These schools were his way of giving back to his hometown.
As for whether specifying that the schools be built in Northwest Province would make them suspect that he came from there?
Lu Ze did not take it to heart. It would be a miracle if they could figure it out. Northwest Province had tens of millions of people, and there were countless overseas Chinese as well.
And he was just a government-sponsored master's student who had been abroad for less than a year. Who would be stupid enough to suspect that he could obtain technology of this level?
On the contrary, it would lead them in the wrong direction, which was also one of Lu Ze's incidental objectives.
"Now that a thousand schools have been built, it should greatly ease the urgent need."
Lu Ze let out a somewhat melancholy, helpless sigh. "The educational environment back home is still far too impoverished."
His hometown was not only in Northwest Province, a relatively underdeveloped region of Great Xia, but was even a typical impoverished county within the province.
When he was in elementary and middle school, it was still the 1990s. At the time, there were only a handful of schools in the entire town. From middle school onward, Lu Ze had boarded at the town school and could only go home once every two weeks.
One reason was that there were too few schools. Several nearby villages did not even have a single elementary school. Since elementary schools did not offer boarding, the children had no choice but to trek through mountains and rivers for one or two hours in scorching heat or bitter cold just to attend class.
With these thousand schools, this situation should be greatly alleviated.
He thought of a second issue. "As for the teaching staff, the Great Xia Academy of Sciences should handle that, right?"
Since Great Xia had promised to build a thousand schools, it certainly would not build them without assigning teachers. That would not fit Great Xia's usual style.
"Things back home should be much better now than they were in my day. The last time I went back, I even saw that the village roads had been paved." Countless memories flickered through Lu Ze's eyes.
In the blink of an eye, he had not returned home for more than half a year. Over the past two or three months, he had not even spoken with his family on the phone.
The last time they had been in contact was, if he remembered correctly, during the Lunar New Year at the end of January.
After all, he was now studying abroad in Eagle Sauce. Unlike when he had been in college, when he could occasionally return home during the New Year, or spend one or two months back in his hometown over summer break if he could not find a suitable part-time job, he used to call his family often.
But in Eagle Sauce, an international call from Great Xia cost several cents per second. The price was outrageously expensive.
So his family tried to wait quite a while between calls, and they would even count the seconds before hanging up to save money.
Lu Ze took a deep breath. "I should go home during summer break."
"Otherwise, even the dog at home will forget who I am."
As a government-sponsored international student, Great Xia generally only covered his round-trip airfare. If he wanted to return home during his studies, he had to pay for the ticket himself.
Fortunately, he had saved quite a bit of money in his daily life, so making a trip home during summer break would not be a problem.
After joining LLNL Laboratory, his original two- or three-month summer break had been drastically reduced to around two weeks, but that was barely enough.
He glanced at the system information on the light screen.
[Achievement Points: 8,500!]
"Should I draw a few times?" Lu Ze frowned as he looked at his less-than-ten-thousand Achievement Points.
"Forget it. I'll wait until the copy attempts refresh again on Monday."
By then, he would have more than ten thousand Achievement Points and could directly perform a ten-thousand-point Blue Draw.
After all, a Blue Draw had a chance of yielding purple items, and even a minuscule chance of yielding gold ones.
Then a White Draw probably only had a minuscule chance of yielding purple items. He did not think he would have such absurdly good luck every time.
After copying next week, he would spend all of his Achievement Points on draws at once.
Meanwhile, inside the Great Xia Academy of Sciences.
The two men stared at the email on the screen without replying for a long time, still dazed as their minds went blank.
Several minutes passed.
Only then did Zhang Yuli snap out of it, wondering if he had seen something wrong. "He is using his one billion US Dollars in compensation entirely to build schools in Northwest Province?"
"What is he trying to do?"
Even now, he was still ten thousand percent shocked by the mysterious person's decision.
That was a full seven billion yuan, all of it being spent on building schools? What kind of audacity was that?
Last year, Northwest Province's total annual fiscal revenue had only been a little over twenty billion yuan, while its total education budget had only been a little over three billion yuan.
These seven billion yuan amounted to one-third of Northwest Province's fiscal revenue and twice its education budget.
"Why Northwest Province? Why not somewhere else, or even all of Great Xia?"
Zheng Lixing looked toward Zhang Yuli and voiced his doubt. "Could this mysterious person be from Northwest Province?"
Only if his hometown was in Northwest Province would such a decision make sense. Otherwise, it did not hold up logically.
"Old Zhang, do we need to investigate this in detail?"
Hearing that, Zhang Yuli decisively waved his hand. "There is no need to investigate anything. There are so many people in Northwest Province. How would you even investigate?"
"Besides, what harm would it do us to know where he is from?"
The mysterious person was using this one billion US Dollars in compensation to build schools in Great Xia. What harm did that do to Great Xia? There was simply no need to go out of their way to investigate.
Besides, they could not investigate everything, could they? If they actually uncovered something, what would they do then?
Why do something that had no benefit whatsoever?
"I was too fixated and walked into a mental dead end." Zheng Lixing slapped his forehead, his face full of regret. "No matter where he is from or what his identity is, it is enough to know that he benefits Great Xia."
For Zheng Lixing, an old man who had immersed himself in scientific research for decades, his researcher's habit of getting to the bottom of everything and understanding every matter thoroughly had still not changed. That was also why he had previously been unwilling to serve as president of the Great Xia Academy of Sciences.
Research required investigating every detail thoroughly, but politics required learning how to play dumb.
A sharp glint flashed in Zhang Yuli's eyes. "And there is an even more crucial question that we need to investigate instead."
"What crucial question?"
"Did you notice that this mysterious person kept saying 'we' just now?" Zhang Yuli stared at the email on the screen and heavily emphasized the word.
"We? Then that means..."
Before Zheng Lixing could voice his speculation, Zhang Yuli decisively reached a conclusion. "This mysterious person is definitely not alone. They may even be an organization."
"That is why they keep referring to themselves as 'we'!"
One person and one organization were concepts on completely different levels.
To continuously obtain top-tier technology like the F-22 from Eagle Sauce without a fuss was absolutely not something a lone individual could accomplish.
Zheng Lixing sucked in a cold breath. "Then the person who contacted us just now might not even be from Great Xia."
The more he thought about it, the more it seemed likely.
The person who truly wanted to build a thousand schools in Northwest Province might have remained hidden behind the scenes all along, never contacting them directly.
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