Chapter Summaries

Li Qingsong restarted research into controllable nuclear fusion with help from Blueprint experts and built a reactor that achieved a Q Value of 12. After decades of experiments and improvements, his latest reactor reached a Q Value of 260, close to the Blueprint Humans’ best technology.

• Li Qingsong and roughly two hundred Blueprint experts constructed a massive nuclear fusion reactor using magnetic confinement and tritium self-sustaining technology.
• The reactor ran for an hour under the watch of Blueprint Scientists and clones, producing twelve times the energy supplied to it.
• Li Qingsong continued fusion research instead of deploying the reactor widely, drawing on Blueprint expertise and materials from the Lantu Ke Civilization.
• Over the following decades, roughly ten million clones worked on fusion research as Li Qingsong iterated on the technology.
• Within fifty years, Li Qingsong’s latest reactor reached a Q Value of 260, nearly matching the Blueprint Humans’ most advanced reactor.

Li Qingsong expanded his Solar System power network with nuclear fusion and developed Jupiter Aircraft to collect the deuterium needed to fuel it. He deployed the first aircraft into Jupiter’s atmosphere and calculated that a fleet of at least 100,000 would be needed to meet his fuel demand.

• Li Qingsong began miniaturizing fusion reactors and built his first Nuclear Fusion Power Station with an installed capacity of 100,000 megawatts.
• Li Qingsong had built more than 100,000 large Nuclear Fusion Power Stations across the Solar System to supply his industrial and research systems.
• Li Qingsong developed Jupiter Aircraft to extract deuterium from Jupiter’s atmosphere and transported the first batch into the planet’s cloud layers.
• The Jupiter Aircraft flew through Jupiter’s winds, processing the atmosphere to collect deuterium.
• Li Qingsong calculated that he needed at least 100,000 Jupiter Aircraft to supply his annual deuterium needs and account for reserves and losses.

Li Qingsong’s Jupiter Aircraft and Blackbird Platforms supplied deuterium across the Solar System with far fewer clones than nuclear-fission fuel production required. The operation faced heavy daily losses from Jupiter’s storms and magnetic field, while clones endured 2.5 times Earth’s gravity.

• Li Qingsong deployed five hundred Blackbird Platforms as hubs for one hundred thousand Jupiter Aircraft collecting deuterium in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
• Jupiter Aircraft crews rotated through the platforms for rest and resupply as Heavy Transport Ships carried deuterium to Ganymede for distribution throughout the Solar System.
• Jupiter’s violent storms, wind shear, lightning, and supersonic hail destroyed an average of ten Jupiter Aircraft each day.
• Jupiter’s intense magnetic field caused equipment and communication failures that destroyed about one more Jupiter Aircraft daily.
• Clones working aboard the aircraft and Blackbird Platforms endured Jupiter’s gravity, roughly 2.5 times Earth’s.

Li Qingsong endured heavy clone losses at Jupiter while advancing fusion and high-speed ion propulsion technology. After a Mercury-class Battleship matched and surpassed the Lantu Ke Civilization’s warships, he decided to build an interstellar fleet and leave.

• Li Qingsong rotated clones working near Jupiter, though hundreds still died or were crippled each day under its gravity.
• Li Qingsong advanced Controllable Nuclear Fusion toward large-scale use and developed ion propulsion engines capable of accelerating a Mercury-class Spaceship.
• Li Qingsong replaced the propulsion modules on his non-warship spacecraft with High-Speed Ion Propulsion modules and continued absorbing the Blueprint Humans’ technologies.
• Twenty years later, Li Qingsong tested a new Mercury-class Battleship whose performance matched or surpassed the Lantu Ke Civilization’s warships.
• Li Qingsong concluded that he could now undertake interstellar voyages and decided to build a fleet to leave.

Li Qingsong chose Altair as a temporary destination to escape the Machina Calamity and began planning a vast interstellar migration fleet. He intended to carry enough ships, supplies, and researchers to avoid the shortages that had weakened the Lantu Ke Civilization.

• Li Qingsong selected Altair, which had a gas giant, two rocky planets, and abundant debris, as his migration destination and planned to continue onward after resupplying there.
• Li Qingsong designed five hundred enormous, ten-layer Aerospace Carriers to transport ships, industrial equipment, habitats, and cargo during interstellar travel.
• Li Qingsong planned to build more than one thousand Heavy Transport Ships and a greatly expanded war fleet, including thousands of large battleships and hundreds of thousands of smaller ones.
• Momo Lansi advised Li Qingsong against dedicating one hundred Aerospace Carriers to transporting warships and supplies, but Li Qingsong rejected the warning, citing the Lantu Ke Civilization’s past supply shortages.
• Li Qingsong planned to take five billion clones on the voyage, keeping four billion in hibernation and assigning at least eight hundred million of the billion awake clones to low-resource scientific research.

