Liang Wan’s investigative approach is quite simple. This group of young draftsmen is only in their teens. In that era in China, being a teenager meant you could use professional skills, and it was only during that time that the youth class was proposed. These children, starting from the first cohort in 1978, could have been the ones depicted in those blueprints in 1979 and 1980. However, the number of students in the youth class was limited at that time, so as long as someone had the authority to access the files, it would be easy to find them.

One can imagine that these children were seen as military resources. Of course, the eventual development of the youth class did not progress along this path. However, many of the exceptionally talented children from the earliest youth class entered the military. The development of science and technology has always been closely tied to the military.

Liang Wan’s reasoning was correct; she found the file of Huo Zhongshu in the archives of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1979. He entered university at the age of 13. Soon after, Liang Wan saw the final note of disappearance in Huo Zhongshu’s file. He did not report to school when he was 16; he was listed as missing.

Liang Wan looked at Huo Zhongshu’s class and then followed the class number to search for it. As she expected, she recognized almost all the students in Huo Zhongshu’s entire class from the blueprints. All of them were listed as missing in the files.

In September 1982, a class at the Chinese Academy of Sciences disappeared. The entire youth class failed to report. Liang Wan knew where they had gone; it was that year they began to draft the blueprints she had seen.

However, architectural drafting is an engineering specialty, and the youth class generally did not focus on engineering. Many of these children’s talents lay in mathematics and other scientific fields. True genius only existed in mathematics and music.

She looked at the specialty of this class and couldn’t help but bite her lip. It was a military engineering specialty—Department of Military Architecture. If it weren’t for her relationship with her first love, she would never have been able to find information about this department.

Why these children? Liang Wan found a step to sit on to reach the top of the bookshelf and tried hard to organize her thoughts. She didn’t need to analyze or deduce; she had plenty of time for that after she left. She knew all the answers to her questions were on the shelves around her, but she had to find direction.

The core question was, why these children? There were already many talents in military architecture, and many older experts had more experience. Why employ a group of children for this project?

What exactly was this project about? The first thing that came to her mind was the Children’s Crusade, where the rulers believed children were pure and that God would bless them to achieve victory. As a result, almost all of those youths died in the Alps.

But no, there is no such religious tradition in China. She was familiar with that part of history and knew the likelihood of such an event happening in China was very low. From the very beginning of the founding of New China, atheism had already set the tone.

If it weren’t for the children’s aspect, could it be another obvious reason? What advantages do children have? In terms of professional knowledge or experience, they had none; their only advantage was their age. They were young enough that if the project’s construction time far exceeded what an adult could work, it would make sense to use them.

If a 25-year-old engineer undertakes this project, assuming his lifespan is 85 years, then he can serve on this project for a maximum of 60 years. The actual time may be even shorter.

From this, we can infer two things. First, this project is likely to be strictly closed off, similar to so-called space travel, where personnel cannot be replenished during the journey, and it takes place in an absolutely enclosed environment. This project is so closed off that this group of children may be working in a confined environment for as long as 60 or even 70 years.

Second, this project requires an extremely long construction period. However, looking at the blueprints, based on the scale, the project itself does not seem large. Even if it is built in the desert, digging a huge pit should take about 20 years, right?

The Three Gorges Dam was completed in 20 years; by then, Chinese football should have qualified for the World Cup. How many years did it take to build the tomb of Qin Shi Huang?

Historically, we know of long-term projects like the Great Wall of China, which is hard to estimate, and another comparable project is the Dujiangyan irrigation system, which took two generations. Of course, there’s also the legend of the old man moving mountains.

This project should have started in the 1980s, with completion expected between 2040 and 2050. What kind of project requires such a long time and necessitates that this group of children continues to serve?

Liang Wan suddenly realized a problem. She had seen many blueprints, but those blueprints might not represent all the designs. If these children are continuously working, then there will always be new blueprints, various kinds of blueprints, drawn year after year.

She looked at their major; the name of the major was too vague, so she decided to investigate this aspect further. Thus, she began to search through the archives, hoping to find the transcripts for this class. With the transcripts, she could know what courses these children were taking.

At that time, she couldn’t find any materials related to the courses these children studied. The only clue was a disciplinary record she found in one person’s file.

This disciplinary record stated the reason was for damaging a textbook, which was titled “Bronze Smelting.”

A military major studying bronze smelting? At that time, China was so impoverished that it couldn’t even afford iron and had to resort to using bronze, an alloy that couldn’t even build a three-story building? Or was this just an elective course meant to broaden knowledge or to keep these gifted children occupied?

If it were a metallurgy major, such a course might exist. However, later, after Liang Wan investigated further, she found that she was too optimistic; bronze smelting was merely a piece of knowledge and was unlikely to be complex enough to constitute a dedicated course.

This child burned the book, attempting to set fire to his desk, and was penalized for it. The reason stated was revenge against a female classmate who rejected his romantic advances—this kind of plot exists in every era.

She quietly noted down the words “Bronze Smelting,” hoping that this was not an internal textbook and that she could find this book in the published materials system.

Liang Wan had no concept of what everything she had found pointed to at that time. In the following five hours, she couldn’t find any publication information for the textbook, nor did she find any further direction. After two hours of fruitful research and five hours of fruitless searching, she left the archive with endless confusion.

Her first love didn’t come to see her off, leaving her with questions in her mind and worries about her first love. She was unaware of the key to this information until she later chatted with Li Cu, at which point the clues began to gradually piece together, revealing the immense possibilities behind this project.