Chapter 57: Ambers of the Long Night (13)
[Good grief, so all those messy academic jargon the big boss posted before was for this day! I thought he was just fooling around!]
[Suddenly it all makes sense +1. So when the streamer was flipping through research papers at home, the big boss had already planned how to boost his level?]
[Emmmm, big boss, you love him too much!]
[For real, everyone — in this world, scientists have a higher weighting than other professions, and he can even copy answers directly. It’s definitely the most efficient upgrade route for the streamer.]
[And considering the streamer doesn’t have an official local identity here, if he only submitted one paper, it might not even get published. Doing hands-on “adjustments” at an academic conference like this is way smarter — it’s easier to fix someone else’s paper than start from scratch.]
[Easier? You’re kidding, right? Do you realize how insane it is to correct papers across multiple disciplines? I’ve got goosebumps, okay? Just how knowledgeable is this “big boss”?]
[So we can basically confirm that Tang Mobai’s “Great Demon” must be from the tech side, right? Now that the stream isn’t public, can we narrow down who it might be?]
[That’s tricky. Not every Great Demon likes livestreaming. Unless it’s to show off at certain moments — most of them couldn’t care less about earning a few points that way.]
[But I have one question — the streamer’s just copying the boss’s answers, right? What happens if someone asks questions? Is the big boss gonna spoon-feed him line by line?]
[No way the boss is that free, come on. My god, I’m so jealous I could scream.]
[Same. I’m so jealous I might literally awaken the “Path of Envy.”]
As the barrage of comments filled with envy rolled by, the chat could only watch Tang Mobai running around the conference floor, enviously amazed by the invisible display of affection between him and his mysterious Ment.
The expert team had carefully selected their targets: some were theories already proven sound in their own world and easy to extend here; others contained glaring mistakes or flawed logic that could be swiftly corrected — those served as evidence of Tang Mobai’s “genius.” The first kind was meant to “bait the hook,” the second to prove worth to the Super Intelligence Bureau. Now, the only question was — how many fish would bite?
Just then, Seth sent a timely reminder: “The lecture’s over — people are coming back.”
“Got it. We’re leaving, Seth.”
Meanwhile, across the hall, a man named Dodge scowled at his notebook, crossing out line after line of formulas. Failure. Failure. And still failure. No matter what he tried, he couldn’t find a way to solve his current problem. He’d even attended a cutting-edge physics lecture for inspiration — it was novel, yes, but the spark it gave him fizzled out as quickly as it appeared.
He had hoped the conference would help him find an answer. Now it looked like another wasted trip. He sighed, ready to head back to his lab, still mulling over the issue of orbital control systems. Lost in thought, he didn’t notice anything amiss until someone bumped his shoulder, snapping him out of his trance.
Something was off. Crowds had gathered around several exhibition booths, pointing at whiteboards and screens.
“You too?”
“Yeah, it was like this when I got back.”
“Mine’s been drawn on too.”
“Is this a prank? Who’s so childish?”
“No idea. What’s the security doing — how’d they let someone like this in?”
“So annoying! Who the hell doodles all over other people’s work like that?!”
Several booth owners complained loudly, angrily scrubbing their boards. Sure, the conference encouraged open academic discussion — but not random strangers editing your work without permission! And this wasn’t an isolated case — more than a dozen whiteboards had been marked, all in bright red pen, apparently by the same hand. It was blatant provocation!
The onlookers were just as convinced — this had to be a prank. Until one man, staring intently at a whiteboard, suddenly muttered: “Wait… I get it now. Your equation’s wrong.”
“Huh?” the booth owner snapped, irritated. “What do you mean, wrong? That’s impossible.”
“No, right here — you shouldn’t get x = p/2, it should be x = p/1. That’s why your equation breaks down later.” The man’s eyes gleamed as he ran the numbers mentally. “Don’t believe me? Try substituting it back in yourself.”
The booth owner hesitated, stopped wiping, and pulled up his AI computation tool.
A few minutes later —
“…You’re right.” His voice trembled with excitement. “That means my theory works!”
“The person who made that correction saw the flaw — it wasn’t random graffiti.” The man who had first spoken now looked intrigued. He raised his voice: “Did anyone else’s boards get edited? Let me see them!”
The crowd, realizing this “prank” might actually be genius, buzzed with excitement. One by one, they started examining the other “defaced” boards — and the more they looked, the more they realized those red corrections made sense. At worst, they were plausible. At best, they were brilliant.
This was no prank. This was the work of a polymath — someone capable of “grading” everyone’s work across disciplines. The red markings, the corrections — it was like being back in school, homework handed in and marked by a teacher’s red pen. Most of these scholars hadn’t been “graded” in decades. Now, standing at the world’s top academic conference, they found themselves with that feeling again.
At that moment, Dodge suddenly remembered something. He sprinted back to his booth. “Eddie! Did you see—?”
His friend pointed silently at his board. Dodge’s gaze followed — and froze. His own poster had been altered too. But instead of anger, he felt only burning curiosity. His eyes devoured every line of the red markings, desperate to absorb it all.
“The Chebyshev pseudospectral method discretizes the original dynamic differential equations, based on the principle of… redistributing CGL nodes clustered near the interval boundaries…”
Of course! That could solve the inefficiency in trajectory planning algorithms — the complexity of derivation and low computational speed! It was brilliant — but… it stopped halfway?
Dodge’s heart sank. It was like reading a novel that cut off right at the climax. He could feel the insight forming, could almost glimpse the solution he’d been chasing for weeks — but it ended right there!
Who stops writing mid-formula?!
Around him, other researchers were shouting similar things:
“Did anyone see who did this? I have so many questions!”
“Yeah! Did anyone catch a glimpse? I’ll pay handsomely for any clue!”
Clearly, Dodge wasn’t alone. But no one had seen the mysterious “grader.”
Someone finally spoke up hesitantly: “I think… I saw two figures around here earlier. Both pretty young… one of them kinda looked like a robot.”
“A robot…?”
That distinctive clue caught Dodge’s attention. He hesitated, torn between staying and searching. Maybe the person would come back. Maybe they’d just gone to listen to a lecture.
That was what many others thought too. This wasn’t vandalism — it was genius. And now, every scholar in the area wanted to meet the mysterious red-marked “teacher.”
“Go,” said Eddie calmly, clapping Dodge’s shoulder. “If he comes back, I’ll let you know.”
“Thanks. Dinner’s on me later.”
Dodge didn’t waste time. He ran off to find staff, asking if any visiting scholars matched the “robot” description. He wasn’t the only one — several others from different fields began doing the same. Some wanted to argue, some wanted to meet the rumored prodigy, others simply couldn’t rest until they’d found answers.
That relentless curiosity — the kind that refuses to stop until a mystery is solved — was, after all, what had brought them all this far in the first place.
And as time passed, the story of this strange “red mark phenomenon” began to spread — first among scholars, then beyond the conference, rippling outward to the highest circles of power.
Thank you for reading 🙂 I hope you all liked my translations. If you enjoyed my work, please consider buying me a Ko-Fi 😉
