When I am reborn, I just want to be a top student

After handing over the matters in Seoul to Baili Xiu, Wang Donglai turned his attention to another matter.

To be precise, it's two things.

Hidden on the bookshelf behind his desk is an inconspicuous safe.

After unlocking with iris scan, fingerprint scan, and dynamic password, there was no gold or silver jewelry inside, only two thin documents.

Each cover is printed with a code name: "Shennong" and "Mending the Sky".

The Shennong Project: Food.

The Sky-Mending Project: Energy.

Wang Donglai knew better than anyone that what could truly strangle a country in this world was never chips or lithography machines, but food and energy.

Chip shortages hinder development, while food and energy shortages hinder survival.

If a country's technology industry lags behind by decades, it can still catch up slowly by exchanging market access for technology.

But if there isn't enough food or energy, we don't even have the right to pursue it.

So he started planning a long time ago.

The core of the Shennong Project is the optimization of crop seed gene editing.

Using Nuwa's supercomputing power, we can simulate, screen, combine, and optimize from a vast sea of ​​gene fragments to find those special gene modules that can double crop yields, resist disease and lodging, and even have benefits for human health.

Super rice, super soybeans, and super corn—each of these alone is enough to revolutionize the global agricultural landscape.

The core of the Sky-Mending Project is energy.

Controlled nuclear fusion, thorium-based molten salt reactors, and superconducting energy storage—using clean, cheap, and almost limitless energy sources—will liberate human civilization from the shackles of fossil fuels.

These two project proposals had been locked in a safe for a long time, but Wang Donglai had been building up the relevant technical reserves for a long time.

Quantum computing platforms run gene simulations, materials laboratories work on superconducting coatings, and aerospace departments verify life support systems in extreme environments. Each piece of the puzzle is slowly progressing on its own track, waiting for the day it will be assembled into a complete picture.

And now, the time is almost here.

"Wa, a progress report on the Shennong Project."

"The relevant information has been retrieved: Dr. Zhao Xing'an, head of the Super Soybean project, and Dr. Qian Lin, head of the Super Rice project. Both teams are at the Yinhe Agriculture Tangdu R&D Center and are currently in the research and development phase. Zhao Xing'an's team submitted seven problem reports this week, and Qian Lin's team submitted four. The total number of unresolved issues is eleven."

Wang Donglai didn't say much, he just stood up, picked up his coat, and pushed open the office door.

Yinhe Agriculture Tangdu R&D Center is located at the southernmost tip of the High-tech Zone.

From the outside, it looks like an ordinary cluster of glass-walled office buildings.

Only after entering will you discover that the underground space is several times larger than the above-ground space, containing a temperature- and humidity-controlled gene-editing laboratory, a fully enclosed plant factory, and rows of server racks connected to a quantum computing platform.

The rules here are even stricter than those at Galaxy Aerospace: all personnel must undergo dual identity authentication to enter and exit, experimental data can only be transmitted through an encrypted intranet, and not even a handwritten draft can be taken out of the building.

The door to the Super Soybean Laboratory was tightly closed, with pale light shining through the frosted glass, and the faint sounds of arguing could be heard. The person in charge here, Zhao Xing'an, was only thirty-five years old.

When Wang Donglai poached him from a multinational seed company, he was going through a midlife crisis and had been working on molecular breeding overseas for nearly ten years. He had accumulated a lot of new ideas, but the company kept shelving them because of the long research and development cycle and high risks.

When he saw Wang Donglai's message on Galaxy Technology's internal system, he deleted and rewrote it repeatedly. He still remembers every word of the last message he sent: "What I want to do is use gene editing technology to double the yield of soybeans per mu, not to make minor adjustments and increase it by a few percentage points. Boss, if you think I'm crazy, then just pretend I didn't say anything."

Wang Donglai's reply at the time was only a few words longer than his: "You're not crazy, you've come to the right place."

Since then, Zhao Xing'an has led a team with an average age of less than thirty into this underground laboratory.

They stayed here for almost a year, witnessed countless failures, and accumulated a thick stack of failure records.

On each page of failure records, Zhao Xing'an circled the problematic points in red pen, and next to them were densely written improvement ideas. These red pen marks, when put together, represent the path they had taken over the past year.

At this moment, he was staring at a set of gene editing simulation results on the screen, his eyes showing dark circles from long hours of staying up late, but his eyes were surprisingly bright.

When I pushed the door open, I saw several young people arguing in front of the screen. When they saw Wang Donglai, they all fell silent.

"Where is it stuck?" Wang Donglai didn't exchange pleasantries and went straight to the main control panel.

