Chapter 19 Aftermath and Explanation

After Lou Qingxi conceded, everyone was surprised that Ye Tao didn't come out to say anything more. Later, Lu Dan somewhat embarrassedly explained to everyone that Ye Tao had fallen asleep in that sweltering little wooden hut after the short film was shown. He was simply too exhausted.

Ye Tao slept for two days straight.

During these two days, the Yi Zhan (Strategy Battle) Shop first opened for business. The various Yi Zhan chess sets and related merchandise that sold so well in Yicheng also appeared in Danyang. The difference was that this Yi Zhan Shop was larger in scale and more professional in its presentation. If the Yi Zhan Shop in Yicheng had already tried to incorporate the modern concept of a showroom and integrated sales into a small space, then this Yi Zhan Shop in Danyang was practically a modern specialty store. Modern specialty store elements, except for shop decoration and lighting which couldn't be achieved due to technical reasons, such as a unified visual identity, categorized counters and displays, professional shop sales staff, a streamlined product introduction plan, and even comprehensive after-sales service content were all available. The Yi Zhan Shop had even started issuing metal Yi Zhan Lou national chain membership cards...

Less than an hour after the Yi Zhan Shop opened, another specialty store with close ties to Ye Tao opened on Danyang's most bustling Zhuque (Vermillion Bird) Street. It was the Tissot watch store. Although Tissot wasn't Ye Tao's favorite brand, given that he could only use Chinese at the moment, names like Rolex, Citizen, Longines, and Omega were simply too bizarre and certainly couldn't be used. In contrast, the word Tissot was not only a romantic depiction of the constantly passing time, like "time flies like a shuttle," but also a pun that expressed the ingenious craftsmanship of the manufacturer in mechanical manufacturing. Probably, for the time being, there wouldn't be a more fitting word. Although it was called a watch store, the Tissot watch store currently only had six samples of clocks with different appearances. All sales were based on on-site orders, followed by door-to-door delivery and debugging, and the timing of orders depended on the production capacity of the Ye Family Workshop's clock workshop. If this were the modern era, such a store would inevitably go bankrupt due to its overbearing sales methods and almost unpredictable delivery times, but in this era, the orders received in just one day were enough to fill the production schedule until winter. From the second day of the Tissot watch store's opening, a peculiar scene appeared in the store. Every time it was the hour, several well-dressed individuals would inevitably appear in the store, standing there just waiting to hear the melodious and bright chimes, and then leave contentedly, and there seemed to be an increasing trend of such people.

Overall, after three rounds of gambling fights, everyone now regarded Ye Tao as the number one craftsman in Dongping. The things he made were not only exquisite, but simply magical. If the previous Iron Armored Tiger and Iron-Blooded Hero Cups were merely amazing, then this thing named "Kaleidoscopic Vault" was so captivating that one performance was clearly not enough. Countless people had already come to the door asking to see it again, and had even used Tan Weixing's connections.

Although Tan Weixing had seen it once during rehearsals, she only had the opportunity to carefully examine this magical contraption during Ye Tao's two-day nap. For Tan Weixing, after understanding the principle, the "Kaleidoscopic Vault" didn't seem so mysterious. Tan Weixing, after all, had a general understanding of the whole thing beforehand. The entire "Evening Song of the Fishing Boat" piece, from the accompanying orchestra to the invitation of Liu Xiangyuan, Danyang's best guzheng player, to perform the main melody, was all handled by her. She had originally thought that Ye Tao wanted to create a simple projector to produce an animated short film or something, but unexpectedly, Ye Tao, possessed by something, had created something that was much more difficult, but even more surprising.

In fact, the Kaleidoscopic Vault was a multi-functional projector with nine channels. Each light source had a complex mechanism in front of it that could be used to replace slide-like clips. Every three channels projected onto the same screen, one channel was responsible for the background, and the other two channels projected different dynamic foregrounds, similar to the concept of scrolling in early computer games, and by arranging different elements on different scrolls to achieve dynamics. Not to mention a powerful designer like Ye Tao, even some animation and game enthusiasts with a little research on animation technology would understand how it worked.

All the slides were thin crystal sheets, on which various patterns were painted with transparent paint. What was surprising was that Ye Tao's mastery of color had reached such a level that he was able to achieve such rich and magnificent colors entirely with transparent paints.

For example, the activities of fishing boats and cloud shadows, which were relatively slow, had few slides drawn, and during the performance, they were realized by manually and quickly changing slides. The extremely classic rapid and coherent action of the egret grooming its wings and then flapping its wings and flying into the blue sky used as many as one hundred crystal sheets. These crystal sheets were connected with copper pages and installed on a specially designed rocking barrel. By rotating the rocking barrel, continuous images were quickly projected onto the screen.

Even the curtain used for the screen had been specially treated. The white curtain surface was brushed with a layer of coating made of a mixture of crystal powder and oyster shell powder, so that the images on the curtain could appear clearer and brighter.

While Tan Weixing marveled at such a design, she finally understood that the most difficult part of this thing was not the optical design at the front end, but the light source. Although Ye Tao was magical, he was not magical enough to be able to create high-brightness, reliable light bulbs and batteries to drive the nine light channels of the "Kaleidoscopic Vault" in a few days. He used completely traditional light sources, hot, burning things. At the bottom of the entire Kaleidoscopic Vault, immersed in a small pool of water, were nine copper cylinders, which contained a very peculiar fuel. This fuel was a mixture of specially treated whale oil and an insect oil. The smell was naturally not very good. However, this fuel had a characteristic: it emitted a strong white light when ignited, and the color was very pure. Moreover, this fuel did not emit smoke when burning, and the residue after burning would automatically sink to the bottom of the copper cylinder and then be drawn away. If the fuel was injected while the residue was drawn out, as long as the circulation problem of the water pool used for heat dissipation could be solved, the Kaleidoscopic Vault could theoretically be screened continuously.

Knowledge is indeed the primary productive force. Looking at the many simplifications made under duress inside the Kaleidoscopic Vault, such as the lens group that could not be focused according to the screen distance, and a large number of places that needed to be operated manually instead of being driven by more precise machinery, Tan Weixing knew that, in fact, Ye Tao had taken a shortcut this time. Playing with light and image, such modern tricks, were too shocking for this era.