Li Qingsong planned the life-support fleet needed to keep a billion clones and two hundred million Blueprint Humans alive during the interstellar voyage, then began an immense Solar System-wide construction effort. As the fleet took shape, he concluded that restoring Earth's ecosystem was harder than expected and decided to seek another approach.

• Li Qingsong designed rotating Cylinder Spaceships to provide artificial gravity and house the clones and Blueprint Humans.
• Li Qingsong calculated that the fleet would require roughly 5.7 million spaceships and more than twenty trillion tons of mined and processed materials.
• The Jade Emperor and industry AIs coordinated a vast construction project across the Solar System, building ships, supplies, factories, and space bases.
• Li Qingsong found that restoring Earth's ecosystem was more difficult than he had expected and decided to find another way.

Li Qingsong continued restoring Earth’s damaged ecosystems and realized that toxic atmospheric pollution threatened to undo his work. With only decades before he planned to leave the Solar System, he began an immense project to purify Earth’s air directly.

• Li Qingsong restored rivers, lakes, land, and wildlife but found that severe atmospheric pollution continued to harm Earth’s ecology.
• Li Qingsong decided to restore Earth because it was home to him and Human Civilization, despite his approaching departure from the Solar System.
• Li Qingsong rejected more than a hundred chemical substances and hundreds of proposed purification methods because their side effects would cause too much damage.
• Li Qingsong chose to collect, purify, and release the atmosphere bit by bit, aiming to cleanse about sixty percent of it before he left.
• Li Qingsong built more than ten thousand giant purification facilities at Earth’s air-current convergence points and powered them with Nuclear Fusion Power Stations.
• The facilities began operating at full capacity, processing and purifying hundreds of tons of air each second per facility.

After thirty years of purification, Li Qingsong restored much of Earth's ecosystem and dismantled his facilities before departing with the Migration Fleet. In the Jupiter System, more than thirty million ships gathered, and Li Qingsong resolved to return one day strong enough to face any enemy.

• Li Qingsong used more than ten thousand air purifiers to cleanse Earth's atmosphere while restoring its ecosystem, and after thirty years he confirmed that pollutants had fallen below the standard limit.
• Li Qingsong dismantled his artificial facilities on Earth, and the final clones left the planet for the Jupiter System.
• Ships and clones from across the Solar System assembled in the Jupiter System, where Li Qingsong gathered more than thirty million vessels into six fleets, including one real Migration Fleet and five decoy fleets.
• Li Qingsong completed preparations to leave the Solar System and vowed to return strong enough to defeat the Machina Calamity and any other enemy.

Li Qingsong sent most of his forces out of the Solar System while leaving hidden observers and equipment behind to monitor it. The Migration Fleet crossed beyond the Solar System’s radiation boundary but remained far from the Oort Cloud, the system’s gravitational boundary.

• Li Qingsong dispatched six fleets in different directions, with only the true Migration Fleet carrying clones and the other fleets set to become mindless vessels after accelerating.
• He left dormant clones and concealed devices throughout the Solar System to watch for threats such as the Machina Calamity, relying on his unusual connection to his clones to receive their observations.
• The Migration Fleet crossed Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and Luoshen Star’s orbits as it accelerated to 1,140 kilometers per second.
• After traveling roughly 95 billion kilometers from the Sun, Li Qingsong observed that the Sun still shone brightly enough to illuminate the fleet.
• Li Qingsong determined that the fleet had passed the Solar System’s radiation boundary but was still far from its gravitational boundary at the Oort Cloud.

Li Qingsong’s fleet searched the outer Solar System for evidence of the Oort Cloud while studying the region’s unexpectedly high temperature and sparse matter. After years of acceleration, the fleet reached 4% of light speed and arrived 0.19 light-years from the Sun, which still shone brightly behind them.

• Li Qingsong sent Unmanned Probe Spaceships outward to scan the vast region ahead and search for Oort Cloud objects.
• As the fleet traveled, Li Qingsong observed that matter density had dropped while particle temperatures reached tens of thousands of degrees, and he dispatched researchers to investigate.
• Several years later, Li Qingsong’s Migration Fleet reached its planned maximum speed of 4% of light speed and ended its acceleration.
• At a distance of 1.8 trillion kilometers from the Sun, Li Qingsong looked back and saw that the Sun remained exceptionally bright.