Zhao Xing'an pulled up the genome map: "Boss, following the technical route you provided, we've edited in both the soybean yield gene module and the disease resistance gene module. Simulation results show that the yield per mu can reach over 2,000 jin, the oil content can reach 30%, and the disease resistance is far superior to the best varieties on the market."

"but……"

As he spoke, he zoomed in on a region of the gene sequence: "The two modules collided in the metabolic pathway. The high-yield module needs more carbon skeletons to synthesize fats and proteins, while the disease-resistant module needs more carbon skeletons to synthesize disease-resistant substances. It's like two big eaters crammed onto the same assembly line; the production line simply can't feed them all."

Wang Donglai raised his eyebrows with interest: "Didn't you notice before?"

“This kind of problem would never have happened before, and the academic community never thought that someone could fit two supermodules into one genome at the same time.”

Zhao Xing'an gave a wry smile and explained, "Right now it's a matter of yield versus disease resistance, and for the time being we can only choose one. Either high yield but high disease susceptibility, or disease resistance but low yield. We tried adjusting the expression level, but lowering it had no effect, and raising it caused the plant to collapse on its own, resulting in yellowing leaves, root shrinkage, and the entire plant failing to grow well."

Wang Donglai nodded, but did not speak immediately.

He walked to the screen and studied the genome map carefully for a few minutes, then turned to the whiteboard next to him and picked up a marker.

"Let's look at this issue from a different perspective. You've been arguing about the allocation of carbon skeletons, which essentially means you're competing for the same metabolic pathway. But have you ever considered increasing the sources of carbon skeletons?"

He drew two parallel circles, representing the yield and disease resistance modules respectively, and then drew a new arrow from the side. "In soybean leaves, photosynthesis converts carbon dioxide into a carbon skeleton, and this pathway is fixed. But in the root nodules, the symbiotic relationship between nitrogen-fixing bacteria and soybeans is a backup source of carbon skeletons that is often overlooked. Normally, the rhizobia take carbon skeletons from the soybeans and then give back nitrogen; it's an exchange process. But if we use gene editing to make the rhizobia synthesize extra carbon skeletons while completing their nitrogen-fixing tasks, instead of taking over the soybeans' own production line, we can create an external logistics channel for the plant, allowing the two big eaters to each have their own kitchen."

After saying that, Wang Donglai put the marker back in the whiteboard tray, turned around and said to everyone, "The specific editing plan can be verified by Wa Yiyuan through simulation, and then reverse analyzed based on the data. I will allocate the relevant computing resources to you."

Zhao Xing'an stared at the minimalist diagram on the whiteboard and remained silent for a long while.

Then he stood up and shouted to the bespectacled young man on his team, "Xiao Liu, bring out that abandoned rhizobium symbiosis scheme from before! Run it again using the boss's approach!"

His voice trembled slightly, not from nervousness, but from the kind of trembling one feels when you finally find the doorknob after bumping into walls countless times in the dark.

After leaving the soybean laboratory, Wang Donglai went directly to the rice laboratory.

Unlike the anxiety in the soybean lab, the atmosphere here was more subtle. Team members sat at their respective workstations, their brows furrowed as they stared at the dense data on their screens.

Occasionally, someone would stand up, walk to the whiteboard, write down a few lines of thought, then step back a few paces to look at it for a while, before shaking their head and erasing it.

The project leader, Qian Lin, was recruited from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Unlike Zhao Xing'an of the soybean team, Qian Lin had spent nearly 20 years in the system and had seen too many "impossibilities": it was impossible to break through a certain number of kilograms per mu, it was impossible to achieve a certain level of resistance to lodging and disease at the same time, and it was impossible to achieve a certain level of precision in gene editing.

Some of those "impossibilities" are due to technological limitations, while others are due to institutional inertia. In the end, he can't distinguish which are truly impossible and which are just things no one dares to think about.

When Wang Dong came to him, he only said one sentence: "With me, I only ask if it can be done, not whether anyone has done it before."

On his first day at Galaxy Agriculture, he wrote a line on the first page of his notebook: "Starting from scratch."

He was checking the latest round of simulation data item by item, his brow furrowed so deeply it could snap a pencil.

Seeing Wang Donglai push the door open and come in, he stood up, his tone carrying a hint of suppressed frustration.

"Boss, there are no problems with yield and disease resistance. We've followed the technical route you provided and used a super quantum computing platform to screen gene combinations, and we've already found the optimal solution. The yield per acre can reach 2,000 kilograms, and its lodging resistance and disease resistance far surpass any variety on the market. But we're stuck on the extraction of special components."

He pulled up a biochemical analysis report, and a set of complex molecular structure diagrams popped up on the screen.

