The torrential rain finally let up. In theory, interfering with nature without permission was bound to bring retribution.
Two days after the typhoon had passed and the flood had subsided, its various effects began to emerge one by one. But Wei Keng always acted just a little faster than nature. Before nature could bring its wrath to bear, he had already tidied up the area around him.
As soon as the river receded, the Wei Keng Collective sent out teams in gas-powered carts to patrol.
First, they cleared any corpses that might have been left in the river. Under normal circumstances, most bodies would have been swept downstream, and the few that remained would quickly be dealt with by animals. But the Wei Keng Settlement had become a forbidden zone for all kinds of Gene Colonies, so there were certainly no animals nearby to scavenge the dead.
The bodies had to be disposed of quickly, then, to prevent swarms of strange mosquitoes and other insects from breeding.
Next, they checked the area upstream of the settlement to see whether any animals had fallen in and drowned.
The several large wells absolutely could not be allowed to become contaminated. They had to build barriers around them, make sure the water was clear, and add quicklime to disinfect it further. Then they would draw water, boil it, and store it in tanks. It would need to be boiled again before drinking.
Finally, they took some dried fish and searched for surviving animals about the size of house cats.
They weren't searching for them just so they could pet them. Although Wei Keng had driven the Gene Colonies away from the area around him, he still had to build a new ecosystem based on objective reality and control the various levels of ecological energy.
At the very least, Wei Keng himself couldn't be the one catching mice. Cats were predators that had to exist wherever human cities took shape.
The emergence of human cities destroyed the local natural balance. With so many animals higher up the food chain gone, insects like cockroaches and rodents like mice were bound to overrun the place. At a time like that, cats—able to hunt them without endangering humans—were humanity's best allies! They could diligently clear out every creature beneath humans in the food chain.
Even in the 27th Century, humanity still couldn't eradicate city rats. That was why, when they issued a ban on dogs and eliminated stray dogs, they were still very lenient toward stray cats. City officials even built warm basements for them during winter. They were useful.
Wei Keng returned with a large group of kittens. Among them might even have been a few unlucky little leopards.
Wei Keng casually scruffed one by the back of its neck. "It's fine. I don't keep chickens or ducks running loose here. Bite as much as you like. If you see a mouse, go for it and bite down hard."
And so, the epidemics, insect infestations, and rat plagues that nature had prepared to teach that bastard Wei Keng a lesson after the flood were all buried in a pit and made to disappear without a trace.
Wei Keng silently mused, Why am I so good at this? Tsk, tsk. After thousands of years, if humans and nature are to coexist in harmony, you have to understand nature's disposition. I have a Dao heart, too.
Then Wei Keng, shameless as ever, told the laborers who had gone out with the various environmental inspection teams, "Let's take a step toward sustainable development. We need green mountains, clear waters, and GDP that keeps growing."
Summer flowed away like the surging waters of the Pearl River. Before he knew it, Wei Keng had spent a year in this plane.
Two months later.
Water roared as the dam's sluice gate slowly opened, pouring into the basin. From there, it flowed in succession along the gradients of the cultivated land into each plot. The crops' roots, buried in the soil, sucked up its moisture like sponges. In the height of summer, their genes expressed a state resembling that of aquatic plants.
Before the Pandora Era, when water was plentiful, plants could make full use of sunlight for photosynthesis. Summer was when all kinds of aquatic plants grew most explosively. Land plants, on the other hand, stopped transpiring and photosynthesizing when their leaves received too much light radiation, lest they dry out in the sun. To Old Master Wei, that behavior—refusing to produce at the slightest hint of heat—was unreasonable! Land plants ought to learn from aquatic plants.
With the dam holding back the water, nearly half of the small river's flow was absorbed by the farmland. The air soon grew damp, but the soil didn't turn to mud. The farmland, spread across dozens of square kilometers, used up nearly all the water from the seven-meter-wide river.
Of course, the harvest was enough to make the farmers sweating beneath the scorching sun feel their efforts had been worthwhile. The crop was rich in starch, and once cooked, it had a hint of water chestnut flavor. After the fruit was heated, dried, sliced, and packed into glass bottles filled with nitrogen, it became a popular commodity among passing merchants.
By now, Wei Keng had opened three river routes to transport goods to and from the surrounding cities.
These human settlements, which had previously retreated into the mountains for safety, lacked everything.
As for food, they had eaten mushrooms for generations. As a result, the people in the lower strata had grown shorter and shorter, and adult men stood only about 1.6 meters tall.
Wei Keng wasn't someone who cared about height. At first, he'd thought they seemed very capable and hadn't considered anything else. Only later did he realize that their caution when they first encountered him might have had a lot to do with the imposing effect of his size.
