A Different Approach

The Beautiful Country Science Promotion Association was the world's largest federation of scientific and engineering societies, as well as the largest nonprofit international science and technology organization. It had over two hundred branches and tens of millions of members.

The Science Promotion Association's annual meeting was also one of the world's premier gatherings for the scientific community. In addition, the renowned journal "Science" was now organized and published by the Science Promotion Association.

Backed by such a colossal organization, it naturally had experts from every field available to review submissions. However, since peer review also depended on their schedules, the review process was usually not short.

Moreover, to prevent all sorts of bizarre manuscripts from wasting the experts' time, submissions had to pass through several procedures before being sent to peer reviewers.

First, preliminary review staff checked a paper's formatting, layout, and plagiarism rate. Once those passed inspection, editorial assistants checked whether the submission was complete and so on. Only after a journal editor had read the paper and deemed it suitable would it be sent to peer reviewers, minimizing the number of unsuitable manuscripts that reached them.

Even the preliminary review staff responsible for the first step had developed a broad base of knowledge through constant exposure over the years. Still, their daily work was rather mechanical and tedious.

Many submissions came from students trying their luck and casually sending in whatever they had written.

Students were not too bad, at least. Anything they sent in generally met the basic requirements for formatting and layout.

But there was another type of person known as Folk Scientists, and they gave the staff headaches.

They often came across utterly horrifying titles.

The more one knew, the more reverence one had for knowledge. Yet when faced with Folk Scientists who could exceed the speed of light with one hand, create a Perpetual Motion Machine with the other, and prove the Goldbach Conjecture every so often, even the preliminary review staff felt powerless.

Sometimes, after being rejected, those people would even send emails cursing them out.

In the editorial office, Hoff opened his work email and began the day's preliminary reviews after brewing himself a coffee for what he expected to be a pleasant day. Having held this position for three years, he was highly experienced.

For many manuscripts, he could tell whether to reject them just by glancing at the title.

"Oh God, the Goldbach Conjecture has been proven again."

After seeing a terrifying title, Hoff could not help raising a hand to his head. But out of professional duty, he still glanced at the corresponding author.

Good. As expected, he had never heard of the person. They were from China.

Remembering the machine-translated paper about a Perpetual Motion Machine he had seen last time, his scalp began tingling again.

"Who sent it?"

The colleague beside him was no longer surprised by this sort of thing. They occasionally used such remarks to tease new hires, but there were no newcomers here now.

The question was also an instinctive part of the job. If it had been submitted by some major figure, then this truly would have been a bombshell.

"WANGYI, Chinese."

"Really? I've never heard of a Master Yi."

Since it was an English-language journal, even submissions from China generally listed names according to Western conventions. But Wang Yi had always been entirely pragmatic and had never considered such matters. Even if he had known, he probably would not have cared.

So he had simply become Master Yi here.

"Rejected?"

"Rejected. The work affiliation wasn't filled in properly either."

"Sigh, we've been receiving more and more useless manuscripts from over there lately."

"That's normal. They have such a huge population. If the language barrier hadn't filtered out most of them, there would probably be even more submissions. The recent increase is because machine translation has become more common."

Hoff sighed helplessly. The workload for this position was only getting heavier.

"Still, there are capable Chinese scholars. I remember Tao proved last year, without relying on the Riemann Hypothesis, that every odd number could be expressed as the sum of at most five primes. That filled in another piece of the puzzle."

"Right, but he already won the Fields Medal two editions ago."

"The Fields Medal... Last month, that Harold from France also seemed to publish a paper related to the Weak Goldbach Conjecture."

"After all, it's a century-old problem..."

As the two chatted away, they casually swept Wang Yi's submission into the recycle bin...

Elsewhere, Wang Yi rubbed his forehead and roughly understood where the problem lay.

The near-instant rejection meant that it had never reached any professionals. Mathematics did not lie. If they could not understand it, they simply could not understand it.

