Black Flame City Seventh National School was a standard boys' school. As the name suggested, there wasn't a single girl in the whole school. Boys' and girls' courses differed enormously, and supposedly, to save resources and improve teaching efficiency, after five years of compulsory elementary education with boys and girls studying together, they were separated into different schools. Every course at a boys' school served one purpose: survival. The goal was to help every young person who entered the school accumulate the means to survive in this era as quickly and cheaply as possible. None of the school's graduates received anything like a diploma. If you could survive in this world after leaving school, that was the best proof of your education. So every course offered and every lesson taught was closely related to whether you could stay alive. They said girls' schools had gentler curricula, including music, literature, cooking, art, and dance, but boys' schools had none of those. Apart from the most basic language, law, and mathematics, every subject taught here corresponded to a skill that could help humanity survive in this era—for example, how to tend a seed and help it grow in a field into food;
how to use every resource at hand to make the most basic tools for survival;
how to use the resources at hand to build the simplest houses;
how to recognize and evade attacks from dangerous creatures in the wild;
how to prepare basic wound medicine from wild plants;
how to treat several common illnesses;
how to fight with weapons;
how to train and strengthen your body...
Once the eight years of compulsory national education were over, more than 99 percent of ordinary students would leave school, officially enter society, and begin their lives. If you'd paid attention in class, then with a little extra training, you could pick up a hoe and become a farmer, enter a factory and become a worker, or join the army and become a warrior—or, to be more accurate, cannon fodder and food for the alien races. The spirit of national education in the Black Iron Era was to use the lowest cost and most efficient methods to cultivate people who could best survive in this age, not a bunch of pretty pillows and sources of beast dung.
Of course, just as it had been before the Great Cataclysm, compulsory education in every era fell short of the highest level. After the eight years of compulsory education, a handful of true elites and lucky geniuses with powerful backgrounds or exceptional talent in some area could enter a higher and more mysterious institution to study specialized knowledge and receive a genuine elite education. Black Flame City, founded by a group of merchants and factory owners, naturally had no elite academies of any great stature, only an ordinary business school. Even that was highly sought after by ordinary people.
They said true elite academies could be found only in other human cities and core settlements beyond the city, places with deeper roots. The requirements for getting into those elite academies were so harsh that only one in ten thousand could make it. To put it this way, more than a thousand students graduated from Black Flame City Seventh National School each year, yet this school hadn't produced a single student qualified to enter a true elite academy in eight years. Eight years ago, a Hua Clan genius named Li Shizhen had been selected by the Continental Alchemist Guild and taken away immediately after graduation. He had become the pride of the entire school. A portrait of Li Shizhen had hung in the school's exhibition hall for eight years, and at every school assembly, the principal brought him up and talked about him until everyone's ears grew calluses. Two other people were also featured alongside his portrait—legendary figures who had come from this school. Higher education in this era was true elite education. The kind of university admissions that had supposedly enrolled tens of millions of people each year across human nations before the Great Cataclysm now seemed like nothing but myth. Knowledge in this era was expensive—beyond imagination—and held by a small number of people, a few families, and the powerful sects, temples, and churches. Only true elites had the chance to access it.
Although Zhang Tie thought he'd worked hard at school, in this era, when everyone was fighting to survive, his efforts hadn't turned him into an elite or a lucky one. His family had no important figures, either, so he was average in every respect. He wasn't the worst, but he didn't stand out. He wasn't an elite, nor was he trash.
If nothing unexpected happened, Zhang Tie figured he might follow in his father's footsteps. After his military service, he might seek a steady, uneventful job, rack his brains to get into one of the city's factories, marry a hardworking woman who wasn't ugly and knew how to run a household, have a few children, then toil like an ant every day to feed his family. One day, he'd lie on his bed, dying, and look back on his miserable, drab life as an insignificant cog in the machinery of this era. He'd think about all the beautiful women he'd seen but never slept with, like the goddess Daina. Before finally closing his eyes in one last fit of resentment, he'd shakily raise a hand, flip off this fucked-up era, and then croak...