To accommodate the few recent PhD graduates on his team, he tried to explain in layman's terms: "According to your plan, 0.4 grams of a special component can be extracted from each kilogram of this super rice. This component has shown a very significant neuroprotective effect in simulation experiments. It can inhibit the chronic inflammatory response in the hippocampus of the brain and promote the plasticity of neuronal synapses. Simply put, it can alleviate Alzheimer's disease and enhance cognitive function. Moreover, unlike those so-called 'smart drugs' on the market, it is not addictive and has no neurotoxicity."

He paused, his voice suddenly lowering, as if what he was about to say was something even he found difficult to handle: "But the problem lies in the byproducts of the extraction process. After the extraction is complete, what do we do with the remaining rice, which makes up the majority of the product?"

Several young researchers nearby looked up at the same time, their eyes shifting back and forth between Qian Lin and Wang Donglai.

A girl wearing black-rimmed glasses hesitated for a moment and asked in a low voice, "Teacher Qian, didn't you say before that the byproducts were non-toxic?"

"Non-toxic does not mean it can be used directly."

Qian Lin pulled up a nutritional analysis report and explained, "The extraction process used high temperatures and organic solvents. Although the solvent residue was ultimately kept within a safe range, the protein structure in the rice was partially destroyed during the process, resulting in a significant decrease in digestibility and absorption. Simply put, if this pile of byproducts is used as feed, pigs won't grow, and chickens won't lay eggs. If it's discarded directly, based on this ratio, producing one kilogram of special ingredients would require discarding several tons of rice. Leaving aside the cost, the waste disposal alone is a huge problem."

Wang Donglai sat down and carefully examined the report, page by page.

Qian Lin stood to the side without saying a word, and the young researchers held their breath.

They knew that their boss always solved the most difficult problems in a very short time when he came to the lab, but this time the problem wasn't in gene editing, but in the downstream process, which was a matter for another field.

Wang Donglai closed the report, stood up, and walked to the whiteboard.

He picked up a marker and spoke in a low voice, but clearly throughout the lab: "The problem isn't with gene editing, it's with the downstream process. But sometimes problems with the downstream process can be solved with upstream design."

He drew a schematic diagram on the whiteboard showing the process of extracting special components from rice, including extraction, separation, and purification, with key parameters marked for each step.

Then an arrow was added next to the "Extract" step.

"The extraction process damages proteins, mainly due to high temperatures and solvents. If you don't want to use high temperatures, you have to separate the active ingredients at room temperature. If you don't want to use organic solvents, you have to use safe media such as water or edible oil."

He pointed to the densely packed molecular structure diagrams and said, "This special component has a medium molecular weight, and its structure contains both hydrophobic and hydrophilic groups, making it perfect for ultrasound-assisted aqueous extraction. No high temperature or organic solvents are needed; specific frequency ultrasound waves are used to break open the rice cell walls, allowing the active ingredient to dissolve directly in water. After extraction, the remaining rice grains retain their intact protein structure and can be processed into feed, starch, or other products as usual."

Qian Lin paused for a moment after hearing this, then blurted out, "Ultrasonic-assisted aqueous phase extraction? We had considered this approach before, but we couldn't determine a few key parameters: frequency, power, time, and temperature. These four variables have a huge number of possible combinations, and it would take at least half a year to screen out the optimal solution by manually conducting orthogonal experiments. We didn't have enough manpower or time, so we put it aside."

"These parameters do not need to be screened manually."

Wang Donglai's voice was calm: "Wa can use a quantum computing platform to run simulations, running all combinations of ultrasonic frequency, power, time, and temperature within a few hours to find the optimal parameters. The technical difficulty is not great."

He added, "The extraction of special components is just a byproduct. The core of rice is still grain, a yield of 2,000 kilograms per mu, lodging resistance, and disease resistance—that's the main course. Special components are just an extra step in the process; we can't put the cart before the horse just because of their high added value. We must ensure its grain properties first, and then explore its commercial value. The order cannot be reversed."

Qian Lin nodded vigorously and quickly jotted it down in his notebook.

The pen tip was pressed very hard, and each line of text seemed to be engraved on the paper.

"Go ahead. I need to see the complete data from the first phase of the field experiment after the next batch of seeds is planted."

Qian Lin and Zhao Xing'an exchanged a glance, a hint of excitement flashing in their eyes, and they couldn't help but stand up at the same time.

They knew the road ahead was long, but the direction was as clear as a runway illuminated by a searchlight.

It can be said that if this seed is successfully developed and put on the market, the two of them, as researchers, will be famous enough, even if they are not the most important contributors.

The value of this super rice seed can only be described as unparalleled and unique.

Thinking of this, their hearts burned with fervor, wishing they could burn themselves out to accelerate the research and development process. (End of Chapter)