Looking at Su Mo standing before him, he took a small step back, slowly bent both knees, and knelt on the ground.

Thud! Thud! Thud!

After performing three heavy bows of discipleship, Zhang Bowen stood up and ran out with the blueprint in long strides.

Su Mo watched the boy, barely eighteen years old, disappear from sight, and only then withdrew his gaze and leaned back in his chair with a wistful sigh.

Humans are not plants or rocks. How could he be without feeling?

After some time spent together, he had already developed a certain fondness for Huang Xiaojuan, Sun Quan, and his apprentice Zhang Bowen.

But precisely because of that.

Whenever he thought that once he completed his task and returned to the real world, he would never see these people again, Su Mo could not help feeling a bit emotional, his heart hollow.

“I still need to find out the cause of the ruins as soon as possible. If I could, as with summoning the murlocs before, summon the people of this world to the real wasteland as well...”

With that precedent in mind, after a few sighs, Su Mo pulled his attention back.

Three days had passed, neither long nor short.

Zhang Bowen had finished developing the energy stone sickle, and Su Mo himself had not been idle either. He had basically produced a suitable machine model blueprint.

Along the way, to guard against accidents with this backup plan, he had relied on the system upgrade and spent a huge sum of 1,200 points to upgrade the blueprint for applicability, matching the characteristics of Xinghuo No. 3 wheat as closely as possible.

As for the rice on the other side, he had neither the energy nor the time to develop a corresponding tool.

He could only cut off an arm like a warrior and give up this small portion directly, in exchange for successfully harvesting most of the wheat!

“I hope I won’t need to use my backup. Otherwise, staying low-profile will get very hard.”

He pulled out the Sun-chaser armor blueprint from under the desk, now ninety-five percent disassembled, and took from a drawer a roughly made but convincingly shaped silvery-white mask.

Su Mo picked it up gently and fitted it over his face.

The next second, something marvelous happened!

The mask, which had been one solid piece, seemed to come alive, its corners trembling constantly.

As the trembling grew stronger, tentacles like an octopus’s slowly began to extend, clamping the mask firmly around Su Mo’s face.

Only when it was certain the mask would not fall off did the tentacles stop and begin further comfort adjustments.

“Not bad. After the improvements, the deployment and wearing time has gone down from three minutes to a little over one minute.”

“If I raise the output frequency of the energy stone core, shortening it to half a minute, or even within twenty seconds, shouldn’t be difficult in the future.”

He drew a sharp little knife and tried cutting at the area the mask covered.

After making sure the force was completely dispersed by the structure of the mask, Su Mo tapped lightly behind his head, satisfied.

The next second, the tentacles began to move again.

This time, though, instead of spreading, they retracted quickly, shrinking back to the places around the mask where they had emerged.

In only forty-five seconds, the mask returned to normal and fell off Su Mo’s face on its own, dropping onto the desktop.

Looking at the inner side, there were several obvious dents inside the mask, and the deepest one was nearly through the body of the mask.

Clearly, compared with what was described on the Sun-chaser 1.0 blueprint, the mask had begun to be perfected in function, but its strength fell short by far more than a little.

One could fairly call it the difference between clouds and mud.

“Still too expensive!”

“Just a half-finished mask, and it has already consumed almost forty thousand points of materials.”

“By this reckoning, my original estimate was indeed too conservative. If I want to build a battle armor that is actually usable, the materials alone would cost no less than a million points.”

“And alloy materials above grade four can only be bought after I personally report and state the purpose. Above grade six, I must make certain contributions before I get a quota.”

“These restrictions are really...”

Su Mo fully understood the territory’s reasons for doing this, but that did not mean he would not worry about the restrictions.

Money was fine. As long as Zizai Liang Lane successfully completed the Summer Harvest this time, the terrifying profit it earned would be enough to fill that gap, with plenty to spare.

But contribution, and the hassle of reporting, were much harder to deal with.

“Looks like I’ll have to take the initiative!”

Gazing far out the window at the canteen sending up cooking smoke, Su Mo felt his mind drift, with an indescribable oddness.

Fleecing an enemy brought no psychological burden at all.

But fleecing one’s own side always felt strange.

Still, in this world he had already set a precedent with Feng Long.

When one has many debts, one stops worrying, and when there are many lice, they no longer itch.

“Pei Shao, oh, Pei Shao. Who told you, old bachelor, to come and run into my gun?”

“This time it’s your turn to ‘contribute’ something to the territory’s grand plan!”

A smile at the corner of his mouth, seeing that it was approaching five in the afternoon, dinner time, Su Mo simply stopped waiting.

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