Chapter 260 214: C Company's Combat Drone, Comparable to a 6th-Generation Fighter?

Getting back on his electric scooter, Chu Bamboo sighed with mixed feelings and made a call. "I found him! He's alive, for now. But the specifics..."

"? Is he hurt? Or disabled?" Madam Xue's anxious voice came through the phone. "As long as he's alive, that's all that matters! As long as he's alive..."

"Yeah," Chu Bamboo nodded. "He should be back in the next day or two! As for the details... you'll see for yourselves then. It's hard for me to explain."

Chu Bamboo hung up. Even though he had never once mentioned Xue Fusheng's return to Su Xiaoqun, it was a tacit understanding between them.

After all, Chu Bamboo still held Su Xiaoqun's identity in the palm of his hand...

Besides, even if Su Xiaoqun wanted to run now, their connection couldn't be severed! There was still Hai Mingyue, after all.

Rubbing his temples, Chu Bamboo mulled things over in pain for a moment. 'The redevelopment zone! The redevelopment zone.'

'What on earth does All-Powerful want to do with the redevelopment zone?'

Chu Bamboo felt as if the enemy was constantly making moves on a chessboard, while he could only respond in vain, cutting off the hands they extended one by one.

"If worst comes to worst," Chu Bamboo clenched his jaw and took out his phone again. "I don't know when the Eleventh Apostle will return! It seems he's the crucial point right now... When the time comes, I'll just gather a mob and jump him! I refuse to believe... that if he dies, the remaining Apostles will just keep coming one by one, like the Calabash Brothers trying to save their grandpa!"

'Even if they did come like that, he'd just have to accept it! He would just have to call in his connections one by one...'

'If all else failed, his last resort was to seek out the Giant of the Mo Family and become his disciple!'

'With that man's power—which is enough to rival the Bright Pope in the Extraordinary World—he refused to believe... that he couldn't sweep away an All-Powerful that could only scurry around in the gutters?'

At this thought, Chu Bamboo's mood lightened. He made another call, this time to Li Kang. "It's handled! You can go back."

"???" Li Kang, who was still at the hospital questioning the injured escort personnel, was completely dumbfounded. He glanced at his notebook, half-filled with notes, then at the clock on the hospital wall, wanting to say something but stopping himself several times.

'Seriously, your efficiency... Isn't this a bit much! How did you solve it already?'

'What in the world happened? Can someone please tell me...'

Just as he was about to ask, Li Kang realized the call had already been disconnected.

Li Kang: "..."

'I can't take this anymore! He's always making me feel like an idiot.'

...

「On the other side.」

After a moment of thought, Chu Bamboo chose to return to Nuwa Base.

"Time to continue studying," Chu Bamboo said with a grim expression. "Nuwa No. 17, if you would... pull up all the drone models launched after Great River and C Corporation started their collaboration! And the detailed blueprints. Show me everything. Specifically, start from the year '25!"

After a brief silence, dense clusters of data charts materialized.

Chu Bamboo began to memorize them, bit by bit. From the ordinary models at the beginning... to the later drone models specialized for warfare, and then finally...

"Wait, they have this too?!"

After looking through some of the perfectly ordinary drones, Chu Bamboo then saw... some utterly absurd drone data—

Length 20 meters, wingspan 13.56 meters, height 5 meters, maximum takeoff weight 40 tons.

But the key issue was, according to what Chu Bamboo knew, the specs for the White-headed Eagle's most advanced F-22 were... length 18.9 meters, wingspan 13.56 meters, height 5.08 meters, maximum takeoff weight 38 tons...

In other words, this unmanned drone was actually slightly larger and heavier than the White-headed Eagle's fighter jet.

'What the hell is this thing packing? Isn't this supposed to be a drone? Logically, its payload and other specs should be much lower than a manned aircraft...'

'No, wait, this is just a straight-up fighter jet, isn't it?!!'

Of course, after Chu Bamboo glanced at the ridiculously absurd combat data, a smile of understanding finally appeared on his face.

How to put it? The overall performance of this fighter, produced in the year '38, was probably comparable to the sixth-generation fighters that most likely already existed in the Real World.

Yes, just a *smidge* stronger than an F-22! At a level where one could easily take on three to five F-22s.

'Being able to memorize the blueprints for this thing is definitely a good thing... After all, it's obvious C Company must have had a tough time developing the plans for this beast. Now I'm just swooping in to reap the rewards!'

But the key problem was...

"The number of blueprints, while not as many as for the nuclear fusion power facility, is still ridiculously high..."

If converted to paper, its weight would probably be measured in tons.

After much hesitation, Chu Bamboo sighed softly. 'What else can be done? Time to get to memorizing.'

And so... he kept at it, right up until bedtime!

...

「Real World.」

「8:00 AM.」

「Z Intelligence Co., Ltd., President's Office.」

With his arms crossed, Chu Bamboo scanned the various data displayed by Z while quietly waiting for the arrival of Howard Raven, as mentioned in the diary.

Then...

"...Principal?" Chu Bamboo answered the call, confused. "You're calling me because... Wait! You're saying you're downstairs at Z Company right now? Okay, okay... I'll come down and get you all right now!"

However, when Chu Bamboo actually saw Li Quanyuan...

"And these gentlemen are?" Chu Bamboo trailed off, looking at the men who, despite their civilian clothes, stood ramrod straight and had crew cuts, thick eyebrows, and large eyes.

"It's good news!" Li Quanyuan said with a grin, patting Chu Bamboo's shoulder.

"Mr. Chu! Hello. I am... Qian Zai!" A highly competent-looking man in his thirties, with a build comparable to Zhao Shao's, stepped forward and shook Chu Bamboo's hand. "We're here because of the paper you produced... That paper has passed our internal verification! It is extremely valuable... And, we've heard that you have an even more advanced battery?"

Pausing briefly, Qian Zai said gravely, "According to our internal discussions, this battery is far, far more advanced than those currently on the market... Therefore, on behalf of my superiors, I would like to sign an agreement with you! And rest assured, we don't intend to sign an exclusivity deal... However, for the initial stage, we... should be able to buy up every single battery your factory produces!"

"..." Chu Bamboo almost instantly realized who was standing behind them. Understanding dawned in his eyes; in that moment, many things clicked into place...

'So that's how it was!'

'He'd been wondering why, in the past few timelines, the batteries weren't officially sold to the public until almost half a year had passed...'

'With the changes he made to the production line and the addition of a brand-new, Z-assisted AI program... production capacity should have exploded, allowing them to hit the market right away... Besides, even though the C battery factory had fallen on hard times, its old connections were still intact. If the batteries were really that good, there was no way they would have had trouble finding buyers...'

'But now it seemed...'