Chapter: 52

The meeting ended, and Mark immediately rushed back to his own laboratory. Although he had been working overnight on a plan, he was very tired physically. But his spirit was still very excited!

Because just now, a fantastic idea popped into his mind. When it comes to "Sword Art Online," anyone even remotely familiar with the world of anime and manga would also associate it with another work by the author, Reki Kawahara, called "Accel World."

In a more distant future within the same universe, virtual reality devices had evolved into terminal devices called "Neuro Linker."

Equipped with quantum communication terminals worn on the head, these devices could connect to global networks and local area networks, allowing quantum-scale wireless communication with brain cells. They could transmit simulated sensory information to the brain and also eliminate various real-world sensations. With the passage of time, they had become ubiquitous, with almost everyone owning one, replacing phones and computers from people's daily lives.

The Neuro Linker not only replaced the virtual reality consoles but also the smartphones and computers that people used in their everyday work, studies, and entertainment in that era.

Even more astonishingly, the Neuro Linker, through an application called "Brain Burst" allowed users to achieve overclocking of their brains in both the real world and virtual reality.

However, there were some limitations to this application. The conditions for its use were that the user had to have been wearing the neural connection terminal since birth. In the "accelerated" state, the user's thinking speed would increase a thousandfold, but due to the program's restrictions, the maximum duration of the "acceleration" was 30 minutes, equivalent to 1.8 seconds in reality.

Of course, Mark's goal was not to immediately produce such a connecting device. Although he possessed all the necessary technological capabilities, such a device would significantly accelerate the overall technological progress of the company's products. This would not only throw him back into the dilemma of product updates and iterations but also cause the company to lose a significant amount of profit.

What Mark wanted to do was to use virtual reality and the application that could overclock the brain to create a virtual laboratory. In the external world, his body could rest and recuperate in a nutritional sleep pod, while in the virtual reality, he could have several times the time compared to reality to conduct virtual experiments and create conditions that were impossible to achieve in the real world. To achieve this, Mark needed to overcome the hardware and software aspects as well as these [the user had to have been wearing the neural connection terminal since birth] and [the maximum duration of the "acceleration" was 30 minutes, equivalent to 1.8 seconds in reality] two limitations.

Compared to dispersing his focus and imagination to construct a virtual mirror in his mind, the virtual reality created through external hardware would allow Mark to devote himself more fully to the experiments.

Thinking about this, Mark completely forgot about his physical fatigue and just wanted to seize the time to implement this idea immediately.

Regarding this idea of a virtual laboratory, Mark already possessed all the necessary technological conditions in terms of hardware. The only thing missing was the application that could accelerate the brain's frequency and adjust the flow of time between the virtual and real worlds.

However, regarding the principles of this application, Mark already had a preliminary concept. Essentially, it involved using the brain-machine interface hardware in the virtual reality console to detect the user's brainwave frequencies. Then, through the application, adjusting the sensory and inhibitory waves released by the hardware to resonate with the user's brain frequency, thus achieving the effect of overclocking the brain.

The brain-machine interface developed by Mark captured the brain's emitted brainwave frequencies, instead of using the quantum communication adopted by the Neuro Linker in "Accel World." This naturally broke the first limitation of the application.

To overcome the second limitation of the application, extending the duration of brain overclocking, it wouldn't be enough to solve the problem solely by improving the technology of the brain-machine interface and the development of the application. It involved the high-speed consumption of energy, nutrients, and oxygen in the body during the process of brain overclocking.

This consumption rate exceeded the limits of the body's storage and supply, to the point where the brain could not receive sufficient support, triggering its own protective mechanism and actively disengaging from the state of resonance and overclocking.

To solve this problem, the first step was to ensure that the brain could receive timely and ample supplies of energy, nutrients, and oxygen. This was where Mark's previous consideration of the nutritional sleep pod for rest and recuperation in the real world came into play.

Mark planned to transform the nutritional sleep pod into something similar to the "Entry plug" (EVA cockpit) in "Neon Genesis Evangelion." Once the user entered the pod, an amber-colored viscous liquid with a bloody scent called "L.C.L." would be injected. Its composition was similar to the primordial soup that life originated from, comparable to the amniotic fluid in the womb of the mothers (although amniotic fluid cannot provide oxygen for breathing). When the liquid was electrified, its molecular composition would change, reconfiguring its composition through the electrical nucleus. It could establish a neural connection between the user and the nutritional sleep pod, and provide oxygen, energy, and nutrients (which meant the L.C.L. contained more than 21% oxygen). Its purpose was to sustain life.

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