The three options lay there quietly in the group chat.
The first option: the Third Industrial Revolution tech tree.
Li Dong looked at this line of text, the corner of his eye twitching.
He subconsciously looked toward Xiaohai in the bottom right corner of the screen.
A small black ball was bouncing around. When it saw him looking, a dialogue box immediately popped up above its head.
[Master, why are you looking at Xiaohai?]
Hmph.
Li Dong couldn’t be bothered with it and turned his gaze to the second option.
The Life Sciences tech tree.
The 21st century is the century of life sciences. He seemed to recall a professor from Zhejiang University telling him that once.
To be honest, he was quite tempted.
But...
He looked at the third option.
The Atomic Matter tech tree.
The description was very long. Li Dong only glanced at it briefly, his eyes finally stopping on a particular phrase.
[Aging, scarring, fibrosis, ischemia—no longer irreversible sentences in a medical sense.]
Scarring.
The moment that single word entered his vision, everything else he saw—"aging," "ischemia," "medically irreversible"—became completely unimportant.
The only thing left in his mind was the face of the elderly Zhang Lufang, leaning back on the sofa with her eyes closed.
Li Dong took a deep breath.
’What was there to hesitate about?’
He reached out and selected it directly.
[You have selected: The Atomic Matter tech tree.]
Li Dong had expected that making the selection would trigger some kind of earth-shattering phenomenon, a celestial event, or at least a great gust of wind.
’Even just a flash of golden light would have been something, right?’
As it turned out, absolutely nothing happened.
The only change was a new button that had silently appeared in the bottom-left corner of the group’s function bar.
[Channels]
Li Dong: ???
’Seriously?’
’Which product manager designed this localized adaptation?’
’He was all geared up for some high-end operations like "tech tree materialization" or "atomic structure infusion into the brain," and what does it give me? A "Channels" feature?’
Li Dong muttered a few exasperated comments to himself, then reached out and tapped it.
Inside, there was only one major category.
Atomic Matter.
The other categories next to it were all grayed out, so blurry he couldn’t even make out the words.
He clicked on Atomic Matter.
Inside were five videos, neatly arranged and labeled from left to right as Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, Level 4, and Level 5.
Only the leftmost one, Level 1, was lit up. The other four were grayed out and marked "Locked."
[Unlock Condition: Complete the previous level’s video lesson.]
Li Dong muttered to himself.
’This thing is just like a video game. You have to clear the previous map just to open a new one?’
But he didn’t dwell on it and clicked directly on Level 1.
The video expanded in the center of the screen.
The picture slowly brightened.
As Li Dong watched the screen, his expression gradually grew serious.
On the screen was a high-resolution structural diagram of a single-atom iron nanozyme.
An Fe-N? (iron-nitrogen-4 single-atom coordination site) site.
The substrate, the stereoscopically coordinated electron cloud distribution.
’This stuff... he couldn’t possibly be more familiar with it.’
The enzyme from Wu Kai’s research group.
The very thing he had painstakingly pored over again and again for their previous joint paper.
But strangely, though the image was on screen for less than two seconds, several new connections he’d never considered before immediately formed in his mind regarding the paper he thought he had already thoroughly mastered.
The solid angle difference in Auger electron capture.
The detail of the Fed_z2 (iron atom’s d_z2 orbital) and Np_y (nitrogen atom’s p_y orbital) hybrid orbitals being filtered out in the tunneling channel.
The set of transverse scan data that Wu Kai had personally collected.
Li Dong paused, slightly taken aback.
’It seems this video isn’t just playing; it’s using the visuals to stuff a higher level of understanding directly into his brain.’
Then, the image slowly faded.
A line of text floated up in the center.
[Second-Generation Single-Atom Iron Nanozyme]
[A Sustained, Slow-Release ROS-Scavenging Platform]
Li Dong’s heart skipped a beat. ’Here it comes.’
Just as he was about to scroll down to see what this second-generation enzyme was all about...
The video snapped to a halt.
A line of text popped up in the center of the screen.
[Wise Li Dong, due to your lack of supporting knowledge, you are temporarily unable to continue viewing.]
[Please supplement with the following related knowledge before proceeding.]
A list followed immediately below.
[Wang H. et al. Single-atom nanozymes. Nat. Rev. Chem.]
(Omitted)
...
Li Dong looked at the list.
He was so angry he had to laugh.
’Fine, fine, fine.’
’At least the "Channels" feature isn’t asking me to buy a membership.’
’It’s just a few dozen books and a few dozen review articles.’
’Time to get gnawing.’
...
「The next morning, at the Yan University Library.」
Although it was already summer vacation, the atmosphere on the Yan University campus was much livelier than usual.
Many students hadn’t gone home, and the library was even more crowded than it had been during the previous semester.
And then, everyone witnessed a familiar scene.
East God—oh, no, he should be called Professor Li now—had once again commandeered the long table by the window in the corner.
Dozens of books were stacked on the table, completely obscuring him from view.
This time, however, Professor Li’s speed of flipping through books was even more exaggerated than before.
Before, he would finish a dozen or so books in a day. This time, in just three or four hours, he had already pushed the entire pile of several dozen books to the side.
A few undergraduates nearby, who had come early to grab seats, were secretly watching him out of the corners of their eyes.
"Holy shit."
"Didn’t East God already graduate?"
"It’s Professor Li."
"Ah, right, right, right, Professor Li."
"Isn’t Professor Li’s reading speed a little over the top?"
"He was already flipping through them when I got here. I thought he had just started on that first one."
"But by the time I finished one Chapter of exercises, he was already on the last stack."
"What kind of monster did our university even recruit?"
"Shhh."
Although their voices were quiet, Li Dong, with his Flow State Plus, still "heard" them.
He closed the book on top, *Fundamentals and Applications*, and glanced up at the group of whispering young people.
Seeing him look over, they immediately buried their heads and pretended to be working on their exercises.
Li Dong gave them a slight nod.
He gathered his things and, adopting the proper air of a professor, walked slowly out of the library.
The moment he stepped out of the library’s main entrance, he immediately broke into a full sprint.
...
「Blue Banner Camp, in Li Dong’s room.」
He opened his laptop.
"Let’s do this."
"I’ve already fucking finished gnawing through it all."
With all three attributes on his status panel above 0.5, stacked with his Memory Palace... if this were the past, it would have taken him at least ten to fifteen days to gnaw through those dozens or even hundreds of books.
Now, with this set of buffs, it didn’t even take him a full morning.
Moreover, on this trip to the library, he hadn’t just gnawed through the items on the list.
He had also casually skimmed through lipid nanoparticle delivery, the homing mechanism of cardiac-targeting peptide (CTP), and the TGF-β/Smad fibrosis pathway.
The list from the "Channels" feature had originally set the passing grade for him.
He had gone and set the bar for himself at "excellent."

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