"Supplies? What supplies?" the military representative asked instinctively.
"A reagent required for Meme Reverse Engineering, with a daily consumption of forty to fifty thousand tons," Song Yarong explained. "Its storage and transportation requirements are extremely strict... it can only be produced and used on-site. In all of Tianfu City—or rather, the entire Shu Province—the only place capable of producing this reagent is Factory 105."
"In other words," Yang Qi continued, "if anything happens to Factory 105, the entire Meme Reverse Engineering project... even the whole Insecticide Plan, will come to a standstill."
"Can't other factories produce it?" The military representative was somewhat confused. "If it's a raw material for the Reverse Meme Agent, shouldn't every city-state be capable of producing it themselves? After all, something like the Reverse Meme Agent..."
Before the military representative could finish, Song Yarong interrupted him. "You're right. Tianfu City has six production lines for this reagent, but five of them are in Factory 105... This is the border, not Chunming City, where companies capable of producing Reverse Meme Agents are everywhere."
Most companies of this kind were concentrated in Chunming City and Shencheng. Some had official backing, some were entirely privately owned, and some were public-private joint ventures. Competition between them was fierce, and all kinds of new technologies and products emerged every year... Among those participating in the Meme Reverse Engineering project this time, aside from researchers from Tianshu Tower and research institutes across the cities, quite a few came from companies like these.
As the Xiazhou Federation's largest and second-largest cities, Chunming City and Shencheng did not actually have such great demand for Reverse Meme Agents. The primary reason so many companies clustered in those two cities was to attract more and better scientific talent.
Border cities like Tianfu City might not be