Once Wei Keng had finished tuning the equipment in the factory, he successfully cast a steam engine crankshaft and a sealed piston. In this world, he had managed to forge a single-cylinder vertical steam engine of his own.
It weighed two tons, sat on a fixed base, and produced only five horsepower, but it was a breakthrough from nothing!
What did the invention of the steam engine mean? Ships? Tractors? Textile machines?
In Wei Keng's eyes, it meant better-quality steel! Good steel had to be hammered. Previously, without the power output of a steam engine, they had used water power for processing. That limited them to tiny parts—at most, a bayonet or some gun barrel components.
As for larger pieces of steel, any ingot bigger than a wine bottle would jam the water turbine.
But with a steam engine, things were different. When it met resistance, the steam engine didn't simply reach its limit and let the water flow away like a water turbine. Instead, the pressure in the boiler surged, increasing the output.
Building his own steam engine marked a qualitative improvement in Wei Keng's manufacturing capabilities! He stepped up his purchases of ore, accepting every offer that came his way. The surrounding areas were just as eager to buy his steel products.
As the saying went, "A capitalist will brave fire and water for profit."
Once these merchants confirmed that the downstream plains had grain and metal processing capabilities, they finally began bringing people over. They also transported some obsolete machines from their city-states.
September 4.
When Wei Keng saw the eight diesel generator sets delivered by the merchants from Menghe City, the corners of his mouth twitched.
The merchant eyed Wei Keng and quoted a price in one breath: eight single-cylinder steam engines. Oh, Wei Keng could only assemble one a month now. Faced with such an outrageous demand, he thought it over and cut the price in half.
The merchant immediately sealed the deal. "Sold."
Old Master Wei felt as though he hadn't haggled hard enough.
After the merchants left, people from Wei Keng's industrial team took wrenches and screwdrivers to the diesel engines. First, they found that the internal electronic control systems had deteriorated, making the engines impossible to start. Some wires had clearly burned out from overheating. Overall, though, the most technically challenging components—the cylinder blocks and other parts—were still in very good condition.
They dismantled everything, cleaned the parts, gathered electroplating solution and lubricating oil, and drew up plans for the small damaged components. Then they had the forging field use good steel selected from the scrap yard to forge replacements.
Few people in the present era still knew how to repair machinery. More precisely, even fewer could read manuals with solid geometric structures in them. On Earth, Wei Keng had muddled through higher education, but he had studied machinery, chemistry, and basic principles. The education system of the 27th Century had even given everyone hands-on practice assembling machinery in factories.
Now the system had sent him a complete three-dimensional model of how the machinery worked. After Wei Keng's various work groups had understood the machine in full, the system also retrieved the model number and a series of maintenance tutorials provided by its manufacturer. At this point, when it came to these diesel engines, Wei Keng had everything under control except for his still-clumsy disassembly technique and the slight slowness with which he removed parts.
Put it this way: the Wei Keng Collective now served as a high-level talent reserve that all the native human settlements in the entire Yue Region, taken together, couldn't match.
The Wei Kengs beside the diesel engines worked late into the night. There were six teams, three people to a team: one with a wrench, one recording notes with a pen, and one sorting the parts they removed.
The pile of dismantled parts grew larger, while the process for handling them became clearer. Drawings of the parts were also sorted into several neat stacks by category.
Machinery was a man's romance. All those complex geometric shapes, energy flowing through them, each part he had thought through rationally coming together in his hands. Then he pressed a button, and in an instant, the whole thing sprang to life. Oh, that moment felt a hundred times better than sex.
Well... it wasn't as if Wei Keng hadn't glanced at women in this plane. Wei Keng thought, It's not like I'm afraid of the Overseer. Her? Afraid of her? Heh. Ahem.
The main issue was that he had no guarantee of making it through the next day. He felt unsafe, so he had to keep expanding, expanding, and expanding some more.
It was just like the economic leap in the East at the start of the 21st Century, when a generation of baby boomers suddenly aged out.
Back then, women might have felt that they had the advantage in the gender ratio and kept picking and choosing. The men, on the other hand, were like Wei Keng: lacking confidence. A house, a car, savings—work a few more years, and they'd have a little more security in life.
[Of course, perhaps that was indeed how it was. That generation of young people had grown up when society was still relatively simple, and they believed too much in the idea that hard work was always rewarded. Add in all the chicken soup from Yilin and Reader magazines, and then they went through the Gaokao, which was fair enough by the standards of the time. So when they entered the workforce, even though they worked hard, they lacked a fighting spirit. As a result, for the first few years of their careers, they blindly followed the orders they were given and fattened up the "People's Rich" of that era. And then~~~~~]
Back to the point.
The simple-minded Wei Keng now believed that machinery wouldn't deceive him. If he applied his mind and energy to his work, then the society he lived in wouldn't fool him either.
