“The third doesn’t feel right either. The people who posed those problems probably don’t even know how to solve them, or what the answers are. Even if I bring over a correct one, the verification alone would take plenty of time. By then the moment would have passed.”

“It seems that if I’m going to answer, I can only choose problems from the second stone tablet.” After this round of analysis, Su Mo fixed the information in his mind and began scanning the tablet from the very top downward.

Architectural design and materials research relied not only on knowledge accumulated day by day, but also on the luck of a sudden flash of insight.

Neither could usually be missing. They fused into each other.

But strangely, from the first problem all the way down to the last one Hou Congwen had just added, Su Mo’s expression shifted slightly.

“Have a lot of new problems been added these past few days?” He turned his head and looked at Qi Xiaomei.

She looked surprised and nodded again and again. “Yes. Lately the frequency has indeed gone up a lot. The problems on these tablets are kept for a year. In the past, over a whole year, each tablet only held twenty or thirty problems.”

“But this year it’s only June, and the problems on the tablets have already passed a hundred. These last three months especially, it seems thirty or forty new ones have been added, mainly on the second and third tablets.”

“That many?” Just from looking at the problems, Su Mo had already sensed something subtle.

Now that Qi Xiaomei had confirmed it, he could basically be sure that, just as Zhou Yue had said, the territory really had reached the eve of a fourth technological explosion.

And the field most likely to explode this time was... structural architecture!

“What kind of tricks can be played with this thing?”

“Or rather, why the rush to research something like this?”

Of the hundred-odd problems, around eighty were related to buildings.

Some were like Hou Congwen’s, starting from the fundamental properties of a building’s skeleton and asking about impact resistance, warmth retention, corrosion resistance, safe ventilation and so on.

Others started from the rationality of the building, from making the most of minimal space, later maintainability, and similar angles.

Taken together, unless this was a smoke screen the Academy of Sciences had deliberately released,

Su Mo did not even need to think. He already knew this must be one of the reasons they were so urgently grabbing buffer alloy across such a wide range.

Only a huge demand for experiments would make them need the matching materials this desperately.

And even though outsiders had noticed a little, they still paid it no mind, which only made the importance of this research clearer.

“How about it? Why don’t you go up and pick a problem to answer? I can help pass your answer to the matching researcher.”

“If you can solve the problem, win the recognition of the researcher and the Academy of Sciences, and take a senior researcher title or above, I’ll even be your personal bodyguard, if you like,” Qi Xiaomei teased in a low voice, blinking, as she noticed how seriously Su Mo was looking.

“Ha, forget it, forget it. So many people can’t answer these problems. What virtue or ability do I have to produce an answer in one go?”

“Let’s go stroll somewhere else.” Waving a hand, Su Mo smiled and slowly shifted his gaze away from Hou Congwen, who was about to leave.

Of the hundred-odd problems on the second stone tablet, after one pass Su Mo had found that he could immediately solve about a tenth of them and obtain the most basic researcher qualification.

There were also four problems for which, with only a stretch of calculation and exploration, he could even take intermediate or senior qualifications.

And for a problem like the one Hou Congwen had just posted, as long as he could find a way to adapt the “Pillar of Creation” structure on the Sun-chaser Battle Armor to a building,

never mind a thousand times. Even fifteen hundred or two thousand times could be built with ease.

But even so,

before he had felt out the Academy of Sciences’s true rules, Su Mo still meant to plan before he moved.

Everything would wait until he thoroughly understood the rules.

“All right. You really don’t want to go and make contact with the researcher? He’s about to leave, you know?”

“Why would I make contact with him? An unhygienic old wreck.” Shaking his head, and seeing Qi Xiaomei’s scrutinizing gaze, Su Mo smiled even more freely this time.

He had figured it out. He knew why the Academy of Sciences specifically picked out first-time visitors like him and offered so-called “guide” services.

In fact, Qi Xiaomei’s current work was both a private job and official business.

In close contact, as a guard of the Academy of Sciences, she would keep probing and complete the process of clearing out hidden dangers.

Anyone with other ideas, anyone whose mind was not firm, would easily be screened out.

And those without such ideas would not need this kind of one-on-one observation the next time they came in.

“You’re older than him yourself, and you still look down on him as an old wreck. Tsk tsk...” Looking at Su Mo with suspicion a few times and finding nothing unusual, Qi Xiaomei was clearly rather dissatisfied.

But limited by her role as a guide, she could not dig any further and could only follow Su Mo toward the energy car.

After that, for the whole afternoon, the two of them toured quite a few places.

With the sidecar energy car, Su Mo had visited nearly every place in the vast Academy of Sciences that visitors were allowed to go.

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