Inside the Sea Wolf.
Time ticked by, and the two projectiles drew ever closer to the Lagrange points. Meanwhile, Nie Yun kept a close watch on changes at both locations.
"Captain, we've reached the designated coordinates!" Codename reported.
"Good! Then... cast the nets!" At Nie Yun's command, the two projectiles began to change.
Black strands as thin as human hair suddenly sprouted from their dull gray, rocky surfaces. The strands kept emerging and stretching outward, as though the rocks were spinning silk. Soon, both rocks had become balls of black fuzz.
The strands on the fuzzy balls continued to lengthen. One meter, ten meters, a hundred meters...
Then the growing strands branched again, splitting into two finer strands that continued to spread...
Three minutes later, the rocky projectiles had vanished entirely. In their place were enormous nets invisible to the naked eye.
Each circular net consisted of fine, tough strands, with openings less than half a meter across. Fully spread out, they already measured five kilometers in diameter, and they were still expanding.
These strands were a new material made from Mechanical Insects arranged in a sheet-like structure. Put simply, they were a two-dimensional material only an atom thick, with a structure similar to the "black gold" of materials science-graphene!
Graphene was a single-layer, two-dimensional carbon nanomaterial made of carbon atoms with sp2-hybridized orbitals arranged in a hexagonal honeycomb lattice.
Modern materials scientists called it "black gold" because it was one of the strongest known materials. A strand as thin as a human hair could lift a grand piano!
It was also the thinnest, hardest nanomaterial known to exist. It was two hundred times harder than steel, six times lighter, and could bend through large angles.
With a similar structure, the Mechanical Insect material far outperformed graphene. Even with the