The thought made Zhang Tie shiver as he entered the classroom. He really didn't want to live that kind of life. Although he'd made up his mind long ago, as he walked into class today, he reminded himself fiercely once more: My life has to be long enough. I need to have plenty of gold coins, and I need to have slept with plenty of beautiful women. If the day ever came when he had to leave this world, Zhang Tie hoped the scene would look like this: a whole crowd of beautiful, mature women would weep over his death, some even grieving so desperately they'd want to follow him into the grave, while a whole crowd of unfilial descendants would secretly rejoice over the gold coins and family wealth he'd left behind, some even laughing at the sky: The old bastard finally croaked...
Maybe one day, he'd get to live like those big shots: a dozen pairs of underwear and a dozen pairs of new leather shoes in his wardrobe, meat at every meal, and a gorgeous, sexy, big-breasted, big-bottomed personal maid or something...
Zhang Tie often thought this way. As he saw it, all big shots should live lives free of worry about food and clothes. But that dream felt as distant as a duckling rolling in the mud and dreaming of becoming a dragon.
There were about ten minutes before class started. The morning's lesson was shop class. When Zhang Tie arrived at the shop classroom, he saw several of the class's beasts lined up by the windows on one side, heads poking outside. Each had one hand flying beneath his waist, and some were letting out faint moans. Zhang Tie looked out the window. Down below the shop classroom, the goddess Daina was walking gracefully past a flower bed. From this angle, her breasts looked incomparably magnificent...
Zhang Tie swallowed.
Those bastards!
"Big Head, how about it? Come enjoy the show with us..." The pimple-faced guy beside him offered his "sincere" invitation while stroking the thing he'd pulled out of his pants.
"No thanks. I just saw Captain Colin heading this way. You guys enjoy yourselves!"
At Zhang Tie's words, everyone froze. The pimply-faced guy went pale. The things they'd pulled out shrank visibly fast, like balloons that had been popped. Then the classroom descended into chaos. Several guys were in such a hurry to zip up that they caught their skin or yanked their pubic hair, and another round of agonized howling broke out. Who knew whether any of them would end up impotent? God forgive me, Zhang Tie would bet his life that if Captain Colin knew what was going on in this classroom, he'd really want to come in and crush those bastards' balls one by one...
Everyone hurried back to their places and stood in front of their workbenches, eyes fixed ahead. The classroom quickly fell quiet. Zhang Tie went to his own workbench, casually wiped away some dust, and began checking that the rows of tools laid out on it were all in good condition. Ten minutes flew by. Even when the bell rang and the shop teacher walked into the classroom carrying a huge pile of things, Captain Colin still hadn't shown up. As they breathed a sigh of relief, the bastards from earlier glared angrily at Zhang Tie one by one, but they didn't dare make a scene in class.
The shop teacher was a balding man in his fifties, dull and listless, and painfully quiet. He never said more than he had to in class, but no one dared look down on him. In front of all of us, the old man had once taken a few simple tools and a heap of junk and tinkered for a whole morning until he'd made a small single-cylinder steam engine. He set a brazier under it, and the engine started turning. In this era, nobody who could be a teacher was simple.
As usual, the balding man entered the classroom and wrote "Handmaking Coil Springs" on the blackboard, then launched straight into his lecture. When he finished, he left a few formulas and figures on the board: spring index, slenderness ratio under compression, mandrel diameter, and tensile strength. Then he had someone hand out the steel wire he'd brought, three lengths to each student. That morning's assignment was to hand-make any three types of coil spring. Once they received their wire, everyone bent over their workbenches and got started. Even the bastards from earlier seemed like different people now, working hard to build the means of their own survival. The balding man, meanwhile, took a cup of water and left the shop classroom.
The greatest difference between humanity and the powerful beasts and slaughter-minded alien races was the ability to use and make tools. Springs might seem insignificant, but they were among the most widely used objects. Being able to make them by hand was undoubtedly a survival skill.
After receiving his steel wire, Zhang Tie thought for a moment and came up with a plan. Once he'd memorized the formulas on the blackboard, he measured the three pieces of wire, which varied in length and thickness, picked up a writing board, and began calculating at his workbench. In the end, he decided to make three types of springs: the simplest cylindrical compression spring, a concave compression spring, and a cylindrical torsion spring with a hook...