76: Chapter 76 Recruiting a God-Level Prodigy, Wuling Hongguang Takes Away the Broken Metal

Song Changming's oil-stained hands gripped the thin blueprint tightly.

The edges of the paper were already blurred by the grease on his fingertips.

His gaze was locked onto the fluid dynamics equation on the third line, his eyes bloodshot.

"Utilizing heavy metal ion stripping properties to form a natural water curtain network..." Song Changming suddenly looked up, staring at Lu Chen and shouting, "Using gravitational potential energy to replace a breeze motor? Who drew this blueprint! What kind of madman came up with this stuff!"

Lu Chen looked at Song Changming's bloodshot eyes.

"Who drew it doesn't matter. What matters is that, in this country, besides you, no one can turn it into reality."

Song Changming let go, and the blueprint fluttered to the edge of a muddy ditch. He pointed at the pitch-black sewage under his feet.

"To turn the data on this paper into reality requires the absolute freedom to make mistakes; it requires filling it with massive amounts of reagents and materials."

"Those factory owners in the country only want patents they can brag about on their reports. No one will burn this money for me. Even if I wasted a single cent, they would use audit reports to pressure me, and then try to tell me how to do my job."

Lu Chen took a step forward, his leather shoes stepping on a ruined electronic board.

"I will burn it for you," Lu Chen said, his voice low. "There is no upper limit on funding. Whatever equipment you need, I will buy. If it can't be bought, you will build it yourself."

"You have the final say on the purification project for the entire workshop. I won't send anyone to meddle in your progress, and I absolutely will not allow anyone to force you to change even a single decimal point of data."

Song Changming did not reply immediately; his Adam's apple bobbed up and down.

Lu Chen took out his phone and opened his online banking app. The light from the screen shone onto Song Changming's tattered anti-chemical suit.

"Card number," Lu Chen said.

Song Changming recited a string of numbers; it was a useless card that hadn't received a deposit in three years.

Lu Chen entered the account number and pressed the enter key.

Three seconds later.

The old phone in Song Changming's arms, its screen shattered with three cracks, vibrated. He took it out and glanced at it.

The text message notification was particularly jarring in the junkyard: one million in prepaid base salary, instant interbank transfer via The Big Four Banks' green channel.

Song Changming stared at the long string of zeros on the screen, then looked up into Lu Chen's eyes. Lu Chen looked back at him, saying nothing more.

Song Changming turned and bent down to pick up a paint-chipped enamel mug from the ground. It still contained half a mug of clean water he had just filtered using scrap metal.

He tilted his head back, gulped it all down, and then smashed it down with a flick of his wrist.

Clang—the mug hit a discarded picture tube and bounced into the muddy water.

"I'm in!" Song Changming turned and pointed to the pile of ruined equipment on the ground. "But these devices must be taken with us. They have the fluid parameters I've recorded over these past three years."

Lu Chen looked back at Da Biao. "Load the car."

Da Biao glared at the pile of foul-smelling copper pipes and broken magnets, gagged once, and immediately straightened his posture.

"Come here, a few of you! Move it!"

Several security guards in black vests strode over. Without covering their noses, they put on gloves, picked up the racks covered in sludge and acid, and stuffed them into the trunk of the van. The sound of metal clashing rang out several times.

Song Changming walked over and reached out to stop a guard. "Don't break this induction coil. I'll carry it myself."

He picked up the dirtiest battery assembly and climbed into the back seat of the car.

Before the door was even closed properly, Da Biao slammed on the gas. The tires kicked up a large amount of mud, and the car careened out of the junkyard.

The inside of the vehicle was filled with a sour, rotting stench.

Song Changming didn't wipe the mud off the seat. He fished a carbon pen with a worn-out tip from his pocket, flipped over the blueprint Lu Chen had given him, and laid it flat on his knees.

The van, which didn't even have shock absorbers, jolted violently on the rough road.

Song Changming pressed his wrist hard against his thigh, the pen tip rapidly writing out formulas on the paper, row after row. Da Biao honked the horn twice, but he didn't even lift his eyelids.

Da Biao glanced in the rearview mirror. "Boss, is this guy obsessed?"

"Drive steadily." Lu Chen watched the wasteland receding outside the car window. "If he draws one wrong line, Old Zhao's thirty-thousand-square-meter project will all have to be reworked."

