"Old Two, Old Two, wake up."
"How can this guy sleep so soundly?"
"He slept through the whole ceremony, really can sleep."
"Old Two, Old Two, wake up quickly."
...
Wang Shuo opened his eyes groggily and saw Zheng Jun, Li Li, and Chen Cheng standing in front of him. The opening ceremony seemed to have ended, and the hall was almost empty.
"Did I fall asleep?" Wang Shuo was confused.
"Not just asleep, you slept like a pig," Chen Cheng said. "You slept through the whole two and a half hour ceremony, really can sleep!"
"We've been calling you for a long time," Li Li pushed up his glasses, adding.
"Maybe I was too tired yesterday." Zheng Jun had a knowing look, his face full of ambiguous smiles, and he pushed Wang Shuo: "Let's go."
"Where to?" Wang Shuo seemed not to have reacted yet.
"Of course, it's to continue celebrating! Such a short time at noon, you can't even eat well, how can you have fun!" Chen Cheng had a dissatisfied look, saying: "I'll take you to the most famous snack street in W City, Shunxiangju, Fuqinghe, and Xiaotaoyuan are all unique, I guarantee you'll be satisfied."
Wang Shuo looked at Zheng Jun, whose saliva was about to drool.
"You guys go, I want to go back to the dormitory first."
"Are you really not going?" Zheng Jun complained, "This is our first group activity."
Wang Shuo shook his head. He felt dizzy and had a headache, just like staying up for three days and three nights playing games without sleep.
"Alright, then you go back to the dormitory first, and we'll bring you some food back." After confirming several times, the three brothers also saw that Wang Shuo was not in good spirits and didn't force him anymore.
Wang Shuo ran back to his dormitory, opened the door, and threw himself onto the bed.
He closed his eyes and lay there for a long time, but found that he couldn't fall asleep, and instead, he became more and more excited.
"It's really strange."
Wang Shuo stared at the ceiling, thinking about the various strange things he encountered today.
After thinking for a long time and still not finding a clue, Wang Shuo decided to get up from the bed, took out the laptop he brought to school, plugged in the internet cable, and turned it on.
He skillfully entered the password for the campus network, and after seeing the network connection status in the lower right corner showing a successful connection, Wang Shuo quickly opened the web browser and entered a string of addresses in the address bar.
The webpage opened, showing a very ordinary text page, nothing special.
Wang Shuo didn't look at the page, pulled up the source code page of the website, entered a string of code, hit run, and the page redirected again. This time, it displayed a page for entering an account and password.
Wang Shuo quickly entered the account and password.
The page redirected again.
This time, the top of the page was written in large black letters: Explorer's Forum.
The Explorer's Forum was a bounty forum that Wang Shuo stumbled upon when he was fifteen years old.
It existed in the dark web and could only be accessed after passing a few small tests. Wang Shuo, whose hacking skills were barely up to standard, had a significant element of luck in entering this forum.
At that time, the founders of the Explorer's Forum did not strictly limit the entry conditions. Otherwise, with Wang Shuo's amateurish hacking skills at the time, he would never have been able to enter this forum.
Upon entering the forum, Wang Shuo, at the age of fifteen, was exposed to a world he did not understand ahead of time.
The Explorer's Forum was simple in a way. It contained various technical sharing posts. Whatever you could think of, whether it was mature technology or something that only existed in theory, or even just a general concept, you could find it there. You could share your technology, or you could share your doubts. You could turn the various problems you encountered into posts on the forum, and there would always be experts who could solve these problems.
Among these issues, some were very simple, such as asking how to use a programming language or how to solve small problems encountered in daily life. These questions would generally receive answers. There were also theoretical issues, such as how to improve energy density to create more useful energy batteries, or how to control molecular motion to make it controllable. Of course, there were also some fully formed concepts that were almost impossible to realize with current human understanding, such as feasible solutions for anti-gravity propellers.
With Wang Shuo's knowledge reserve, issues like creating batteries with higher energy density were almost like reading a foreign language to him; he couldn't understand them, let alone the more advanced concepts.
So, Wang Shuo entered this forum just to broaden his horizons, to see the ideas of various experts. He didn't even speak.
Over time, Wang Shuo found that the Explorer's Forum was also complex. Every person in the Explorer's Forum was anonymous, but it was easy to guess that those who proposed feasible theories were not beggars in reality. They were tech enthusiasts or tech magnates.
Wang Shuo quietly browsed through the posts. It seemed that there were no particularly significant sharing posts today.
Recently, Wang Shuo noticed that the number of technology-sharing posts on the Explorer's Forum was decreasing, almost to the point of being non-existent, while the number of help-seeking posts was increasing.
In the Explorer's Forum, the poster would pay a reward for every problem solved, with the reward varying according to the difficulty of the problem. These rewards could be converted into currency.
Although the rewards were generous and Wang Shuo was tempted, he knew he didn't have the ability to solve these problems, so it was best to just quietly observe.
There was another setting in the Explorer's Forum that made Wang Shuo very angry. That was the requirement to pay forum points to view other people's answers. Besides the 100 forum points given to him when he first joined the forum, Wang Shuo didn't have any extra points. This meant that most of the time, he could only look at the questions and daydream about his own solutions, but whether they were correct or not, only heaven knew.
Forum points could be converted into currency, and currency could, of course, be converted back into forum points. However, the price of one forum point... anyway, Wang Shuo couldn't afford it; it was almost linked to the value of Bitcoin. Wang Shuo knew about Bitcoin, but since he didn't own a mine, it was best to just watch.
Looking at the 20 forum points he had left in the upper right corner, Wang Shuo felt very dissatisfied. He randomly chose a question post and clicked on it.
The nickname of the person seeking help in this post was Tian Wuming. Wang Shuo couldn't help but read aloud, "How do I solve the problem of overheating of basic materials?"
There were no prerequisites, no conditions, just this one question, which seemed very unreasonable.
Material overheating? What material? Where and how is it used? What is the overheating limit? Nothing was known, just this one sentence.
Wang Shuo smiled and looked at the answer, which required consuming one forum point.
Wang Shuo clicked confirm.
"The base of the material determines its stress and the upper limit of its applicable environment. In this case, only ceramic materials or other composite materials with higher heat resistance can be used. The world's advanced heat-resistant materials mainly include the following, and the poster can choose to deal with them selectively..."
"This answer is just so-so, anyone would think of using better heat-resistant materials. The key is how to manufacture such heat-resistant materials, I have at least seven ways to solve this problem..." Wang Shuo muttered to himself.
Suddenly, Wang Shuo was stunned. In that moment, Wang Shuo actually felt that he had the ability to solve this problem, and there were seven ways to do so.
What was going on?
Was he still not awake?
Wang Shuo tried reading the poster's question again, and this time, the ideas in his mind were even clearer. He distinctly felt that his solutions were probably correct.
Wang Shuo looked at the computer screen, bit his teeth, and typed in the reply column: "The problem you raised is very unclear, so I can't be sure how to solve it, but I can provide several solutions for you to choose from according to the actual situation: The first one..."