The year of Retention Time passed in a flash. With that enormous sum of Merit Points, buying a year of Retention Time for every core member was nothing more than a drop in the bucket. There was no problem at all. As for non-core members, they could only receive partial subsidies, and most chose one to three months before returning to Prometheus ahead of time.
That year of Retention Time was enough for the legion to accomplish many things. It allowed them to prepare the goods ordered by Shadow Blade and the Emerald Dream Legion, gave the newly promoted S-class Pilots enough time to fully adapt to their improved selves, and let those who wanted rest receive plenty of it.
Most importantly, the two newly established departments—the Research Department and the Basic Science Research Institute—had entered regular operation. The Research Department alone had launched more than a thousand logic research projects and selected nearly three hundred thousand people from all territories to participate. They included not only logicians and programming experts, but people from every profession, using different ways of thinking and different methods to calculate and deduce Prometheus's logic.
The Basic Science Research Institute had also begun normal research operations. Though located in Fleet World, it had been set up on another uninhabited habitable planet as a massive Research Institution. Much of the required research equipment had already been supplied, but the planetary-scale collider had not yet been completed. The scientists did not dare say exactly how useful such a collider would be, but it would certainly be useful and had to be built. A great deal of resources had already been invested in it, and it would probably take another year or two before it could be fully operational.
Leaving aside the legion's own development, the trainees sent