Homo Sapiens

October 15, 2019.

After a violent storm, about 63 kilometers southeast of Bantun Island, lies the famous World War II battlefield—the Sibuyan Sea.

The Musashi Battleship of East Japan was sunk in these very waters.

To the north of the Sibuyan Sea lies Sibuyan Island, a mid-sized island with an area of 445 square kilometers.

This island is also one of the core territories of the Fernando Clan.

「Sibuyan Island, San Fernando Town.」

Just over eight months ago, this small town of just over twenty thousand people was a quiet place dedicated to traditional agriculture.

That all changed when Zhang Jue Ming arrived with his team to establish Laboratory 606, a facility directly under the Homo Sapiens Company.

After more than half a year of tedious research, Zhang Jue Ming’s team had undergone a remarkable transformation, evolving from a flustered, clumsy startup to a smooth, proficient operation.

Zhang Jue Ming, who came from the rank-and-file of the research world, had spent his career working in genetic modification. He had contributed to a number of successes, but none of them had ever truly been his own.

He was nearly thirty-five, his parents were getting old, and with his meager income, striking it rich was out of the question. Even buying a house back in his hometown of Jinyang seemed like a stretch.

After much deliberation, he resigned from his previous company. Then, through a strange twist of fate, he was lured to Luzon.

At first, he thought he’d been scammed, but once he settled into the job, he realized he’d made the right choice.

As a research scientist at Homo Sapiens Company, his compensation package was a tier higher than that of other employees at the same level. The company had also assigned him a house in San Fernando Town, which was perfect for the unmarried Zhang Jue Ming.

The subject of research at Laboratory 606 was genetically modified bamboo.

Initially, Zhang Jue Ming didn’t understand why the company was interested in genetically modified bamboo. ’After all, what’s the point of modifying bamboo?’

But when they successfully cultivated Iron Bamboo No. 5, he finally understood the company’s vision.

Of course, their ability to rapidly develop Iron Bamboo No. 5 wasn’t solely due to their own hard work. They had also benefited from the Homo Sapiens Company’s powerful supercomputing center and a few genetic modification concepts provided by Li Qingye.

The Homo Sapiens Company had built the world’s most powerful supercomputing center on an uninhabited, deserted island. Dubbed Fuxi Supercomputer No. 1, its peak floating-point performance reached 3 exaflops per second.

For perspective, the world’s top-ranked supercomputer at the time, the Tianhe-1, only reached a peak performance of 2.57 petaflops per second.

Fuxi Supercomputer No. 1 was comprised of 30,000 biological chips, with a total construction cost of only about 6.73 million US Dollars and daily operating costs of around 6,271 US Dollars.

This was the advantage of biocomputers; once the technology was developed, both production and operating costs were several orders of magnitude lower than traditional electronic computers.

Zhang Jue Ming’s team had free rein to use the company’s supercomputer, leveraging its immense computational power to brute-force solutions to many of their problems.

Combined with Li Qingye’s guidance from behind the scenes, this was what led to their success with Iron Bamboo No. 5.

The current strain of Iron Bamboo No. 5, which had been rendered sterile and unable to reproduce by seed, now covered 10 hectares of mountain terrain.

Zhang Jue Ming and a few assistants used a high-pressure water jet to cut down a large swath of the iron bamboo. Then, wearing work-grade exoskeletons, they carried the stalks back to the laboratory.

Laboratory 606 was located right next to the bamboo grove.

Today, the lab hosted not only Zhang Jue Ming’s team but also a delegation led by Harlem Lopez, the General Manager of the Coral Building Materials Company.

Harlem eyed the processed iron bamboo, picked up one of the strips, and began to twist it with all his might.

But the strength of the two-finger-wide strip far exceeded his expectations. His face flushed red with exertion, but he still couldn’t snap it.

"Whew... Is the strength of this stuff comparable to steel rebar?"

Zhang Jue Ming just smiled and shook his head. "Ordinary rebar has a tensile strength of about 300. Iron Bamboo No. 5 can reach around 650."

