Richard appeared at the Spell Testing Ground at the bottom of Eden Garden's sinkhole.
It had already been seven days since work on the Nuclear Weapon had begun.
Over the course of a week, he had completed the first four major stages of manufacturing the Nuclear Weapon, along with many of the subsequent tedious procedures. Progress had reached sixty percent, with the remaining forty percent still awaiting completion.
And now, he needed to carry out one of the more important steps within that remaining forty percent—the testing of the Nuclear Weapon's detonating explosives.
As mentioned before, a Nuclear Weapon such as an Atomic Bomb consisted of a Detonation Control System, High-Energy Explosive, a Reflector Layer, Nuclear Components containing nuclear fuel, a Neutron Source, and a casing.
The High-Energy Explosive was the source of energy that propelled and compressed the Reflector Layer and the nuclear fuel. In other words, it was the high explosive that violently compressed the previously manufactured "Crystal Heart" metallic uranium components together, bringing them into a supercritical state and triggering a nuclear explosion.
If it were a gun-type Atomic Bomb, the setup for the High-Energy Explosive would be extremely simple. As long as it could explode, that was enough.
But to avoid waste and conserve the hard-won Uranium-235 nuclear material, the Atomic Bomb Richard was building was not gun-type, but Implosion-Type.
This required the high explosive not only to explode, but to explode according to the required standards.
What did meeting the standards mean? Generally speaking, the high explosive in an Implosion-Type design was installed inside the Nuclear Weapon in dozens or even hundreds of blocks arranged in an oval shape, making it look like a pearl necklace.
To compress the metallic uranium components to the greatest possible extent, every "pearl" on this "pearl necklace"—every explosive block—had