Chapter Summaries

Li Qingsong expanded his shipbuilding plans, prepared old Mercury-class Battleships to train a Combat AI, and began research into atomic bombs as the first step toward nuclear power and advanced propulsion. The chapter left him pursuing the technology he believed would open the way beyond chemical fuel and into the stars.

• Li Qingsong planned a thousand-ship fleet of Mercury-class Battleships, Venus-class Battleships, and logistical supply ships, then began manufacturing the new vessels.
• Li Qingsong refitted retired Mercury-class Battleships with sensors and controllers so their combat data could train a Combat AI.
• Li Qingsong sent the old ships into costly live-fire exercises more than a hundred thousand kilometers from Luoshen Star.
• Li Qingsong assigned another group of clones to research atomic bomb technology and the physics needed to achieve nuclear fission.
• Li Qingsong pursued atomic bombs as a foundation for nuclear power plants, miniaturized reactors, and advanced propulsion technologies.

Li Qingsong chose uranium for his first attempt at nuclear energy and built facilities to mine, process, and enrich uranium on Luoshen Star. After using a supercomputer to calculate a detonation design, he completed a 3.6-ton bomb more than three meters long.

• Li Qingsong selected the richest of Luoshen Star's four uranium mines, despite its very low uranium content.
• Li Qingsong built a nearby factory and power plant to extract uranium oxide, then chemically converted it into Uranium Hexafluoride.
• Li Qingsong constructed more than ten thousand centrifuges to enrich Uranium-235 through four production lines.
• Li Qingsong used a supercomputer and data from several dozen pre-detonation experiments to calculate the bomb's detonation device.
• Li Qingsong completed an enormous bomb weighing 3.6 tons and measuring more than three meters long.

Li Qingsong tested and improved Atomic Bombs, then used his growing knowledge of nuclear physics to design and build a nuclear fission power plant on Luoshen Star. The plant began supplying electricity, but its uranium production consumed more power than it generated, and Li Qingsong resolved to build more and improve the technology.

• Li Qingsong detonated an Atomic Bomb hundreds of thousands of kilometers from Luoshen Star and collected data on the explosion.
• Li Qingsong refined his Atomic Bomb designs, raising the tenth bomb's yield to 100,000 tons of TNT before turning to miniaturization.
• Li Qingsong designed a nuclear power plant using water as a neutron moderator and began construction with uranium fuel rods enriched to around 3%.
• Li Qingsong connected the 50,000-kilowatt plant to the grid, but its uranium-production process used 1.8 million kilowatt-hours to generate 1.2 million per day.
• Li Qingsong accepted the 600,000-kilowatt-hour daily loss and decided to build more plants while studying how to improve and miniaturize their reactors.

Li Qingsong built and refined a Second Generation Nuclear Fission Power Plant, then shifted his attention to developing Ion Propulsion Technology on Luoshen Star. After a series of research breakthroughs, he completed a massive, 300-ton ion thruster.

• Li Qingsong analyzed the First Generation Nuclear Power Plant’s operation and verified more than a thousand optimizations in the laboratory.
• Li Qingsong constructed the Second Generation Nuclear Power Plant, using improved materials and a shortened heating process to increase efficiency and safety.
• Li Qingsong began studying Ion Propulsion Technology after confirming that it was essential for future space travel.
• Li Qingsong established an Ion Propulsion Laboratory on Luoshen Star and built a power plant to supply its experiments.
• Li Qingsong and his clones developed an ionizer, precision electromagnetic acceleration coils, and an energy stabilization module.
• Li Qingsong completed a cylindrical ion thruster weighing more than 300 tons and measuring over ten meters long.

Li Qingsong tested an ion thruster with impressive exhaust velocity but negligible thrust, then focused on nuclear fission upgrades and returning to the Inner Solar System. After years of training a Combat AI with battles between hundreds of warships, he tested it in a fleet battle and found its performance disastrously poor.

• Li Qingsong observed that the ion thruster reached an exhaust velocity of 30 kilometers per second but produced only around 0.05 N of thrust, making it impractical for now.
• Li Qingsong decided to continue researching ion propulsion while prioritizing Secondary Pressurization Propulsion Technology and nuclear fission power to eventually move his fleet and industrial resources to the Inner Solar System.
• Li Qingsong continued developing the ion thruster and upgrading the Nuclear Fission power plant as supplies and research data flowed from Adversary Star and Luoshen Star.
• After more than ten years of battles used to train the Combat AI, Li Qingsong judged it ready for deployment.
• Li Qingsong tested the Combat AI with two fleets near Luoshen Star and was shocked that it performed far worse than his own control despite communication delays.

