Max and the Mechanical Army Chapter 8

The opening ceremony that Principal Lu had scheduled for Zhan Lu had not yet begun, but he himself encountered some trouble.

The opening ceremony is scheduled in the morning, and is preceded by a faculty and staff meeting.

Under the newly established Xinghai College, there were a total of three professional colleges, namely Mecha Mechanical Design, Mecha Operation and Information Science. The textbooks were all written by the principal himself... and pieced together from here and there.

According to President Lu's great vision, the Xinghai Academy of the future should be the ultimate temple of human wisdom, equipped with the most advanced laboratories and synesthesia libraries, its own publishing house being the most authoritative in the universe, research institutes spread across the eight galaxies, gathering the elites of all mankind, and being comparable to the Ulan Academy on the distant planet Votto in both civil and military aspects, and echoing each other from afar. Countless shining names in human history will bear the imprint of Xinghai Academy.

Lu Bixing has nothing but the courage to dream.

A thousand miles begin with a single step. Principal Lu firmly believes that these three small majors are the first small step in his great career.

However, in the bright morning light before the start of school, the three "small step" deans were all gloomy and showed the principal the cold reality.

The dean of the mecha operation department was a hot-tempered person. He didn't wait for the principal to finish talking about his bright prospects for the new semester and interrupted him: "Principal Lu, I can't teach anymore. The failure rate of our department last semester was 90%, and this was the result of taking the square root of all the scores in the final exam and multiplying them by ten. What do you think we should do?"

The dean of the Mecha Mechanical Design Institute added expressionlessly, "The failure rate in our institute is 100%."

After hearing these shocking figures, Lu Bixing said tolerantly, "The design major requires a high level of basic knowledge, but that's OK. We can just extend the duration of study. You see, shouldn't we be less strict in the first year? We can just give a few points higher to those who are about the same so that they can pass."

"It's impossible to improve it," said the Dean of the Design School, looking very sad and disappointed. "If we calculate it based on the percentage system, only one student in our school has an average score of double digits."

Lu Bixing: ...

"I won't talk about my department, as we don't have any data," said the dean of the School of Information Science, a white-haired old man with a clear face. "President, I don't know how you advertise for recruiting students. Many students who apply for this major think that we teach them how to get gossip. I explained to them that our department is not a spy department, nor is it called a secret service department. As a result, forty-nine students applied and fifty dropped out. In other words, I only have freshmen now, no sophomores."

Lu Bixing repeated the old dean's words from the beginning: "...Why are there more students dropping out than reporting?"

The old dean said: "One student was halfway through the registration process when he discovered that there was a gang of hooligans in the school who were his enemies. He was afraid of being beaten, so he jumped directly to the withdrawal process."

The teachers in the school are scholars that Lu Bi has dug out from every nook and cranny in the Eighth Galaxy. In the Eighth Galaxy, they are all endangered species.

When the scholars came, they thought they would be able to teach the best talents in the world and embark on the road of pursuing knowledge and truth. But after they arrived, they found that they were doing the work of zoo managers, which was really a disgrace to the society.

The three deans sat together and used their six eyes to accuse the principal of being a big liar.

Lu Bixing remained unmoved: "This should be a problem of unreasonable teaching materials and course outlines. I have only taught a few students privately before. This is the first year of formal school operation and I have no experience. Next time you encounter this situation, you can bring it up in a teaching meeting in time and we can correct it at any time."

"Principal Lu," the mecha operator said, "do you know how much a primary degree certificate costs?"

The education system in the Eighth Galaxy is different from that in other places. It is relatively simple and is divided into only two levels: "primary" and "higher". Elementary is basic education. You can study step by step in public schools for fifteen years, or you can teach yourself and then take a certificate at a government-designated place. After obtaining a primary education certificate, you can participate in vocational training, choose to find a job, or choose to continue your studies and enter higher education.

Of course, you can't just choose higher education. In the entire Eighth Galaxy, there are a total of 18 inhabited planets, but only 11 higher education institutions, six of which have closed down. Only the bare campus and two or three security guards are left to prevent homeless people and criminals from using the school as a hideout.

Most people probably don’t know what a university looks like.

Going to school and studying is useless - this is common sense in the Eighth Galaxy.

