The Laboratory

After more than half a month of integration and adjustments, Homo sapiens Company finally began operating normally.

Through his connections in Hong Kong, Li Jinglan had also arranged for a company specializing in laboratory construction to take on the entire project.

At the same time, they had spent hundreds of thousands of US dollars cultivating connections with the authorities in Luzon and obtained the permits required to open a laboratory.

For the past few days, Li Qingye had kept to himself, studying theories related to biochemistry and other fields on the island.

Suddenly, the villa's doorbell rang. The security guard in charge of the villa brought Li Jinglan and an urbane middle-aged man inside.

"Boss, this is Mr. Fang Wensi, the business manager of New Sea Engineering Company."

The urbane middle-aged man quickly held out his hand. "Boss Zhang, a pleasure to meet you. I'm Fang Wensi. I look forward to working with you."

After shaking his hand, Li Qingye smiled and said, "Please sit down. Jana, brew us a pot of tea."

Once they had sat down and exchanged a few pleasantries, Li Qingye got straight to the point. "Manager Li should have already told your company that mine needs a biological laboratory built. The total investment is 50 million US dollars."

Fang Wensi took out a thick catalog of scientific equipment and handed it over. "Yes, I've been briefed. This is our company's catalog of scientific equipment configurations. Please take a look and see if there's anything you'd like to add or change."

Li Qingye began flipping through the catalog, along with the list of instruments recommended by Xinhai Company.

The standard instruments included tissue homogenizers, ultrafine grinders, separatory funnels, Soxhlet extractors, solid-phase microextraction devices, rotary evaporators, centrifuges, refrigerators, liquid nitrogen tanks, and water purifiers. There were more than ten of each type of equipment.

The next items were mid-range equipment.

These included gas chromatographs, high-performance liquid chromatographs, supercritical fluid chromatographs, high-performance capillary electrophoresis instruments, protein purification systems, ultraviolet-visible spectrophotometers, infrared spectrometers, molecular fluorescence spectrometers, photosynthesis systems, open-path oxygen analyzers, implantable wireless telemetry systems for physiological signals, an IKA-C2000 oxygen bomb calorimeter, microplate readers, biochemical analyzers, and polymerase chain reaction instruments.

The more advanced instruments included atomic emission spectrometers, atomic absorption spectrometers, nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers, mass spectrometers, laser scanning confocal microscopes, flow cytometers, transgenic instruments, gel imaging systems, gene differential display systems, semi-dry transfer units, hybridization ovens, UV crosslinkers, electroporation systems, sequencers, bioreactors, fermentation equipment, and cryo-electron microscopes.

There was also a computer system.

The laboratory Li Qingye had worked in back in Jiangcheng hadn't had many advanced instruments.

Of course, he wasn't getting ahead of himself. He directly removed from the procurement list any instruments that required manufacturer support to operate.

After all, there were plenty of things in his laboratory that couldn't be exposed to the outside world. If he frequently needed manufacturers' technicians to come in and assist, the risk of leaks would only increase.

When Fang Wensi suggested using computing services provided by other commercial companies, Li Qingye rejected the idea without hesitation.

As if. Borrowing computing services from those companies would be tantamount to exposing himself. As for their so-called commitment to confidentiality, he'd take that with a grain of salt.

He would rather use servers he had set up himself than rely on any equipment connected to a public network. He even insisted that New Sea Company strengthen the laboratory's network isolation when designing it.

After selecting the equipment and discussing some of the laboratory's finer details, the two parties soon signed a contract.

After Fang Wensi left,

Li Qingye gave Li Jinglan a few more instructions, then took a dozen bodyguards with him to the office building that had been relocated to Darte Port.

After all, New Sea Company's construction crew and technicians from the instrument manufacturers would soon be coming to Calagua Island. He didn't want to be around where so many people could see him.

The entire project was expected to be completed by the end of 2017.

Li Qingye didn't want to waste the next six months. Ever since his brain had been enhanced, he had been studying all kinds of knowledge day and night.

After all, he didn't have much time. Getting revenge and staying alive were both crucial.

He still had nearly 100 million US dollars in cash on hand. Compared with physics, materials science, and mechanical engineering, biochemical research was less costly. That sum could support him for at least two or three years.

And Li Qingye had one enormous advantage that others lacked: his brain had been enhanced, and Super Analysis and Super Deduction allowed him to rapidly work through vast numbers of theoretical models. All he had to do was conduct experiments to verify them.

On top of that, the Jianmu Factor itself was a treasure trove.

Over the next six months, Li Qingye would settle down and learn as much new knowledge as possible.

It was the information age, after all. The internet offered access to vast amounts of scientific research.

Of course, Li Qingye didn't blindly trust the papers and knowledge he found online. Academic fraud wasn't confined to Huaguo; it was a widespread problem throughout the world.

In just over a month of studying, he had used Super Analysis to identify more than three hundred problematic papers.

For example, Gregg Semenza's papers, "Anthracycline Chemotherapy Inhibits HIF-1 Transcriptional Activity and Tumor-Induced Mobilization of Circulating Angiogenic Cells," "Hypoxia-Inducible Factors Mediate Coordinated RhoA-ROCK1 Expression and Signaling in Breast Cancer Cells," "Hypoxia-Inducible Factor...," and "Breast Cancer Stem Cells..." all contained serious problems.

This man was even one of the Nobel Prize candidates.

Since those papers were flawed, the papers that cited them were affected as well. It was a cascading disaster.

After all, if you started with incorrect knowledge, the result could only be one mistake piled on top of another.

Faced with an ocean of academic papers, he could only sift through them bit by bit, extracting what seemed relatively accurate and adding it to his Memory Palace.

The process was much like a qi cultivator refining the true from the false during cultivation.

He didn't limit himself to biochemistry, either. Every day, he set aside three hours to study other subjects, including mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering, mechanics, paleontology, and geology.

After all, the modern academic disciplines weren't isolated systems. They overlapped and influenced one another.

Studying other fields could even lead to insights by analogy and reveal how different paths converged on the same truth.

He also studied scientific instruments and equipment. To reduce the risk of leaks from the laboratory, he had to rely on himself.

He didn't expect to be able to reproduce the equipment, but at the very least, he needed to know how to repair and calibrate it.

Through his connections at Xinhai Company, he asked the instrument manufacturers to provide detailed maintenance and operating manuals. They didn't object openly, but they would surely obscure some critical data behind the scenes.

But they had underestimated Li Qingye's ability to learn.

As he familiarized himself with the equipment, he also taught himself software programming, electronics repair, electrical appliance repair, and computer science.

As time went on, Li Qingye's knowledge grew increasingly broad and deep, and he rapidly integrated what he learned across different fields.

In computer technology, for instance, he had spent the past six months searching for new knowledge. Sometimes he had to dig through the deep web hidden beneath the surface web, which honed his hacking skills.