Everyone turned their attention back to the Science Kingdom's great infrastructure project.
Senku, Chrome, and Kohaku returned with a full load of high-purity copper ore and threw themselves into speeding up construction. The village's production lines ran at full capacity.
Mining proceeded smoothly, with a steady stream of high-grade copper ore delivered to the workshop for flotation to remove impurities, followed by pyrometallurgical smelting.
Batch after batch of electrolytic copper with a purity of 99.99% was successfully produced.
While everyone tackled the circuitry, Li Xiang continued preparing medicine for the coming conflict.
With plenty of hands available for the village's infrastructure work, she focused on refining the process for mass-producing Montmorillonite Powder.
The raw bentonite ore was dried and crushed, air-separated and coarsely screened, then mixed with water into a slurry and centrifuged to remove coarse sand and impurities.
After ultrasonic refinement, low-temperature drying, and grinding, repeated purification and adjustments steadily raised the montmorillonite content above ninety-five percent. The best batches even approached the pharmaceutical standard of ninety-nine point five percent.
Then the additives were measured out and mixed in evenly.
After a full half month, the antidiarrheal medicine, Montmorillonite Powder, had been successfully produced in bulk.
The powder was safely stored, and their emergency supplies were fully stocked. The circuitry project, however, remained bogged down in problems, its progress stumbling along.
Making wire seemed like a simple matter of drawing it out and coating it, but in reality, it demanded extremely high precision and insulation quality.
The electrolytic copper snapped easily during wire drawing, and the thickness of the insulating coating was difficult to control. The slightest deviation could ruin the wire.
Hundreds upon hundreds of attempts wore everyone's patience thin.
Half a month slipped quietly by, and Li Xiang's medicine-making project came to a successful close.
Inside the