Got a CCPC (Chinese ICPC) finals HARD question in Google Screening round

Found the question on Codeforces. It was a Div 1 E 🙂 I get it, it’s Google but this level of question in a screening round is atrocious. I have seen people getting asked 2 pointers and here I am with this.

Was able to figure out the approach, and write some code to tie things end to end, but it was too hard to solve in 40 mins.

Anyone else in the same boat as me?