3: Chapter 3 Explorers' Forum

"Number Two, Number Two, wake up."

"This guy, how can he sleep so soundly?"

"The entire ceremony, he slept through the whole thing. He really can sleep."

"Number Two, Number Two, wake up quickly."

...

Wang Shuo opened his eyes groggily to see Zheng Jun, Li Li, and Chen Cheng standing in front of him, and the opening ceremony seemed to have already ended, with most of the people in the auditorium having left.

"Did I fall asleep?" Wang Shuo was bewildered.

"More than just fell asleep, you slept like a pig," Chen Cheng said. "It was a two-and-a-half-hour ceremony, and you slept through the whole thing. You really can sleep!"

"We've been calling you for quite a while," Li Li added, pushing up his glasses.

"Maybe he was just overtired yesterday." Zheng Jun, with an 'I understand you' look and a face full of ambiguous smiles, nudged Wang Shuo. "Let's go."

"Go where?" Wang Shuo didn't seem to have fully reacted yet.

"Of course, to continue celebrating! The time at noon was so short, we couldn't even eat properly, how could we have had enough!" Chen Cheng said with a look of insatiable desire. "I'll take you to the most famous snack street in W City; Shunxiangju, Fuqinghe, and Xiaotaoyuan are all top-notch, guaranteed to satisfy you."

Wang Shuo looked at Zheng Jun, who was practically drooling.

"You guys go ahead, I want to go back to the dormitory first."

"You're really not going?" Zheng Jun said with dissatisfaction. "This is our first group activity."

Wang Shuo shook his head. He felt dizzy and heavy-headed, just like he had been playing games all night for three days and three nights without sleep.

"Alright then, you go back to the dormitory first, and we'll bring you something to eat when we get back." After confirming a few times, the three brothers saw that Wang Shuo wasn't in good spirits and didn't force him anymore.

Wang Shuo jogged all the way 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 at all; instead, he felt more and more energized.

"That's really strange."

Wang Shuo stared wide-eyed at the ceiling, thinking about all the strange things that had happened today.

After thinking for a long time without finding a clue, Wang Shuo simply rolled off the bed, took out his laptop that he had brought to school, plugged in the network cable, and turned it on.

He skillfully entered the campus network password, and after seeing the network connection status in the bottom right corner show as successfully connected, Wang Shuo deftly opened the web browser and entered a string of addresses in the address bar.

The page opened; it was a very ordinary text page, nothing special.

Wang Shuo didn't even look at the page. He brought up the web page's source code, entered a string of code, and hit run. The page redirected again, this time displaying a login page for an account and password.

Wang Shuo quickly entered his account and password.

The page redirected again.

This time, the top of the page had large black letters written: "Explorer Forum".

The Explorer Forum was a bounty forum that Wang Shuo had discovered by chance when he was fifteen.

It existed on the dark web and required passing some small tests to enter. Wang Shuo, whose hacking skills were only barely up to standard, had a lot of luck in being able to enter this forum.

At that time, the founder of the Explorer Forum did not strictly limit the entry conditions; otherwise, with Wang Shuo's amateur hacking skills at the time, it would have been impossible to enter this forum.

And having entered the forum, at the age of fifteen, Wang Shuo had already come into contact with a world he didn't understand.

The Explorer Forum was as simple as it was straightforward; it contained various technical sharing posts. Whatever you could think of, whether it was mature technology or just something existing in theory, or even just a rough concept, you could find it there. You could share your technology or share your questions. 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 problems, there were very simple ones, such as asking how to use programming languages or how to solve small problems encountered in daily life; these questions were usually answered. There were also some theoretical questions, such as how to increase energy density to manufacture more useful energy batteries, or how to control molecular movement to make it manageable. Of course, there were also some ready-made concepts that were almost impossible to achieve with current human understanding, such as feasible plans for anti-gravity thrusters.

With Wang Shuo's knowledge base, problems like manufacturing higher energy density batteries were almost like reading a book from heaven; he couldn't understand them at all, let alone the concepts beyond that.

Therefore, Wang Shuo entered this forum just to broaden his horizons and see the ideas of various experts; he never even posted.

Over time, Wang Shuo discovered that the Explorer Forum was also very complex. Everyone in the Explorer Forum was anonymous, but one could figure out with their toes that the people who proposed the feasibility theories couldn't be beggars in reality; they were all technology fanatics or tech tycoons.

Wang Shuo quietly browsed the posts; today there didn't seem to be any significant sharing posts.

Recently, Wang Shuo noticed that the number of posts sharing technology on the Explorer Forum was getting fewer and fewer, almost approaching zero, while the number of help-seeking posts was increasing.

In the Explorer Forum, every time a problem was solved, the thread starter would pay a reward. Depending on the difficulty of the problem, different levels of rewards would be paid, and these rewards could be converted into currency.

Although they were valuable and Wang Shuo was tempted, Wang Shuo knew that he didn't have the ability to solve these problems, so he just watched quietly.

And in the Explorer Forum, there was another setting that made Wang Shuo angry: viewing others' answers required paying forum points. Besides the 100 forum points given when he first entered the forum, Wang Shuo had no extra forum points, which meant that most of the time he could only look at the questions and fantasize about his own solutions. As for whether they were right or not, only heaven knew.

Forum points could be converted into currency, and currency could of course be converted into forum points, but the price of one forum point... anyway, Wang Shuo couldn't afford it; it was almost pegged to the value of Bitcoin. Wang Shuo knew about Bitcoin, but he didn't have a mine at home, so it was better to just watch.

Looking at the number of forum points he still had, 20, in the upper right corner, Wang Shuo felt very unhappy. He casually selected a question post and clicked into it.

The nickname of the person seeking help in this post was "Heaven Nameless". Wang Shuo read it out loud unconsciously: "May I ask how to solve the problem of basic material overheating?"

No premises, no conditions, just such a question; it seemed very nonsensical.

Material overheating? What kind of material? Where is it used? How is it used? What is the overheating threshold? None of this was known, just this one sentence.

Wang Shuo smiled and looked below the post; there were three answers. He tried clicking on one, and the system prompted that viewing each answer required consuming one forum point.

Wang Shuo clicked confirm.

"The basis of the material determines its stress and applicable environmental limits; in this situation, you can only use ceramic materials with higher heat resistance or other composite materials. Currently, there are several advanced heat-resistant materials worldwide, and the thread starter can selectively handle..."

"This answer can only be considered mediocre. Anyone could think of that, and knows to switch to better heat-resistant materials. The key is how to manufacture this kind of heat-resistant material. I have at least seven ways to solve this problem..." Wang Shuo muttered to himself.

Suddenly, Wang Shuo froze. In that instant, Wang Shuo actually felt that he had the ability to solve this problem, and there were as many as seven ways to solve it.

What was going on?

Was he still not fully awake?

Wang Shuo tried reading the thread starter's question again. This time, the things in his mind were clearer, and he felt clearly and distinctly that his solutions were nine times out of ten correct.

Wang Shuo looked at the computer screen, gritted his teeth, and typed in the reply section: "The question raised by the thread starter is very unclear, so I cannot be entirely sure how to solve it, but I can provide several solutions for the thread starter to choose from according to the actual situation: The first one..."