Li Qingsong’s fleet reached the Solar System’s gravitational boundary and discovered ancient Oort Cloud objects. Samples from a large object revealed material preserved from the Solar System’s formation, and Li Qingsong began studying its history.

• Li Qingsong’s probes found a seventy-eight-kilometer Oort Cloud Object, and a Scientific Research Ship collected samples from it.
• Near the Solar System’s gravitational boundary, Li Qingsong found a smaller, two-hundred-meter object and dispatched another research ship.
• Li Qingsong and his clones examined the samples and found the object was a loose mixture of water ice, dust, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide.
• Li Qingsong observed that the asteroid still orbited the Sun despite being about one light-year away, taking roughly 350 million years to complete an orbit.
• Li Qingsong began uncovering evidence about the early solar nebula, Jupiter’s influence, and Earth’s formation from the ancient samples.

Thirty years into the fleet’s four-hundred-year voyage, Li Qingsong used the journey to advance neglected technologies and sustain the population with limited supplies. The fleet continued toward the Altair System as research progressed and its food production shifted to starch synthesis.

• Li Qingsong’s fleet traveled at 12,000 kilometers per second, and he said goodbye to his hometown as it receded behind him.
• Li Qingsong coordinated research among clones and Blueprint Humans across the ships to improve technologies that had lagged behind his military advances.
• Li Qingsong decided he would capture aliens only if another civilization first showed hostility, because he wanted to preserve the cultural qualities he had inherited from Human Civilization.
• Research into secondary technologies produced breakthroughs that also inspired improvements to warship structures, weapons, and propulsion, though larger projects had to wait until the fleet reached the Altair System.
• Li Qingsong’s fleet used fusion-powered industrial ships to convert Carbon Dioxide into starch for food, industrial uses, and animal feed, sustaining a recycling cycle.

Li Qingsong's fleet crossed an invisible interstellar dust cloud on its way toward Altair, avoiding maneuvers that could reveal its position to the Machina Calamity. The cloud damaged the pathfinder spacecraft's armor, leaving Li Qingsong to arrange repairs and wonder how stronger civilizations survived travel at far greater speeds.

• Li Qingsong let the dust cloud gradually divert his fleet rather than maneuvering and exposing its presence to the Machina Calamity.
• After a year and roughly 350 billion kilometers, the fleet emerged from the cloud as Altair grew brighter.
• Li Qingsong observed the cloud and reflected on how interstellar matter could eventually collapse into stars and other celestial bodies.
• Inspections revealed that dust impacts had reduced the pathfinder spacecraft's armor performance by at least 10%, requiring repairs before deceleration.
• Li Qingsong concluded that dust damage helped limit Electroweak Civilization fleet speeds and wondered how Strong Nuclear Civilizations traveled at 70% or 80% of light speed.

Li Qingsong brought his battered fleet to Altair, a young star system rich in minerals and fuel, and prepared to rebuild and advance his civilization. After surveying the chaotic system and assessing his dwindling supplies, he launched the Altair Construction Project.

• Li Qingsong considered the obstacles to unifying the Strong Nuclear Force and resolved to pursue the technology with enough time and resources.
• After emerging from the nebula, Li Qingsong's fleet repaired its damaged ships and continued its centuries-long journey toward Altair.
• Li Qingsong's fleet entered the young Altair System and surveyed its planets, gas giants, moons, debris disk, asteroids, and comets.
• Li Qingsong brought the fleet to a halt beside a massive gas giant, where Altair's brightness had become painful for the clones to view directly.
• Li Qingsong assessed the fleet's depleted supplies and damage, then ordered the Altair Construction Project to begin.

Li Qingsong awakened his clones and began rapidly building an industrial base on Altair a1 while extracting deuterium from the gas giant Altair a. The chapter left him facing the problem of frequent celestial-body impacts, which he needed to solve before expanding production.

• Li Qingsong awakened the sealed clones, and millions of spacecraft carried workers and equipment to Altair a1.
• Li Qingsong and the Divine Craftsman AI began construction on stable regions of the moon while spacecraft deflected asteroids from those sites.
• Li Qingsong deployed modified Jupiter Aircraft into Altair a's atmosphere to extract deuterium despite the dangerous gravity and high clone attrition.
• Li Qingsong built more than ten thousand factories in less than a year and began manufacturing warships and spacecraft locally.
• Li Qingsong recognized that frequent asteroid impacts across the Altair System had to be addressed before industrial expansion could continue.

