Braised Dragon with Soy Sauce

Farmer-inventor Mo Yuming was driving his nearly new pickup truck, rushing towards the International Technology Development and Exchange Center in the city center. In the cargo box was a prototype of his latest patented invention, "A New Type of Decomposition and Recombination Feed Pelletizer".

His patented machine was developed based on his earlier 48th invention patent, "A Novel Plant Decomposition and Recombination Technology".

The biggest highlight of this technology lies in its ability to decompose many unusable plant roots and waste materials, such as bark, sawdust, fallen leaves, and weeds, removing harmful substances and extracting useful components for recombining and pelleting into complete livestock feed. (Complete feed is nutritionally complete feed that can be used directly to feed livestock without the need for additional ingredients.)

With a raw material utilization rate as high as 90%, the remaining 10% of waste can be processed into charcoal for further use. Furthermore, it requires little space, consumes little energy, yields quick results, is low-cost, and pollution-free, truly achieving zero emissions. In today's world of increasingly scarce energy and deteriorating environment, it is a promising new environmentally friendly product.

Moreover, it is easy to operate and manage, and durable. Ordinary farming households can operate and use it themselves with a little training, without the need for professional personnel, making it very popular among herders. Authoritative experts have estimated that if his technology and machinery can be promoted and used worldwide, it will cause a revolutionary technological revolution in animal husbandry and even agriculture.

This completely overturns the traditional feeding methods that rely on grains and forage. While significantly reducing feeding costs, it can save hundreds of millions of tons of grain from livestock every year.

His low-cost, high-efficiency technology and machinery immediately attracted great attention from the international aquaculture and machinery manufacturing industries upon their introduction. Large companies and conglomerates from many countries expressed their willingness to pay high prices to purchase his technology and machinery.

Today, he received a call from the technology center, inviting him to bring his new prototype to the center to meet with over a dozen CEOs of major companies to discuss technology transfer. The fact that CEOs from over a dozen top multinational corporations personally led their teams demonstrates how highly they value his technology.

Approaching forty, he was of medium build, with a thin face and average looks. He was actually the owner of a small to medium-sized livestock farm. Introverted and not fond of talking to people, he was engrossed in invention and research, spending most of his time raising animals and tinkering with machinery, rarely interacting with outsiders. As a result, he was still single at thirty-seven or thirty-eight. He was a typical eligible bachelor.

He has no other relatives besides a sister who is studying at university and is not related to him by blood.

His younger sister, who was more than ten years younger than him, was adopted by an old, widowed shepherd named Old Man Mo when he was sixteen. In fact, he was also an orphan picked up by Old Man Mo.

But three years later, Old Man Mo abandoned him and his three-year-old sister. Having just finished high school, he had no choice but to secretly put away his college acceptance letter. He took over the few sheep left by Old Man Mo and began his life as a herdsman, relying on his sister for support.

Perhaps because he grew up in the livestock industry, Mo Yuming has a special fondness for animal husbandry. Over nearly twenty years of hard work and experimentation, he started with a few sheep left by his father and gradually expanded his livestock business, eventually establishing a sizable ranch.

Besides cattle and sheep, the ranch also raises more than a dozen other animals, ranging from chickens and ducks to mules and horses, as well as special wild animals such as deer, foxes, and minks, including several domesticated carnivores. Calling it a ranch is more like calling it a zoo.

A keen researcher, he quickly mastered scientific breeding techniques through years of self-study, becoming a renowned breeding expert and one of the top breeders in the area. Although his ranch couldn't compare to international giants, his production and sales rate was 20% higher and his profits were more than 10% higher than other farms of similar size. Moreover, the quality of his products was a grade higher.

After the livestock farm reached a certain scale, improved its quality, and generated a stable income, Mo Yuming was not satisfied. However, instead of continuing to expand the farm, he turned to invention and creation. He was skilled with his hands and deeply passionate about design and manufacturing. To pursue this hobby, he invested heavily in building a sizable laboratory and purchasing numerous instruments and equipment.

Although his livestock farm was quite profitable, he used a portion of the profits for experiments and to support his sister's education. The majority of the profits were donated to charity to repay Old Man Mo's kindness in raising him. Therefore, among the wealthy families in the area, he was the only one who still drove a pickup truck and lived in a single-story house.

A person's energy is ultimately limited. In order to squeeze out more time for invention, he hired a professional manager at a high salary to manage the ranch and then devoted himself to experiments.

Hard work pays off. Ten years of dedicated research finally yielded results. After more than a decade of effort, he achieved remarkable success, obtaining forty-nine patents by the time he developed this groundbreaking patented technology.

These patented technologies include inventions, technological improvements, and utility models, covering more than a dozen technical fields. They include fully automatic forage harvesters, automatic livestock manure collectors, high-efficiency air humidity and temperature regulators, new technologies for efficient biogas utilization, and novel feed additive formulas, among many others. Although diverse, they are all connected, consistently revolving around the theme of animal husbandry and serving the livestock industry.

Approaching forty, he finally realized the dream his father had envisioned for him—to name him such a prominent figure—becoming a world-renowned figure, hailed as a legend in modern animal husbandry. His father, however, was illiterate, and the four-year-old boy still didn't have a name.

The reason I named him this was because I was resting by the wall outside a construction site when I went to the city to run some business. I overheard a few men in suits, ties, and hard hats talking about a man named Yuming with great respect. I thought the name was very scholarly, so I decided to give it to him.

Located at the foot of Longshan Mountain and on the banks of the Chu River, this place boasts beautiful mountains and clear waters, shady trees, and is a lovely place with birdsong and fragrant flowers.

