What Do You Mean an Outstanding Graduation Project Is a Mushroom Cloud?!

At Daxia Institute of Technology, the graduation assessment decides your fate. Lu Mao, the top student in his year, is challenged in front of everyone by Sun Fan, the perennial third-place student: Whoever gets the lower score on their thesis project has to drop out on the spot! Sun Fan comes from a military-industrial family. He pours money and resources into building a small tactical missile for his thesis project, and the whole school thinks Lu Mao is doomed to lose. Lu Mao simply hands over a list of materials. His advisor’s hands tremble after reading it. “You need this many specialty materials... what exactly are you trying to build?” He smiles faintly. “Something that’ll make every examiner stand up at once.” For the next three months, rumors spread across the school: Strange vibrations can always be heard late at night from Lu Mao’s state-of-the-art lab. Students passing by say they’ve smelled something like the air before a thunderstorm. Someone glimpsed a corner of a blueprint. It read: Recommended evacuation radius: classified. While Sun Fan is still bragging that his missile can fly fifty kilometers, Lu Mao adjusts his safety goggles and murmurs to the circuit board: “Relax. Let the mushroom grow a little longer.”