Beneath the Cable

The Mid-Autumn Festival had just passed.

In Venus's atmosphere, after more than two years of effort, the Federation had established two floating cities on Venus.

The two floating cities were officially named Penglai Island City and Yingzhou Island City.

Penglai Island City had expanded to an area of 273 square kilometers. Its thickest section reached 1,375 meters, while even its thinnest section was around 120 meters thick.

Yingzhou Island City, the second city included in the construction program, was currently only 20% the size of Penglai Island City.

The reason they had been able to expand so quickly—

On one hand, the number of spacecraft had increased. The active vessels traveling between Blue Star and Venus included seven Zhurong-class ships and twelve Vanguard-class ships.

On the other hand, Venus's local industrial scale was also growing explosively by the day.

Most of the raw materials for the floating modules were mass-produced locally on Venus, with a self-sufficiency rate for parts and components of around 96.7%.

Meanwhile, Venus's wind and geothermal power generation had also been rising steadily. Maximum installed capacity had reached 160 million megawatts, providing a stable average of 2 billion megawatt-hours of electricity per day, with carbon powder reserves of 1 to 1.5 billion megawatt-hours.

The astronauts serving on Venus were already in their second rotation, and their numbers had increased from the previous three to twenty-four.

Fang Gaoyuan and Asik, who were responsible for geothermal power technology, took a work elevator down from Penglai Island along a geothermal power cable toward Venus's surface.

The work elevator was essentially a simplified version of a space elevator. Its cable ran beside the power-generation cable, mainly to facilitate maintenance.

There were currently sixteen geothermal power cables. They supplied a substantial portion of Penglai Island's electricity while also anchoring the island in