novelraw Chapter 78 Deep Space Furnace
Chapter 78 Deep Space Furnace
The subspace journey was smooth, and the readings at the Geller position fluctuated slowly within the green zone. The Black Pearl's porthole armored covers were tightly closed, and only the faint glow of the instrument dials and indicator lights remained in the bridge.
Liu En sat in a chair in his private workshop. In a higher dimension, two ship blueprints unfolded layer by layer.
The Cobra-class destroyer. 1.5 kilometers long, its main armament consisted of a pair of torpedo tubes at the bow. It had thin armor and high speed. The standard design for the Imperial Navy was that it was a expendable vessel—built quickly, sank quickly. Liu En modified the blueprints layer by layer: the armor layers were thickened around the bridge and engine room, the power system's energy ducts were rewired, and the torpedo loading mechanism was replaced with a more efficient model. It wasn't a major overhaul, but rather an optimization.
An Odysseus-class armed transport ship. The atomic-level information came from a partially destroyed wreck deep within a space debris field. The hull was severely compressed and deformed within the wreckage, broken in two, the engine room blown open, and its surface covered with thousands of years of subspace sediment. Liu En discovered it while dismantling and recovering other materials, and after dismantling key parts of the wreckage, obtained a severely incomplete atomic-level blueprint.
This is an ancient ship type, established and in service during the Great Expeditions. Unlike the thinly armored, bulky transport ships of the M41 era, the Odysseus-class was designed to be "combat-ready, durable, and capable of carrying cargo." With thick armor, powerful weaponry, and a large cargo hold, it served in the Imperial Navy and merchant/ronin fleets for tens of thousands of years. The skeletal data remains, but details such as armor parameters, weapon configuration, and the energy conduit routing of the propulsion system—many details—have been lost due to corrosion and physical damage.
Previously, in Lucis's wreckage warehouse, he had disassembled the wreckage of several transport ships of different models. The hull structures and propulsion system specifications differed, but they provided usable references at the atomic level—the composite proportions of the armor layers, the material formulas for the energy conduits, and the supporting structures of the cargo hold bulkheads. He compared, pieced together, and completed these fragments layer by layer with the Odysseus-class skeleton obtained from the wreckage. Missing parts were filled in using design parameters from standard Imperial Navy transport ships, and the Thinker's mainframe also conducted stress simulations and iterative verifications for each completed section.
The final document archived was a complete, production-ready blueprint for the Odysseus-class armed transport ship. Larger than a standard cruiser, with double the cargo hold volume, and separately reinforced armor around the cargo hold and engine room, the armament configuration remained the standard scheme of a macro gun array plus a light lance.
Both blueprints passed the verification of the Thinker's main brain and the simulation of Liu En's high-dimensional space blueprint. Dimensional parameters, armor thickness, weapon configuration, power output—every set of data was simulated and extrapolated. Although they are currently just blueprints, they are already ready to be built.
Liu En shut down the index of the higher-dimensional space and stood up.
He left the workshop and walked along the corridor toward the mess hall. The corridor lights shone with a cold white light in daytime mode. The veteran on duty from the garrison saluted at the corner, and he nodded. There weren't many people in the mess hall. A few technicians on duty were eating their rations in a corner. They didn't get up when they saw him come in, but just raised their hands slightly.
He took his plate and sat down in the corner. Grox steak and a fried starch pie, plus a cup of fried coffee. No one shared his table.
After finishing his meal, he went to the reception room. Marcus was already inside, with a data board spread out in front of him displaying the ship's duty roster and formation route data.
"The status of the Truth." Liu En sat down.
"Formation spacing is stable, and heading synchronization is normal. Vera has not reported any anomalies." Marcus pushed the data panel over.
Liu En glanced at it, then pushed it back. "Continue."
He left the reception room and walked around the main corridor. Passing the hangar, service crew were moving supplies; past the armory, the doors were closed, and the indicator lights were green; past the medical bay, Dr. Liz was organizing the medicine cabinets, glancing at him but saying nothing. The patrol was merely a formality. The moment his consciousness switched back to Cohen's body, it had already covered the entire ship—the spherical field with a 25-meter radius could only cover a localized area, but the five-kilometer radius of his consciousness was enough for him to perceive the personnel distribution and general condition of every compartment on the Black Pearl. The patrol was simply to let the crew see the captain moving around.
He returned to his private workshop and closed the door.
The field unfolded anew. Consciousness sank into higher dimensions, continuing to deduce the blueprint. Several parameters of the Cobra-class armor optimization scheme could still be fine-tuned, and the Odysseus-class cargo hold bulkhead structure needed re-verification. He decomposed the universal atoms in subspace while modifying the information layer by layer in the database.
Several hours later, consciousness detached from the body and flowed into Enpu's body through a higher-dimensional anchor.
Enpu sat up from the life support pod, put on a robe, and walked to the floor-to-ceiling window.
The transparent armor plating of the dome stretched overhead, sunlight filtering through the plates and casting bright patches of light on the buildings. The city beneath the dome was slowly growing. Streets stretched outwards from the central plaza, their surfaces made of greyish-white concrete, with lampposts spaced at Imperial standard intervals. Solar panels adorned the rooftops of residential buildings, and lights shone from their windows. The agricultural district's interconnected greenhouses formed a silvery-white sea along the edge of the dome, their transparent walls revealing neatly arranged green crops. Immigrants lived beneath the dome. Some sat on benches along the street, others chatted in the open spaces in front of buildings, and children chased and played. The first families to arrive from Lucis had been living there for months, their faces no longer showing the bewilderment they had when they first disembarked.
Enp stood by the window for a moment, then turned and left. He walked through the spaceport's transfer hall, boarded the shuttle, and headed towards the asteroid belt.
The asteroid belt is located on the outer edge of the galaxy. Enp found an asteroid about 300 kilometers in diameter in the edge region and completed the basic framework of the base—reactor, Thinker array, initial production line, storage, offices, and the prototype of the dock.
This place will then become a small-scale forging world. It will integrate asteroid belt mining, metal smelting, servant manufacturing, and ship construction. Its surface will be covered with armor plates, equipped with thrusters, and will later be fitted with warp engines, void shields, Geller fields, and numerous firepower platforms. It will be both an industrial base and a fortress. These are all long-term plans.
Enpu's office is located here, and this clone will reside here permanently. He is the manifestation of Liu En's power—where the field unfolds, atoms reshape everything. From ore to metal ingots, from parts to warships, the chain begins in this rocky body. He will occasionally travel to Garros or the spaceport to handle emergency engineering and add rare materials, but most of the time, this asteroid is his workshop.
He turned and walked out of the office, ascended along the shaft, and returned to the shuttle.
Enpu leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. His consciousness drifted away, flowing into the body that had been waiting in the Black Pearl workshop.