Exploring Technology in a Wizard World
Chapter 533 - 531: Richard’s Beastliness and Metal Molybdenum

Chapter 533: Chapter 531: Richard’s Beastliness and Metal Molybdenum

Narlyd had left.

Her arrival was sudden, her departure crisp, with no dragging of feet. However, before she left, she repeatedly told Richard that she would honor her three-year promise, and would definitely come back to marry him after three years.

Marry...

Richard simply laughed it off.

For him, there were many matters to attend to, with no time or interest to devote to such playful and trivial matters. Meeting Narlyd was just a minor episode in his mundane life. Seeing her body rise from the bath was merely a fleeting moment of marvel, never to be seriously indulged in.

Of course, this wasn’t to say he lacked desires, as if he were a robot. In fact, his mind was perfectly normal, possessing emotions, desires, lethargy, and passion like any other human.

But he chose to let rationality dominate it all; thus, he would always suppress his emotions, desires, passions, and so forth.

Everything he did was for one purpose—to resolve the biggest doubt in his heart.

It could be said that from the moment he descended into this world, he had only this one purpose. Apart from that, everything else was a trifle.

This was not good, this was very not good.

He was well aware that this was not good.

But what could be done?

Not every book was a fairytale, and not every world was a world of fairytales. Some worlds were cruel, dangerous, and the cruelest, most dangerous world was called—reality.

The current Wizard World was such a real world, with no perfect way of life available; he had no miraculous means to reverse what was ordained by fate. If he wanted something, he had to pay the price, otherwise, life would just drift by aimlessly.

Leading an aimless life wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; many chose to live humbly and contentedly, accepting whatever came their way. Being ordinary might be common, but it had its own benefits.

If he chose, he could live quite comfortably: in the Blue Lion Kingdom, he had the capability to control the overall situation, to be a wise and conservative king, hunting occasionally, teasing maids, and sometimes using modern Earth knowledge to dupe the ignorant, enjoying the sensation of being worshipped and feared. How splendid!

However, he didn’t want to do that.

From the first day of his inexplicable arrival in this world, he was filled with doubts about the logic, authenticity, and scientific nature of this world.

The one thing he wanted to do was to figure out what was really going on.

Under the same circumstances, perhaps many wouldn’t choose as he did, because he clearly chose the hardest, most tedious, and most meaningless path. But he wouldn’t regret it, because he was just being himself.

And to one day achieve his goal, he sacrificed a lot and lost a lot, such as most of his humanity—hence he would suppress many of the emotions and desires common to humans.

There’s a saying: to lose humanity is to lose much, to lose the animal instinct is to lose everything.

"Humanity" refers to the finer things, and the more he discarded, the more of these finer things he lost, of which he was acutely aware. And he did so to preserve his last shred of animal instinct.

This animal instinct wasn’t about the bloodthirstiness, madness, or wildness of a beast; it was an absolute pursuit of a specific goal, a discarding of everything, devoid of any emotion, purely rational means.

In fact, this kind of animal instinct was what lay deepest within humans, the reason they could become the dominant species on the planet.

Humans climbed to the pinnacle of the food chain from being Upright Apes, not because of civilization—bowing politely wouldn’t make beasts retreat—but because of savagery—human animal instinct was more ferocious and brutal than all other beasts combined. To survive, they learned to set traps, cooperate, use fire, make weapons, and they used these tools mercilessly to eradicate any threats to their survival. As such, wherever the habitats of primitive humans expanded, the large animals in those areas disappeared, leading to their eventual extinction.

This was how humanity had evolved step by step.

To sum it up in one phrase: only by sparing no expense could success be possibly achieved.

Therefore, Richard, to succeed, spared no expense.

This was his animal instinct.

Of course, all actions ultimately had to be grounded in reality.

Even the greatest of goals had to be achieved through handling smaller tasks one by one.

For Richard at the moment, if he wanted to achieve his ultimate goal, he needed to clarify the world’s history and decode the wizard power system.

To clarify the world’s history, he had to solve the ultimate secret of the Black Spirit King; to decode the wizard power system, he had to complete his current research on magic materials.

Everything had to be done slowly.

Even the most ambitious goals ultimately boiled down to mundane life and seemingly meaningless effort.

Richard was currently engaged in that tedious effort.

Several days after Narlyd left.

Inside Eden, in the Mechanical Processing Sector, the laboratory.

Eden had been almost fully reconstructed, and the molybdenite that Narlyd had brought back had been melted by Richard to produce a needed metal—molybdenum.

Molybdenum!

Molybdenum (Molybdenum), with atomic number 42 on the periodic table of elements on Earth, chemical symbol Mo, is a transition metal. Due to its lead-gray appearance on the exterior of the ore, it was confused with lead ore until the eighteenth century. It was not identified by the chemist Scheler until 1778 and was successfully extracted by Peter Jacob Hjelm in 1781.

When combined with other metals, the resulting alloy possesses many outstanding characteristics:

For instance, adding molybdenum to stainless steel greatly improves the corrosion resistance of steel; adding molybdenum to alloy steel can enhance the elastic limit; adding molybdenum to iron significantly increases the strength of the metal; and in nickel-based superalloys, adding molybdenum achieves effects such as a high melting point, low density, and small thermal expansion coefficient, which are used to manufacture various high-temperature parts for aviation and aerospace.

Of course, the main reason Richard chose molybdenum for his research on magic materials is due to its role in electronic devices.

Metal molybdenum has many incredible effects in electronic devices such as electron tubes, transistors, and rectifiers. For example, Earth utilizes molybdenum disulfide to manufacture molybdenum-based flexible microprocessing chips. These chips, compared to equivalent silicon-based chips, are only 20% the size and consume very low power, with standby power consumption one hundred thousandth of that of silicon transistors.

Moreover, circuits based on molybdenum are extremely thin—silicon is three-dimensional, while single-layer molybdenite is two-dimensional. Using technological means, circuits can be manufactured thinner than a sheet of paper, even reaching sub-nanometer levels.

Circuits based on molybdenum also have unique mechanical properties. They can be used to manufacture special thin-layer chips with elasticity that can be used in rollable computers or wearable electronic devices on the skin and can even be implanted into the human body.

In summary, molybdenum can be used to create miraculous circuits.

And to revert to an idea Richard had long ago, a hypothesis: the magic runes of the current world are equivalent to Earth’s circuits, only instead of electricity, mana or free energy elements flow through them.

What then, if molybdenum was experimentally used on alloy 237?

In the laboratory, a fist-sized square metal block had already been manufactured by Richard. Due to the addition of various metals including molybdenum, the color of the alloy was no longer the silver-white of previous alloy 237 but now looked somewhat darkened.

Richard now placed the metal block on the processing table, controlling the steady mechanical arm, using the mechanical arm’s end equipped with two unused Space Iron Rings, to etch on the surface of the metal block. Ultimately, he etched out highly precise magic runes to store free energy elements and merge them with the alloy.

"Shasha shasha..."

The laboratory was incredibly quiet, only the faint sound of the Space Iron Rings sliding over the surface of the metal block could be heard.

Outside the laboratory.

Pandora sat on her exclusive little wooden stool, chewing on a quill, looking at the mathematical problems on the papyrus scroll.

A simple linear equation had been solved by her to the last step—"7X=21."

Pandora frowned slightly, counting on her fingers seriously for a long time, then with the quill, she carefully wrote out the answer—"X=3." Then, she looked at the next problem.

After a while, Pandora suddenly felt something was off, glanced at her answer a few times, unceremoniously scratched it out with her quill, then wrote "X=4," nodding her head with satisfaction.

That was more like it.