“Design a tower-type or stacked structure. Materials must be basic grade-one alloys. Specific types are not limited.”

“Requirement: it must be able to bear impacts many times its own weight.”

“Three hundred times: may obtain formal researcher status, one qualification to apply for a Class D research task, and two hundred thousand trade points in initial research funding.”

“Five hundred times: may obtain intermediate researcher status, qualification to apply for two Class C research tasks or one Class B research task, one million trade points in initial research funding, and one independent laboratory.”

“Eight hundred times: may obtain senior researcher status, one qualification to apply for a Class A research task, and treatment matching a Class A research task.”

“One thousand times: may obtain dean-level status and lead all corresponding research in the relevant field. Other treatment to be discussed in person.”

Before the towering technology monument, Hou Congwen worked a simple mechanical arm, carving characters one after another.

He carved with great care, as if every scrap of his attention were fixed on the stone tablet, unmoved by anything outside it.

But the people standing beside him watching the excitement were nowhere near so calm.

As the wording of the problem grew clearer, the reward conditions grew richer and richer.

Inevitably,

waves of discussion began to rise one after another.

“A tower structure, only grade-one alloys allowed, and it still has to reach a minimum of three hundred times its load? How is that possible!”

“Even using the strongest rigid alloy for the bones and the best buffer alloy for the flesh, withstanding a hundred times the impact would already count as a miracle. Three hundred times... five hundred times... even a thousand times. That’s just outrageous.”

“What does a thousand times mean? A frame built from one kilogram of material that can hard-resist a ton of impact. With something like that, what disaster would you still fear? Just duck inside and you’re done.”

“Be realistic. Maybe this is telling us to explore whether we can develop a new alloy with even stronger buffering than buffer alloy?”

“Grade-one buffer alloy is thirty times, grade-two fifty times, grade-three already eighty times. If they didn’t restrict the alloy grade, I could slap on a grade-seven alloy and hard-resist a three-hundred-times impact right away.”

“Damn it, idiot, stay away from me. Why restrict it to grade-one alloy? Obviously it’s for large-scale application. If you put on grade-seven alloy, how much grade-seven alloy does our territory even produce in a year? Brainless trash, get lost!”

“Who are you calling brainless? I think you’re the one...”

Scholars belittling one another had been the way of things since ancient times.

Those who could still stand here after failing the exam, hoping to regain their qualifications by solving hard problems, mostly still had some ability and ideas, and were unwilling to muddle along in the wasteland like this.

The remaining small portion were people who could not even get exam qualifications and had only come to try their luck.

Lined up against each other like that, a chain of contempt naturally formed.

Those who passed looked down on those who failed. Those who failed looked down on those who tried their luck. Those who tried their luck looked down on those who came just to visit.

Under layer upon layer of scorn, though there were barely a hundred people in the square, several circles had already formed.

“No need to dodge. These people won’t dare to make a move. At most they’ll argue themselves happy.”

“But you’re lucky too, catching this moment. Ordinarily this place is quiet. There are only twenty or thirty people at most.”

“It only gets this lively when the researchers put out word that they’re about to post a new problem.”

Fearing the uproar ahead would splash onto him, Su Mo had been about to step back two paces and clear the battlefield when Qi Xiaomei beside him smiled, caught his arm and explained it all in a rush.

“Oh? These problems are posted on a cycle?”

Seeing that the two men indeed dared not fight and could only argue themselves red in the face from two or three meters apart,

Su Mo could not help smiling to himself and shifted his gaze back to the stone tablet.

The three technology monuments in the small square had different categories of text carved on them.

The first mainly covered physics and chemistry.

The problems carved on it were mostly highly specialized, subdivided questions.

An ordinary person, even if he could pronounce every character describing a problem, would find it hard to grasp the true meaning once the characters were strung together.

The second mainly covered building materials.

Compared with the first, the problems carved on this tablet looked far more approachable.

Like the problem Hou Congwen was posting now, they clearly stated the need and the desired result.

As for the third, Su Mo looked at it from some distance and could not tell what category it belonged to. For the moment he could only count it as miscellaneous learning.

And being miscellaneous learning, its problems were naturally no longer confined to rigid frames.

For some problems one could still feel out a bit of a path. Some were simply the question-setter’s imagination.

To complete them, either a candidate had been fixed in advance, or one had to run into tremendous luck.

“Of the three stone tablets, the first is too specialized. To answer it you need not only solid basic theory but also a large amount of experimental data to back it up. I’m afraid that’s also one of the reasons lab rentals exist.”

“If I choose a problem from this one, even if I can produce an answer, I’m unlikely to bluff my way through. After all, I haven’t really done those experiments, and the data would come out of thin air. Once they dig in earnest, it would be far too troublesome...”

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.