The laboratory was pitch-black, its power already cut off. As the robots scanned the room, they saw silvery metal sheets a meter long and wide scattered across the floor.
Porcelain-white lights illuminated the room again, revealing a chaotic interior strewn with metal plates of every size and instruments abandoned on the floor.
The shelves near the walls were already piled high with metal plates of various colors.
"The T3 Robots follow the Replica's instructions and clean the laboratory whenever needed."
"The logs show the last cleaning was three hours ago. Was his manufacturing speed beyond imagination?"
A black cylinder thirty meters in diameter occupied the very center of the laboratory. The robots continuously uploaded their observations as they stepped over the clutter surrounding the enormous experimental apparatus.
Under Luo Qi's remote control, the cylinder's door slowly opened, revealing darkness within. Light from the laboratory pierced the interior, falling across a floor covered in silver metal plates.
The lights inside the cylinder came on, and three robots stepped inside.
Eight black metal electric-field emitters, each four meters tall, stood around the inner chamber. The room also contained half a railcar's worth of ordinary red sand and soil.
At that moment, however, the sand and soil floated up from their container, drawn out by an invisible energy entity into a ribbon that drifted into a distorted magnetic field.
Amid a pale blue glow, the tiny grains of sand actually assembled themselves, bit by bit, into a thin metal plate. The floor was covered in those very plates!
This was matter recombination! It was no exaggeration to say that matter recombination was the solution to an interstellar civilization's basic mineral needs!
It was also one of the hallmark technologies of an interstellar civilization!
Controllable nuclear fusion was the first, and matter recombination was