While people marveled at Phantom Immortal Technology's use of room-temperature superconducting material in well-drilling equipment, they also praised the Golden Pangolin's extraordinary capabilities.
This was a machine unlike anything the world had ever seen.
For the true experts, the focus was neither the Golden Pangolin's formidable drilling power nor the superconducting material that had already been revealed. Instead, they noticed another detail.
Why did no rock debris come out of the wells drilled by the Golden Pangolin, and how were those rock walls formed?
None of this could be explained by existing scientific theories.
With current drilling methods, even an ordinary drill bit boring downward required the removal of rock fragments, let alone a machine drilling a hole more than seven meters across.
So where had the earth and rock excavated by the Golden Pangolin gone?
The high-strength rock walls it created were even harder to understand. Deep underground, one could argue that the rock had already been there, but the surface was nothing but soil!
As far as people knew, soil could only become rock through hundreds of millions of years of sedimentation and deep burial, or by melting into magma and solidifying again.
The latter was clearly impossible. There was no way people nearby would fail to notice temperatures high enough to melt soil. As for the former, could the Golden Pangolin have created localized high pressure, forcibly compressing the soil into rock?
That explanation did make sense, but the bizarre thing was that the entire ring of rock was only twenty centimeters thick. Beyond that, the soil remained soil, soft and loose.
Anyone who claimed it was fucking compression was welcome to try compressing something into that shape themselves!
Some suspected that the formation of the rock layer was connected to the missing earth and stone, but