
Learning is often a source of frustration for many.
It is common to encounter difficulties during the learning process, which can arise from various factors, including the complexity of the subject, learning methods, mental state, and environmental influences.
Everyone knows the importance of progress, but not everyone can accept the hardship that learning requires in order to achieve it.
The core difficulty of learning lies in its poor input-output ratio.
When learning new knowledge or skills, we often need to understand and master complex concepts, theories, formulas, languages, and more. These may exceed our current cognitive limits, requiring a substantial amount of energy for contemplation, study, and repeated practice.
In the end, the return might not be as rewarding as expected.
Even someone like Benny, who considers himself a genius and has mastered various skills such as information, artifact restoration, art forgery, chemicals, tools, stealth movement, sculpture, painting, lock-picking, and multiple languages, sometimes finds learning to be a painful experience.
However, while teaching Zoe, Benny’s worldview was slightly shaken.
Before him, Zoe, who did not try to act, displayed a powerful ability to learn.
This made Benny briefly believe that he was particularly skilled at teaching others.
However, he quickly realized that it wasn’t his teaching ability that made the difference—it was Zoe’s exceptional learning ability.
Every word Benny spoke was immediately remembered by Zoe.
Every point Benny explained was understood without the need for a second explanation.
Zoe could grasp related ideas on her own without needing Benny to elaborate.
Such a student could easily become a teacher's star pupil, the one that would stand out and be remembered throughout their entire teaching career.
By five or six in the afternoon, Benny felt that all his knowledge on signal modulation and demodulation had been drained by the eager-to-learn woman before him.
There was not a single drop left.
He even ended up teaching Zoe additional insights about baseband signals.
The speed at which Zoe absorbed knowledge was astonishing, never requiring repetition.
Benny felt less like a teacher and more like a robot, reading from textbooks without deviation.
His earlier plan to use small devices to make the lesson more engaging was rendered unnecessary, as there was no need for extra help. Zoe never had any questions that required additional tutoring.
The only role Benny could play was using his deep familiarity with the material to organize different sets of knowledge for Zoe, providing a more structured and systematic approach to her learning rather than aimless, disjointed attempts.
During the focused study session that afternoon, Zoe not only learned signal modulation and demodulation, but also the conversion rules for common types of image, sound, and text information into baseband signals.
After radio waves are demodulated, they turn into baseband signals, not directly into images, sound, or text.
She also needed to understand how sound waves, bit sequences in data signals, and pixel value changes in image signals are represented within baseband signals.
Only then could she fully decode the images, sounds, and text hidden within the radio waves that pass through her transparent world.
Around 5:30 p.m., seeing that Benny was nearly exhausted, Zoe decided to pause their studies for the day.
Noticing Benny’s dazed expression, Zoe, with some apology, patted his shoulder and said, “I’ll cook something nice for you.”
Saying this, Zoe draped her arm over Benny’s shoulder and led him to her home.
She instructed Benny to sit on the couch and play with Platinum, while she rolled up her sleeves and headed to the kitchen.
Having gained some skill in preparing snake dishes recently, she decided to make a nourishing snake soup for Benny.
...
After finishing the snake soup, Benny played with Platinum for a while before leaving around two hours later.
Zoe, following her short-term plan, prepared some snake soup for the next morning and then read a novel for a while.
Around 9 p.m., Zoe began her daily training for the Transparent World 3.5.
Her Transparent World 3.5 involved developing many non-human abilities, so her training included visual, auditory, olfactory, and mental power exercises.
The mental power training primarily focused on sensing the emotions of living beings, telekinesis, and electromagnetic wave perception.
After completing most of the specialized training, Zoe prepared to begin her electromagnetic wave perception training when she paused.
Surrounded by countless chaotic and scattered electromagnetic waves, she tried to apply the knowledge she had learned earlier that afternoon: signal modulation and demodulation, and the information carried by baseband signals.
Although she had not yet completed her studies on these topics, after the afternoon session, she had already gained a solid understanding.
