Karin's arrival left Todd somewhat bewildered.

First, he really didn't know how to arrange the girl's accommodation and food; second, he also vaguely felt that her running away from home might be related to yesterday's conversation, and he should bear some responsibility.

The girl didn't pay much attention to his thoughts. After walking around the monastery, she decided to use a mass room next to the underground hall as her temporary residence.

After reviewing the document, Todd immediately objected. Leaving aside the question of whether it was appropriate to have a young girl living beneath a tomb, the room's dark, damp, and stuffy atmosphere gave him ample reason to find her another place to live.

Afterwards, the monk apprentice planned to have Karin stay in a village at the foot of the mountain, so that the journey would not be long and would not be conspicuous. However, she insisted on staying near the laboratory, which gave him a huge headache.

In the end, Todd came up with a desperate solution.

He managed to find several monks' robes so Karin could disguise herself as a nun and move around freely. Next, he planned to secretly clear out a room in the attic of the monastery library, used to store scriptures, to serve as the girl's bedroom. Ignoring Huggins's uproarious laughter upon learning of the idea, Todd, with the help of several others, finally managed to move her home safely late one night.

In the days that followed, the monk's underground experiments were no longer conducted alone; he gained a beautiful yet mischievous and difficult female assistant by his side.

Whether in his past life or this one, this was the first time Todd had ever felt that the teaching interaction between teachers and students was so difficult. Helping someone living in an era that was thousands of years behind to understand a technology that was crossing generations was undoubtedly a difficult and long journey.

"You mean, our world is made up of tiny particles?"

“Kalin, the word I used is ‘molecule’.”

"Okay, 'molecule', what a strange word."

Todd fiddled with the flask in his hand, saying without turning his head, "Besides molecules, there are atoms. Molecules can make up matter; atoms can make up molecules, or they can directly make up matter."

The girl scooped up some powder from the jar with a measuring spoon and asked, "So, once we make a microscope, will we be able to see molecules and atoms?"

Todd laughed: "No, no, we made an optical microscope. To see molecules and atoms, you have to use an electron microscope."

"Then why don't we just make an electron microscope?"

“Um…no…it’s not that we don’t want to make it, it’s just…we can’t make it. First, we need to solve the electricity problem…Sigh, Karin, forget about molecules and atoms. Maybe we should look closer. After we’ve made this microscope, I can let you see some tiny creatures that are invisible to the naked eye, like cells or whipworms.”

The girl was clearly dissatisfied with this perfunctory answer. She pouted and angrily pounded the powder in the bowl with the grinding stick.

Seeing her performance, Todd could only sigh heavily.

After eleven busy days, trying hundreds of rounds of raw material purification, material proportioning, mixing and firing, and cleaning, and experiencing countless failures, Todd finally confirmed the optimal optical glass manufacturing process.

The first step is the most basic glass raw material formulation, which involves adding materials such as soda ash, limestone, and quartz in the correct proportions.

The second step involves adding boron oxide to increase heat resistance and chemical stability, thereby lowering the glass melting temperature and making it resistant to sodium vapor corrosion.

The third step involves adding a small amount of silver chloride, which increases the optical sensitivity of the borosilicate glass.

The fourth step involves adding a very small amount of copper oxide as a sensitizer to regulate the optical reaction rate of the glass.

The fifth step is melting, where the prepared raw materials are heated at high temperatures to form a uniform, bubble-free molten glass.

The sixth step is shaping: pour the molten glass into a pre-prepared mold and wait for it to solidify and take shape.

The seventh step is annealing, which involves slowly cooling the gradually solidifying glass to room temperature.

The final step, and also the most difficult one.

Grinding the lens. The surface of the lens was carefully polished with natural diamond abrasive to ensure its light-gathering ability and image accuracy. Lacking professional optometry equipment and light-sensing devices, Todd could only use the most primitive direct-light measurement method to manually grind the lens. Due to his lack of skill and poor matching, it took him five whole days to grind a barely usable product.

The eyepieces are only available in 5x and 10x magnification, and the objective lenses are only available in 10x and 40x magnification. These figures were measured manually and still have a large margin of error.

Because there wasn't enough time to make a mirror, copper had to be used as a substitute for the focusing lens.

Since he didn't have a lathe (actually because he didn't understand mechanics) and couldn't make a mechanical knob, he used a slot to adjust the height.

The observation platform was just a simple wooden frame.

When Todd finished building this incredibly rudimentary and grotesque microscope, his first thought wasn't to cheer, but to smash it and start over. It took him a great deal of effort to suppress this impulse.

Karin showed no dissatisfaction with the device, which she had painstakingly created. On the contrary, when she placed her hair on the observation platform, the girl immediately felt that it was the greatest invention in the world.

Todd made microscopes not simply for observing hair.

He obtained blood samples from Huggins' hands and live tissue samples from Edgar's legs. After adjusting the magnification to 400x, he was finally able to see the true source of their alien abilities—bacteria. He had originally planned to discuss with Karin about extracting her bodily fluids for testing, but her disgusted expression upon hearing the word "sample" immediately dissuaded him from the idea.

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