Chapter 312 "Inner Power

The birth of the Primordial AI marked a new, unprecedented peak for Li Qingsong’s artificial intelligence systems.

One could even say that if Li Qingsong wished, he could transform from a Cloning Calamity into an Intelligent Mechanical Calamity at any moment, just like the Black Mountain Civilization before him. He could entrust all future development to the Primordial AI’s decisions and just sit back and relax.

And the Primordial AI would undoubtedly do a better job than the Red Dog AI.

But obviously, Li Qingsong had no intention of doing so.

The birth of the Primordial AI also directly quadrupled Li Qingsong’s previous industrial capacity.

Back then, the alliance between the Harville Civilization and the Black Mountain Civilization created a synergy where the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. Now, to a certain extent, Li Qingsong and the Primordial AI could achieve a similar effect.

Because of Li Qingsong’s unique form of existence, which was more efficient and powerful than the Harville Civilization had been, his union with the Primordial AI resulted in an even greater boost than the one achieved by the alliance between Harville and the Black Mountain Civilization!

By a rough estimate, Li Qingsong believed that with his maximum number of consciousness connections increasing to 8 billion and the birth of the Primordial AI, his current industrial strength was now genuinely at least ten times greater than it had been in the Lyra G16 Star System!

Furthermore, Li Qingsong had a unique advantage: he could freely convert between industrial and scientific research capabilities.

For an ordinary civilization, industrial strength was industrial strength, and research strength was research strength. Although the two were related, they were fundamentally different.

After all, an engineer who spent their days buried in blueprints couldn’t possibly work in a cutting-edge physics lab. Even if they did, they wouldn’t be competent.

This was the inconvertibility between industrial and research capabilities.

But for Li Qingsong, even a Clone who was cooking in a kitchen one moment could work in the most advanced Gravitational Wave detection base the next without any hindrance.

Thus, a tenfold increase in industrial capacity also meant a tenfold increase in research capability for Li Qingsong.

And so, not long after the Primordial AI’s birth, through the powerful combination of biological and artificial intelligence, the Harville Civilization’s most core technology, the Variable Energy Shield, was completely analyzed and assimilated by Li Qingsong, becoming his own.

Li Qingsong even optimized and iterated upon it, and the Variable Energy Shields he could now manufacture were more advanced than the Harville Civilization’s original version.

At this point, all the more urgent, major scientific breakthrough missions were complete. The next step was to painstakingly and thoroughly assimilate all the conventional technological data and techniques from the two civilizations.

This was a task involving a vast number of items, where each individual technology contributed very little to the overall improvement, making it extremely tedious and time-consuming.

Fortunately, Li Qingsong now possessed greater research strength, so he figured it wouldn’t take too long to complete.

Time continued to slowly pass. The massive Flying Star was constantly shrinking, and Li Qingsong’s vast fleet maintained a speed of 55% the speed of light, pressing ever onward through the Vast Cosmos.

A total of 8 billion Clones were constantly busy in laboratories or factories, with another 4 billion on rotation. This ensured that all 8 billion of Li Qingsong’s consciousness connections were always fully occupied, with not a single one wasted.

Materials science, biology, medicine, physics, engineering, mechanics, armor, radar, engines, Thrust Devices, communications, computation, and so on and so forth—Li Qingsong launched an all-out assault on every discipline and every field within them, leaving none behind.

Even though he was only assimilating—merely learning rather than conducting his own research—and even though he now possessed the Primordial AI and a maximum of 8 billion consciousness connections, granting him immense research power, Li Qingsong still had a certain feeling as he confronted the technological data from two entire civilizations.

‘I’m like the Foolish Old Man from human mythology, trying to move a great mountain.’

It couldn’t be helped. The sheer volume of technological data was simply too immense, and its contents too complex.

Li Qingsong gradually came to a realization.

For an ordinary intelligent civilization, the difficulties faced in technological advancement probably weren’t limited to just researching and discovering new science.

Even if a civilization didn’t have to find new science through its own efforts—even if, like him right now, all the data for new sciences was laid out before them—the mere act of learning and assimilating it was difficult enough.

‘Come to think of it, back on Earth, when I was still in school, civilization created the best possible learning conditions for students like me. There were professional teachers who would tirelessly explain every concept, and all sorts of knowledge were readily available on the internet, but… if you couldn’t learn it, you just couldn’t learn it.’

‘And that was just for some basic, highly specialized knowledge.’

‘But for a civilization to advance through learning, what it needs to learn must be all-encompassing, touching upon every field of science.’

‘It would take at least one to several billion outstanding, top-tier scientific talents, all studying with single-minded focus and total dedication, just to learn and assimilate all this knowledge.’

‘Cultivating one to several billion outstanding, top-tier scientific talents and allowing them to study without any distractions… that would have been incredibly difficult even for the Harville Civilization.’

‘It would require a stable social environment, a strong central government, favorable public opinion, a steadily operating social mechanism, and a large number of service and engineering personnel willing to accept relatively meager salaries to contribute to the functioning of society…’

‘For a massive civilization with a population in the hundreds of billions, that alone would be difficult enough.’

‘After all, the larger the population, the harder it is to manage.’

‘But achieving all that would only grant them the qualification to “learn” the next stage of technological data.’

“In this Vast Cosmos, I’m afraid that even if some super-civilization were to release all of its technological data publicly, very few would be able to advance to the Strong Core, Gravity, or even higher stages. Acquiring technological data from external sources to achieve self-improvement is certainly a shortcut. But it’s not a shortcut that just any civilization can take. The most crucial, most core factor is a civilization’s own ‘Inner Power.’ If you don’t cultivate your Inner Power properly, you can only stare helplessly at the technological data laid before you, completely unable to assimilate it. But with ‘Inner Power,’ even if you can’t acquire external technological data, you can still achieve technological advancement through your own efforts. Fortunately, I am different from ordinary civilizations. My ‘Inner Power’ doesn’t need to be cultivated at all; it’s naturally at its peak. The only thing that limits me is the number of consciousness connections. As long as I have enough consciousness connections, I can easily handle the task of assimilating any amount of technological data, no matter how vast.”