Under such circumstances, Xinghai College had more than a hundred students apply for the first year of its opening, and received more than 300 applications in the second year. There was even such a thing as an "acceptance rate", which was truly a miracle in the Eighth Galaxy. The miracle was not born because Principal Lu was particularly handsome, but because it was said that the backer of Xinghai College was the fourth brother.

After all, this is an era where universities have to cling to gangsters.

"30 yuan for a fake certificate, quality guaranteed, an additional 108 yuan, you can customize a full set of application materials, your application is guaranteed to be approved --- Do you want to meet the fourth brother? Want to enter the black hole? It's only 138 yuan, you won't get cheated," said the dean of the School of Information Science, "Yes, it was the group of people who dropped out of our school who did it."

Lu Bixing: ...

The Dean of Design had a pair of sad eyebrows, which drooped at this moment, and he looked even more distressed: "Principal Lu, the students you recruited are basically here to watch that gentleman. They are hooligans, and they are illiterate. Although we are committed to being gardeners, it is too much to ask us to plant a whole garden of live mice."

Lu Bixing quickly calculated the price of his body and smiled as he began to act like a god: "You can't say that. Every great road is initially covered with thorns. Every sage was once regarded as the foolish old man who moved the mountain. As the old saying goes, 'Only the road to hell is paved with flowers of kindness.' Isn't adversity the only way to reach your dream?"

The three deans were like three eggplants hit by frost. They all hung their heads together. The principal's rotten chicken soup was really hard to swallow.

Lu Bixing: "I know you've been working hard, so I decided to raise the salaries of all faculty and staff this year, and no one will get a 20% raise."

The eggplants quietly sprouted new buds, and became more lively.

Lu Bixing played two roles, the good cop and the bad cop. When he said this, his face turned cold again: "According to incomplete statistics, the dropout rate of primary schools on the planets of the Eighth Galaxy is as high as 90%. The vast majority of people in the application materials have not completed primary education, and the certificates are also fake. I know this, but dropping out is not necessarily voluntary. How do you know that there are no students who are trying their best to grasp a glimmer of hope? Colleagues, do you know that in the same world, in other galaxies not far from us, primary education is no longer needed?"

"Garden of Eden..." Someone answered.

"The Garden of Eden," Lu Bixing stood up, put his hands behind his back, and talked freely, "Children in the Garden of Eden will have basic knowledge directly instilled into their memories by the spiritual network before they are ten years old. They call this 'painless learning'. They lie in the nutrition chamber and sleep for a month, just like enlightenment, and naturally master the knowledge. Can you imagine it? They don't have to recite and forget repeatedly like us, go astray back and forth, and search hard without anyone to guide them. You despise students for their poor foundation. From this level, everyone here has a poor foundation. We lost at the starting line when we were born, but so what? We can modify the textbooks, little by little, teach slowly, and let students learn slowly. Give up on others at every turn. Are you worthy of your once troubled and confused selves?"

The meeting room was completely silent. No one knew whether they were moved by Principal Lu's concern for the country and the people, or because they felt guilty about the salary increase.

Lu Bixing looked around and felt that he had convinced people with his reasoning, so he maintained his tone of concern for the country and the people, and after a while, he prepared for the opening ceremony. He found a place where no one was around, and quickly observed his appearance through the glass in the corner - broad shoulders and narrow waist, formal clothes, neatly combed back hair, forehead that could participate in the interstellar forehead beauty pageant, and a pair of regular and good facial features. He was indeed a handsome man with a graceful demeanor.

Then, the handsome man tried smiling in front of the glass for a while, trying the half-smile method of "not showing teeth, but raising the corner of the mouth", the standard smile method of "eight teeth", and the reserved smile method in between the two, "showing only one tooth edge".

The three ways of smiling each have their merits and are all perfect. Lu Meinan suffered from a fear of making a choice. After a rigorous comparison, although he wanted to show off his bright white teeth, he felt that being more reserved seemed to be more in line with his identity as a principal. So he had to reluctantly settle for the second best and chose option three.

When everything was ready, he put on his most nonchalant attitude, turned around the teaching building and walked towards the auditorium.

Standing on the threshold of the auditorium, Lu Bixing put one hand in his trouser pocket and nodded to everyone who greeted him, but he was distracted, thinking: "Is he coming or not?"

On this beautiful planet full of bumpkins, Lu Bixing was probably the only one who had the foresight to tell that Max was not human, because the average IQ of the local artificial intelligence was probably less than 80, and it was indeed difficult to regard Max as the same species as them.