"Da-da-da." With an electric ignition like that of a gas water heater, the gas from the gas generator flowed into the diesel engine, and this diesel-to-gas engine finally started up.
Electricity reached the newly assembled circuits. The steel in the factory could now undergo more complex heat treatments, and the machine tools no longer needed pressure supplied through high-pressure steam pipes. The electric motors set their wheels spinning with a humming sound. Wei Keng's main concern was that if the metal broke, the fragments might fly as fast as bullets.
At the Smelting Plant, they dug all kinds of scrap metal raw materials out of the ruins and fed them into newly assembled electric furnaces to process new products.
After spending four months on it, Wei Keng looked at the latest nickel-steel cylinder blocks, crankshafts, and other key parts he had made. It seemed he could now build a Stirling Engine.
Those diesel generator sets really were a tech pendant gifted to him by the locals here.
Wei Keng said, "I'm going mechanized! Get the tracked vehicles moving."
Wei Keng was certain that his mechanical skills now roughly matched the machining capabilities of factories in city-states like Jian City. They could only maintain the mechanical processes needed to produce tractors. And the fuel for their tractors?
Around Jian City, Wei Keng found large quantities of herbaceous plants resembling castor beans. These were the raw materials the cities used for oil refining. When Kaomu's armored cars had charged in a year ago, they had advanced with billowing smoke, wheezing like asthmatics. Even though this biofuel was poor quality, making that kind of diesel still consumed chemical raw materials like caustic soda.
The straw-based oil refining Wei Keng had his eye on involved heating the material to 650 degrees in a sealed reactor until it liquefied. The resulting product contained a lot of carbon powder, so it was hard to call it diesel. By 21st Century standards, it consumed a lot of fuel, produced poor yields, and was prone to clogging machinery.
In Wei Keng's eyes, synthesis was better than gathering. Whether he used water gas or methane hydrogenation, then filtered it, he ought to be able to accept the fuel that came out, even if it was poor quality.
After settling on this complicated plan, the first problem was the chemical reactor. He needed to build one, but not a large one, and definitely not too large.
He had to make a three-cubic-meter reaction furnace. It might have been an experimental product from the early days of the chemical industry in World War I. He wasn't aiming for an exceptionally long service life. He would just run it a dozen or so times, then check the inside for hydrogenation corrosion.
Oh, this was a bit of a challenge, even for Wei Keng. But then he thought about how junior high school students had been the main engineers in factories during World War I. That stirred his perseverance.
Besides, he was building the most primitive kind of small-scale chemical equipment. The smaller the chemical equipment, the less challenging the materials, and the simpler the numbers in the formulas.
In the chemical industry, the hard part wasn't the principles or the technology. It was the many production regulations and the discipline of the personnel in the early days. Some procedures seemed unnecessary and slowed work down, but they prevented accidents that might happen one time in ten thousand. For instance, before discharging a product, you might be able to finish in two or three steps, but the regulations called for forty.
Wei Keng had split off a large team to start studying this industry. As for that? Wei Keng realized he seemed to be short on people again.
In the second month of the 134th year of the Pandora Era, while Wei Keng was still working through the supporting requirements for the chemical industry,
the merchants had found the reactor he wanted. This time, though, they couldn't transport it to him. Instead, they took Wei Keng to it.
When Wei Keng arrived at an abandoned brick house, he dug the chemical equipment, protected by steel frames, out from beneath dozens of broken bricks. Along with it, he found dozens of large boxes of spare parts.
Wei Keng realized something! He was an outsider. He might have been able to go to some parking lot ruins and pick up stainless steel, but the locals actually knew of many more warehouses.
After Wei Keng had cleared the area of its Gene Colonies, these merchants had taken records from before the Pandora Era that listed the locations of factories large and small in their hometowns. They led teams straight to abandoned warehouses and brought the "useless" old equipment back here. In exchange, they got dozens of sacks full of salt, then left with the steel tools.
Wei Keng could only laugh wryly. "Should I tell them, 'It's all on my land. You can dig up five hundred coins' worth at most, and you get a pennant'?"
Old Master Wei wasn't that stingy. But a new problem had emerged.
If he sparked a Gold Rush, and merchants from these city-states kept bringing him treasure after treasure in quick succession, his workforce and productivity had already reached their limits. He couldn't produce enough to exchange for what they brought.
But if Wei Keng refused to accept the equipment, then, driven by strong demand for goods and their own selfish desire for profit, these merchants might smash the equipment in the old warehouses swallowed by the jungle and sell it to him as scrap! Even if they ruined the equipment, they wouldn't want someone else to benefit from finding the treasure.
That would bring a tremendous disaster upon the industrial heritage from before the Pandora Era.
Once economic activity got underway, it sometimes brought factors that were difficult to control!
Before you continue