Chapter 914: Construction Tasks |
The most complex and difficult technical problem had finally been overcome. From this moment onward, Xiao Yu’s quasar transport operation officially entered the action phase.
And by now, nearly one hundred years had passed since Xiao Yu first began trying to leave this place.
“The time the music civilization left me is about four hundred years. If I include technological development, instrument manufacturing and deployment, plus calibration and testing, it will probably cost me a little less than three hundred years. They really judged it accurately. They had long since understood my capabilities…” Xiao Yu sighed inwardly. “Transporting a quasar, the scale of this project is simply too enormous. An ordinary Level 7 Civilization has no such ability. Only an existence of my type has the ability to carry out a project on this scale.”
Several thousand huge space bases had already been completed in the earlier stage. With the support of subsequent research, these construction bases had already begun operating and had started manufacturing the instruments Xiao Yu had designed. But compared to the enormous number of instruments needed to transport this quasar, merely several thousand space bases were far from enough. After this, dozens of times more huge space bases were still under construction.
There was no need for the space bases to be too close to the quasar, so comparatively speaking, they were much less affected by it. This saved Xiao Yu a great deal of trouble. Otherwise, he would have had to go to great lengths to build defensive facilities for them.
The tens of billions of warships in Xiao Yu’s possession all took on other missions at this moment. They changed from warships into transport ships, taking on the task of transferring materials between different space bases and capturing incoming celestial bodies.
A vast quantity of matter continuously followed the mighty star stream from the distant companion galaxy to this place. Within this stream were not only interstellar dust and such things, but also dwarf planets, rocky planets, and gas giant planets of very great size and mass. Occasionally, even a star would come through.
This quasar was about eight hundred thousand light years away from the companion galaxy. The average speed of this huge star stream was around one thousand five hundred kilometers per second. That meant these materials, traveling from the companion galaxy to here, had to trek through the vastness of space for more than one hundred fifty million years before they could reach their destination. One rather tragic thing was that after such a long journey, what awaited them was not beautiful scenery at their destination, but a grim supermassive black hole. This was a one-way trip with only a departure and no return. Being swallowed by this supermassive black hole was their only ending.
However, all the celestial bodies in the companion galaxy, if nothing unexpected happened, would eventually be swallowed by this supermassive black hole anyway. The only difference was sooner or later. Seen this way, on the road to the underworld, these celestial bodies would at least have company and would not be too lonely.
Recently, it had been a long time since Xiao Yu had captured a celestial body this large. Once this planet was fully refined and made into products, it would at least be enough to support the manufacture of several million related instruments.
So Xiao Yu’s fleet began the capture process. This City-Class spaceship formation first released a miniature landing force. After arriving on the surface of the planet, the pre-manufactured planetary propulsion devices were installed on it. Under the powerful thrust of the planetary propulsion devices, the speed of this planet quickly slowed, and in the end Xiao Yu pushed it toward his enormous construction zone. There, it would undergo the next stage of transformation. Instruments would carry out a holographic three-dimensional scan of it. Its elemental composition, mineral reserves, distribution of usable materials, and so on would all become known to Xiao Yu. Then mining plans would be arranged according to the circumstances. Within just a few years, this planet would be fully digested by Xiao Yu, and the useless material residue would be thrown into the trash heap. The giant black hole beside him had quite a good appetite. It would eat whatever it was given and was never picky.
Sometimes, some celestial bodies were also directly abandoned by Xiao Yu because they had little value, and he simply let them be swallowed by the black hole. Before they reached the black hole’s accretion disk, they were basically already stretched into long strips. Huge amounts of matter would collide violently with the black hole’s accretion disk. Every time a large celestial body was torn apart and smashed into it, it would trigger a new round of violent energy radiation. Xiao Yu had long since become used to this.
Planets were one thing, but the process of a star being torn apart was even more violent. A star, while being torn apart, likewise could not escape the fate of being stretched into a long strip, but the process was far more magnificent.
