“Mr. Su, you know what kind of treatment awaits anyone who gets into the Academy of Sciences. My brother has talent. Please be patient and instruct him.”

“All right, I’ll do my best!”

Compared with her earlier coldness, Zhang Min was warm again, which was rather puzzling.

Even when Su Mo handed her the newly added materials list worth forty thousand points, Zhang Min only frowned slightly and agreed readily.

“Forty thousand points? Fine. I’ll send people to gather it all as soon as possible!”

That afternoon, to show her sincerity, Zhang Min brought Zhang Bowen to the workroom and then said she would go to the city herself to buy the materials.

Su Mo felt a faint strangeness about this, but for the moment he could only play blind and treat everything as none of his business.

“What do you want to learn?”

Looking at Zhang Bowen, who sat beside him with a curious face, Su Mo smiled, and his heart was not entirely calm.

Whether martial arts or science,

both stressed passing things on.

The old to the young, the former generation to the new.

Su Mo had thought his first disciple would surely be a genius chosen only after repeated selection across the territory.

But now, Zhang Bowen’s appearance let him taste the feeling of inheritance ahead of time.

“Mr. Su...”

“Call me Brother Su.”

“All right. Brother Su, I watched you yesterday... I know you’re definitely not as simple as your résumé says, and not what my sister thinks either. I... I want to learn electrical appliance manufacturing!”

Zhang Bowen gritted his teeth and looked at Su Mo’s kindly face. Only after working up his courage could he finish the whole sentence.

It showed none of the firmness he had when he came to Su Mo’s rescue earlier that morning.

“Electrical appliance manufacturing. Why do you want to learn that?”

Zhang Bowen didn’t want to learn weapons manufacturing or the making of high-tech products, the grand-sounding things young people looked up to. He wanted to learn something as plain and down to earth as electrical appliance manufacturing, and Su Mo became interested at once.

“Because there’s money in it!”

“No big company in the territory is researching small and medium appliances, and very few are imported from other territories. If I could learn to make them and develop the matching product lines, then... it would definitely make money!”

“Pfft!”

Zhang Bowen’s thinking was indeed as simple as his age of just over eighteen.

Hearing that he actually wanted to make money from small household appliances, Su Mo nearly spat out the water he had just drunk.

“Bowen, didn’t you ever wonder why those big companies don’t make small household appliances?”

“Because the profit isn’t enough?”

“No. Because nobody can afford to buy them!”

Zhang Bowen had been born into a merchant family and yet thought just like most plain technical science boys. Seeing this, Su Mo pulled over a sheet of white paper, picked up a pen, quickly sketched a simple circuit diagram on it, and labeled the name of each component.

“This is the circuit structure of an electric rice cooker, and the materials it needs.”

“Here is the material price list your sister gave me.”

“Work it out. See how much money it would take in total to make one rice cooker like this!”

“All right!”

Zhang Bowen took the price list and the white paper, sat at the table and began to calculate patiently.

Watching how seriously he worked, Su Mo felt a little gratified.

The kid was a bit silly, but not entirely beyond saving.

Zhang Bowen was eighteen now. Counting back, that meant he had come into the world around Year Five of the Apocalypse.

By then the Zhang Clan had just opened Zizai Liang Lane, and life was beginning to flourish.

He had never felt the despair of the early wasteland, so it was no wonder Zhang Bowen could stay so naive.

After a while, having checked it twice, Zhang Bowen looked up in disbelief.

“One... rice cooker, and it’s this expensive?”

On the white paper, the 390 at the far left was the sum Zhang Bowen had added up.

Clearly, the gap between this price and the one he had imagined was far more than tenfold.

“On Earth, when we make rice cookers, one manufacturer supplies the casing, one supplies the inner pot, and another supplies the control circuit board. Our demand and industry are enormous in scale, which is why these things look so cheap.”

“But in the wasteland, never mind how you would integrate those upstream and downstream industry chains or how you would sell the rice cookers you make. Just finding the raw materials is a considerable expense.”

Having shattered the naive boy’s dream of getting rich, Su Mo smiled somewhat unscrupulously.

What no one expected was that Zhang Bowen accepted it very quickly. After being dejected for a short while, he perked up again.

Looking at Su Mo’s slightly sallow face, he said earnestly, “Brother Su, then what should I learn now in order to get into the Academy of Sciences?”

“Get into the Academy of Sciences?”

Su Mo had heard of the Academy of Sciences long ago.

Whether it was the miniature development platform he was using now or the various black technologies that benefited every corner of the territory,

nearly all of them came from the hands of this mysterious institution.

And in the eyes of the outside world, being able to get into it meant stepping onto the road of rapid rise.

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