Homo Sapiens

After more than half a month of restructuring and adjustments, Homo Sapiens Company finally began normal operations.

Meanwhile, Li Jinglan used his connections in Xiangjiang to contract the entire laboratory construction project to a specialized firm.

At the same time, he spent several hundred thousand US dollars to grease the wheels with officials in Luzon, successfully obtaining the necessary permits to establish the laboratory.

These past few days, Li Qingye had kept a low profile, holing up on the island to study biochemical theory.

Suddenly, the villa’s doorbell rang. The guard in charge of security brought in Li Jinglan and a refined, middle-aged man.

”Boss, this is Mr. Fang Wensi, the sales manager from Xinhai Engineering Company.”

The refined man quickly extended his hand. ”Boss Zhang, a pleasure to meet you. I’m Fang Wensi. I look forward to working with you.”

After they shook hands, Li Qingye smiled and said, ”Please, have a seat. Jana, bring us a pot of tea.”

After they sat down and exchanged a few pleasantries, Li Qingye got straight to the point. ”Manager Li should have already informed your company that I need to build a biological laboratory. 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 equipment catalog. Please see if there’s anything you’d like to add or change.”

Li Qingye began flipping through the catalog and Xinhai Company’s list of recommended instruments.

The standard instruments included tissue homogenizers, ultrafine pulverizers, separatory funnels, Soxhlet extractors, solid-phase microextraction devices, rotary evaporators, centrifuges, refrigerators, liquid nitrogen tanks, and water purification systems. He needed at least ten sets of each.

Next were the mid-range devices.

This included gas chromatographs, high-performance liquid chromatographs, supercritical fluid chromatographs, high-performance capillary electrophoresis systems, protein purification systems, UV-Vis spectrophotometers, infrared spectrometers, molecular fluorescence spectrometers, photosynthesis analyzers, open-path oxygen analyzers, implantable wireless physiological telemetry systems, IKA C2000 bomb calorimeters, microplate readers, biochemical analyzers, and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) machines.

The high-end instruments went even further: atomic emission spectrometers, atomic absorption spectrometers, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometers, mass spectrometers, confocal laser scanning microscopes, flow cytometers, gene delivery systems, gel imaging systems, differential gene display systems, semi-dry transfer systems, hybridization ovens, UV crosslinkers, electroporators, sequencers, bioreactors, fermentation equipment, and a cryo-electron microscope.

Also on the list was a computer system.

Li Qingye’s previous laboratory in Jiangcheng hadn’t had much in the way of advanced equipment.

Of course, he wasn’t being unrealistic. He immediately removed any instruments from the procurement list that required on-site support from the manufacturer to operate.

After all, a lot of the work in his lab couldn’t see the light of day. If technicians from the manufacturers needed to visit frequently, the risk of leaks would increase significantly.

He also flatly rejected Fang Wensi’s suggestion to use the cloud computing services of commercial providers.

’Are you kidding me? Using a commercial company’s computing services would be tantamount to exposing everything. As for the so-called sanctity of contracts, that’s just something people say.’

He would rather build his own servers than use any equipment connected to a public network. He even demanded that Xinhai Company strengthen the lab’s network isolation facilities in its design.

Once the equipment was selected and the lab’s details were discussed, both parties quickly signed the contract.

After Fang Wensi left, Li Qingye gave Li Jinglan a few more instructions. Then, he took a dozen bodyguards and relocated to the office building in Dart Port.

After all, with Xinhai Company’s construction crew and the manufacturers’ technicians coming to Kalaqua Island, he didn’t want to be around so many prying eyes.

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

Li Qingye had no intention of wasting the next six months. Ever since his brain had been enhanced, he had been studying all sorts of subjects with an intensity that made him forget to eat or sleep.

After all, he was running out of time. Both getting his revenge and simply staying alive were of paramount importance.

He currently had a cash flow of nearly one hundred million US dollars. Compared to research in physics, materials science, or mechanics, biochemistry was relatively less expensive. This amount of money could sustain his work for at least two or three years.

Moreover, Li Qingye possessed a huge advantage no one else had: his enhanced brain. Its super-analysis and super-deduction abilities allowed him to rapidly formulate a vast number of theoretical models. All he needed to do was run the experiments to verify them.

Plus, the Jianmu Factor itself was a massive treasure trove.

For the next six months, Li Qingye would hunker down and absorb as much new knowledge as he could.

It was the information age, after all. A vast amount of scientific information could be found on the internet.

Of course, Li Qingye didn’t blindly trust every paper or piece of information he found online. Academic fraud wasn’t unique to Huaguo; it was a global phenomenon.

In just over a month of studying, he had already used his super-analysis to identify over three hundred problematic papers.

For example, papers by Gregg Semenza, such as *Anthracycline Chemotherapy Inhibits HIF-1 Transcriptional Activity and Tumor-Induced Mobilization of Circulating Angiogenic Cells*, *Hypoxia-Inducible Factor-1-Mediated Coordinated RHOA-ROCK1 Expression and Signaling in Breast Cancer Cells*, *Hypoxia-Inducible Factor...*, and *Breast Cancer Stem Cells...*, were riddled with serious issues.

And this guy was a candidate for the Nobel Prize.

Since these papers were flawed, any other papers that cited them were also compromised, creating a catastrophic domino effect.

After all, building on a faulty foundation of knowledge would only lead to compounded errors.

Faced with a sea of academic papers, he could only painstakingly sift through them, extracting what was relatively correct to fill his Memory Palace.

In the process, he also uncovered a great deal of useful information.

It was like a Qi Cultivator achieving the state of ”purging the false to preserve the true” during their training.

Furthermore, he didn’t limit his studies to biochemistry. Every day, he set aside three hours to study other fields like mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering, mechanics, paleontology, and geology.

After all, modern scientific disciplines aren’t isolated systems; they intersect and influence one another.

Studying other disciplines could even lead to moments of insight, where disparate fields converged on the same truth.

He was also studying the equipment itself. To minimize the risk of secrets getting out, he knew he had to rely on himself.

He didn’t expect to be able to replicate the equipment, but he at least had to know how to repair and calibrate it.

Through Xinhai Company, he arranged for the manufacturers to provide detailed maintenance and operation manuals. The companies outwardly agreed without issue, but he was certain they would deliberately obscure some of the key data.

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

In the process of familiarizing himself with the instruments, he also taught himself software programming, electronics repair, and computer science.

As time passed, Li Qingye’s knowledge base grew more comprehensive and profound, and he rapidly integrated these diverse fields.

In computer science, for example, he had spent the better part of a year searching for new information. He sometimes had to dig into the deep web, hidden beneath the surface net, which in turn honed his hacking skills.