Before a star was torn apart, it also possessed gravity itself. It was precisely under its own gravity that it maintained its spherical structure. As it approached this supermassive black hole, the black hole’s gravity and its own gravity would begin clashing, and the black hole’s gravity would gradually gain the upper hand as it drew closer.
The instant the black hole’s gravitational strength exceeded the star’s own gravity, an interesting event would occur immediately. Before this instant, although the star had already been stretched into an elliptical shape, it still maintained its own complete structure. After this instant, everything would become very different. The star’s stable structure would be broken in an instant, and its own material would gush out instantly, surging toward the black hole in a long-strip shape, just like a fire dragon suddenly leaping out from the star. The black hole itself was small in size, so this fire dragon would coil completely around the black hole, fully covering it from sight. It would instead look as though the fire dragon that emerged from the star had swallowed the black hole.
But in the face of a black hole, a star was still ultimately something strong on the outside but weak within. This fire dragon was in essence a conveyor belt transferring stellar material into the black hole. It was desperately drawing material away from the star. Depending on orbital trajectory, gravitational strength, and mass, this process might last from a few days to several million years. But once it reached this stage, the star’s fate had already been decided. Death was unavoidable.
Beside this huge quasar, this scene of stars being born and dying was playing out at every moment. A star here was merely the most insignificant of existences. If it died, it died. At most, it released a burst of energy radiation before dying. Even that would be completely drowned out by the quasar’s light and would attract no notice at all.
After deciding to adopt transporting the quasar as the means of escape, Xiao Yu’s mind fully settled down. While using his enormous computational power for the huge construction tasks, Xiao Yu also found time to appreciate these beautiful scenes.
“Along the way, how much beauty have I missed?” Xiao Yu even found himself sighing inwardly like this. “It has always been observation and research, observation and research. I ended up overlooking many other things.”
Under such circumstances, Xiao Yu’s construction tasks progressed at high speed. Time passed quietly. Every minute and second, enormous quantities of matter were turned into instruments, and then the warships responsible for transportation would carry them to their designated positions. This busy scene continued for more than two hundred years. This was several decades earlier than the time Xiao Yu had originally estimated.
“Well, it seems I underestimated my construction capabilities back then.” Xiao Yu sighed inwardly. “The thousandfold increase in computational power has brought about an earth-shaking breakthrough in construction capability as well. Fine then, now that all the construction tasks are basically complete, the next step should be calibration and testing…”
The workload of this stage was somewhat lighter, but it was even more tedious. Xiao Yu needed to continuously observe, continuously calculate, and continuously adjust. Xiao Yu even had to observe in real time the flow of matter converging in the star stream, because the addition of this matter would alter the quasar’s overall mass, and Xiao Yu’s space-curvature operations depended to a great extent on mass parameters as support. This meant that perhaps Xiao Yu’s arrangement was perfect one moment, but the next moment, after a planet charged in, Xiao Yu’s arrangement would be completely ruined.
A giant instrument as large as Mount Everest on Earth floated silently in space. On it were tens of millions of miniature thrusters responsible for adjusting its position. Its positional precision even had to reach the millimeter level. And instruments like this numbered nearly one hundred billion around the entire quasar.
Xiao Yu’s computational power began shifting toward this task. Every instrument was under Xiao Yu’s direct control. Behind Xiao Yu, even larger observational instruments were providing him with real-time intelligence. Every minute and every second, Xiao Yu’s mind was operating at high speed, converting these observational data and finally calculating the position each instrument should occupy at that moment.
This stage consumed another twenty-plus years of Xiao Yu’s time. At this point, less than fifteen years remained of the four-hundred-year time limit.
“Success or failure depends on this one move.” Xiao Yu thought inwardly. “After being busy for these several hundred years, I hope all my deductions are correct…”
After checking all the instruments one final time, verifying the mass parameters and positional parameters one final time, and recalculating them once again, Xiao Yu finally issued the command.
“Activate the quasar transport instruments.”
This command was received in real time by nearly one hundred billion instruments at once. In that instant, they all moved simultaneously.