"That high? Doesn’t that mean it can replace rebar?" Harlem’s eyes lit up with excitement.

Zhang Jue Ming nodded. "It can. After advanced processing, it can replace a portion of the rebar used in buildings."

Harlem had no interest in the specifics of the advanced processing. He wasn’t a materials scientist, after all, so there was no need to get bogged down in the details.

He turned and spoke in a low voice to Ji Xingchen, the head of the market research department for building materials, who had accompanied him. "Xingchen, what’s your take on this iron bamboo’s performance? Can it truly replace rebar in construction?"

Ji Xingchen didn’t answer right away. Instead, he asked Zhang Jue Ming for the specific material parameters of the iron bamboo, as well as its cultivation and processing costs.

After scribbling notes and calculations in a small notebook for over ten minutes, Ji Xingchen finally had a clear picture of the iron bamboo’s performance, cost, and applications.

"General Manager, I believe this iron bamboo can replace a significant portion of steel rebar. Its strength is greater than commercially available rebar, and its fire and corrosion resistance are comparable. Furthermore, its weight per unit is only one-third that of steel, while its cost per unit is just one-fourth. This material has enormous potential."

Harlem thought for a moment, then asked, "If we push this to the market all at once, will customers be hesitant to accept it?"

"Well..." Ji Xingchen hesitated. "That’s certainly a possibility. After all, the idea that bamboo is inferior to steel is deeply ingrained in people’s minds."

Holding the iron bamboo strip, Harlem suddenly laughed. "It’s too early to worry about that. Our products are all supplied to our sister companies. Whether the open market accepts it or not is of little concern to us."

"That’s true," Ji Xingchen said, having nearly forgotten that around 70% of their company’s products were supplied to the Coral Construction Company.

Harlem immediately announced that they would move forward with the commercialization of iron bamboo.

The Coral Building Materials Company would invest in building an iron bamboo plantation on Sibuyan Island. The planned cultivation area was 150 square kilometers, to be developed in three phases over three years.

In truth, as the General Manager of Coral Building Materials, Harlem had been under immense pressure lately. The main issue was that his steel mills’ production capacity couldn’t keep up with demand.

After a period of consolidation and expansion, Coral Building Materials now owned a total of three steel mills, with a combined annual output of 2.4 million tons of crude steel.

In Huaguo, small steel mills of this size were considered outdated facilities slated for closure.

But in Luzon, they represented the pinnacle of heavy industry.

However, the Homo Sapiens Company’s frenetic pace of infrastructure development meant that even an annual output of 2.4 million tons of crude steel was not enough to meet its needs.

There was a massive slate of projects—highways, docks, bridges, employee dormitories, factory buildings, and ocean farming installations—which had forced the Coral Construction Company to import 840,000 tons of structural steel from Huaguo this year just to fill the shortfall.

While imports could solve the problem for now, long-term reliance on foreign suppliers was not a wise strategy.

Moreover, the Homo Sapiens Company also had the New Luzon Shipbuilding Company to support. In the future, it would have to be self-sufficient in producing both shipbuilding and military-grade steel.

Simply continuing to expand the steel mills wasn’t a good solution, either.

This was because Luzon’s iron deposits consisted of pyrite, which has a relatively low iron content and is notoriously poor in quality. In fact, mining had already been suspended at the pyrite deposits controlled by the Homo Sapiens Company, which held several tens of millions of tons of the ore.

As a result, Coral Building Materials’ steel mills had to import cheap, high-quality iron ore from Australia.

The problem was that Li Qingye didn’t trust Australia. To avoid being vulnerable to a supply cutoff in the future, Coral Building Materials had to adopt a two-pronged strategy.

On one hand, they would import double the necessary amount of iron ore while simultaneously halting all local mining operations, thereby building up a strategic reserve.

On the other hand, they needed to find a substitute for steel.

It was against this backdrop that the Iron Bamboo project was initiated. Currently, structural steel accounted for the lion’s share of steel consumption. If even a portion of it could be replaced by iron bamboo, the conserved steel could be allocated to military and shipbuilding applications.