Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place

As the saying goes, "Man is iron, rice is steel, one meal missed and you're starving." It wasn't until this moment that Zhang Yi realized his stomach was rumbling, clearly protesting.

Just then, Zhang Yi's mother walked in, carrying a plastic bag. She had brought him lunch, afraid he would go hungry.

"Mom! Why are you here? Mom! How's Dad's mood?" Zhang Yi asked his mother as he took the plastic bag she handed him.

Since he knew he wouldn't be able to do heavy work in the future, Zhang Yi's father, Zhang Ming, had been in a bad mood lately. After all, his father was less than fifty years old, and he had been lying in a hospital bed for most of this time. The atmosphere in the hospital wasn't great, so naturally, his temper wasn't good either.

"Hmm! He didn't lose his temper today. After all, his leg is much better now, and since he's at home, his mood is much better than before," Zhang's mother replied.

"Mom! You should go back and take care of Dad! I can handle things here." After taking the plastic bag, Zhang Yi told his mother to go back first. This was when his father needed someone to take care of him.

"Okay! Then I'll go back first. I'll leave this factory to you. If the business is good, then keep it going. If it really doesn't work out, then just forget it.

After all, even before, your dad didn't make much money in a year," Zhang's mother said.

After speaking, Zhang's mother walked out the door. However, her meaning before leaving was very clear. She didn't trust Zhang Yi's skills. Even before, Zhang Yi's skills were only barely enough to process some simple parts. Now that he hadn't touched a machine tool for such a long time, his skills were imaginable.

After finishing his meal, Zhang Yi walked into the workshop, to a small partitioned area in a corner. This partition was actually the office of their family's factory. This office was only a few square meters, and besides a desk, a stool, and a computer and files on the desk, there was nothing else.

Sitting on the office chair, Zhang Yi's mind became active. Without the Scholar Hiring System, Zhang Yi would have no confidence in keeping this factory going. But with the system as his golden finger, Zhang Yi was absolutely confident in keeping the factory going and developing it, and it was even possible to become the overlord of the mechanical processing industry.

So he reopened the Scholar Hiring System. After careful examination, Zhang Yi found that the scholars he could hire now were all low-level, entry-level industrial scholars with relatively low abilities. Short-term hiring was slightly better, allowing him to hire intermediate-level scholars, but the prices for short-term hiring were very high, more than ten times that of long-term hiring.

For example, the entry-level scholars he could hire now cost around twenty scholar coins a month at most. But if he chose short-term hiring, a scholar of the same level would cost more than two hundred scholar coins a month. If he wanted to hire an intermediate-level scholar, the required scholar coins would be even higher, starting at two hundred scholar coins per day, and the prices varied greatly depending on the race, with the highest reaching a thousand scholar coins a day.

Subsequently, Zhang Yi opened the Scholar Mall, but he found that all the items in the Scholar Mall were gray and could not be purchased at all. Just then, he saw a system prompt above the Scholar Mall.

The content of the prompt was that the Scholar Mall could only be opened after he had hired a scholar. After all, this was the Scholar Hiring System, not the Scholar Mall. The Scholar Mall within the system was only an existence attached to the Scholar Hiring System.

Furthermore, even if he hired a scholar, the Scholar Mall could only open up corresponding types of goods. For example, if he hired an entry-level scholar in mechanical processing, then only some blueprints for mechanical industry of the corresponding level would be unlocked in the Scholar Mall.

Although there were many races of scholars he could hire in the system, with scholars from all the heavens and myriad worlds, in reality, the range he could hire from was very limited. Because the only intelligent race on Earth was humans, if he hired a non-human race, they would definitely be discovered by special departments and taken away for dissection and research as soon as they went out.

In reality, the range he could hire from could only be human races, or races that were very similar to humans.

So among the scholars currently provided by the system, there were only five races he could hire. The first race, and the race he most wanted to hire, was the Red Alert Trainee Engineer. However, the hiring price for Red Alert Trainee Engineers was the highest among all entry-level scholars.

So Zhang Yi was a bit unsure. After all, the scholar coins he had were only enough to hire one Red Alert Trainee Engineer for a year. This meant that if he hired a Red Alert Trainee Engineer, converted into Chinese money, the starting annual hiring price would be over 300,000 yuan. This price was simply unbearable for his small mechanical processing workshop.

The second race was the Dwarves. Although Zhang Yi didn't know how good the skills of these Dwarves were, since they could be hired in the system and were called scholars, their skills shouldn't be bad. At least, Zhang Yi thought they should be much better than those apprentices who had just learned to operate a lathe, otherwise they wouldn't be worthy of being called scholars.

The most important thing was that the system also clearly stated that their racial talent was mechanical processing.

The third race was the Gnomes. However, since the talent of this race was precision mechanical processing, and Zhang Yi's workshop currently did not have precision processing equipment and did not have this need for the time being, Zhang Feng did not want to hire them for now.

The fourth race was called the Giant Race. From the name, it could be seen that this race had great strength. According to the system's introduction, this race could easily lift items ten times their own weight, and their racial talent was in the production and processing of large machinery. However, their temper was not very good, so they were also temporarily discarded by Zhang Yi.

The last race was the Half-Elves. Although the ears of the Half-Elves were different from humans, the difference was not very big, after all, they were not pure Elves. Although this race also had a high talent for mechanical processing, they were more inclined towards manual processing and mechanical carving, so they were also temporarily excluded from his choices.

Finally, there were only two races left for Zhang Yi to choose from. At this time, Zhang Yi was very hesitant about which race of scholar he should choose.

After all, with the scholar coins he had now, he could only hire one entry-level scholar, and his mechanical factory only had one machine tool, so he didn't need too many people for the time being.

After thinking about it for a long time, Zhang Yi still couldn't make a decision. He decided to calm down and think about it tomorrow, and first turn out the main shaft for Uncle Zhang. After all, it was already past three in the afternoon, and if he didn't start processing now, he would likely have to work overtime tonight.

Since he had been working outside for the past few years and hadn't operated a machine tool for a long time, he was actually a little worried about whether he could turn out this main shaft before tomorrow.

Thinking of this, he immediately got up and left the office, coming to the front of this old machine tool.

He first inspected the machine tool to see if it could operate normally. After all, this machine tool was very old, and it hadn't been started for a while. If he didn't check it, and something went wrong during processing, the consequences could very likely injure himself, so he couldn't be careless.