Li Qingsong launched the Sky Net Plan to divert asteroids threatening Altair a1 and the Deuterium Gas Field, using mass-produced thrusters controlled by Wukong AI. As three increasingly powerful thruster types began operating across the system, the chapter ended before revealing the plan’s most important remaining component.

• Li Qingsong decided to use artificial intervention to stabilize the young Altair System and devised the Sky Net Plan.
• He directed hundreds of millions of clones to manufacture small metal-box thrusters, which were sent to a Space Base in Altair a1's orbit and placed under Wukong AI's control.
• Wukong AI used Probe Satellite data to identify threatening asteroids and dispatched swarms of thrusters to attach to them and change their trajectories.
• Li Qingsong expanded the system with larger fission- and fusion-powered thrusters to divert asteroids beyond the small units' capacity.
• The three types of thrusters began diverting asteroids across the Altair a system, while the Sky Net Plan's most important component remained to be introduced.

Li Qingsong expanded the Sky Net Plan to protect Altair a, Altair b, and their satellites from incoming Small Celestial Bodies, then rapidly built a vast industrial system across the worlds. With Blueprint Humans contributing strategic and technical work, his industrial strength surpassed its former peak, and he prepared to begin the next phase of his plan.

• Li Qingsong built automated space-based and ground-based air defenses that joined roaming thrusters and Space Bases to shield Altair a from Small Celestial Bodies.
• Li Qingsong sent a fleet to Altair b, and within months the Sky Net Plan there prevented Small Celestial Bodies from striking it.
• Li Qingsong linked the worlds with Space Elevators and ordered mines, power plants, chemical factories, robot factories, and spacecraft factories built across them.
• Li Qingsong restricted Blueprint Humans to advanced planning and direction, while billions of clones and AI handled basic production; the Blueprint Humans grew grateful and loyal to him.
• Li Qingsong established a complete industrial system in just over a decade, surpassing his former Solar System industrial strength, and prepared to start the next phase of his plan.

Li Qingsong completed repairs, replenished supplies, and prepared his fleet to evacuate the Altair System within days if needed. Believing the Solar System had not yet been reached by the Machina Calamity, he chose to remain and direct the fleet’s industrial capacity toward technological research.

• Li Qingsong launched an extensive program to repair his fleet, stockpile supplies, harvest deuterium, and produce decoy shell ships.
• After more than twenty years, Li Qingsong restored his fleet, refilled its warehouses, replaced lost clones, and made it possible to evacuate within five days.
• Li Qingsong considered whether the Machina Calamity had entered the Solar System, but no information had reached him from his sleeping clones there.
• Li Qingsong decided to stay in the Altair System and pursue technological development, planning to flee if the Machina Calamity reached the Solar System.
• Li Qingsong built research facilities and assigned clones to test long-accumulated hypotheses, producing new practical technologies.

After absorbing and digesting Lantu Ke Civilization technology, Li Qingsong began building large scientific devices to pursue foundational physics research. He constructed facilities across the Altair System and left the story with his gravity research underway.

• Li Qingsong planned a hundred space-based particle colliders to search for new particles, dark matter, and evidence of supersymmetry.
• Li Qingsong built a nuclear fusion power station in space and began laying pipelines for enormous colliders, including a twenty-kilometer Heavy Ion Collider.
• Li Qingsong excavated Altair a1 and built fifty Neutrino Telescopes, each with a huge ultrapure-water tank and millions of detectors.
• Li Qingsong deployed Optical Telescope Arrays and Radio Telescope Arrays throughout the Altair System to observe celestial bodies.
• Li Qingsong began researching gravity and designed Gravitational Wave Detectors with laser arms up to one hundred kilometers long.

Li Qingsong mobilized more than a billion clones and millions of Lantu Ke scholars to pursue breakthroughs in basic and applied science while investigating ways to increase interstellar voyage speed. Just after the Large Scientific Devices were completed, a clone consciousness connection from deep space interrupted his research.

• Li Qingsong began building more than 1,500 Large Scientific Devices and numerous Applied Physics laboratories to accelerate scientific research and technological development.
• Li Qingsong conjectured that extra supplies and protective hull layers could let his spacecraft travel at 6% or even 8% of light speed, improving on his previous 4% speed.
• Li Qingsong allocated clones and mental capacity to research faster interstellar travel despite the strain on his other projects.
• A clone consciousness connection from distant deep space shattered Li Qingsong's quiet period of research.