Ke Meng waited outside the door for a dozen or so minutes, taking the opportunity to ask Captain Luo about the printer.
"The printer started printing a few days ago. That was also when the trees began disappearing one after another."
Captain Luo explained the library's reopening to Ke Meng. It had reopened later than everyone had expected, so no one had been working inside at the time.
Of the two security guards, the suspicious one had covered his colleague's shift. His colleague had been happy to take the time off and hadn't come to work.
They had therefore worked out how many trees the printer had consumed over seven days: 360 in total.
Ke Meng had done the math in his head last time. This time, he recalculated it using his phone's calculator.
20 × 60 × 24 = 28,800.
Its daily output was 28,800 sheets, and its annual output was ten million.
Someone had crunched the numbers. On a national scale, this printer's consumption wasn't particularly large. It couldn't cause any substantial short-term impact on the country, which could easily accommodate it.
In a city, however, it was a disaster for the trees planted along the streets.
The printer had therefore been transported to a desert. There, it printed for only a short while before shutting down and refusing to print any more.
But as soon as it was moved out of the desert, it would start printing again.
Even the trees in desert oases would disappear because of it. As luck would have it, however, a containment site in the desert held a Special Item that produced landscaping trees every day. Paired with the printer, they formed a perfect, endless cycle-a perpetual motion machine.
As for the side effects of producing trees every day, Captain Luo wasn't