The preliminary review must have rejected it for some other reason. His identity, perhaps?

At this point, Wang Yi could certainly have asked his Alma Mater for help, found some prominent scholar to sign on as corresponding author, and gotten all the way to the professional review stage.

But clearly, he had no intention of doing that.

His original purpose in publishing the paper was to let the academic world get to know him—to offer a greeting in advance. That way, when he later published some strange things, they would join him in researching and discussing them, letting their ideas collide and spark inspiration.

Now that his legitimate submission had been rejected, he naturally took a different approach.

It was just a greeting, after all. They could get acquainted another way...

He then found a proxy and connected to Mote.

Although Mote had not yet reached its future height of popularity, its monthly active users had officially surpassed two hundred million. Moreover, in this parallel world, its comment function—which would originally only have been launched a couple of years later—had been introduced ahead of schedule.

(At first, Mote only allowed users to add their own thoughts when reposting. The comment function was not launched until 2015, but similar adjustments would be made for the sake of the plot. There would be no further special explanations, so please do not argue with me. It is a parallel world~)

At this time, Xiaohongshu actually had five times as many active users as Mote and even greater influence overall.

He was not going to post anything sensitive anyway, so he was not worried.

Well, despite saying he would not post sensitive topics, after completing his registration and casually setting a Jax avatar, Wang Yi immediately wrote a title: "Does this indicate that the journal 'Science' is involved in racial discrimination?"

Only then did he lay out the events in detail, attach a screenshot showing the time of his instant rejection, and finally upload the entire proof step by step in separate sections.

The point he emphasized was that his proof was so long that they had definitely rejected it instantly without even reading it.

There was no use going on and on about the difficulty and significance of the Goldbach Conjecture or rambling about mathematics on Mote. Who went online to look at math?

So it was better to choose a topic involving Political Correctness. The proof was attached afterward anyway. If any experts capable of understanding it saw it, they would naturally explain it for him.

Perhaps later, when he needed help with some strange problems, he could post them directly on Mote and crowdsource ideas.

After doing all that, Wang Yi did not care how much of a stir it would cause and simply disconnected from the proxy.

He only needed to achieve his goal. He would not deliberately waste time dealing with those comments.

Instead, he turned around and began looking up relevant information that would be useful to him.

"Silver is pretty expensive."

After looking through information related to silver, Wang Yi muttered to himself.

Under the impact of the European Debt Crisis two years ago, silver prices had climbed to a thirty-year peak. Although prices had now begun to decline somewhat as China's silver output continued to surge, creating a certain degree of overcapacity.

And although demand for silver in manufacturing had also begun to decline slightly, prices still remained high. One ounce cost over forty US Dollars, or roughly ten yuan per gram.

Silver was an excellent Magical Metal and could also be processed into Mithril. With natural magic power being so sluggish, Wang Yi also needed to consider building himself a Mage Tower from high-quality materials.

Build a perfect Mage Tower, expand his own influence to make money, gather the world's resources and talent to pursue the Truth of magic and technology—this was the new goal Wang Yi had set for himself.

Naturally, the more silver he could obtain for building a Mage Tower, the better. Ten yuan per gram did not sound expensive, but that was per gram. Like those overpriced rice cakes, the price became a real headache once there was a huge lump of it.

How much did an ordinary bracelet even weigh? Industrial use was not particularly high either. Yet what Wang Yi needed was enough to build a Mage Tower. If possible, he would not even mind building it entirely from silver and enchanting it into Mithril.

China was now the largest silver producer, but it also had many uses for it. Stockpiling such a large amount of precious metal was truly troublesome. It was no longer merely a question of money.

A surge in short-term demand would only send prices soaring. Currency itself had its limitations.

After browsing for a while, Wang Yi felt that once he had some free time, he might need to make a trip to Mexico...

Two updates complete~

The review required some edits, so this came out a little late. Sorry about that. I made revisions and reposted it...

If it gets unbanned again, I'll delete a chapter then...