Da Biao immediately eased off the gas, gripped the steering wheel tightly with both hands, and specifically chose to drive on flat patches of dirt.

"Engineer Song." Lu Chen didn't turn around. "The thirty-thousand-square-meter pit in the north of the city has already been dug."

Song Changming didn't even look up; his carbon pen drew a cross-sectional sketch of gravity differential on the paper.

"I can finish the blueprints for the dust removal towers tonight, but I need to buy heavy metal chemical solvents. The precision requirement is at the milligram level; if it's off by one milligram, the workshop will be filled with highly toxic substances. Can your people buy it?"

"List out what you need." Lu Chen looked at the front windshield. "Old Wu is in the north of the city. Whatever I need, he will have it sorted out before dawn."

"Buying these chemicals requires special authorization qualifications. You can't buy industrial-grade stock on the open market, and the quantity is huge," Song Changming added.

"I'll handle the qualifications. You just worry about writing the parameters."

The pen in Song Changming's hand paused. He looked up at the back of Lu Chen's head.

"The filtration plan on this blueprint doesn't require any imported materials, so the foreigners can't hold us back. But after this workshop is built, who are you going to let in to build the Lithography Machine? This job isn't something a few dozen people can do."

"That's not something you need to worry about. Five thousand people are already on their way," Lu Chen said.

Song Changming didn't speak again; he clamped the worn-out pen in his mouth and closed his eyes.

Thirty minutes later, the car stopped at the edge of a construction site in the high-tech development zone in the north of the city.

The roar of hundreds of excavators was deafening. Powerful floodlights illuminated the twenty thousand mu of land, and tens of thousands of construction workers wearing hard hats were divided into four large work zones.

In the very center, a giant rectangular foundation pit reached a depth of ten meters.

Lu Chen pushed open the car door and got out.

Song Changming followed him out. His worn-out rubber shoes stepped onto the hardened road of the construction site. Looking at the scene before him, he took off the gas mask on his face. The air here was filled with the smell of loess and diesel.

Zhao Tiezhu came running over from a distance, shirtless, holding a megaphone, his chest covered in sweat mixed with mud.

Wei Jianguo followed beside him, wearing a yellow hard hat.

"Factory Director Lu!" Zhao Tiezhu ran up close and stopped.

"The first batch of steel for the frame has arrived, but without the blueprints, we can't determine the position of the water curtain wall, and we can't tie the rebar!"

Lu Chen turned to the side and pointed at Song Changming behind him.

"Get the blueprints from him." Lu Chen looked at Zhao Tiezhu. "From now on, for this thirty-thousand-square-meter ultra-clean workshop, aside from the steel and cement which are under your control, everything regarding purification, ventilation, and wiring is decided by Song Changming."

Zhao Tiezhu looked at Song Changming's black-and-yellow tattered anti-chemical suit and was stunned.

Wei Jianguo stepped forward and noticed the beard on Song Changming's face.

"Song Changming from Shenzhen Yuanyang? Weren't you banned by the entire industry?"

Song Changming glanced at Wei Jianguo and nodded. He squatted directly on the ground, pulled the paper covered in formulas from his chest, and spread it out on the sandy ground.

"General Manager Zhao, right?" Song Changming's pen pointed to the bottom-left corner of the blueprint.

"At this location, at a depth of fourteen meters, dig me a water storage tank. The anti-leakage grade must be the highest national standard. All water pipes must run underground, and the pipe diameter should be twelve-centimeter corrosion-resistant copper pipes."

Zhao Tiezhu didn't understand the chemical terminology, only the part about digging a pit and laying pipes. He turned and roared into the megaphone,

"Group One! Take some people to the left and mark the spots!"

"Above the water tank, erect two sixty-meter-tall dust removal towers."

Song Changming drew two circles on the ground. "Connect them in the middle with steel frames. I don't want exhaust fans; I want to hang five layers of high-voltage electrostatic mesh inside."

Wei Jianguo stood to the side, stretching his neck to stare at the drawing on the ground.

"Utilizing the physical height of the dust removal towers to create a negative pressure backflow? You want to turn the entire building into a fully enclosed internal circulation filtration chamber?"