The next day.
Bai Xu and the others came over to formally sign the naturalization agreement, becoming residents of the territory.
Of course, they could also be described as individual members of the Mutual Aid Society.
Only after taking them to experience the Elementary School's school-place bonus did Zhang Tianyuan get down to business. He asked them to report to their superiors and clear out a virology laboratory to store the raw materials for the KV vaccine. They also needed to manufacture a hundred thousand doses of the KV vaccine.
Hearing that Zhang Tianyuan really had a way to obtain the raw materials for the KV vaccine, Bai Xu and the others dared not delay and immediately reported it to their superiors.
By that afternoon, Zhang Tianyuan received a reply.
He only needed to wait another week. Someone would take him to the laboratory, where people would be ready to cooperate with him.
After hearing the news, Zhang Tianyuan felt reassured.
He spent his days with Bai Xu's group of five, studying the mysteries of the Elementary School and conducting all sorts of controlled experiments. In the end, they confirmed that the Elementary School's bonus effects on people were indeed significant.
During this process, Zhang Tianyuan was not worried about revealing his unfamiliarity with the system's buildings.
Because from the moment Bai Xu and the others became residents of the territory.
Zhang Tianyuan's Lord Clauses had already been activated.
Lord Clauses- The lord cannot be replaced; Residents of the territory must not take any action against the lord that could result in imprisonment or injury, nor may they participate in similar actions while subjectively aware that such consequences could result;
Although these two clauses could not make the residents unswervingly loyal to their lord, they were enough to guarantee the lord's personal safety.
At least those lords with clumsy political skills would not have to worry about having their heads cut off in the middle of the night, or being locked in a dark little room to count sheep.
For Zhang Tianyuan, this was another layer of protection.
He already shared enormous common interests with the country in this spacetime, and the two sides would only cooperate amicably. Now that the Lord Clauses had been activated, he was even safer.
Once 2012 arrived, this world would be his backyard.
While Zhang Tianyuan was taking it easy, some disturbances had already begun to emerge both at home and abroad.
At home.
First, a flashlight development assignment with bizarrely extreme performance requirements was issued to universities and relevant research institutes, requiring them to produce working prototypes within a month to compete for the bid.
Then came news known to only a tiny handful of people: a certain virology institute had been urgently cleared out, new work assignments had been urgently issued, and its personnel had begun emergency training.
There was also an extremely secretive selection process underway across the country. Many soldiers, engineers, scientists, doctors, and people in other professions were gathered together, seemingly conducting
some sort of doomsday contingency drill...
Next came news that affected most of the nation's people-
Cities large and small began studying disaster evacuation procedures. Some cited flood preparedness, others earthquake preparedness, and several drills were also expected to be held in major cities in the future.
This move led quite a few people abroad to worry that the country was preparing for a war.
Yet the country's next move soon caught these people off guard again.
Because it had reached an agreement on scientific cooperation with its neighbor, India.
It leased an extremely deep mine in India, said to have once been the world's deepest copper mine, to conduct basic geophysical research and observations.
This could be considered a friendly signal.
Only then did the neighboring countries, whose nerves had just been rattled by the disaster drills, relax.
It probably was not preparing for war.
Only one man in India, a doctor named Satnam Tsurutani, felt deeply frustrated.
Because this mine had originally been his domain, a research facility he had discovered, where he had been conducting his research all along.
But as soon as the foreigners who said they wanted to lease the mine arrived, the local officials immediately threw him out, along with his wife and child.
"I signed a contract, but I was still kicked out!"
While exchanging emails with his good friend Adrian Helmsley, Dr. Satnam was still seething with resentment.
He continued typing:
"I secured a chance to speak with those foreigners. I had hoped to pay some money to research alongside them, or join them, but they rejected me without hesitation. That hurt me deeply."
"I have nowhere else to go, my friend. Are there any vacancies where you work? Could you recommend me?"
He finished writing and hit send.
Dr. Satnam left the room and spent some time with his wife and child.
During this period, after his research had been forced to a halt, his relationship with his family had actually improved.
Unfortunately, his wife's curry tasted as awful as ever...
That remained a small regret.
His good friend Adrian, on the other side of the Pacific, soon replied.
"My friend, I sympathize deeply with your plight, and I fully agree with your idea. Unfortunately, I am still a newly
recruited researcher and cannot recommend you for a job.
But I think you could come to me first. When the time is right, I will do everything I can to help you."
Delighted to receive his good friend's promise, Dr. Satnam spent the night discussing with Adrian the research projects the Chinese were conducting in his copper mine.
"I looked at their publicly released project materials. Honestly, those projects are truly strange. They actually want to monitor changes in the Earth's core through the mine."
"That is simply impossible. Unless the movements of the Earth's core become extraordinarily violent, there is no way to detect them from inside a mine..."
Faced with his good friend's rambling, Adrian merely smiled as he sat at his desk.
"Then let them monitor it. This has nothing to do with us. I have been reading a book lately, and I think it is worth recommending to you..."
Just as Dr. Satnam, who had originally been the first to discover the doomsday crisis, flew across the Pacific with his entire family like so many other Indians.
Zhang Tianyuan had already exchanged for the KV vaccine's production method and inactivated KV Virus through the wishing machine, and placed them in a dedicated laboratory for expedited research and manufacturing.
These two wishes had reduced his base energy to almost zero.
So as soon as he returned, he began pressing for the ten thousand members the leadership had previously promised.
He demanded that these people sign their membership applications as soon as possible.
Only then could he quickly recover.
Otherwise, he would not even have enough energy to open a spacetime portal to the Legend world.
After receiving Zhang Tianyuan's urging, the selection of the ten thousand members noticeably accelerated. The country's branch of the Parallel Mutual Aid Association was secretly established the very next day, and some people who had already been confirmed as qualified signed their applications ahead of time, becoming the second batch of members after Bai Xu's group of five.
These people simply did not know what organization they had joined.
They thought they had joined some secret agency established in preparation for nuclear war.
Meanwhile, on the tenth day after Bai Xu and the others joined, Zhang Tianyuan received the first batch of energy points provided by his residents-
5 points.
The reason it had taken ten days was that there was also a tenfold time difference between this world and the game world.
Ten days had passed in "2012," but only one day had passed in the game...
Now all that remained was to wait for the vaccines and flashlights...