After returning to the base underwater, Nie Yun immediately directed the Mechanical Insects to begin devouring the nearly ten thousand tons of cargo aboard the freighter, along with the frigate.
With the current number of Mechanical Insects, the job would only take about a day. Nie Yun did not sit idle during that time, either.
Whenever the Mechanical Insects devoured an item, Nie Yun immediately analyzed its structure and design principles in tandem, absorbing all the technology used in it and storing it within the Mechanical Insects.
Nie Yun had tested the Mechanical Insects' copying and analysis abilities countless times and knew the process inside out. This time, however, he was not simply copying and absorbing the technology. He had begun optimizing it.
The optimization focused on two main areas: first, converting everything to Mechanical Insect construction! Second, integrating the technologies!
Equipment built from ordinary materials and equipment built from Mechanical Insect material were two entirely different things.
As a supermaterial, the Mechanical Insects already had the potential to trigger the fourth industrial revolution.
First, besides being a material, they could also store energy, allowing most low-power batteries and power supply components to be eliminated outright.
For example, if a smartphone were made entirely from Mechanical Insect material, removing its relatively bulky battery would make it over 50% thinner and lighter!
Its battery life would also theoretically approach infinity, because even while consuming energy, the Mechanical Insects could continuously draw energy from their surroundings automatically. They could even replenish it faster than it was being consumed.
Second, they were superconductors of both heat and electricity, and could directly absorb either as an energy source.
Taking phones as an example again, an ordinary smartphone had a battery capacity of roughly 3,000-4,000 milliamp-hours. Yet from the moment it was switched on until