Chapter 169 168: 30 Years of Raging Winds

Winds of 100 meters per second surpassed the strongest gusts ever recorded in the history of Earth.

Now, over ten thousand of these air purifiers blew day and night, generating gales that no natural force could create, continuously pumping purified air into Earth's atmosphere.

To prevent these violent winds from damaging the environment, Li Qingsong had taken special precautions, such as reinforcing the ground, building wind channels, and carefully selecting lifeless areas like mountain ranges for the purifiers.

Time ticked by. Gradually, the areas blasted by these winds developed a topography distinctly different from the surrounding regions.

Soil was scoured away, rock was shattered, and the surface took on features resembling riverbeds. Near some of the purifiers, even massive mountain peaks crumbled, worn down by the relentless, day-and-night gales.

Li Qingsong never halted the purification process. He assigned enough Clones to work in these facilities, constantly supplying a tremendous amount of electricity, maintaining the equipment to ensure it ran properly, and hauling away the extracted toxic and hazardous materials.

These materials were either buried deep underground, treated chemically, or incinerated at high temperatures—all to render them harmless before they were returned to the natural world.

For anything that proved too difficult to process, he simply had it launched off Earth, given enough initial velocity to be sent plunging directly into the Sun.

The operation of these ten thousand-plus air purifiers even had a significant impact on Earth's entire climate. Li Qingsong observed that the Siberian cold fronts grew stronger than ever, warm, humid air currents penetrated deeper into the continents bringing more abundant rainfall, and so on.

However, these effects weren't particularly significant for the biosphere. Besides, once he completed the purification of Earth and shut down the purifiers, the climate would eventually return to its previous state without that external influence.

While purifying the air, Li Qingsong also diligently employed artificial methods to restore the ecosystem, continuing to sow seeds and release animals.

As the air quality improved, Li Qingsong's efforts finally began to bear fruit.

He saw deserts slowly turn green, bare mountains become covered in vegetation, and birds and wild animals begin to reappear. Everything was teeming with life.

The massive air purification project continued for thirty years.

Thirty years later, after collecting samples from tens of thousands of air quality monitoring stations and confirming that the concentration of toxic and hazardous substances had fallen to acceptable levels, Li Qingsong finally breathed a sigh of relief.

Thirty years of relentless gales had finally breathed new life into Earth's ecosystem.

Viewed from space, Earth had not yet completely regained its former splendor, but it had recovered fifty to sixty percent of its beauty.

Blue skies, white clouds, azure seas, and verdant mountains had returned.

The rest of the recovery no longer required Li Qingsong's intervention; it could be completed by the biosphere's own regenerative capacity alone.

The immense wind tunnels that had been blowing for thirty years could now finally be dismantled.

After he dismantled and destroyed all of his artificial creations on Earth, the planet once again returned to a near-pristine, natural state.

The last batch of Clones piloted their spacecraft, leaving the planet's surface.

Through the Clones' eyes, he took one last, lingering look at Earth. Then the ships ascended rapidly, merging with the main fleet assembling in the Jupiter System.

At that moment, throughout the entire Solar System, every planet that housed industrial facilities and Clones was undergoing a similar process.

All factories and installations were either dismantled and taken, hidden if they couldn't be moved, or simply destroyed if they couldn't be hidden.

Then, Clones boarded their ships. Ship after ship lifted off from planet after planet, converging on the Jupiter System from all corners of the Solar System like countless rivers flowing into the sea.

Viewed from a distance, the vast Jupiter System glittered with a brilliant constellation of stars.

Innumerable shining points of light were packed so densely they filled nearly every corner of the Jupiter System, as if the Galaxy itself had descended upon it.

Those stars were the spaceships Li Qingsong had built over the past thirty years.

All manner of vessels, numbering over thirty million in total.

Yes, not just the roughly 5.7 million ships of Li Qingsong's originally planned migration fleet, but over thirty million.

Of course, besides those 5.7 million vessels, the other twenty million-plus ships couldn't truly be considered real spacecraft.

Inside, they had nothing but engines and fusion reactors. Add a large outer hull, and they looked the part.

They were all fakes.

These ships were cheap and fast to build; Li Qingsong had churned out over twenty million of them in one go.

Now, this grand total of over thirty million ships was divided into six fleets.

One of these was the true migration fleet, fully loaded with the Clones, the Blutuk People, all kinds of resources and supplies, various Warships and other spacecraft, all manner of facilities and equipment, and much more.

The other five fleets, while identical to the real one on the outside, were merely filled with low-value ballast like rock and water ice.

Their only purpose was to make the ships seem heavy, enough to pass for the real thing.

Now, the final phase of construction and cleanup throughout the Solar System was complete.

All the Clones and all the Blutuk People had been brought aboard the migration fleet.

On Ganymede, factories no longer roared through the night, trains no longer sped along their tracks, and large groups of Clones no longer bustled about.

In Jupiter's atmosphere, Jupiter Planes no longer crisscrossed the skies day and night. Silence had finally returned.

Over the past few years, to collect the deuterium gas needed for the migration, Li Qingsong had increased the number of Jupiter Planes twentyfold, with an average of two million of them flying through Jupiter's atmosphere every day.

The sheer number of Jupiter Planes had even significantly raised the atmospheric temperature in that region of Jupiter, intensifying its gaseous convection and triggering more severe weather phenomena.

But with all the Jupiter Planes now scuttled in Jupiter's depths, no longer flying, the temperature there should slowly fall back to normal.

The skies of the Solar System were no longer filled with countless ships crisscrossing day and night.

Every planet had returned to silence.

Gazing at the tens of millions of assorted spacecraft, at the brilliant Sun, at the colossal form of Jupiter, Li Qingsong was overwhelmed with emotion.

A thousand years had passed in the blink of an eye. A millennium ago, he had been left all alone on Ceres.

Now, a thousand years later, he commanded this vast fleet and was about to leave the home that had birthed and raised him, to venture into the perilous Cosmos.

In that moment, Li Qingsong felt helplessness, fear, anger, and uncertainty. But above all else, he felt determination.

'One day, I will return. By then, I will have become so powerful that a mere Strong Core Level Intelligent Mechanical Calamity, or any other enemy, will no longer be able to threaten me.

Let's go... let's go. It's time to leave...'