After a combat exercise exposed the supercomputer’s inability to process battlefield data quickly enough, Li Qingsong began developing 20 Nanometer chips to boost computing power. He overcame most manufacturing obstacles but remained stuck on the Short-Channel Effect until one clone proposed three-dimensional transistors.

• Li Qingsong’s side won the exercise despite a 100-second communication delay, as the overloaded Combat AI made costly battlefield errors.
• Li Qingsong analyzed the AI’s operational data and discovered that insufficient computing power, rather than poor decision-making, caused its delays and mistakes.
• Li Qingsong skipped 28 Nanometer chips and organized clones to research 20 Nanometer chips, aiming to greatly increase supercomputer performance.
• Li Qingsong’s teams developed an Extreme Ultraviolet Light Source, adopted multiple exposure, and replaced silicon dioxide gates with Metal Gates.
• After thousands of attempted solutions failed to resolve the Short-Channel Effect, a clone suggested changing planar transistors into a three-dimensional structure.

Li Qingsong developed three-dimensional transistors and built a factory to mass-produce advanced chips, then used them to create a far more powerful supercomputer. Combat trials showed that the upgraded Combat AI let a fleet fighting with a 500-second control delay retain roughly 70% of peak combat power.

• Li Qingsong tested Multiple Exposure Technology on three-dimensional transistors and found that it eliminated the Short-Channel Effect while improving performance and current stability.
• Li Qingsong built a highly controlled chip factory, which initially produced 20-nanometer chips at a yield of about 3%; he used the best chips for a supercomputer and distributed the flawed ones for other uses.
• Li Qingsong completed a new supercomputer with 160,000 chips and 130 quadrillion floating-point operations per second, then loaded the Combat AI onto it for trials.
• Li Qingsong tested Fleet B against Fleet A with a 100-second delay and found that Combat AI brought Fleet B to about 90% of Fleet A's combat effectiveness.
• Li Qingsong increased Fleet B's delay to 500 seconds and found that Combat AI kept its combat effectiveness near 70%, compared with about 30% without AI assistance.

Li Qingsong developed a future combat doctrine that paired AI-controlled unmanned forces with crewed fleets and named the Combat AI Wukong. After training it in space battles, he turned his attention to miniaturizing nuclear fission reactors, where his research had finally made a major breakthrough.

• Li Qingsong realized Combat AI could control vast numbers of unmanned combat craft, while his clones and crewed fleets handled tasks that required human judgment.
• Li Qingsong planned a strategy that combined dispersed AI-controlled unmanned forces with nearby crewed fleets, avoiding crewed combat where communication delays were high.
• Li Qingsong named the Combat AI Wukong and assigned it oversight of unmanned forces and support for crewed combat.
• Li Qingsong sent Fleets A and B into a space battle, with one fleet under his control and the other controlled by Wukong, feeding combat data into the AI.
• Li Qingsong shifted his focus to miniaturizing nuclear fission reactors after his research achieved a major breakthrough.

Li Qingsong built a mobile, integrated nuclear fission power station but found it still too large and inefficient for practical spacecraft use. As resources on Adversary Star dwindled, an exhausted Lantu Ke engineer urged him to pursue fundamental technological advances rather than clever structural changes.

• Li Qingsong completed a mobile nuclear fission power station that weighed over four thousand tons and produced up to ten thousand kilowatts.
• Li Qingsong concluded that the station needed to shrink by more than half and double its output, but reverse engineering the Deep Space spacecraft could not reveal the materials or manufacturing tolerances required.
• Li Qingsong worried that Adversary Star's resources would run out before he could reach the Inner Solar System, and recognized that migration depended on miniaturized nuclear power and Secondary Pressurization Propulsion Technology.
• Li Qingsong ordered clones and Lantu Ke engineers to continue intense miniaturization research for a year.
• A Lantu Ke engineer approached one of Li Qingsong's clones and argued that the project required progress in fundamental technology, not an ingenious structure or sudden inspiration.

Li Qingsong accepted that miniaturizing the nuclear fission reactor required advances across the foundational sciences, then used newly improved clones to accelerate research. After five years, he produced a smaller, more powerful shipborne reactor and turned his attention to secondary pressurization propulsion as the key to reaching the resource-rich Inner Solar System.

