Vast and boundless, as if riding the wind without knowing its destination. Drifting as if detached from the world, ascending toward immortality! A thousand-meter building, the sun and moon seeming to hang close together. Clouds rose and fell, accompanying them on every side.

The moment the simulation of the thousand-layer structure began, Hou Congwen was already in a daze. Beside him, Su Mo, who was running the simulation, felt his eyes light up even more in an instant!

“It’s even stronger! The computing power of virtual reality really is much greater!”

Eight years had passed, and the underlying architecture of virtual reality had remained largely unchanged, still running on its original logic. The core idea had simply been to pile on more bricks and make them fly. After the addition of countless servers, its computing power was more than ten, even a hundred times greater than eight years ago.

Today, from a thousand meters up, objects on the ground shrank dozens of times yet stayed clearly visible. Looking around, faintly golden clouds drifted with the air currents like a fairyland. Every detail and texture was vivid, and every physical structure and stress analysis obeyed the rules.

“The skyscraper has 1,098 floors and is 1,199 meters tall. Because it was made in one piece, it weighs about 1,800 tons!”

“Three hundred times the load, that’s 540,000 tons.”

Quantitative change led to qualitative change. Five hundred thousand tons and five tons were worlds apart. The higher the tower, the greater the load, and the more factors had to be considered. Yet despite the 540,000 tons, the integral alloy tower stood completely still, as if it felt no pressure at all.

“It seems there’s at least a five-hundred-times margin,” Su Mo thought to himself, feeling more confident.

In fact, the Pillar of Creation he was using was only a severely weakened version. During the modification, Su Mo had kept one main pillar as the foundation and deleted the other two that were meant for stability. Even so, the results far exceeded what many ordinary researchers could achieve in a lifetime.

Before Su Mo could try again, Hou Congwen snapped out of his daze and began waving his hands with a wry smile, scratching his head.

“Su... forget it. With Brother Zong here, you should reduce the number of floors first. If it goes any higher, I’m afraid you’ll burn through my entire budget for this month!”

“Let’s try lowering it a bit. It won’t affect the results, right?”

Although the computing power of virtual reality had risen a great deal, each researcher’s allocation was still extremely limited. For small objects, structures or a living-environment simulation, the share was more than enough. For a scene this large, even a few minutes were extremely costly. Three minutes could eat more than half of a regular researcher’s monthly quota.

“I see. Everyone’s share is still limited.” Su Mo understood and quickly followed Hou Congwen’s suggestion, bringing the tower back down to a height of about twenty meters.

When he had been the only one using it before, he had not cared about consumption; he had only worried about finding more energy when it ran out. With so many users now, the Academy of Sciences’s allocation was extremely reasonable and kept resources from being wasted.

“Let’s continue testing. Four hundred times!”

With everything settled, Su Mo and Hou Congwen went back down to the ground to test the miniature version of the tower.

It was still the same familiar iron plates and the same familiar way of applying pressure.

After switching to an alloy structure, even at four hundred times, both the outer alloy and the central long pillar remained extremely stable, with no sign of collapse.

“Brother Zong’s structure is truly remarkable. The record for tower structures in our Architecture Institute is 680 times, and even at four hundred times, those aren’t as stable as your structure. Who knows, you might break that record today!”

Hou Congwen explained, a hint of envy on his face.

From a clueless peasant to a researcher with rich theoretical and practical knowledge, and then from junior researcher to intermediate researcher, he had persevered for a full eight years. The effort and sweat he had put in were ten or even a hundred times more than others’. But now he had discovered that Su Mo only needed to submit this building structure to the Academy of Sciences to immediately obtain at least the status of an intermediate researcher...

“Let’s see if five hundred times will really work!”

“Good!” Su Mo clapped his hands, and the iron plates on the tower automatically began to grow heavier, rising steadily to five hundred times.

He was not too worried about something that was a sure thing. But when the notification sound indicating that the five-hundred-times load had been reached rang out, he could not help showing a hint of joy. Even at five hundred times, the weakened Pillar of Creation remained as solid as ever. That was enough to show just how terrifying the Sun-chaser Battle Armor would be once fully formed with this structure.

“The record is 680 times, so I might as well raise it to seven hundred and see!”

“Let’s see where the limit of this single pillar really lies!”

Elsewhere, Su Mo might choose to conceal his talents and avoid showing off. But within the Academy of Sciences, this cradle of talent that he himself had founded, Su Mo knew only one thing: rewards depended only on performance. The stronger you were, the easier it was to earn others’ respect!

Boom!

With a single swing, the weight jumped two hundred times in one go, and the iron plates adding the weight suddenly hit their physical expansion limit and began to multiply. Then a second iron plate crashed down onto the first layer. In the void, a pale yellow list bathed in golden light descended from the sky and crashed heavily onto the ground.

It was white paper with crane motifs and gold lettering. The list was densely packed from top to bottom with hundreds of different names, along with the records they held. With just a glance, Su Mo found dozens of familiar names, as well as some rather astonishing extreme values.

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