Homo Sapiens

「The next day, early in the morning.」

Still groggy with sleep, Fang Xinwu was startled awake by his phone’s alarm.

Rubbing his eyes, he picked up his phone. It was only seven o’clock.

Yawning, he pulled open the curtains and picked up a notice from the table. A hotel employee had given it to him when he returned the previous day. It instructed all visitors like him to head to Qingye Hospital for a free medical examination.

After brushing his teeth and washing his face, he took two of his men to the second-floor restaurant for some steamed buns and fried dough sticks.

The Jade Hotel was located on Jade Street, about two kilometers from Qingye Hospital. Fang Xinwu and his men decided to walk.

By the time Fang Xinwu’s group of three arrived, there were already over two hundred people in line ahead of them.

Quite a few armed Internal Guard Soldiers were on site, maintaining order.

Du Bing, another of Fang Xinwu’s men, grumbled under his breath as they waited in line. ”Boss, you think this Qingye Hospital is really giving us a free check-up? Isn’t this just some kind of scam to get our money?”

”Relax,” Fang Xinwu said, shaking his head with a wry smile. ”They’re not hurting for your pocket change.”

In truth, he didn’t understand Qingye Group’s motives either. If this were just an employee benefit, that would be one thing. But this was a free medical examination for the entire population. Although it meant waiting in line every day, according to Old Ma, it was genuinely free of charge.

It was perfectly normal that they didn’t understand.

In reality, Qingye Group wasn’t running these free check-ups to make money. It was to collect human data and clinical case samples to build a massive medical and human database.

Why are doctors in Huaguo so experienced?

It’s simple: the more patients they see, the more experienced they become.

Hongsawaddy’s infrastructure was poor, and its pool of medical talent was pitifully small. Since they couldn’t recruit a large number of doctors from Huaguo, they had to find their own solution.

As Li Qingye’s body double, Ma Chi had come up with an ingenious solution: use the free check-ups to rapidly ”grind” experience, like a student cramming for an exam.

At this time, Qingye Medical Company employed over 3,000 doctors.

You read that right—over 3,000 doctors.

So where did all these doctors come from?

The answer: scum from the Golden Triangle, death row inmates, and die-hard loyalists from Wu Kailuo’s faction. In total, these groups numbered over a hundred thousand.

By ”re-forging” these individuals, the Hongsawaddy division gained over a hundred thousand loyal, high-quality ”talents.”

To help these re-forged talents better reintegrate into society, Qingye Group even established the ”Qingye Comprehensive University.” Through accelerated programs, these individuals were processed in batches and then legitimately assigned to various positions.

As for whether a Soldier could become a qualified doctor, current practice showed that with a few minor adjustments, their performance was excellent in all aspects.

After all, a Soldier’s bio-chip currently possessed a floating-point processing power of 12,000 teraflops per second, with approximately 200 TB of RAM and 2,000 TB of storage capacity.

What does this level of performance mean?

Its floating-point processing power is equivalent to one-third of the Tianhe-2 supercomputer.

And its 2,000 TB of storage is equivalent to a large library containing tens of millions of books.

The data storage capacity of the human brain is actually incredible. If calculated based on every neuron being able to store data, it could reach nearly 7.7 billion TB, and its processing speed is also unbelievably fast.

The problem is, the human brain has its limitations.

After all, humans can’t use one hundred percent of their brains. Furthermore, the vast majority of human memories are useless or mundane, and these memories are characteristically incomplete and vague.

The advantage of the bio-chip lies in its precision and specialization.

Even a person with the best memory would find it difficult to memorize a book verbatim, but a bio-chip can.

Ma Chi had suggested that Li Qingye establish a comprehensive, categorized database, organizing all of humanity’s existing books, journals, and visual media.

For instance, the Soldier-doctors at Qingye Hospital downloaded specialized medical textbooks and journals for various fields. Combined with the empirical data from natural human doctors and the rapid accumulation of cases from the free check-ups, they quickly transformed into highly competent, qualified physicians.

It was thanks to these three thousand-plus professional doctors that Qingye Hospital was able to rapidly merge with and take over dozens of hospitals throughout Hongsawaddy.

This single-handedly dragged Hongsawaddy’s medical standards from the last century to the advanced level of the twenty-first.

The situation was similar for Qingye Group in other industries. Batches of graduates from Qingye University’s accelerated programs allowed the Group’s capabilities in various fields to advance by leaps and bounds.

This was one of the reasons why Qingye Group could expand its operations so rapidly without collapsing.

With the boost from over a hundred thousand loyal, high-quality ”talents,” plus the full support of both the legitimate and underworld powers in Hongsawaddy, it would have been a disservice to the efforts of all those Soldiers if Qingye Group didn’t soar.

Fang Xinwu found Qingye Group’s actions hard to understand simply because he was unaware of its core operating model.

As for Qingye Hospital’s medical equipment, pharmaceuticals, and consumables...

Currently, Qingye Group’s solution was as follows: a portion of the pharmaceuticals were procured from neighboring Tianzhu, Huaguo, and Siam, as these places had numerous pharmaceutical companies.

They were especially keen on importing generic drugs from Tianzhu, since Hongsawaddy wasn’t bound by international patent laws.

On the other hand, Qingye Group produced some of its own.

A similar strategy was applied to equipment and consumables: import some while developing their own.

Take things like vitamin tablets, penicillin, and oxytetracycline. The technology for these is a dime a dozen, so they could simply copy production lines from Huaguo and begin mass production.

Importing internationally branded vitamin tablets would just be playing the fool and overpaying.

Currently, Hongsawaddy’s most severe public health issues were cholera caused by unclean drinking water; malaria and dengue fever from mosquito bites; hepatitis B and AIDS; and widespread malnutrition (vitamin deficiencies).

This was also one of the reasons why Qingye Group was pushing for large-scale urbanization.

Cities made it easier to centralize the construction of water purification plants, sewage treatment plants, and waste disposal facilities. They also eliminated large areas of stagnant water and could house major hospitals.

As for rural infrastructure, there was no way for Hongsawaddy to reach Huaguo’s level in the short term. Therefore, drawing the rural population into the cities became a viable solution.

As for the risk of creating a large population of urban poor, Qingye Group wasn’t worried. Since Qingye Bank controlled the currency issuance, and the Group itself controlled vast industries and farmlands, absorbing a large labor force was a piece of cake.

For example, the current large-scale urbanization had spurred a construction boom sufficient to absorb several million workers.

Furthermore, the shift to large-scale agriculture created a need for numerous truck drivers, cargo ship captains, sailors, sorters, packers, and movers.

As long as the industrial scale grew and the supply chains extended, Hongsawaddy’s population of over fifty million might even prove insufficient.

Some might ask: where does the money come from?

For ordinary people and regular companies, money can only be obtained through transactions.

But for a mega-corporation, money is something you can print yourself. As long as the supply of goods anchoring the currency is sufficient, the currency has value.

For example, the Jin-yuan that Qingye Bank was preparing to issue was anchored to Qingye Group’s various products and services. If Qingye Group declared the Jin-yuan had value, all of Hongsawaddy had to acknowledge that value.

Is currency really that complicated?

It’s just that some people want to make it complicated.