• Li Qingsong learned that reactor miniaturization depended on improving materials and processing precision, and granted the Lantu Ke person four extra rest days each month.
• A new Gene Optimization Plan produced clones with a maximum consciousness connection count of 10.025 million, so Li Qingsong connected around five million reserve clones to foundational research.
• Li Qingsong redirected scientific effort and resources toward foundational technologies, while Adversary Star’s mines and shipments to Luoshen Star dwindled.
• Five years later, Materials Science and Mechanical Processing Science made breakthroughs that enabled smaller, stronger materials and the required manufacturing precision.
• Li Qingsong built a 1,600-ton Modular Nuclear Fission Reactor with 25,000 kilowatts of output, then set his sights on mastering Secondary Pressurization Propulsion Technology to migrate to the Inner Solar System.

Li Qingsong developed a magnetic confinement approach for secondary pressurization propulsion, using a magnetic field to contain plasma that no physical material could withstand. The first propulsion experiment on Luoshen Star ended in a catastrophic explosion.

• Li Qingsong concluded that a recently miniaturized nuclear fission reactor could power secondary pressurization propulsion for large cargo ships.
• Li Qingsong chose magnetic field constraint to confine the plasma produced by heating methane-and-oxygen combustion gases to tens of thousands of Celsius.
• Li Qingsong began developing secondary pressurization propulsion while confronting the extreme material and reliability demands of the technology.
• Li Qingsong initiated the first propulsion experiment in a laboratory on Luoshen Star, combining a chemical combustion engine, a nuclear fission reactor, and magnetic confinement.
• The experimental engine exploded, flattening everything within dozens of meters.

Li Qingsong repeatedly tested and rebuilt the Secondary Pressurization Thruster on Luoshen Star until one engine operated steadily for twenty-four hours. He then planned to test a batch of engine-powered cargo ships on freight runs between Adversary Star and Luoshen Star.

• The first reactor test exploded, killing more than twenty clones and contaminating the area, but Li Qingsong repaired the site and ordered the wreckage analyzed.
• Li Qingsong traced the first explosion to uncontrolled heating and excessive plasma pressure, while another test base suffered a separate failure caused by unstable magnetic confinement.
• Repeated tests and more than a hundred explosions led Li Qingsong to improve the engine’s materials, stability, and structure, though malfunctions continued across one hundred testing grounds.
• After three years, a Secondary Pressurization Engine at Laboratory No. 67 ran steadily for twenty-four hours.
• Li Qingsong decided to build cargo ships powered by the engines and test them on freight missions from Adversary Star to Luoshen Star.

Li Qingsong restarted Luoshen Star’s shipyards and built a massive Cargo Ship powered by Secondary Pressurization Thrusters. On its maiden voyage, the ship reached Adversary Star in nine days, using less fuel than ordinary Cargo Ships.

• Li Qingsong ordered the Luoshen Star shipyards to resume production and had fifty Secondary Pressurization Thrusters and other components transported into orbit.
• Workers assembled the first Cargo Ship powered by Secondary Pressurization Thrusters, a vessel with a loaded mass of up to 80,000 tons.
• Li Qingsong began the ship’s maiden voyage to Adversary Star, and its thrusters accelerated it to sixty kilometers per second.
• The Cargo Ship reached Adversary Star’s vicinity in eight days, decelerated for one day, and docked after consuming less fuel than an ordinary Cargo Ship.

Li Qingsong stress-tested the first-generation Secondary Pressurization Thruster by keeping dozens of Cargo Ships in constant transit, exposing serious design and component failures. After redesigning and testing a safer, more efficient second-generation thruster for two years, he confirmed it was stable and prepared to depart.

• Li Qingsong expanded the Cargo Ship fleet and kept the ships flying between Luoshen Star and Adversary Star to uncover hidden thruster flaws.
• A Cargo Ship exploded during acceleration, and Li Qingsong traced the failure to a structural design flaw that required him to overhaul more than seventy percent of the engine for the second generation.
• A Cargo Ship's thruster failed to ignite before deceleration, and tugboats diverted it from crashing into Luoshen Star while Li Qingsong inspected the ship.
• Li Qingsong discovered that high-energy radiation had changed a gasket's properties, then inspected the thruster's components for similar risks.
• After further failures and six months without another serious malfunction, Li Qingsong finalized the second-generation thruster and began large-scale testing.
• Li Qingsong tested the new thruster for two years, confirmed its stability, and prepared to leave.

Li Qingsong abandoned Adversary Star, destroyed its remaining facilities, and built fifty enormous Aerospace Carriers on Luoshen Star to transport his people and resources toward the inner Solar System. After a year of loading supplies and equipment, he prepared to set sail before the Lantu Ke Civilization arrived.

