A live-streamed Chinese language lesson under the sky—the ancients were taken aback.

"Yuan Longping and his hybrid rice are guarding this line of defense."

Rice is the staple food of the Chinese people, and we must control our own staple food.

Hybrid rice has enabled China to achieve complete self-sufficiency and control over rice, a core food crop, with its own seeds, technology, and yield.

No country or multinational corporation can hold China back on the issue of rice.

The hybrid rice seeds he cultivated not only took root and sprouted in China, but also went abroad to India, Vietnam, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Madagascar.

But we never use food as a weapon.

We don't try to strangle others; we just won't let others strangle us.

She said this calmly and in a flat tone, as if stating a fact.

Shen Moyan's tone was calm, but Liu Che could detect caution in that calmness.

His gaze turned cold as he turned to Sang Hongyang: "Can grain be used as a weapon?"

Sang Hongyang was taken aback: "Your Majesty means..."

"I ask you, can food be used as a weapon?"

"Yes." Sang Hongyang answered without hesitation. "When our dynasty trades with the Xiongnu, ironware and grain are never included. For the Western Regions countries that refuse to submit, the first thing we do is cut off their supply lines."

"That's war," Liu Che interrupted him. "The celestial screen says that the food wars of later generations will not be fought on the battlefield, but in the market. What method will they use? Low-price dumping, squeezing out the domestic market, and acquiring and controlling it. No fighting, no bloodshed, just food."

He stood up, walked to the entrance of the hall, and looked up at the sky.

The female teacher on the sky said that rice is the staple food of the Chinese people, and the staple food must be in our own hands.

She said that hybrid rice has enabled China to achieve complete self-sufficiency and control over rice, a core food crop, with its own seeds, technology, and yield.

No country or multinational corporation can hold China back on the issue of rice.

She spoke in a calm tone, as if stating a fact, but Liu Che heard the turbulent undercurrents beneath that calm.

"Sang Qing." He didn't turn around.

"Your subject is here."

"The celestial canopy says that future generations' food will be developed in laboratories. What does 'laboratory' mean?"

Sang Hongyang thought for a moment: "It's roughly similar to the experimental fields of the officials, but on a larger scale and with more sophisticated methods."

"Double the number of officials in charge of planting crops, not just for testing improved varieties. Let them learn the methods from the Heavenly Canopy, understand what hybridization is, and figure it out. No matter what method you use, increase the yield per mu."

Shen Moyan pressed the remote control, and several names appeared on the big screen.

"Yuan Longping answered Brown's question with his life."

He ensured that the Chinese people had enough to eat, freeing China from dependence on others for food.

However, the fact that China feeds 22% of its population with only 7% of its land is a testament to the collective efforts of countless scientists.

She pointed to the first name.

Li Zhensheng is a wheat breeding expert and is known as the "Father of Wheat Distant Hybridization in China".

He crossbred wheat with long-spiked wheatgrass to cultivate the Xiaoyan series of wheat varieties, which are disease-resistant and high-yielding.

He and Yuan Longping were known as "Yuan in the South and Li in the North".

One company achieved a breakthrough in hybrid breeding in rice, while the other conquered distant hybridization in wheat.

A photo of Li Zhensheng in a wheat field appeared on the big screen.

He squatted in the wheat field, holding a stalk of wheat in his hand, just like Yuan Longping holding a stalk of rice.

"Li Zhensheng once said something that left a deep impression on me: 'The farmers are the ones who truly evaluate me.'"

Sun Huan is a soybean breeding expert.

After the soybean crisis in 2004, he cultivated new high-yield, high-oil soybean varieties, which were planted on more than 10 million mu of land, allowing China to regain its footing in the soybean sector, which was once controlled by foreign capital.

The cooking oil, tofu, and soy milk we consume, as well as the feed protein needed for animal husbandry, all rely on soybeans.

Fang Zhiyuan, a vegetable breeding expert, is known as the "Father of Cabbage".

Before the 1980s, China relied almost entirely on imports for its cabbage varieties.

Fang Zhiyuan led his team to cultivate China's first hybrid cabbage variety, "Zhonggan 11", which allowed Chinese people to eat cabbage they had cultivated themselves.

Every serving of stir-fried cabbage you got in the school cafeteria today owes a debt to him.

Some students below were secretly laughing.

Shen Moyan laughed too: "What are you laughing at? Do you think cabbage is too ordinary and not worth a scientist spending a lifetime studying?"

No, for scientists, there is no such thing as ordinary food.

A rice plant, a wheat plant, and a cabbage plant.

"Anything that allows ordinary people to have good food is worth dedicating my life to."

Zhu Zhaoliang, a soil and fertilizer expert.

He established a theoretical system for nitrogen cycling in Chinese farmland soil.

Without him, no matter how many high-yield crops we have, the land will be ruined by chemical fertilizers, and future generations will have no land to cultivate.

