After Turning into a Girl, I Gained a Game Panel

Chapter 200. Review

The second floor of the Mage Tower was the paper submission area for mages. After the Northern Society fully integrated the Mana Communication System, every mage had to submit their paper here first so the system could scan and upload it.

Carrying her handwritten draft, Fulan walked up to the submission window and handed it over.

“There is only one author on this paper, correct?”

After glancing at it, the staff member inside curiously pointed at the name written on it and asked the question.

“Yes, just one,” Fulan confirmed.

In other places, it was perfectly common for a mage to submit a paper under a single name. But in the Northern Society, that was somewhat unusual.

That was because, after being absorbed into the Northern Society, its residents would receive dedicated instruction from specific mages.

When a newly advanced mage completed a research result, most of the time it was done under the guidance of another mentor.

So that mage’s paper would usually include their mentor’s name as well, sometimes first, sometimes second, depending on the circumstances.

Moreover, the Northern Society was currently very enthusiastic about exchanges between different schools, believing that such collaboration could uncover new things.

As a result, papers were often submitted under several names together.

So a paper completed by a single author like this was somewhat rare, though not unheard of. The staff member merely gave her a reminder and nothing more.

“All right. Fill out this form, then come back here in three days to check the result.”

As for why the Mana Communication System existed, yet the review process was not simply placed onto it as well, that was due to the system’s limitations.

Unlike the rapidly developing internet from Fulan’s previous life, the Mana Communication System here had been invented for less than thirty years, even at the most generous estimate.

Although it was highly convenient, many functions required by large societies still could not be added to it.

For example, the function of reviewing temporary drafts was very difficult to implement on it.

According to its creator, because mana was constantly being transmitted through the air at all times, reviewed draft materials might directly appear on the normal system.

In other words, papers still awaiting review might show up on the system where mages browsed papers before they had actually been approved.

Of course, the creator had proposed another solution as well: use two separate systems, with one dedicated solely to review.

And in order to prevent mana from crossing between them, the two systems had to be at least ten kilometers apart to ensure stable operation.

Whether the creator truly could not solve the problem, or simply wanted to sell two systems at once, no one was willing to accept that deal. Even now, not a single society was willing to buy two full systems.

Part of that also lay in the defects of the Mana Communication System itself. Tests had shown that there was a limit to how many words could be uploaded into the system each day. Once that limit was exceeded, it would damage the mana itself.

For some large societies, that was completely unacceptable. They had to upload a great number of papers every day. If they had to queue up every single time, how could that possibly work?

That was also why the Mana Communication System had still not been widely rolled out. This time, however, the flaw truly did seem to be with the Mana Communication System itself.

The Northern Society’s scale was still manageable. The number of papers uploaded each day was just within the limit. But with large numbers of mages now pouring into the Northern Society, perhaps one day this system would no longer be enough.

The staff member set down the papers Fulan had brought in the pending review area, worriedly thinking about that possibility.

---

Alaric was one of the Northern Society’s reviewers. He had already worked in this reviewing position for ten years.

Overall, it was still quite an easy post, because the Northern Society did not have many mages, and the number of papers submitted each year was limited.

Moreover, when he reviewed papers, his focus was never primarily on the content itself. He was only doing a simple screening.

The true gatekeeping of content was the job of those mages responsible for launching the featured sections.

In his view, as long as a paper met the following three points, it could pass review.

First, the entire paper had to contain content related to spells, and it could not merely be some overly outdated spell theory.

Second, its content could not be too similar to work that had already been published.

Third, the paper as a whole could not have problems with its presentation.

Those three points were already very clear and straightforward. One could even say the threshold was a little low.

If an ordinary mage wanted to squeeze a paper into the system, there was really no problem doing so, but it would be meaningless.

First of all, once your paper was published, other people actually had to read it for you to gain Points. At any other time, simply publishing a paper by itself served no purpose.

The first two points were old and familiar requirements. If a mage wanted their paper to be seen by others, those two points were absolutely necessary.

The real issue lay in the third point. Although papers here did not have all sorts of formatting requirements like in Fulan’s previous life, there was still one basic requirement: clearly explain your result.

For example, clickbait was unacceptable. Titles that had no connection, or only a weak connection, to the body of the paper were not allowed. Likewise, if the main text rambled on at length about things unrelated to the actual subject, that too would fail review.

After the paper that had shocked the Alliance was published, papers suffering from the third type of problem had clearly become more common, and all of them came from those mages who had recently arrived at the Northern Society.

Alaric stared lifelessly at the eleven papers piled up before him.

“I cleared this place out last night, so how are there already eleven now?”

In other words, all of these had been submitted here in a single night.

“Why are those mages submitting papers in the middle of the night? Don’t they sleep?” he grumbled a few times. The submission window ran on three shifts, so papers could be handed in at any time.

“Let’s begin.”

...

By the time the morning had passed, Alaric’s mood had gradually turned irritable. He cursed under his breath and muttered,

“Those mages from the Alliance are a bunch of damn idiots. How do they even dare submit garbage like this?”

After spending the whole morning reading trash, Alaric still had to do his job and write comments for every piece of trash, then attach the comments to the papers and send them back.

“Another paper just came in.”

Alaric reached out and took the newly delivered paper, hoping this would be one he would not have to label as garbage.

“‘A Mathematical Analysis of Fireball’...” The moment Alaric saw the title, the stench of garbage rushed straight into his head.

From the title alone, he already had a bad feeling. What era was this, and someone was still researching Fireball?

As one of the oldest spells in existence, Fireball’s spell structure had long since been optimized as far as it could possibly go. This was obviously another piece of “trash.”

But as a reviewer, he could not simply reject a paper the moment he saw its title. That would violate procedure.

So he could only resign himself to looking further down the page, hoping it was a paper with the wrong title.