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"."

At this very moment.

As he watched the mushroom cloud churning in the distance.

Xu Yun's mind was almost completely blank, with only one thought drifting through it again and again:

"It's so beautiful."

This was the first time he had witnessed a nuclear explosion with his own eyes. It was no exaggeration to say it was the most spectacular "scenery" he had ever seen in either of his two lives.

From afar.

The mushroom cloud initially rose to a height of roughly two or three thousand meters, towering into the sky as if it were about to break through the heavens.

And this was still far from the mushroom cloud's final form.

As everyone knew.

In fluid mechanics, a mushroom cloud was essentially a vortex ring, or a toroidal vortex.

It often occurred in turbulent regions of liquid or gas flow. Viscous friction at the interface between two fluids slowed the outer layer of A relative to its core.

Then the outer layers slid around A and gathered at its rear. The central mass continued forward, while the outer layers became "locked" into a ring. The result was that the axial flow in A developed into a vortex ring.

A vortex ring traveled at roughly half the speed of its core mass, so the mushroom cloud from a real nuclear explosion would not reach its maximum height until about thirty minutes after the blast. Many mushroom-cloud images were not captured at the instant of the explosion, either.

Xu Yun stared fixedly at the distant mushroom cloud, watching it rise higher and higher.

Suddenly.

A line from a poem resurfaced in his mind:

[Mountains dance like silver serpents, the plains race like waxen elephants, all vying with the heavens to see who stands taller.]

Come to think of it...