Chapter 299: Research Maniac
Blue veins stood out on the Sea King’s forehead when he saw the letter and signature of the player at the bottom.
Now that the Player Clan had chosen his side, he was supposed to automatically feel delighted about it.
However, the players’ ambiguous attitude made the Sea King feel uncomfortable. He couldn’t put the feeling into words. It was as though he was a beast being chased by a hunter. He spared no effort in running away, yet the hunter smilingly took his time to hold up the gun and looked at his struggles.
Besides, the reason why they offered to help this time was that he had come upon a tiger when he was running away. Seeing that the prey would soon fall into the jaws of the tiger, the hunter could hardly sit still and launched an attack.
Bang!
The Sea King smashed his fist onto the table, his face gloomy as he felt uneasy at even the thought of it.
It was just the same as last time when he was provoked by the force of Langya Island, whereby the players had initiated an attack and threw him an odd look before they left. The same thing occurred now that he was facing the Kuilong Military Alliance.
How could he possibly believe that there was nothing fishy going on?
What exactly were they trying to do!? What are they plotting!?
Glancing around at the surprised looks on the faces of the lords here, the Sea King sank into deep thought.
…
Land of Naraka, Blue Valley Ruins.
A man was hiding in a teetering building that appeared to be in imminent danger of collapsing.
He was down on all fours on the ground. On the floor was a paper that was two yards long and two yards wide, full of all sorts of equations and sketches. The room around him was cluttered with all kinds of mechanical components bought from the shop.
‘Fortress Plan’ was written on top of the huge design draft.
As the man was drawing, he would occasionally lift his head and cast a glance at the Rechargeable Mech placed in the corner, and then put his focus back on designing.
Being the top scientist in the National Defense of the United States, Tesla actually felt disdain in his heart when he first came into contact with these kinds of products that far exceeded the reality of science and technology.
He entered the game solely for the purpose of ascertaining whether this 100% realistic simulation game was really as good as what others had said.
However, Tesla was soon dumbstruck by the game. Not only did the simulated world really achieve 100% reality, but the mech settings here were also marvelous.
After thorough research, he figured that all these mechs took action and battled via the operation of the correspondent power system.
For instance, the most common left-foot jump, in which the power and components of the mech’s left foot would start operating during the jumping, would not bring the kinetic energy of all the other components of the body into operation. This was only one of those ingenious aspects in the game where Tesla found remarkable. It was absolutely not just a whole piece of mold.
Tesla simply disassembled his mech in order to ascertain the cause, but it still left him dumbfounded.
Apart from the mech’s core power system that could not be disassembled, the internal part of the mech was actually made by putting mechanical parts of different sizes together. Every part was fit perfectly together, constituting the exact transfer points of the power system.
What concept is this? If this is just a simple game, they can absolutely use a mech mold and leave the internal part empty. It seemed somewhat unbelievable to him that the mech in the game was, in fact, a complete unit.
Above all, he was well aware that the research on mech technology consumed lots of energy. But this is just a game.
Speculating in this respect, Tesla suspected that the Battle Online Corporation might even be fully capable of building a mech in reality, based on the degree of understanding of the research and development team behind the scenes.
This totally upended Tesla’s worldview. After a momentary shock, Tesla fell into a fit of a frenzy due to his desire to get to the bottom of this world and explore the profound mystery inside the mechs. All in all, everything seemed enigmatical to him.
As such, Tesla set foot on the road to the truth in the game, trying to find the bugs in this simulated world due to his serious behavior.
He was a materialist, in which he believed that bugs definitely exist even if this world felt so real to him.
This is just a game anyway. As long as it’s a game, there will be a bug, and he’s going to find out the bug to verify his perception.
However, the terror of this world had led to Tesla’s despair.
It could be said that there was no place for him to do research at all. Basically he spent his days in torment, repeating between dying and waiting for the respawn to cool down.
In the end, Tesla finally sought help from the National Defense of the United States so that he could properly conduct research, hoping that the army could provide him with safety assurance to conduct scientific research in this world.
The National Defense of the United States was more than willing but lacked the power to fulfill Tesla’s request.
The military base that they were preparing to set up had been destroyed, and their subsequent fortified points were wiped out entirely as well. They were unable to unite their military force, let alone providing protection for Tesla.
Under such circumstances, Tesla only had himself to rely on. He changed his way of thinking and recalled a wildly inventive idea he once had.
Back when he was working for the government, he came out with an idea of an extremely tough secret weapon while he was designing weapons for war.
It was a battle fortress with a body pieced together by multiple pieces of equipment and power sources, an enormous battle mech in normal times, which could turn into a battle fortress occupying ten square yards after transformation. Being able to attack both the air and land, and at the same time intercept attacks with all sorts of missiles equipped, it could be regarded as capable of attacking and defending all in one. It was not at all exaggerating to call it a moving battle robot.
This idea was merely a wild thought he had in his spare time which he never took seriously. For the reason that the engineering workloads required were too wide and it appeared impossible to be executable based on the current technology.
In spite of that, Tesla was once again shaken when he opened the shop in the game, so much so that he was currently wondering whether this was all a dream.
Numerous design drafts, all sorts of latest equipment and the editing function of customizing mech hanging on the right-hand side of the shop.
All these turned Tesla’s once impossible dream into a practical one.
Besides, his personal safety would be out of the question once he owned the moving battle fortress.
Thereupon, the idea that appeared to be extremely insane even for Tesla himself, was formally put into operation.
However, the most important thing was missing before he could start inventing the battle fortress, and that was money!
All the blueprints in the shop were not cheap at all. If he were to utilize his ability to save up soul coins by killing the monsters, most probably it would be impossible for him to do so in his entire life.
As such, in order to buy a massive amount of blueprints and equipment for his research, all he could do was apply for a research grant from the National Defense of the United States.
The money was indeed difficult to be approved. If it wasn’t because of his great value and the fact that he repeatedly played an important role in the weapons development of the United States, there wasn’t the slightest chance for approving this grant.
Even the executive officers were stunned when they knew Tesla was planning to apply for a grant worth over 100 million dollars.
The highest-ranking officer in the military personally gave Tesla a call to inquire about his idea and whether he was designing some kind of secret weapon.
Tesla didn’t have any cunning plot as he devoted himself to doing research. Hence, without hiding anything, he spoke with great confidence about his intention in using all the money to top-up in the game and buy soul coins from the hands of the other players.
The highest-ranking officer was dazed at that time, wondering if he was not fully awake yet.
He knew Tesla very well after all. Tesla was a complete research maniac who wouldn’t even care to sleep or eat when he was fully concentrated in his research.
Nonetheless, Tesla was in fact telling him that he wanted to apply for a multi-million dollar grant to play a video game. This had completely overturned his views in outlooks of the world, life, and values, leaving him thinking that the world might have changed.
Originally it was absolutely impossible for them to approve the grant. However, Tesla threatened them with more than twenty important projects that were in progress, indicating that he would walk out if he couldn’t get the money to top-up the game.
He also expressed that the reason he played the game was for the sole purpose of doing research and thus there was no room for negotiation over the money.
In the face of Tesla’s threat, the mighty National Defense of the United States chose to compromise as Tesla was the very heart of all the important projects. They had no choice but to allocate millions of dollars for Tesla to use in the game.
All in all, they were acquainted with Tesla’s temper, whereby it was impossible to pull him back once he set his mind on something. Threatening did not work well on him either. In fact, he simply joined the National Defense of the United States for the mere reason that they could provide him the huge amount of consumption demand he needed for his research.
At that moment, the executive officers of the National Defense of the United States felt extremely complicated feelings in their hearts.