Lu Bixing also knew that Lin was not from the Eight Star Systems, and was definitely not an extraterrestrial interstellar pirate. Lu Bixing had been with the One-Eyed Eagle since he was a child, and had seen many interstellar pirates. Those people were like wandering vultures, and their ferocity was that of people who had been displaced and were at the end of their rope. Lin was not like them.

When they talked about "Garden of Eden" the day before, Zhan Lu tried twice to correct some of his imaginations about the first galaxy, but was interrupted by Lin both times. Lu Bixing actually just pretended not to notice. The reason why he and Lin could become friends was because they knew what to ignore.

Lu Bixing met Lin when he was running away from home. At that time, he happened to be wandering near Beijing Beta Star. Before he decided whether to land or not, he came across a drifting bottle... no, an eco-capsule.

At that time, it had no identification and was rotating quietly outside the lifeless artificial atmosphere of Beijing β. It was so exquisite that it seemed like an alien from another dimension. The minimalist shell design was enough to turn any scientific researcher into a stalker. Lu Bixing drooled as he followed the unknown ecological capsule around Beijing β three times. Although he knew that fishing for unidentified objects in the universe was an unpopular way of suicide, he still couldn't help but do this great thing.

The entire fishing process lasted nearly three hours. After the fish were pulled up, Lu Bixing discovered that the ecological cabin was equipped with a strict encryption system. Once it was forcibly broken through by external forces, it would immediately trigger a nuclear self-explosion, destroying everything.

This exquisite ecological capsule may contain a big secret or a deadly virus. In either case, it is a dangerous item. According to the normal way of thinking, you should immediately put it back where you took it from and stay away from it.

But Master Lu is obviously not a normal person.

As a scientist with little experience, Master Lu was not curious about what was in the eco-capsule, nor did he want to see it. However, he fell in love with the provocative encryption system on the eco-capsule at first sight. He immediately forgot about his poetry and distant places, and enthusiastically fought a battle of wits and courage with the encryption system. It took him more than two months to defeat this "Sphinx" in a dangerous situation.

Lu Bixing was so happy that he wrote a lengthy interstellar navigation diary with two bottles of whiskey, recording his own heroic deeds. After finishing the diary, he was drunk and accidentally opened the ecological hatch while staggering. Pandora's box was opened with a bang, and Lu Bixing's drunkenness almost evaporated along with his gallbladder.

He rubbed his eyes, rubbed his eyes again, and sat on the ground for five minutes to make sure he was not hallucinating.

There is a person in the eco-pod... alive.

Lu Bixing quickly took a handful of hangover pills and went to check on the person in the eco-capsule. He found that the person's vital signs had dropped to the lowest level. There was a decorative mechanical arm on his arm, which should be some kind of artificial intelligence. It had insufficient energy and could not be started.

Low vital signs can save lives in extreme environments, but over time they can cause irreversible damage. Lu Bixing didn't know how long this "Sleeping Beauty" had been hibernating, and was afraid that he would die in his sleep, so he took out all his medical equipment. However, the drugs that this "alien" used to lower his vital signs were not common ones, and the medical equipment could not identify them at all. Lu Bixing was not a doctor, so he did not dare to use the wrong awakening agent without authorization. He could only give him nutrient solution every day and try to wake him up with microcurrent.

On the third day, "Sleeping Beauty's" eyelids moved slightly. Lu Bixing tried to talk to him, but there was no response.

Lu Bixing had nothing to do, so he took a dozen books and started reading into Sleeping Beauty's ear, from "Advanced Mecha Design Theory" to "History of the Earth", and finally a vulgar P*rnographic story about dozens of goblins fighting - this time, his audience finally couldn't stand it anymore and opened their eyes.

Lu Bixing's righteous thoughts reached a more intense point. The climate in the mecha cabin of space travel was dry. When Lin opened his eyes, he saw two lines of blood flowing down his nose.

Lin's awakening agent was in Max's place, but Max's energy was not full at that time and could not be activated. Without the awakening agent, the person who was awakened prematurely by Lu Bixing by mistake was very painful. At first, he was like a mummy, with only his eyeballs moving. He had to soak in nutrient solution for several months before his limbs could gradually recover their mobility. Only then did Master Lu realize that he had made trouble, so he had to work hard as a male nurse.

In the vast and dark universe, he spent more than three months with the "paralyzed" Lin Chaoxi, and formed an indescribable... friendship.