Inside Cleanroom Tower 1 of the Taichu Sanctuary High-Tech Park, the air was pristine and completely still.
The negative-pressure vacuum airlocks hummed with low, steady vibrations.
Overhead, laminar airflow blowers pushed filtered air downward, keeping the ambient dust particle count strictly below ten particles per cubic meter.
Yet inside the central optical preparation bay, the atmosphere was thick with mounting despair.
Twenty-seven-year-old Dr. Lin Wei stood in front of a high-precision laser interferometer, her safety goggles pushed up into her dark hair.
On the granite optical test bench lay a broken cylinder of raw optical quartz.
Beside it sat three shattered wafer discs, their edges jagged and clouded with milky micro-fractures.
Academician Fang Dequan stood nearby, his hands trembling as he inspected the cracked disc under a magnifying lamp.