In a moment of clarity, the amplitude, frequency, and phase patterns of the surrounding electromagnetic signals began to make sense to her. However, she couldn’t understand all of them yet.
There are too many rules for signal modulation, making it difficult to accurately match each unassigned electromagnetic signal with the correct modulation type.
This is especially true for more complex signals, where the demodulation process involves intricate mathematical operations and signal processing techniques such as carrier synchronization, symbol timing recovery, equalization, channel estimation, and soft-decision decoding.
Modern demodulation methods involve advanced mathematics, complex filtering algorithms (e.g., Kalman filtering, adaptive filtering), channel estimation, constellation decoding, and error correction coding. These algorithms often require iterative calculations, matrix operations, probability theory, and statistical methods.
Moreover, with Zoe's current ability to sense electromagnetic waves, her perception of characteristics like amplitude, frequency, and phase is still not very clear. Everything still requires more intensive training.
At this point, only a small portion of simple electromagnetic waves seem decodable to her.
Deep in thought, Zoe began using the knowledge she had learned to attempt demodulating these modulated signals into baseband signals.
This was difficult.
Relying solely on her brain as the central processor, signal demodulation was no small task. Even for basic AM (amplitude modulation) or FM (frequency modulation) signals, the demodulation process, though relatively direct, was still far from simple.
After more than twenty minutes, Zoe managed to decode a signal into a baseband signal. Then, following common rules for interpreting the information within baseband signals, she attempted to convert it into an image, text, or sound.
This took another ten minutes.
Once she finished decoding the signal, a familiar sound echoed in her ears:
"This is FM 101.7, Mundi Traffic Broadcasting reminding you: You may have insurance, but safety is the top priority!"
"Next, we bring you a classic song 'Together Margarita.'"
"Ohh~ Why can't we stay looongeeer~ Margaritaaaa~ Time may be short but here we are~ together Margaritaaa~"
After the decoding process, the familiar music filled her mind.
Due to her inexperience with the decoding process, the sound was somewhat choppy, or rather, very choppy.
This was a sensation she had never experienced before.
The electromagnetic wave, once decoded, formed a clear, imagined sound playing in her mind.
But in reality, no one around her was playing the song "Together Margarita."
This strange feeling was particularly novel and fascinating to Zoe.
If you asked how this differed from imagining the song directly in her mind, the difference was clear.
The electromagnetic wave carried the song, and once decoded in her mind, it was clearer than if she had simply imagined it.
It was so clear that her hearing, which could now penetrate the world, desperately searched for the sound's source, but her remarkably powerful hearing couldn't align with her mind.
Mind: "I definitely heard it."
Hearing: "???"
After thinking for a while, Zoe smiled and refocused, beginning to seriously contemplate the source of this converted electromagnetic wave.
However, there was no need for deep thought.
This was clearly… a traffic broadcast?
At present, it seemed that she could only decode simple electromagnetic waves that could be received by a radio.
This indeed opened a new door to the world.
But it also seemed like…
She had become a human radio?
Literally.
Zoe couldn't help but laugh at herself.
It wasn't a bad situation. Once she became more proficient in decoding, these traffic broadcast waves would be decoded in an instant, and she would truly be like a radio.
At that point…
She could listen to music or the news anytime, anywhere.
However, after Zoe sensed the electromagnetic waves, she had to analyze the amplitude, frequency, and phase, perform signal demodulation, and convert the baseband signal into imagined images, text, or sound.
These three steps took time.
This caused significant delays when trying to use the surrounding electromagnetic waves to listen to music.
To achieve smooth listening, she would need long-term training so that decoding and translating various electromagnetic signals into baseband signals would become instinctual, ideally producing results in one second or even less.
Besides that,
She would need to study and train more to understand and decode a wider range of electromagnetic waves, not just those limited to the radio frequencies that a standard radio could receive.
She could listen to taxi, military and other radio channels... Next one is to send radio signals to call a taxi.
TFTC!



TFTC
TFTC
English isn't my first language, so my brain was smoking by the end of this Chapter.