Time flew.
Hours later, a breaking news story in New York sent the city into an uproar once again!
New York had suffered one disaster after another lately.
First, Dr. Otto's artificial sun experiment had gone out of control, reducing an entire block to rubble and killing over a thousand people.
Then the Green Goblin had appeared out of nowhere. This green demon murdered people indiscriminately wherever he went. Spider-Man had fought him several times, but he had still escaped.
And now, without warning, the Green Goblin's true identity had been exposed across the media and the internet.
This murderous demon was none other than Norman Osborn, the founder and chairman of Oscorp Industries!
In an instant, Norman became a universally despised outcast, with everyone calling for his death.
Many furious citizens even gathered outside Oscorp Industries' headquarters, holding signs and staging frenzied protests and boycotts.
However, this thoroughly enraged Norman, who had a split personality.
He donned the Green Goblin Armor and shot out of the building on his glider, hurling Pumpkin Bombs into the dense crowds. Flames mingled with screams in a scene of horrific bloodshed.
Only when Spider-Man risked his life to intervene was his rampage barely brought under control.
Just as Spider-Man and the Green Goblin were locked in a fierce struggle, Iron Man finally arrived!
During the Green Goblin's previous rampages, Tony had still been in Los Angeles, far too distant to arrive in time to help.
This time, he happened to be surveying Manhattan, planning to establish a branch tower for Stark Industries, and had thus stumbled into the drama surrounding Norman's exposure.
Together, Tony and Spider-Man, Peter, finally pinned the Green Goblin firmly to the ground. The military swiftly intervened afterward, taking Norman into custody and hauling him away.
With such a staggering scandal erupting at Oscorp, the company immediately teetered on the brink.
Even though Norman's son Harry wanted to step forward and take charge, he could not steady the situation at all.
The company's assets faced complete liquidation. At that moment, Star Ring Group made a forceful entrance and announced its acquisition of Oscorp.
The military already held shares in Oscorp and now desperately wanted someone to take over this mess, so it readily sold its shares to Star Ring.
Norman had already killed nearly all the other board members. Their families were naturally willing to cash out these worthless, troublesome shares.
After a series of swift, decisive moves, Star Ring ultimately succeeded in taking over eighty percent of Oscorp Industries!
Star Ring Group became a household name overnight!
Time hurried on, and half a year passed in the blink of an eye.
During those six months, the entire world was bustling with activity.
Because Tsarist Russia had restricted palladium exports, the United States joined its allies in imposing sanctions.
South Africa plunged straight into war, with various factions embroiled in chaotic fighting, frantically plundering mineral resources to refine palladium.
The United States even openly established military bases, seizing mineral belts under the pretext of maintaining stability. Its actions were utterly domineering!
Global palladium supplies became hopelessly scarce. Palladium prices skyrocketed to more than ten, then dozens of times the price of gold, and the futures market collapsed.
The Ten Rings' territory had also been extremely unsettled over the past six months.
This once-peaceful haven attracted countless refugees ravaged by war. Various powers had also deliberately encouraged this influx, seeking to put pressure on the Ten Rings.
But Wenwu turned no one away, opening the borders to accept the displaced. As vast numbers of people poured in, he recruited workers on a massive scale and expanded the urban areas, spreading factories and fully automated smart equipment everywhere.
However, quite a few malicious individuals slipped in among them, stirring up chaos among the civilians. Armed forces also frequently harassed and raided the border markets.
Wenwu suspected that this had to be Hydra's retaliation.
He had no time to play with them now. Once he could spare the time, he would crush them with a single blow!
The massive influx of refugees into his territory, combined with the existing local population of over two million, did place tremendous pressure on the Ten Rings. Supplies were severely inadequate.
Fortunately, Wenwu had secretly established numerous underground factories, using his metal ability to help rapidly construct a number of giant transport aircraft.
As one transport after another was completed, they flew to outposts around the world to deliver supplies, turning the nations and powers blockading and sanctioning the Ten Rings into a joke.
