Chapter 277: Dismantling a Planet

Within the Lyra G16 Star System, Li Qingsong’s vast industrial construction and technological development continued.

The highly concentrated stellar light from the star persisted. It was like a giant porcupine with limitless power and an infinite supply of quills, constantly shooting them into space and causing Li Qingsong immense trouble.

Weathering these attacks, Li Qingsong steeled himself and diverted a significant portion of his industrial capacity to form a massive fleet, which he then dispatched to a nearby dwarf planet.

A dwarf planet is defined as an object whose own mass gives it enough Gravity to pull itself into a spherical shape—achieving hydrostatic equilibrium—but not enough to have cleared its orbital neighborhood.

Based on this definition, the minimum radius for a dwarf planet is approximately 400 kilometers.

The target Li Qingsong had now selected was just such a dwarf planet, one of the smallest.

Its radius was a mere 410 kilometers, composed mainly of water ice and rock, with an average density of about 1.9 grams per cubic centimeter.

This gave it a total mass of approximately 5.5 x 10^17 tons.

As far as planets go, it was undoubtedly on the small side. But as a celestial body, it was still a true behemoth.

To put it in perspective, the Flying Star that Li Qingsong had once painstakingly constructed had a total mass of only 200 trillion tons, just 1/2,750th of this dwarf planet.

And what Li Qingsong planned to do now was, in fact, quite simple.

Dismantle this dwarf planet!

He would break it apart, piece by piece, install Thrust Devices on all of them, and then hurl every single fragment at the star!

‘My Hydrogen Bomb ships couldn’t deal with you Electromagnetic Creatures. Now, I’ll tear apart a dwarf planet and throw it at you. Let’s see if you can withstand that!’

This represented a project of such a colossal scale that even Li Qingsong found it daunting.

This was, after all, a massive, bona fide celestial body.

But his technology had long since advanced to the Strong Core Stage. It had developed immensely during his long flight, and the war against the Harville Civilization had furnished him with a complete industrial system. Moreover, the Divine Craft AI had also experienced a quantum leap in performance.

All these factors combined gave Li Qingsong the confidence to undertake this task, certain that he could do so while still advancing his two top priorities—technological R&D and industrial production—and withstanding the harassment from the Electromagnetic Creatures.

Now, numerous giant industrial ships, Supercomputer Spaceships, passenger ships, and energy ships were all in position.

Innumerable Clones and countless robots had also converged around the dwarf planet.

Because the dwarf planet held vast quantities of water ice, which could be electrolyzed into hydrogen and oxygen, Li Qingsong didn’t even need to dispatch additional energy transport fleets. With the hydrogen available for fusion power, he could acquire ample supplies right on site.

And so, countless giant machines began their bustling work, swarming like ants.

The first order of business was constructing space elevators.

The dwarf planet’s surface gravity was only about 0.24 meters per second squared—a mere 1/40th of Earth’s—making it incredibly simple and convenient to build space elevators there.

In a short amount of time, Li Qingsong constructed 1,000 of them.

The next phase was the cutting operation.

Across the dim surface, a landscape of towering mountains and deep canyons, cutting tools made from Strong Core materials sliced through the hard rock and water ice as effortlessly as a knife through tofu.

The planetary matter was cut into massive cubes, each with sides 100 meters long.

Their volume was one million cubic meters, and their mass was approximately 1.9 million tons.

On a large planet like Earth, lifting a 1.9-million-ton cube into space would be no easy feat.

But this planetoid’s gravity was extremely low. This not only drastically reduced the weight of the cubes but also massively increased the lifting capacity of the space elevators.

Thus, the cubes were hoisted into space one by one and placed in temporary storage in the same stellar orbit as the dwarf planet.

While quarrying massive quantities of rock, Li Qingsong did not neglect the extraction of water ice.

In space, Li Qingsong had specialized industrial electrolysis ships to process the water ice.

The water ice was first melted, then purified to remove impurities. Afterward, it was placed into electrolysis cells and broken down into hydrogen and oxygen.

The oxygen was used for life support, while the hydrogen was supplied to the giant nuclear fusion power ships also stationed in orbit. The energy was then transferred via superconducting cables or wireless power transmission to the other industrial ships and the vast array of machinery working on the planetoid’s surface.

The wireless power field generated by Li Qingsong enveloped the entire dwarf planet. All the machinery operating on the surface required neither cables nor onboard power sources.

As long as they operated within this field, they had a virtually unlimited supply of power.

And so, under the direct control of the Divine Craft AI and the decision-making of the Clones, the dwarf planet’s towering mountains were razed and its sprawling canyons gradually vanished.

It wasn’t that the canyons had been filled in, but rather that the land on either side had been dug away.

As one giant cube after another was carved from the planetoid and stored in space, the dwarf planet’s radius steadily shrank.

By now, its radius had shrunk to a mere 350 kilometers, and its total mass had decreased by 38%!

In its place, Li Qingsong had essentially created a new Asteroid Belt out of thin air, containing some 200 billion individual bodies!

Due to its reduced mass, the dwarf planet’s surface gravity dropped further, from the original 0.24 meters per second squared to just 0.14. Its escape velocity also fell to only about 280 meters per second, forcing Li Qingsong’s various ships to decelerate even more to maintain their orbits.

Any faster and they would simply escape its Gravity and fly away.

「Another twenty-odd years passed in the blink of an eye.」

By now, a massive Asteroid Belt had fully formed. Where the dwarf planet had once been, only a single, cube-shaped body remained, its sides measuring a mere dozen kilometers or so.

Li Qingsong couldn’t be bothered to excavate this “core.”

‘It was too small and its surface area was limited. Besides, he had more than enough small bodies now; there was no need to continue.’

Now, gazing at the dense swarm of 500 billion small bodies filling the void, Li Qingsong once again sent a message toward the Lyra G16 Star System.

“Electromagnetic Creatures, listen up!”