Transition

"The robotic arms on the production lines are getting more agile. They're almost like the ones I saw on Water Blue Star."

"We now have vast arrays of solar panels and high-energy Power Storage Stations. Energy is no longer a constraint."

"I'm starting to worry he'll cover all of Orange Star. There's no one who can keep him in check now."

"He has endless ideas and endless plans. His machines keep bringing his blueprints to life."

"Upgraded day after day, covering vast stretches of land. It's just like a virus."

"We could just wait for rescue from Water Blue Star now."

"No, he has a mission. Maybe he's right?"

"...I hope Natasha and Fei'er are living well under the Alliance's laws. I pray they're healthy."

"I don't even know if I'll ever get back to Water Blue Star..."

Luo Qi "watched" Stendhal through the tablet's camera.

Luo Qi knew the man was starting to fall apart. Once people with knowledge in their heads had nothing to do, they started thinking about this and that.

But the current Orange Star Base was still insignificant compared with humanity's vast industrial society.

Luo Qi's greatest advantage, however, was that he had no economic needs.

In other words, factories had to manufacture whatever end consumers wanted to make a profit, ensuring they neither lost money nor went bankrupt while raking in cash.

But everything on Orange Star served Luo Qi's industry.

All productive capacity and materials went toward advancing heavy industrial production, with no need for an economic system to assign them value.

He owned a planet. He did not need to eat or drink. His robots only needed their batteries replaced, and they worked all twenty-eight hours of every day without stopping. They never complained of exhaustion or asked for time off.

A week quickly passed. Luo Qi had now been in this world for 1,600 hours.

For 1,585 of those hours, the base's host computer had never entered sleep mode. All month long, he had worked twenty-eight hours a day without rest, controlling every unit of labor and production as he frantically expanded his base.

Not a single product coming off the assembly lines was superfluous. There was no trash here, no waste, only remelting, upgrading, and construction.

The speed of mechanical expansion was practically like stacking up data. Even capitalists would have trembled at the sight.

Throughout this period, the Guard System remained online around the clock, guarding against meteors that might fall from the sky. In fact, none had actually fallen.

As Luo Qi gained more productive capacity, he began expanding toward medium-sized factories, striving to increase production capacity as quickly as possible.

The growing number of machines in these factories all demanded his focused attention to operate.

Although he still could not observe the existence of magnetic fields, the Electromagnetic Force Research Center remained operational. It continually tested configurations for elementary electromagnetism, selecting the most energy-efficient options from hundreds upon thousands of designs to make the electromagnetic furnaces faster and more efficient.

Meanwhile, in electronic instrument production, the sensors Luo Qi had been researching finally took shape, ranging from the simplest levels and pressure sensors to the complex technology for converting optical signals into electrical signals that he could now manufacture.

These sensors were how Luo Qi perceived the outside world. Housed inside a computer, he was like a human brain.

Without external data being transmitted into the computer, Luo Qi would be like a patient who could neither see nor feel. Even if the world were destroyed, he would know nothing about it.

Once the optical sensors were manufactured, Luo Qi began producing more cameras for the base, aiming to cover every corner.

These cameras would let him observe everything without blind spots, improving the eyes of the Guard System.

The construction of the chemical plant enabled mass production of the chemicals Luo Qi would need for future development. The Red No. 1 battery was successfully upgraded to Red No. 2, bringing its energy-storage performance up to that of a manufactured high-energy battery.

With this series of fundamental upgrades, Luo Qi developed the T2 robot from the T1 model. The new robots were stronger than the T1 robots and featured hydraulic systems and high-strength alloys.

Their bodies looked bulkier, but they still carried a homemade rectangular camera on their shoulders.

As T2 robots appeared inside the base, they began installing fixed cameras in every corner.

The latest statistics soon showed that the base's daily metal output had reached 800 tonnes. The nearby surface had already been sifted once, and nearly a thousand mining vehicles had to travel farther afield to sift sand.

He was already using 45 percent of the twelve servers' total computing power. The entire base still operated on a model of self-replication and expansion, increasing its core heavy industrial capacity.

To guard against the meteors streaking overhead, Luo Qi had devised a backup plan several days earlier, relocating a server, wireless communications equipment, and a backup set of manufacturing facilities.

Thirty kilometers away, he established a small, capable integrated processing factory to serve as a backup.

The original light and medium-sized factories were converted directly into research facilities for high-precision equipment.

Several days earlier, Luo Qi had moved into a new home, a two-story building made from hard metal silicides that he designated the main control base. In reality, he had moved ten of the eleven remaining servers away individually, hiding them inside different factories.

As long as there was electricity and a wireless network signal, Luo Qi's control over the base remained unaffected.

He also built Stendhal a new modern living area, which stored seeds, embryos, and other things left behind by the old base. It too was divided into exercise, residential, dining, and storage areas.

He had the old buildings remelted outright, leveled the base's ground, and covered it with brand-new silver-gray silicon flooring.

Another twenty days passed in a flash. The entire base had transformed into something resembling a dedicated industrial park on Earth, with level ground and large factories.

The constantly self-replicating industrial construction force pushed toward ever greater strength.

Within the planned industrial zone spanning ten thousand mu, dust shrouded tens of thousands of roaring machines. It looked like an ordinary industrial base under construction on Earth, with countless "people" and machines working at the site.

The most eye-catching among them were the five enormous construction machines.

They were even more refined than the designs on the blueprints. Their platforms alone stood sixty meters high, like steel city walls crouching on the ground, with bodies composed of gantry cranes and tower cranes.

Their nearly one hundred lifting modules could operate simultaneously across the construction site, completing the factory buildings beneath them at a speed almost visible to the naked eye.

If he had to describe them, they were like mother hens incubating eggs, with construction capabilities that would leave property developers grumbling.

By now, Luo Qi controlled twelve large heavy industrial factories.

Translated into military production on Earth, that meant the capacity to produce 2,000 fifty-tonne Cold War-era main battle tanks every day, with daily steel output reaching 100,000 tonnes!

The number of mobile machines had reached 200,000. Working alongside the heavy industrial factories, they labored day and night to build the era Luo Qi wanted.

The Guard System had gained another four hundred turrets, with the large ones firing 220-millimeter electromagnetic projectiles and smaller ones using 75-millimeter and 35-millimeter calibers.

Viewed from the sky, the center and south were vast expanses of level silver-gray ground, and even the north was being paved.

To the northwest lay vast Solar Panel power stations.

Covering hundreds of thousands of mu, they were neatly aligned to receive the greatest amount of sunlight, supplying energy to the factories every day.

South of the power stations stood rows of battery storage centers.

In the middle were two neat rows of large factories.

Countless machines shuttled between the factories, transporting materials across the flat silver-gray ground.

This area adjoined the new base to the south, while the north was a new industrial zone bustling with construction.

Along the edge of the large factories nearest the new base stood seven large, gray, single-story warehouses in a horizontal row.

Beyond them was the new base itself.

After all, with production capacity expanding yet again, continuing to live in a shabby little building would have been far too undignified.

The light industrial base area was completely covered in hardened flooring, forming a fully developed zone four hundred meters wide and eight hundred meters long.

First, five materials warehouses stood in a column on the right. Beyond a fifty-meter gap were two rows of newly renovated buildings: four small factories and four medium-sized factories.

Between every factory building was level ground wide enough for large vehicles to pass.

South of the factories stood Luo Qi's new control center, with the human living area on the left.

To the left of the human living area stood a transparent glass greenhouse.

Large expanses of level ground around the edges were reserved for future development.