Chapter 174 - 173: Dust

This meant that for this interstellar voyage, Li Qingsong only needed to bring enough deuterium gas. There was no need to carry so much food, nor was there a need to build vast cultivation bases.

Time continued to trickle by. In what felt like the blink of an eye, more than two hundred years had passed.

By now, Li Qingsong’s distance from the Sun had reached about nine light-years.

From this distance, the Sun had lost all of its distinctiveness.

It had truly blended into the endless sea of stars, becoming just another ordinary, somewhat dim, and utterly unremarkable star.

Several more light-years of travel still lay ahead of Li Qingsong.

At this point in their journey, Li Qingsong’s fleet entered a cloud of interstellar dust.

Such interstellar dust clouds are actually quite common in interstellar space, coming in all sizes. It’s just that they are normally completely invisible.

The density of an interstellar dust cloud is higher than that of normal interstellar space, which in turn means a higher frequency of dust impacts.

A single dust impact was negligible, but after enough of them, even the course of a Space-Air Carrier weighing hundreds of millions of tons would be affected, causing it to deviate slightly from its target.

In Interstellar Travel, however, a minuscule deviation could result in being wildly off course.

Had it been the Blutuk People, they would have been forced to maneuver within the nebula to adjust and maintain their heading, preventing a deviation so large they wouldn’t have enough fuel to correct it later.

This was precisely why the Blutuk Fleet had "lit up" that nebula back then, which in turn allowed Li Qingsong to detect them.

For Li Qingsong, however, this particular nebula was of no concern.

’Let the course deviate. I have enough fuel to correct it later. By maintaining silence and not lighting up the nebula, I can more effectively avoid detection by that Intelligent Mechanical Calamity.’

So, Li Qingsong took no action, letting the countless particles from the dust cloud strike his ships, slowly and minutely altering the fleet’s heading.

After traveling through the dust cloud for a full year, covering a distance of about 350 billion kilometers, the fleet finally emerged on the other side.

Ahead, the Oriental Star grew ever brighter.

Looking back, Li Qingsong gazed silently at the nebula he had just traversed. Yet, all he saw was the vast, clear dome of the Cosmos and its myriad stars. He saw nothing else, as if the nebula had never been there at all.

It was so sparse, its density so low, that it was nearly transparent and completely invisible to the naked eye.

Its matter density was even lower than the vacuums people could artificially create in laboratories back in the nation-state era on Earth.

So why was a region with such an incredibly low density of matter still called a nebula?

The reason, of course, was simple: because the density of matter in the surrounding space was even lower.

The matter in interstellar space is just that diffuse.

But as diffuse as it was, it was the progenitor of all stars.

Perhaps someday in the future, influenced by some violent physical process like a Supernova explosion, this very nebula would begin to collapse inward, its density increasing until it finally condensed into a Stellar.

The Solar System itself was born from such a nebula.

That endless dust coalesced into the Sun; it coalesced into major planets like Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars; and it coalesced into countless asteroids, comets, dwarf planets, and so on.

This process continues to play out across the Cosmos to this very day.

When a Stellar ages, the dust composing it is cast out, once again forming a nebula, awaiting the next chance to condense into a macroscopic celestial body.

The countless stars exist in this cycle, repeating endlessly.

By observing this nebula, Li Qingsong’s accumulated knowledge of the Cosmos’s macroscopic evolution deepened significantly.

At the moment, however, Li Qingsong was more concerned with something else.

Leaving aside the nebula’s future fate—whether it might form a new Stellar or even give rise to life—it was causing Li Qingsong a certain amount of trouble in the here and now.

After dispatching numerous Clones and robots to conduct a series of precise inspections on the armor of the vanguard ships, Li Qingsong gave a wry internal smile.

’This nebula has degraded my ships’ armor integrity by at least 10%... I have to repair it. Otherwise, they might not withstand the g-forces during deceleration. The entire ships could just fall apart.’

Motion is relative. With his fleet moving forward at 12,000 kilometers per second, it was equivalent to the dust particles within the cloud striking the ships’ armor at 12,000 kilometers per second.

Under such high-speed impacts, the atomic nuclei and chemical bonds of the particles composing the ship’s armor could be shattered, leading to a series of changes in its properties, and even elemental transmutation.

A hydrogen atom might accidentally capture a proton and turn into helium.

An iron atom might be shattered, turning into a lithium or beryllium atom.

Iron oxide could be broken down into oxygen and iron atoms.

As a result, the once-solid ship armor would become like a moth-eaten plank, riddled with decaying sections, ultimately leading to a reduction in overall integrity.

This sort of degradation had actually been happening constantly even before they entered the nebula. The process was simply slower because the matter density outside the cloud was lower. Now that they were inside it, the process had accelerated.

In just one short year, the armor’s integrity had plummeted.

Li Qingsong thought to himself, ’Perhaps the reason why Electroweak Civilizations—a Level Two civilization—can’t achieve very high fleet speeds isn’t just about energy acquisition and propulsion methods.’

The fleets of Electroweak Civilizations generally don’t exceed 5% of the speed of light.

The Blutuk Fleet’s previous speed was 3% of the speed of light. Li Qingsong’s fleet was slightly faster, but still only at 4%.

Going any faster would require more fuel for acceleration, which could mean not having enough fuel left to decelerate later.

That was certainly one reason, but it now seemed that the extreme degradation of a ship’s armor caused by interstellar dust impacts was an equally important factor.

Impacts at a mere 4% of lightspeed could cause such severe consequences; any faster, and the results would inevitably be far more serious.

One mustn’t forget that at such high speeds, Newtonian mechanics no longer apply; one must factor in relativity. The increase in impact force is not linear with speed, but exponential.

A mere 1% increase in speed could increase the impact’s effect a hundredfold.

Under those conditions, a ship might completely disintegrate after only a short time in flight.

’The Blutuk People said that for a Level Three Strong Core Civilization, fleet speeds can reach as high as seventy or eighty percent of the speed of light. At speeds that high, how do they solve the problem of dust impacts?’

That single fact about fleet speed vividly demonstrated the power of a Strong Core Civilization to Li Qingsong.

Li Qingsong felt more certain than ever that his choice to flee the Solar System had been the right one.

’A civilization that powerful is something I absolutely cannot confront at my current stage.’