But seeing that Su Mo did not want to say more, he was not annoyed either. He just came up, giggling, and rummaged around in his leather bag.

“Teacher, these are the longan cherries my mother asked me to bring you!”

“And these are the small parts you asked for yesterday.”

The bag was not big, and could barely hold a few small things.

Zhang Bowen first took out a box of bright red cherries that sold for a full three hundred trade points and put it down. Then he fumbled around a bit more and took out two parts that fit together perfectly.

“Bowen, you rascal, you really do have a heart!”

Without even looking at the cherries, Su Mo found that these parts were really the thing he had mentioned in passing yesterday.

Delighted, he picked them up and examined them in front of his eyes for a good while.

The thing looked like it had no technical content at all, but the alloy it was made of was a solid grade-eight alloy.

And outside, the price of this little part matched its rarity perfectly, a terrifying three thousand points.

“Not at all, not at all. After everything Teacher has taught me, forget one little part, even if it were ten, or twenty...”

“As long as Bowen can get it done, he will absolutely not refuse!”

After saying a couple of high-sounding lines, and only when even Zhang Bowen himself felt a little cheesy, he gave a hehe laugh and hurriedly slipped over to his own worktable.

If you asked what mattered most in the wasteland, then besides the martial strength needed to stay alive, the rest was naturally knowledge that could raise your class.

After several years of development, and after a long period of negotiation and preparation, Tian Yuan Territory had once briefly opened school education in the fifth year of the Doomsday Calendar.

Back then, any child under the age of fifteen could go in and study for a token fee.

However, the uncertainty of the wasteland and the pressure of disasters

meant that from the very start this kind of public-welfare education was doomed to be hard to sustain.

From mid-June of the fifth year of the Doomsday Calendar to the end of February of the sixth year, in just a little over half a year, the school announced its closure for various reasons.

There were two main reasons.

First, the wasteland was simply not suited to introductory education, much less exam-oriented education. The learning methods and knowledge of the civilized era were almost useless for survival in the apocalypse.

Second, the territory’s shortage of labor meant that no parent was willing to let their child go to school and waste time.

So even after the Zhang family no longer lacked survival points, Zhang Bowen could not go back to school. He could only return home helplessly and spend more than half a year doing business with Zhang Da.

During that time,

Zhang Da noticed that Zhang Bowen was not cut out to be a merchant but had some talent for scientific study. Fearing that the only male heir of the family would go to waste, he again had no choice but to hire temporary teachers at high pay from all over, and they began to give Zhang Bowen “small classes” by subject.

As for his future, the entire Zhang Clan said nothing out loud, but even Zhang Bowen himself knew.

He could only go to the Academy of Sciences!

There was only this one choice!

Turning these past matters over in his mind, Zhang Bowen pulled out his stool, set down his bag, and turned on the desk lamp.

Sure enough,

compared with yesterday, the blueprints on the desk today had two more pages, and what was recorded on them was exactly the three tasks Su Mo had assigned for today.

He had previewed the first two yesterday, so at a glance he was not worried.

But when he got to the third, he looked at the complicated device, whose shape bore some resemblance to an energy machine, and raised his head in considerable shock, as if wanting to say something.

In the end, though, the words had to be swallowed back into his stomach and turned into admiration from head to toe.

“Teacher’s learning is so vast that even all my small-class teachers put together couldn’t match a ten-thousandth of it!”

“Sister’s eye is really good. Teacher’s disguise back then was that skilled, and she could still tell he was extraordinary...”

Over these past few days he had become more and more aware of how formidable Su Mo was.

More than once he had tried to test Su Mo’s level with the difficult problems left over from his earlier studies.

Yet the results had been remarkably consistent.

Just like the blueprint in front of him, the more he came into contact with it, the more Zhang Bowen could feel how deep and vast the “ocean” before him really was!

At times he even had the illusion that most of the researchers in the Academy of Sciences probably were not as strong as Su Mo.

Meanwhile, with the question of whether the Zhang Clan could survive this calamity at stake,

Zhang Bowen was not as anxious as Zhang Min.

After four days of manufacturing, he had understood that the thing he was making was an energy stone tool no less valuable than the one Qiankun Grain Store had.

Every day he held down his excited heart and forced himself to resist the urge to tell his family.

He just kept his spirits pent up, planning that when the tool was finished, at the so-called “warm-up conference” of Qiankun Grain Store, he would give everyone a surprise.

And at the same time fulfill a boy’s dream of... astonishing the world with one stroke!

And so,

Su Mo was impatient to produce a Sun-chaser Type One armor of his own, to guard against the enemies for whom even Feng Long had to send people to protect him.

Zhang Bowen was impatient to produce a standard energy stone tool, fulfill his dream of showing off, and save the Zhang Clan in its hour of peril.

Each of the two was holding a breath in his chest, so naturally time passed even faster.

In a daze, until a visiting member of the Inspectorate came outside and summoned the shop manager of Zizai Liang Lane,

the two finally realized that it was already a little past eight o’clock in the evening.

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