Upon hearing this, the common people at the foot of Mount Li suddenly squatted down and touched the soil beneath their feet.

He didn't understand the nitrogen cycle, but he knew the earth would get tired.

The methods passed down from generation to generation are crop rotation, fallow land, and the application of manure.

He knew that if the land was planted poorly, even grass wouldn't grow.

The man named Zhu Zhaoliang was concerned about this matter in later generations.

He suddenly felt a little more at ease.

It turns out that people in later generations also worry about whether the seeds will be sown badly.

It turns out that people in later generations did not regard the land as an inexhaustible resource.

Shen Moyan put down the remote control and looked at the whole class.

"I'm not telling you all this so you can remember every single name."

You don't need to memorize these names; they won't be on the exam.

What I want you to remember is that when we say "Yuan Longping has enabled the Chinese people to have enough to eat," the "Yuan Longping" in that sentence is not a single person.

He is a group of people.

It's Yuan Longping in the rice paddies, Li Zhensheng in the wheat fields, Fang Zhiyuan in the vegetable gardens, Sun Huan in the soybean fields, Zhu Zhaoliang in the soil laboratory, and countless other researchers whose names you may never know in your lifetime.

They are doing the same thing in different fields and different positions: to ensure that Chinese people have a more secure food supply, are better fed, and eat better.

On the big screen appeared a set of familiar photos of modern life: an elderly person picking rice at the market, a child eating heartily in the canteen, and a family sitting around the dining table.

This is our life today.

There is rice in the bowl, meat and vegetables on the plate, and hot soup on the stove.

We've gotten used to these things, but we shouldn't forget where they came from.

Behind every grain of rice, every vegetable, and every piece of meat stands one person or group of people who have dedicated their entire lives to studying them.

She turned off the big screen and looked at the whole class.

After a moment of silence, he spoke.

"We've finished teaching this lesson, but I'd like to end today's lesson with the last sentence of the text."

She picked up her textbook and read the concluding remark.

"He is a true cultivator."

She put down her textbook and nodded slightly to the whole class.

This statement refers to Yuan Longping, but it's not just about Yuan Longping.

Class dismissed, students.

The image freezes.

The old man stood in the rice paddy, wearing a straw hat, his face full of wrinkles, but the light in his eyes was clear and firm.

The sky slowly darkened.

Li Shimin gazed at the sky and suddenly remembered something.

In the second year of the Zhenguan era, a great locust plague swept across the land.

The situation was particularly dire in the capital region, where locusts blotted out the sky and left nothing but desolation in their wake.

He stood on the palace wall watching the locust swarm press in from the north, like a moving black cloud.

He grabbed a handful of locusts and said to the sky: "People depend on grain for their lives, and you eat it. You would rather eat my lungs and intestines."

Then he stuffed the locust into his mouth and chewed it.

The attendants on either side were greatly alarmed and said that Your Majesty should not do this, lest it cause illness.

He said: "I suffer disaster for the people, why should I avoid it?"

That year, the millet harvest in Guanzhong almost failed.

That year, not even a single bushel of grain was harvested from a single acre of land.

If hybrid rice had been available in the second year of the Zhenguan era, even if only one mu of land could produce twelve shi of grain, or even if only ten mu of land could produce it, there would have been no need to open the national treasury or eat locusts raw.

He suppressed the thought; history has no "what ifs," but his hand tightened slightly inside his sleeve.

Li Shimin turned to look inside the hall; none of his ministers were there.

Only a few eunuchs stood inside the hall, their hands at their sides, not daring to utter a sound.

He suddenly wanted to say something to someone, but didn't know who to say it to.

He meant that the reign of Zhenguan was still far from being a model of prosperity.

He wanted to say that the old man in later generations bent his back his whole life so that people in the world would no longer have to bend their backs.

But the people of Zhenguan were still bowing down.

Their bent-over posture is exactly the same as that of the common people of the Qin Dynasty more than 800 years ago.

As an emperor, can't he make people bend over less often?

"Issue my decree." His voice was somewhat hoarse. "Order the Ministry of Agriculture to establish a breeding bureau to search for superior varieties throughout the land, conduct trials, selections, and promotions. Anyone who can increase production by 10% will be rewarded, and anyone who can increase production by 30% will be granted a noble title."

The eunuch accepted the order and left.

He stood there for a while, then turned and walked back into the hall.

He paused as he walked past the window.

Outside the window, the lights of thousands of homes in Chang'an City lit up one after another, like a galaxy fallen on the ground.

In the distance, people are harvesting rice. Those are rice paddies in the capital region, yielding only one and a half shi (a unit of dry measure), less than one hundred kilograms.

He stared at it for a long time.

Then he picked up his vermilion brush and added another line to the manuscript of the "Imperial Model".

The words were written very slowly, stroke by stroke, as if they were carved: "In later generations, there will be a Yuan Longping who will feed hundreds of millions of people with 1,000 kilograms of rice per mu."

I cannot go there, but my heart longs for it.