They could not even catch a glimpse of the transports. Neither satellites nor radar could detect them, rendering the blockade meaningless!
In addition, all the Ten Rings' military factories had achieved full intelligent automation, their industrial assembly lines running around the clock.
High-energy weapons, Iron Man Armor, aerospace fighters, and strategic missiles rolled off the production lines without pause. The Ten Rings' military strength was growing wildly at a terrifying pace.
The Libya base in particular had devoted the entire six months to expanding infrastructure and mass-producing aerospace vehicles.
With the assistance of Wenwu's metal manipulation ability, a 150-meter-class, Arc-powered giant aerospace fortress fighter and two superheavy strategic transports were successfully completed in just six months, becoming the Ten Rings' ultimate strategic air assets.
And at this moment, dozens of miles south of this large base, deep in the uninhabited Gobi wilderness...
A secret laboratory buried a hundred meters underground was brightly lit and utterly silent.
Spotless special-alloy workstations were arranged in intersecting rows. Indicator lights on precision instruments brightened and dimmed in sequence, while pale blue streams of data raced across enormous holographic screens like rivers of stars, interweaving in calculations.
This was the controlled nuclear fusion artificial sun laboratory Wenwu had spent six months painstakingly building with his own hands.
At the center of the laboratory, hundreds upon thousands of newly upgraded superconducting coils encircled one another in concentric layers, forming a perfectly spherical magnetic confinement chamber a hundred meters in diameter.
The chamber's center stood empty, quietly reserving its core area to hold the fire of a star.
Wenwu stood straight before the main control console, his gaze calm.
He had been exceptionally cautious with this experiment. He was not as reckless as Dr. Otto, who had set up a fusion experiment capable of destroying a city in a densely populated urban area, gambling on luck with nothing but fervor, only to end up dead.
Wenwu had avoided every risk from the outset, choosing an uninhabited site a hundred meters beneath the Gobi. The entire laboratory was powered independently by a large, expanded-capacity Arc Reactor.
Over those six months, he had worked his way through the world's most advanced nuclear physics knowledge, thoroughly mastered Dr. Otto's complete fusion theory, and identified every flaw that had caused the original experiment to spiral out of control.
These included insufficient magnetic field power, coil materials with excessively low tolerances, and so on.
He had optimized the entire magnetic confinement algorithm, upgraded the superconducting coil materials, and added multiple layers of buffering force fields and an emergency fuel extraction system, correcting every fatal flaw in Otto's experiment.
"System self-check complete."
"Primary Arc power output stable. Magnetic field array preheating complete."
"Vacuum chamber meets specifications. Impurity removal complete."
"Deuterium-tritium fuel loaded. Fusion experiment ready to begin at any time."
Cold, mechanical notifications slowly rang out through the empty laboratory.
This was an intelligent system Wenwu had programmed and optimized using Otto's underlying AI code. Though it was only an unfinished weak AI and could not compare to Tony's JARVIS, it was more than capable of assisting with experiments!
Wenwu lightly lowered his fingertip, confirming the final command. "Begin the controlled nuclear fusion experiment."
The instant the command was issued, the hundred-meter spherical superconducting array powered up.
Hummm...!
A deep, heavy resonance from the magnetic field reverberated underground. An invisible, powerful magnetic field instantly filled the entire chamber, weaving an impenetrable, supremely stable magnetic cage.
The next second, minute quantities of deuterium-tritium fuel collided and fused at high speed in the center of the chamber, guided by the magnetic field.
A brilliant point of light appeared in an instant, rapidly unfurling into a perfectly round plasma fireball three meters in diameter.
Flames rolled, and golden-red light flowed evenly. There was no violent energy leakage, no strange gravitational turbulence, and no sign of any metal being pulled or dragged.
The immensely powerful magnetic field locked the plasma firmly in place, perfectly confining the fusion energy to the chamber's core.