Chapter 176 - 175: Space Vacuum Cleaner

At Li Qingsong’s command, the hatches of countless Hibernation Pods, sealed for centuries, slowly opened inside the Space-Air Carrier’s Hibernation Room. The equipment in each pod began injecting Awakening Drugs into the slumbering Clones.

Clone after clone opened their eyes, re-establishing their conscious link with Li Qingsong. They then either walked on their own or were assisted by robots to the Recovery Room to begin the recovery process.

Meanwhile, of the roughly one billion Clones who had remained awake, about half made their way to the Space-Air Carrier’s berths and boarded various spacecraft.

The spacecraft, dormant for centuries, finally stirred to life.

Nuclear Fusion Reactors hummed to life, unleashing a torrent of heat and energy. With searing plumes of fire erupting from their engine nozzles, millions of assorted spacecraft departed the main fleet like a swarm of bees, heading for the massive moon nearby.

Long before the fleet had docked, Li Qingsong had dispatched an environmental survey fleet to conduct a comprehensive survey of the Oriental Star System. They assessed the resource reserves and distribution on every major planet, large moon, and dwarf planet, and had already drafted engineering plans in advance.

Now, Li Qingsong could begin the construction process without any delay.

This phase of development would undoubtedly focus on this massive moon, one comparable in size to a major planet. Its immense size meant it had abundant resource reserves.

Furthermore, its proximity to the gas giant—it was, after all, a satellite of this gas giant—meant that fusion fuel could be harvested with great ease.

Now, under the brilliant light of the Oriental Star and watched over by the immense, gray-hued gas giant, this enormous moon—with its thin atmosphere and active geology—finally welcomed its first intelligent, self-aware visitors since its formation.

Hundreds of millions of Clones, billions of intelligent machines, millions of assorted spacecraft, and an endless stream of equipment converged on the planet like a flood.

Under Li Qingsong’s command, with the Divine Craft AI handling the execution, a massive construction effort began in an instant.

And so, a peculiar scene unfolded on the planet’s surface.

In the geologically stable zones Li Qingsong had selected, countless machines moved back and forth. In no time, they had leveled and compacted the surface, shattering mountains and filling in canyons.

Factories sprang up one after another, and heavy-duty railway lines spiderwebbed across the landscape. Speeding trains, landing and launching spacecraft, and bustling intelligent machines and Clones were everywhere.

Outside the geologically stable zones Li Qingsong had selected, violent volcanic activity spewed forth raging lava, and powerful earthquakes instantly tore the flat land asunder. As if these world-shattering cataclysms weren’t enough, numerous asteroids also joined the fray.

Every day, a large number of asteroids impacted this massive moon.

The smaller asteroids would merely form an impact crater, but the larger ones could trigger intense earthquakes and even eject planetary material into space.

On one side: bustling construction, an air of civilization, and total stability. On the other: a scene like Purgatory, with a relentless stream of extinction-level disasters.

The mass of the gas giant, which Li Qingsong had named Oriental A, was simply too great, and its Gravity too immense. On top of that, the number of celestial bodies within the young Oriental Star System was simply staggering.

As a result, the gas giant acted like a powerful vacuum cleaner, pulling in an endless assortment of small celestial bodies that would then crash into its surface.

According to Li Qingsong’s estimates, more than 100 million celestial bodies of varying sizes, with a total mass exceeding one trillion tons, impacted Oriental A every single day.

It was precisely these frequent impacts that had turned Oriental A’s color to gray, rather than pale yellow like Jupiter.

Because the impacts were so frequent, the moon he had named Oriental A1 also suffered from the collateral damage.

Even if only one ten-thousandth of that mass—a hundred million tons—struck the moon, it would be the equivalent of tens of thousands of asteroids with a 10-meter radius.

Because the gravitational acceleration from Oriental A was so immense, the impact from even a single such asteroid would release up to 3.2 x 10^15 joules of energy—equivalent to the blast from approximately 800,000 tons of TNT!

And explosions of this magnitude occurred, on average, tens of thousands of times each day on this planet.

One can only imagine how hostile the environment on this planet was.

Of course, the asteroids didn’t pick and choose their targets; they didn’t deliberately avoid the geologically stable zones where Li Qingsong was building.

The only reason these areas were spared was that Li Qingsong had dispatched a large number of spacecraft to destroy or divert any asteroids on a collision course with the region.

While the massive ground-based construction was underway, the exploitation of the gas giant Oriental A continued unabated.

Li Qingsong specifically chose a region with relatively stable atmospheric currents and deployed a large number of modified Jupiter Planes into it.

These special modifications were essential. The planet’s surface gravity was ten times that of Earth; without reinforcement, the planes would likely have been crushed by their own weight the moment they entered the atmosphere.

In such an environment, the Clones working inside the Jupiter Planes endured immense torment, resulting in an extremely high attrition rate.

But there was no other way. To mine sufficient quantities of deuterium, they had to operate within the atmosphere of Oriental A.

With Li Qingsong committing fully, heedless of the cost or the loss of Clones, vast quantities of deuterium were continuously mined. This gas then flooded into the fusion power plants, fueling all the industrial construction projects under his command.

In less than a year, Li Qingsong had more than ten thousand large factories under his command, and a rudimentary industrial system was already in place.

In addition to numerous foundational facilities like Nuclear Fusion Reactors, mines, and steel mills, Li Qingsong could now even locally produce highly integrated technological constructs like Warships and other spacecraft within the Oriental Star System!

But the current industrial scale was still too small. The next step, supported by the existing industrial foundation, was to develop more planets and build more factories until the entire industrial system was complete and production capacity reached its peak.

Whether he decided to remain in the Oriental Star System to advance his technology or to gather resources for the next interstellar voyage, none of it could proceed until that was done.

However, as he sought to expand his industrial scale and reach peak production capacity, Li Qingsong faced a difficult problem.

It was the same problem that had already been troubling him to some extent.

The Oriental Star System was too chaotic, the frequency of small celestial body impacts far too high. He had to find a way to solve this problem before he could even consider expanding his industrial operations.