• Li Qingsong loaded the last clones, machinery, resources, and Yellowcake from Adversary Star aboard ships, then destroyed the abandoned factories and facilities with more than a hundred nuclear missiles.
• Li Qingsong returned to Luoshen Star and began building fifty massive ships designed to carry spacecraft, personnel, and supplies.
• Over four years, Li Qingsong completed the ships, naming them Aerospace Carriers because each could carry about nine million tons of cargo.
• Li Qingsong spent nearly a year loading the Aerospace Carriers with personnel, spacecraft, ecosystem pods, equipment, and fuel.
• Li Qingsong prepared to set sail with the fifty Aerospace Carriers.

Li Qingsong assembled a fleet carrying millions of clone bodies and vast industrial and survival supplies for a six-year voyage to the Inner Solar System. After destroying the traces of his presence on Luoshen Star, he led the fleet toward its destination, leaving the stars behind as the journey began.

• Li Qingsong prepared fifty Aerospace Carriers and sixty large Cargo Spaceships with industrial equipment, fuel, food, water, clone bodies, and other supplies.
• Li Qingsong looked back at the deserted Luoshen Star and vowed to protect the Solar System until humanity returned.
• Li Qingsong ordered more than a thousand nuclear-armed Interstellar Missiles to destroy every trace he had left on Luoshen Star.
• Li Qingsong turned the fleet toward the Sun and began accelerating away from Luoshen Star.
• After a month, Li Qingsong's fleet had reached roughly 27 kilometers per second and continued toward its predetermined destination.

During the fleet’s years-long inertial voyage toward the Inner Solar System, Li Qingsong used the clones to think and deployed telescopes for continuous sky surveys. As the fleet neared Pluto’s orbit, he discovered a bright nebula that had not appeared in earlier observations, in the direction of the Gliese 625 System.

• The fleet stopped accelerating at 80 kilometers per second, and gravity vanished aboard the ships.
• Li Qingsong had the clones spend their idle time thinking through accumulated scientific problems.
• Li Qingsong deployed dozens of optical and radio telescopes around the fleet to survey space.
• The fleet continued toward the Inner Solar System, and Li Qingsong noted that it would cross Pluto’s orbit in about a month.
• Li Qingsong detected a bright nebula where earlier observations had shown nothing and connected its direction to the Gliese 625 System.

Li Qingsong deduced that the glowing nebula was illuminated by the Lantu Ke People's Migration Fleet traveling from Gliese 625, and its immense scale made him doubt whether he could defeat them. He resolved to protect the Solar System as his fleet crossed Neptune's orbit and continued toward Jupiter.

• Li Qingsong ruled out familiar explanations for the nebula's glow and concluded that the Lantu Ke Migration Fleet's engine plasma had stirred the dark nebula into emitting light.
• Li Qingsong imagined the vast scale of the Lantu Ke fleet and compared it to his own, feeling the pressure of facing such a powerful enemy in just over two hundred years.
• Li Qingsong overcame his fear and vowed to protect the Solar System if he was its only defender.
• Li Qingsong's fleet crossed Pluto's orbit without seeing the dwarf planet, then spotted Neptune after traveling more than a billion kilometers farther.
• Li Qingsong deployed probes toward Neptune but kept the fleet moving toward Jupiter.

Li Qingsong chose Ganymede as his primary development base and brought his fleet into orbit to survey the Jupiter System. He then transferred his consciousness to an Aerospace Carrier orbiting Earth and saw his home planet again.

• Li Qingsong selected Ganymede as the site of his primary development base because of its resources and central position in the Solar System.
• Forty-nine Aerospace Carriers and dozens of Heavy Transport Ships entered orbit around Ganymede after slowing for more than three months.
• Li Qingsong dispatched satellites, Scientific Research Ships, Small Landing Spaceships, and clones to survey Ganymede and the rest of the Jupiter System.
• The Aerospace Carrier that had separated from the fleet reached orbit around Earth several months later.
• Li Qingsong transferred his consciousness to a clone aboard the carrier and opened his eyes to see Earth.

Li Qingsong explored Earth and found no trace of the Human Civilization he remembered, despite extensive investigations. Convinced the evidence was part of a conspiracy, he left Earth to resume construction in the Jupiter System.

• Li Qingsong landed clones across Earth, including at his remembered hometown, the former capital, and a great river, but found their human-made structures gone.
• Li Qingsong and his clones tested for microplastics, nuclear radiation, fossils, and other evidence of humanity, but their results suggested Human Civilization had never existed.
• Li Qingsong remained certain his memories were real and vowed to uncover the conspiracy and bring his compatriots back to Earth.
• Li Qingsong killed and cooked a pheasant, ate it, and then boarded a Landing Spaceship to leave Earth for the Jupiter System.