The Mixed Group of Dragon and Fish: A Research Team with Diverse Members

The corridor outside the meeting room was deathly quiet, with only the occasional distant sounds of students leaving class echoing from afar.

Su Bai stood with his hands in his trouser pockets, leaning back slightly against the cool window frame.

He didn’t speak immediately. Instead, he looked over the doctoral student named Zhou Jian with a scrutinizing gaze, as if sizing him up.

Zhou Jian grew increasingly uncomfortable under Su Bai’s stare. His already pale face turned even more pallid.

He nervously pushed up the black-rimmed glasses that were slipping down the bridge of his nose, his fingertips whitening from the pressure, and his breathing became rapid and shallow.

“Dr. Zhou, what do you mean by that?” Su Bai’s voice was calm, not loud, and his tone was neutral, revealing neither pleasure nor displeasure.

Zhou Jian clenched his teeth, as if locked in a fierce internal struggle. He turned his head and glanced toward the door of the meeting room, confirming that Professor Tang and Li Guobing wouldn’t emerge for a while, then lowered his voice and said urgently, “President Su, I’m not joking with you. The results Li Guobing showed in the PPT, along with the core technologies Professor Tang was boasting about, are heavily inflated. If you really plan to invest heavily in this project, your money will almost certainly go down the drain.”

Su Bai raised an eyebrow, looking intrigued. “Oh? Heavily inflated? Give me the specifics.”

Zhou Jian took a deep breath. Since he had already brought it up, he decided to hold nothing back and laid out the truth in rapid succession.

“First, there’s the surface electromyography (sEMG) signal acquisition system.” Zhou Jian raised one finger, keeping his voice low but speaking quickly. “Li Guobing claimed it was developed ‘in-house’ by our lab, capable of real-time muscle fatigue monitoring. But in reality, the underlying hardware and filtering algorithms were directly copied from an overseas open-source community. We just bought a casing, redesigned the circuit board layout, and put a new wrapper on it.”

“What’s more,” Zhou Jian added with a self-deprecating smile, “that open-source algorithm can produce data under static conditions, but if there’s even a slight increase in movement amplitude or some moderate electromagnetic interference nearby, the collected signals are pure noise. Those smooth, beautiful waveform graphs Li Guobing showed you weren’t collected in real time. They were ‘artworks’ post-processed and manually finessed using software. If this system were actually applied to smart athletic gear, it would be utterly useless for monitoring.”

Su Bai listened quietly, his expression largely unchanged. With his full-powered intellect of 100, he grasped the technical implications immediately. Data fabrication and result-padding were not uncommon in academia these days, but he hadn’t expected Professor Tang to be bold enough to try deceiving an investment from Baiye Holdings with such watered-down technology.

“What about the infrared optical motion capture system?” Su Bai asked casually. “I saw in the PPT that its positioning accuracy can reach millimeter level.”

At this, Zhou Jian’s expression became even more awkward.

“That system… the camera calibration was never done properly,” Zhou Jian said with a resigned sigh, shaking his head. “Infrared cameras have extremely high requirements for ambient lighting, and our lab space is too small with poor light shielding. During every test, the reflective markers would suffer from severe positional drift. To get decent-looking data, Li Guobing had junior lab members manually correct each marker point with a mouse in the background during experiments. As for the so-called millimeter-level accuracy, that was taken from the best set of data collected in an ideal static environment and written into the report. If it were actually used for dynamic mechanical analysis, the error could reach centimeter level.”

Zhou Jian grew more animated as he spoke, his initial nervousness gradually giving way to the rigorous and indignant mindset of a true researcher.

“President Su, I know you have money, and Baiye Holdings is a major corporation in River City. But no matter how much money you have, you can’t waste it like this. Last year, Professor Tang took 300,000 RMB in R&D funding from a local shoe factory, promising to develop smart running shoes for them. A year later, all he delivered were a few PPTs and some fluff papers—not even a proper prototype. The shoe factory owner is still suing the university. Now Professor Tang is trying to secure a bigger investment to patch the previous holes and cook up the results for Li Guobing’s doctoral graduation.”

After hearing Zhou Jian’s account, Su Bai didn’t show any anger. Instead, he smiled.

Looking at the somewhat frail doctoral student, whose forehead was even beaded with sweat from tension, Su Bai asked gently, “Dr. Zhou, as far as I know, you’re also a student in this lab, right? If Baiye Holdings invests several million in your lab, R&D funding would become plentiful, your personal stipends and bonuses would likely increase, and even your future thesis wouldn’t be a problem. But now you’re ratting out your own advisor and revealing these secrets to me. That’s like biting the hand that feeds you. If Professor Tang finds out, do you think you’ll still be able to graduate smoothly?”

Hearing Su Bai’s question, Zhou Jian was momentarily stunned.

He ran his hand through his disheveled hair, his shoulders sagging slightly as a bitter, awkward smile spread across his face.

“President Su, you’re right to say all that. I’m well aware of it,” Zhou Jian said, his voice dropping. He stared at his own shoes, fidgeting with his hands. “If Professor Tang found out I told you this, he’d definitely delay my graduation, maybe even kick me out of the research group outright. I came from a rural background—getting a PhD hasn’t been easy. I’m short on money too, and I could use the stipend.”

He paused, then lifted his head. Behind those black-rimmed glasses, his eyes glimmered with a stubborn, almost dogged clarity.

“But I just feel that doing research requires integrity. You can’t deceive people.”

Zhou Jian took a deep breath. Though his voice trembled slightly, his tone was resolute: “Science is science. It either works or it doesn’t. Passing off fake data to trick someone into investing—what’s the difference between that and robbery? I’ve studied all these years. If I can’t hold onto even this baseline principle, then even if I get my PhD and become a professor one day, I’d look down on myself. This kind of money, earned by cheating, burns to the touch. I couldn’t live with it.”

The corridor fell silent.

Su Bai looked at Zhou Jian, feeling a stir of emotion deep within him. In this materialistic era, where even academia was becoming restless and superficial, someone like Zhou Jian—who would risk failing to graduate just to speak the truth for the sake of his own principles—was truly rare, exceptionally rare.

“Well said, scholarship must be guided by conscience.” Su Bai smiled and lightly patted Zhou Jian on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, Dr. Zhou. What you’ve told me today won’t be known to a third person once we leave this room. I won’t betray you, and I won’t let Professor Tang know it came from you.”

Hearing Su Bai’s assurance, Zhou Jian felt an immense relief, his tense body instantly softening as he nodded repeatedly: “Thank you, President Su. Thank you so much.”

“Alright, you should head back to the meeting room first. Don’t let them get suspicious,” Su Bai said.

“Yes, President Su. I’ll go now.” Zhou Jian cast a grateful glance at Su Bai, adjusted his glasses, and then quickly walked toward the meeting room.

Watching Zhou Jian’s thin, scholarly figure disappear around the corner of the corridor, Su Bai withdrew his gaze and turned to look out the window at the shimmering campus lake under the sunlight.

In this day and age, there were still such pure-hearted researchers.

Su Bai gave a helpless smile and gently shook his head. Still, this incident had indeed been a wake-up call for him. The research teams at Jiangcheng University were a mixed bag—not all of them had real substance.