"Ahem, as everyone knows, the price of steel is extremely high right now, and the ** government has already monopolized all the steel. It takes us a lot of time and effort to buy steel. Moreover, to prevent large rats from chewing through our rat traps, we use high-grade steel bars. Each rat trap weighs at least fifty pounds, so there's a reason why it's so expensive."
Haha! You just want to drive down the price! Of course not! This factory was built with investment from everyone in District 3. If outsiders want to take advantage, Factory Director Lu will be the first to stand up and stop them.
"Moreover, the city has just placed some orders with us. As the factory manager, I feel a great responsibility on my shoulders. However, in order to enable people to use rat traps as soon as possible, I earnestly request the city leaders to allocate a batch of steel to us!"
Lu Yuan stared intently at the reporter. "You're pressuring me, so I'll put some pressure on you too. Don't think that Brother Lu is easy to bully. You want to lower the price, but I still want the steel."
After a fierce struggle with the reporters, Lu Yuan's side emerged victorious. City leaders personally approved 100 tons of steel for their factory. It sounds like a lot, but it's not actually that much. After all, the quality of steel is what it is, and a ton of steel isn't much. 100 tons of steel can't make many rat traps.
For a time, Lu Yuan became a local celebrity. Everyone who saw him had to call him Director Lu, which made him quite proud for a while.
That day, when Lu's mother returned from the supermarket, she put Dahuang back in the living room. Dahuang then went to the river to look for fish all by itself. This guy had no companions. The pigs, cows, and sheep in the house were never on the same wavelength as it, and it could not retaliate at all except when it bullied them.
The main problem is that this thing is too agile. Lu Yuan has been thinking about finding it a companion, but he has never been able to find a suitable playmate for it. Before, Da Huang could play with Lu Yuan for a while every day, but since Lu Yuan became the factory manager, he has spent less time with it.
That day, Lu Yuan opened the group chat again and saw that only a few people were active in the group. Others would occasionally pop up and ask questions, but they didn't say anything else.
However, Lu Yuan felt somewhat depressed after noticing that there were a few fewer people in the group chat over the past few days.
"Mom, has someone died here recently?"
While tidying up the room, Aunt Lu said, "Yes, the day before yesterday, the old master and old lady of the Ge family over at the bungalow couldn't bear to waste food, so they ate the food that the rats had ruined, and they passed away that very night! Sigh!"
"And Chen Xiaoyan's husband was also bitten by a rat. He thought he could pull through, but he developed a high fever that night. He planned to go to the hospital the next day, but when he woke up in the morning, he found that he was already cold."
...
You don't know until you ask, and what you find is shocking. Lu's mother rattled off more than a dozen names as if they were her own treasures. One person died in one family, another couple died in another family. In short, someone died every day. Lu Yuan was sweating profusely as he listened.
"This...this is amazing! Why haven't we seen them hold a funeral?"
Aunt Lu smiled and said, "Who has money to hold a funeral these days! It used to be normal to have a few tables for weddings and funerals, but now with all the prices, it's hard to even put together a few dishes, let alone a table. Don't even think about it."
"Speaking of which, our family actually lost out. Chen Xiaoyan's husband died, and I even had to pay several hundred yuan as a funeral gift. Sigh!"
"Alright, Mom! Don't worry about this money. As long as our family is safe and sound, that's all that matters!"
So the mother and son chatted for a while about Lu Yuan's work. Whenever the topic turned to Lu Yuan's interview with the city officials as factory manager, the mother's face lit up with excitement, and the grandfather and grandmother returned with smiles on their faces.
Even Lu Yuan's father, who had never been optimistic about Lu Yuan, finally smiled. After all, it was his son who had hosted the city's top leaders. Well... that's a bit ambiguous.
Upon seeing Lu Yuan, they showered him with compliments, and Lu Yuan himself began to blush with embarrassment at being praised so much.
At this moment, Aunt Lu suddenly spoke up again: "By the way, have you heard? It seems that the country has developed a batch of rat poison, but it is currently being used primarily in first-tier cities."
Since Lu's mother started working at the supermarket, she has met more people and has more conversation partners. She hears a lot of other topics every day. Originally, Lu's mother was not a very talkative person, but after working for a while, she even grew to like the job.
Moreover, news that she used to never pay attention to has now started to come up in her head, and she'll often ask if we've heard about it, or what's happening in our country lately, and so on.
Lu Yuan had also heard about what his mother had said. When the country was determined to get things done, it went straight to it. Finally, with the concerted efforts of several top domestic research institutions and biotechnology research centers, the first batch of rat poison was produced.
Given the characteristics of this rat poison, it should be of low toxicity to humans. In the past, rat poison was so toxic that some people would take it, which led to news reports of couples arguing and one of them taking rat poison and dying, or families having conflicts and one poisoning the other's house at night, resulting in the deaths of the entire family.
Secondly, the mutated rats have exceptionally strong drug resistance. Someone once conducted an experiment on rats using previously stored rat poison. The rats died after consuming more than 30 kilograms of it. The autopsy report later showed that the rats died from overeating the rat poison. Some curious individuals, not believing this, spent a lot of money to buy a large quantity of rat poison, which was then eaten up by more than ten rats overnight. The conclusion was finally reached that the rat poison produced in the past was just an appetizer for the mutated rats, which wanted to eat more and more.
The third point is the difficulty in manufacturing rat poison. This is currently the biggest challenge for major research institutions and biological research centers. They have tried countless methods, and while killing rats is quite simple, these poisons are either extremely expensive, cannot be mass-produced, or have excessively long production cycles.
This time, however, there was finally some good news. But the first batch of rat poison was only used in some big cities, which made people feel a bit annoyed. Couldn't you produce more? Who doesn't have rats in their house?
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