They visited Mr. Zhou's repair shop, an aging tech tinker lab that served as a training ground for high school students and hobbyists.
"I've seen fancy boards," Mr. Zhou grunted as he squinted at BlueFire. "You made this?"
Li Wei nodded. "From scratch. Want to see it run a coin sorter?"
They hooked it up to a tray rigged with weight sensors and servo-controlled flaps. BlueFire read each coin's weight and thickness, then routed it into the correct slot.
"And this runs off just 5 volts?" Mr. Zhou asked.
"Five volts, no OS, no network required."
The demo ran flawlessly. The old man chuckled.
"Alright. I'll take ten. For student kits."
That marked their first hardware order: $150 for 10 units. Small, but symbolic.
Pricing and Production
Back at the lab, the team calculated cost breakdowns.
Component Cost (per unit)
PCB board $0.50
Capacitors & resistors $0.40
Microcontroller chip $1.20
USB interface $0.40
Solder + assembly $0.30
Total $2.80
"Let's sell it for $8 retail, $6 for schools and bulk," Li Wei proposed.
Lan Jie ran the numbers. "If we hit 100 units/month, we net about $300 profit, give or take logistics."
"Which goes straight into our fabrication budget."
They didn't need outside funding. They didn't want venture capital. Everything they built now would serve one long-term goal: a sovereign technocratic city, forged from steel, silicon, and sweat.
Quiet Resolve
That night, as they cleaned up the lab, Yanyue stood by the window, looking out over the still-sleeping industrial blocks of Jiangnan.
"You're not tempted to sell it, mass-produce it, scale fast?" she asked.
Li Wei shook his head. "Speed without control just invites disaster. I've seen what happens to cities that grow too fast and don't know what they're building toward."
"So we go slow," Lan Jie said.
"We go deliberate," Li Wei corrected. "This isn't a startup. This is the foundation of a nation."
He picked up the BlueFire board and turned it in his fingers, light glinting off the tiny copper traces.
"One chip, one board, one idea at a time."