The low murmur of ForgeNode-01 filled the makeshift lab as morning light filtered through the wooden shutters. Li Wei hunched over a breadboard, meticulously adjusting pins.
"This prototype needs to run at under 5 watts. Otherwise, the solar rig can't keep it alive overnight," he muttered, checking the multimeter again.
ForgeOS was already running smoothly on the lightweight test cluster, but it was useless without reliable hardware. They needed to move beyond scavenged chips.
"It's time," Li Wei told Lan Jie. "We manufacture our own logic boards."
She raised an eyebrow. "In this shack?"
"Not here. But we can set up a micro-fab using repurposed industrial gear."
Sourcing the Skeleton
For weeks, Li Wei scoured secondhand machinery listings. The group managed to buy:
An old CNC milling unit used for watch components
A reflow oven originally intended for jewelry work
A dusty SEM chamber from a failed university project
It cost them nearly $2,100 total. Every dollar burned through the funds they earned from selling ForgeKits.
"If we run out of cash, I'll design a wireless power adapter for old e-bikes and sell it door-to-door," Li Wei joked.
But no one laughed.
They all knew: without a new hardware backbone, ForgeOS would die in obscurity.
ForgeLab: Phase Two
Back at Xin'an Gorge, they cleared out an old storage barn and installed the new machines. Lan Jie soldered new regulators for power stability. Lanyun wrote a basic GUI to monitor equipment activity. Yanyue managed all ordering, schedules, and legal logistics.
Li Wei called this place ForgeLab Two.
The first batch of custom Antlia boards used reclaimed substrates and gold-plated connectors stripped from old telecom servers.
The test result?
"Dead on boot," Li Wei said, sighing.
"Again?" Lanyun asked.
"Signal bleed. Too much EMI. We need cleaner layers."
"We can't afford full photolithography yet," Lan Jie said.
Li Wei rubbed his temples. "Then we do it the analog way."
Glass, Sand, and Signal
A nearby village known for glasswork gave Li Wei an idea. Using quartz sand from the river, he built a crude kiln to produce fused silica wafers — not ideal, but viable for initial trials.
"What we need isn't perfection," he explained to the team. "It's control over every single layer of our stack. If we can own that, we can build anything."
Using copper etching tools and silk screens, they began manually layering conductive tracks onto silica plates. It was painstaking. One board took three days to finish.
But it worked.
"Antlia v0.1 booted successfully," Lanyun reported. "32 MB of flash memory. 1 MB RAM. ForgeOS minimal loaded."
Li Wei grinned.
"That's the seed."
Public Release
After two more weeks of validation, they published their design open-source: Antlia v0.1, alongside detailed fabrication notes and modular casing templates.
Li Wei posted an update:
"A computer you can build with a $50 budget, no imports, and access to basic tools. It's slow. It's ugly. But it's ours."
Hackers and hobbyists across Asia downloaded the plans. A tech collective in Vietnam reached out, asking to partner on testing. A small makerspace in India successfully replicated Antlia using bamboo casing and laptop batteries.
"It's spreading," Yanyue said. "People are calling it the 'people's processor.'"
Li Wei only smiled. "Good. That's what it's for."
Rivals Watching
Not everyone was happy.
Zhenhua Electronics issued a veiled threat through regional distributors, accusing ForgeLab of "anti-competitive open practices." Their presence on major supply platforms was quietly restricted. ForgeKit sellers were being blocked from online marketplaces.
Li Wei responded by removing their dependence entirely.
"From here on," he said, "everything is internal. Materials, logic, power. We stop buying."
New Threat: The Tech Guild
Late one night, Yanyue entered with a worried look.
"There's talk online," she said. "An old group — the Qingzhou Tech Guild. They're pushing back."
Li Wei frowned. "I thought they were defunct?"
"They're still powerful in some provinces. They claim you're violating technical 'tradition'."
"So they're mad we didn't ask permission to innovate," Lan Jie muttered.
"They'll try to blacklist us," Yanyue warned.
Li Wei stood, eyes sharp.
"Then we give them no place to blacklist. We build a platform so complete, so independent, they can't shut us out."
Reflection
By the end of the month, ForgeLab Two had produced seven working Antlia systems.
They were crude, but each one was better than the last. Each revision used more local components. And each log entry carved deeper into the legacy Li Wei intended to leave behind.
One night, he stood outside again, the mountains silent in their quiet power.
The future still loomed — war, collapse, and interdimensional threats. But here, in the present, he was crafting the foundation of resistance.
Not through weapons.
But through sovereign technology.