In the middle of a bamboo grove is a courtyard. The courtyard is not surrounded by a wall, but is separated by some sparse fences and potted plants. Inside the wall are several old-fashioned brick and wood bungalows. Although the houses are not dilapidated, they are quite old.

The courtyard is very well maintained by the owner, featuring a rockery and pavilion. A pebble-paved stream meanders past the rockery and pavilion, and the flowers and plants in front of and behind the house blend perfectly with the surrounding landscape. It is a wonderful place to escape the hustle and bustle of the city and find peace and tranquility.

This is where Mo Yuming's studio is located, and his ranch territory covers an area of ​​dozens of miles around.

Aside from his somewhat frantic work ethic, Mo Yuming maintained a very regular daily routine and knew how to enjoy life. He preferred tranquility and disliked wasting time and energy on tedious social engagements. Therefore, he spent most of his time in this quiet little courtyard.

If the weather is nice, he gets up early and first exercises in the bamboo grove behind the courtyard for a while. Then he runs to the nearby hillside to enjoy the panoramic view and bask in the refreshing morning light. Afterward, he returns home to make breakfast and begins his day in an orderly fashion.

Today's schedule was a bit tight, so the pace was a bit faster. After getting up early this morning and stretching a bit, I started to take stock of the necessary documents. Before seven o'clock, Mo Yuming hurriedly ate a few bites of bread and drank a glass of fresh milk from his own farm before driving off from the ranch to the city.

It's the season of continuous spring rain. Lately, it's been raining incessantly, and it rained all night again last night. This morning the rain lessened a bit, but it hadn't really stopped, with occasional light showers. The sky was overcast, and a cool, damp mist filled the air. A gentle breeze blew across the misty air, making it feel a little chilly.

He opened the car window, habitually pressed the audio switch, and a melodious tune began to play. With one hand on the car door and the other gripping the steering wheel, the car drove along the path through the woods, and Mo Yuming thoroughly enjoyed the feeling of driving.

The melodious music captivated him. However, those who knew him well knew that he didn't actually enjoy listening to music much. His car stereo only had one song, a very classic old song that Mo Yuming never tired of listening to.

'...Who married you, so sentimental?...Who made your wedding dress?...'

Yes, "My Deskmate" was the only song in Mo Yuming's car.

No one knew why he liked this song so much, and he never explained it to anyone. Only he knew how charming, how lovely, and how beautiful the little girl who once sat next to him was.

Although she often accidentally crossed the line she had drawn, and although she often seriously pointed out Mo Yuming's small mistakes, Mo Yuming still liked her without hesitation and wanted to get close to her in order to show his brave side.

Once, he even secretly caught a small water snake, put it in the teacher's chalk box, and brought it to school. But things didn't go as planned. The moment the snake slipped out of the chalk box, all the girls screamed and scattered in all directions. Even the timid female teacher ran out of the classroom...

He was ten years old that year, a fourth-grade student. He transferred from a small, incomplete primary school in the countryside to a complete primary school in the county town. As a transfer student, he was assigned to this class and became the little girl's deskmate. The moment he saw her, he inexplicably fell in love with her. There was no reason. This was his first love, innocent, naive, and pure...

Mo Yuming's ranch is nearly 100 kilometers away from the city. After driving for almost an hour, we finally arrived at the Fourth Ring Road intersection. The city is full of high-rise buildings and is very prosperous. The International Technology Development and Exchange Center is not in the city center, but in the area between the Fourth Ring Road and the Third Ring Road. If there is no traffic jam, it will only take another ten minutes to drive to the Technology Exchange Center.

Seeing the red light at the intersection, Mo Yuming instinctively stepped on the brakes and stopped at the zebra crossing. Although it was the morning rush hour, there was very little traffic on this road leading into the city from the suburbs; at least, he was the only car stopped on the turn where he was.

After waiting for a minute, the left turn indicator light came on. He slowly released the brake, turned the steering wheel, and slowly drove onto the left fork in the road.

"Bang! Bang!"

Two loud bangs rang out behind him, and he immediately felt a tremendous force coming from behind. His entire body was violently thrown up from the seat, and his head slammed hard against the roof. His body was held in place by the seatbelt to prevent him from flying out of the seat, but his head was like a rattle-drum, banging wildly between the seat, the window, and the roof. In an instant, it felt as if it had exploded, and his consciousness instantly became chaotic.

After a dizzying spin, in the last vestiges of consciousness before losing consciousness, I felt myself and the car fly up, and the prototype in the trunk also flew out of the car and into the open space to the left. The prototype spun rapidly in mid-air, like a giant spinning top, drawing an arc in the air, flying over the road guardrail, and crashing into a large electrical cabinet by the roadside like a cannonball.

"boom!"

With a deafening roar, the prototype exploded inside the electrical cabinet. Amidst the billowing smoke and dust, the prototype disintegrated into countless fragments, scattering sparks and emitting a dazzling, brilliant light, like a giant firework bursting into bloom.

Huh? Wasn't I driving? That overturned pickup truck looks familiar, doesn't it? And that exploding machine—wasn't that the prototype I built? How could I be witnessing such a horrific scene?! Where am I...?

"Om..."

His mind went completely blank. After a piercing pain, his consciousness began to fade, his vision blurred, and the surrounding light gradually dimmed. He felt as if he had entered an incredibly dark space, unable to see or touch anything, and the sounds around him grew fainter and fainter. The last thing he vaguely heard was:

"Call the fire trucks quickly! That out-of-control tanker truck is on fire!"