Three Years Forgotten, Why Go Crazy When I Say Goodbye? novel Chapter 584

Soon, the experiment officially began.

Inside the sealed, sterile lab, everything was dead silent except for the low hum of the machinery.

Outside, the audience held their breath, watching the intense duel.

Willow expertly slipped on her sterile gloves, precisely picking up the pipette. With flawless control, she drew the exact volume of cell culture medium and slowly infused it into the human skin cell petri dish.

Her movements were perfectly fluid and incredibly professional. It was obvious she had performed these routines thousands of times.

At the same time, she activated the thermostatic microscope. The screen displayed the genetic sequence magnified thousands of times. Willow's eyes darted across the dense map of markers, instantly locking onto the COL7A1 pathogenic mutation. With a wrist as steady as a rock, she adjusted the parameters and activated the single-base editing system.

Calibrating, targeting, editing, and sealing—every transition was seamless. Her precision was textbook perfect. She looked so profoundly relaxed that it was clear this insanely complex procedure was carved into her muscle memory.

On the other side of the glass, Vivienne was falling apart.

The second she put on her gloves, her hands started shaking uncontrollably. Her fingertips went numb, and a relentless coat of sticky, cold sweat made her panic even more.

At first, she clung to the hope of cheating. She glanced sideways, hoping to mirror Willow's movements and fake her way through. But one look completely shattered her.

Willow was too fast, too precise, and entirely too advanced.

The complicated targeting, the microscopic adjustments to the parameters, the millisecond-perfect timing—these were all practical nuances that were never written in any published paper. The dense genetic sequences, the rapidly shifting data, and the intricate calibration logic flashing on her screen looked like ancient, undecipherable runes to Vivienne.

She didn't understand a single thing.

The experts in the hall and the viewers online saw everything with crystal clarity.

"The skill gap is insane. One is a masterclass, and the other is a trainwreck."

"Vivienne clearly has no idea what she's doing. She's completely frozen. She's just pretending to work."

"Well, the truth is obvious now. We don't even need the final data to verify it; her lab technique says it all."

As the doubts swelled into an uproar, Vivienne's heart hammered frantically against her ribs.

She knew better than anyone that she couldn't finish this experiment. If she kept forcing it, she would be completely exposed. The moment the final results printed, her entire charade would implode, and the reputation, status, and future she had spent years building would burn to ash today.