Chapter 39: Wang Hongbin: It's Time to Deploy My Super Intelligence! (Patreon)

Lan Yan froze for a moment, then rolled her eyes and nudged his arm with her elbow, muttering under her breath, "You just want to use that recording to piss him off! When he reincarnates and finds out you've run off with his precious daughter, he'll chase you down three streets with a poison sword."

Gusttave chuckled, his fingertips hooking lightly around her hand where it hung at her side. His tone was shamelessly, infuriatingly frank. "No way. I helped him rescue the person he's pined for over thousands of years. If he doesn't thank me, fine, but slash me? Besides, his daughter's my wife now. Doesn't he have to save a little face for his son-in-law?"

"Who's your wife!" Lan Yan's face flushed red all over again, so hot that even the embroidered shawl of her wedding gown couldn't hide her burning ears. With guests all around, she couldn't make a scene. All she could do was dig her nails hard into his palm and whisper through gritted teeth, "The wedding isn't over yet! Stop talking nonsense!"

The wedding drew to a close amid celebration. The guests dispersed, the red candles burned low, and as for the wedding night itself, naturally nobody dared come to tease the couple. The bride was the Empress of Nanguo, after all. Anyone who tried to crash her bridal chamber would have to be tired of living.

Yaoguang, on the other hand, the so-called "dowry maid," made quite a spectacle of herself after the wedding, and the whole Nanguo palace clicked their tongues in wonder.

Yaoguang couldn't have cared less. She followed behind Lan Yan waving a round silk fan, her peach-blossom eyes full of lazy amusement. Whenever she brushed past Gusttave, she would "accidentally" rub against his arm, or leave a meaningful little laugh in his ear.

Lan Yan flew into a rage over it more than once, but every time, Yaoguang shut her up with "This humble concubine is only doing her duty as a dowry maid."

[Nicole: With that skill level, Lan Yan's no match for her at all.]

[Qingque: LMAO, the main wife is getting played by the dowry maid. The Nanguo Empress's dignity is hanging by a thread.]

Early the next morning, Gusttave walked out of the bridal chamber looking refreshed and energized, just like on the day of the grand wedding.

Yukong, passing by, saw him come out alone and asked casually, "Why are you the only one out here? Where's Lan Yan and the others?"

Gusttave smiled. "Why don't you go in and see for yourself?"

"Tch, what are you playing at." Yukong pursed her lips and pushed open the door to the bridal chamber.

The sight inside stunned her.

Lan Yan and Yaoguang lay unconscious on the bed, their bellies swollen as if they were pregnant.

Yet just yesterday, those bellies had been perfectly flat.

Of course, only Yukong saw this. Everyone else was none the wiser.

Their eyes stayed fixed on Gusttave the whole time.

After the grand wedding, Gusttave didn't linger in the arms of domestic bliss. Instead, he threw himself into work almost at once.

The Way of Great Peace of the present day was badly corrupt, but on the whole it was still progressive.

It had achieved no small results in poverty relief, infrastructure, disaster relief, education, and crackdowns on organized crime and corruption, which was why the common people still tolerated it.

Class conflicts were sharp and resources were unfairly distributed, but the Way of Great Peace hadn't rotted through entirely.

The lower-middle classes were dissatisfied with it. Yet the people at the very bottom all felt gratitude toward the Way of Great Peace. It was the Way of Great Peace that caught them when they fell, so that they weren't utterly culled.

Put those bottom-rung people in the Interastral Peace Corporation or New Eridu, and they'd have been systematically culled long ago. Going to school would be out of the question. Even staying alive would be a luxury.

That meant Gusttave could overthrow the Way of Great Peace if he truly wanted to, but it wouldn't be what the people wanted.

Three paths lay before Gusttave.

The first was to use his own overwhelming strength to topple the Way of Great Peace by force.

The second was to rise to the top through political struggle, then push reform from there.

The third was to raise productivity and widen the gap between rich and poor, so the people would organize themselves.

"Productivity determines the mode of production... The third path is without doubt the feasible one, and the one with the best prospects," Gusttave muttered to himself. "But I'm no genius scientist. Driving the development of an entire era on my own..."

Though Gusttave, as an Ultimate Life Form, had an intelligence far beyond most people's, he knew he wasn't cut out for research.

Back when he'd boosted agricultural productivity, he'd mostly copied from elsewhere.

But now technology had advanced to the level of his previous life. There was nothing left for Gusttave to copy. He could only rely on his own research.

"Let's give it a shot. I'm an Ultimate Life Form now, and with the Scholar Trait on top of that, I should be able to accomplish something."

In the end, Gusttave decided to use his own superintelligence to drive the development of the whole era.

Drawing on his experience, Gusttave began using Nanguo's resources to build his own laboratories and launch his research projects.

From new energy to AI, from materials science to quantum technology, from deep space exploration to life sciences, from information and communications to organic chemistry, all of it fell within Gusttave's field of research.

Once he'd thoroughly digested all the foundational theory with his superintelligence and the Scholar Trait, he began developing a scientific system of his own.

In the northeast of Nanguo's capital, an entire mountain range was flattened by Gusttave and converted into his research institute.

After all, he had far too much to study, and the institute needed to be big enough to hold it all.

Inside the research institute.

Gusttave hunched over the central console, his fingertips moving so fast they left afterimages as they hammered out line after line of code on a virtual keyboard. His other hand gripped a pen, rapidly working out energy-conversion formulas on scratch paper.

At the same time, he split his gaze into three strands, each landing on a different light screen.

One ran a plasma confinement model for controlled nuclear fusion. Another simulated the neural network architecture of an artificial general intelligence. The third dissected the fundamental makeup of spiritual qi in the Fox Spirit Matchmaker world, trying to fuse supernatural energy with the modern physics system.

The Scholar Trait's effect, amplified to the extreme by the cognitive development of an Ultimate Life Form, made theories that had top scholars poring over books until their hair turned white look no harder than a children's picture book.

[Operation Room No. 3: Pressure anomaly in the organic synthesis reactor. Relief valve open. Backup Plan B executing.]

[Materials Lab No. 17: Spirit-energy conductor doping ratio, test 734. Conductivity up 12%, stability within standard. Sample sealed.]

[Life Sciences Lab No. 9: Cellular telomere repair experiment, run 41. Spiritual qi targeted intervention shows significant effect. Recording data.]

Cold mechanical alerts rose and fell one after another in the main control room. Hundreds of highly intelligent puppet robots carried out Gusttave's commands with precision in the various labs, their metal arms rising and falling with nanometer-level accuracy.

The entire institute held only Gusttave. Everything else was puppets he'd built himself, to serve as his assistants.

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