After more than a year of practicing internal martial arts, Jack Faulkner had already achieved some results. Taking advantage of moments when others weren’t paying attention, he would plunge his fair little hand into the soil and immediately lift up a large chunk of earth. With his adult-level observational skills, he could naturally deduce where cicada larvae were most likely to be hidden, so his harvests were quite astonishing.

A night’s work would often bring him a haul of a hundred or so cicadas. As a result, Jack Faulkner would always, to the amazement of his parents, quietly drag a net made from fishing line out the door. After wandering outside for two hours, he would return home with a net full of cicadas, once again leaving his parents’ mouths agape in shock.

Although Edward Faulkner didn’t know exactly how effective his training had been, one thing was very clear: in a few years, the cicadas in the factory area would probably be caught to extinction by him.

“Mom, we’ve been eating cicadas all summer.” His older sister Olivia Faulkner said softly as she helped their mother Grace Bolton soak and wash the cicadas that Edward Faulkner had caught in salt water.

Grace Bolton said helplessly, “We can’t just throw them away, can we? Tomorrow, take some to give to the neighbors with kids. If you eat too many of these, you just can’t digest them. Haven’t you noticed that William Faulkner feels nauseous now every time he sees fried cicadas?”

“Okay.” Olivia Faulkner agreed, then asked curiously, “Why isn’t Dad back yet? Does he have to work overtime tonight?”

“Your Uncle Zhang sent word that there’s a meeting.” Grace Bolton replied. She was also a bit puzzled—meetings this late had become rare lately, and it was almost ten o’clock at night. Why wasn’t he home yet? It was really worrying.

Seeing that Edward Faulkner had already fallen asleep in bed, just as mother and daughter finished tidying up and were getting ready for bed, the sound of a key turning in the lock came from outside the door.

Henry Faulkner was finally home.

Chapter 5: The Candidate for Director

“Why do you smell so much like smoke?” Grace Bolton asked in surprise.

Henry Faulkner rarely smoked at home—partly because Grace Bolton insisted, and partly because there were many children in the house and he didn’t want them exposed to tobacco at an early age. But now, Henry Faulkner reeked of smoke, his hair was a bit messy, and his eyes were red. Clearly, something had happened.

Henry Faulkner grunted, closed the door behind him, washed his face, and then sat down and said, “There was a meeting at the factory tonight. There are some things I can’t decide on my own, so I came back to discuss them with you.”

“What’s going on?” Grace Bolton immediately had a bad feeling.

After being married to Henry Faulkner for more than ten years and having three children together, she knew exactly what kind of person he was. He never caused trouble—trouble always found him.

Things at the factory were complicated. Although the Cultural Revolution had ended nearly two years ago, its effects couldn’t be erased overnight. You could say that the ten years of the Cultural Revolution had destroyed not just a generation.

Take the situation at the factory, for example: factional struggles, both open and hidden, still existed. The two sides often fought openly and covertly, and incidents happened from time to time. Henry Faulkner was an honest man who never wanted to get involved in such things, but when push came to shove, it was often out of his hands.

Henry Faulkner was a technical backbone of the factory and highly respected among the workers. No matter how tight the schedule, as long as Henry Faulkner said it could be done, his workers would always finish on time. Of course, this came at a price: over the past ten years, Henry Faulkner had given all the honors to his subordinates, and whenever the workers worked overtime, Henry Faulkner never slept at home either.

The factory leaders, seeing that Henry Faulkner was indifferent to fame and fortune, had often taken advantage of him. Take the matter of housing, for example: Henry Faulkner’s family had long qualified to move into a newly built three-bedroom apartment, but they were still making do in a ten-year-old bungalow.

Seeing the way Henry Faulkner looked when he came home tonight, Grace Bolton’s biggest worry was that the factory bosses were bullying her husband again.

“Um—” Henry Faulkner hesitated, not sure how to begin. But this was something he had to let his wife Grace Bolton know about, and he needed her opinion, so he explained, “It’s about our workshop. Actually, you know a bit about this.”

As for factory matters, except for things she wasn’t supposed to know—like classified military projects—nothing else was really a secret. As a teacher at the children’s school with plenty of free time, Grace Bolton had heard plenty of gossip from her colleagues. Plus, her husband would occasionally mention things about work, so she had a pretty good understanding of the factory.

The meeting Henry Faulkner attended today wasn’t exactly a bad thing.

The workshop where Henry Faulkner worked was the last stage in the factory—the final assembly workshop. In terms of difficulty, it wasn’t necessarily that hard; the key was to follow the blueprints and assemble everything as planned. But there were still issues: the complete products were extremely complex, especially since these were highly precise military products meant for warfare. The number of parts always ran into the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands, and even the smallest mistake could cause the mechanical system to malfunction.