Chapter 295 The Quiet Implementation of the Star Gathering Strategy

On the surface, in the joint control room of Kyoto's second fortress city.

The hall was filled with the dull hum of the ventilation system. Four hours had passed since the two failed conversion experiments on the high-orbit platform.

On the enormous holographic main screen, countless array diagrams unfolded like stars. These were all the underlying architecture diagrams sealed away by the Coordination Agency and the Supreme Academy of Sciences when the first phase of the space elevator project was completed.

"Remove all activated backbone nodes. Remove the defense matrix. Remove the power return system."

Wang Mingyuan's eyes were bloodshot as he stared intently at the decreasing number of dots on the screen. "List out all the high-orbit nodes marked as 'redundant,' 'abandoned,' or 'without actual energy throughput' in the construction records from back then."

Swah——

With the computing power of the main supercomputer "Kunlun" poured in, the originally complex blueprints, as intricate as the stars in the sky, were instantly cleared of 99%.

Only one hundred and eight dim points of light remained, suspended forlornly in the holographic projection. They were scattered around the main cable of the space elevator and in several remote, obscure corners of the main platform in the synchronous orbit, like a barely perceptible outer shell.

The heavy breathing of several veteran array masters could be heard on the communication channel, two hundred kilometers away on a high-orbit platform.

"Professor Wang, we've looked at these node diagrams three times already." An old array master who was stationed on the high track rubbed his throbbing temples, his tone filled with tired doubt. "I watched these array patterns being carved back then. Their spiritual energy circulation paths are all dead ends, unable to form a closed loop at all. Once spiritual energy is poured in, it will dissipate into the vacuum in less than two seconds."

"This can't even be called an array. If I had to describe it..." the old array master gestured, "it's more like a bunch of rotten rocks that were randomly thrown into space to prevent high-orbit gravity shearing. It's purely physical counterweight."

"Rotten rock?"

In the control room, Lin Feng, who was engrossed in comparing data, suddenly looked up.

He stared at the 108 isolated nodes in the holographic projection, and the image of the massive wreckage they had seen on the "Broken Army" a few hours earlier flashed through his mind.

The damaged flow guide ring frame.

A broken solar panel.

A mix of backlit and shadowed areas.

"No...it's not the counterweight." Lin Feng jerked back his chair and lunged at the control panel. "Old Liu, pull up the radar topology map of the Tianyan-04 observation station ruins! Quickly!"

Without wasting words, Lao Liu's fingers flew across the terminal, pushing the 3D map of the high-speed rail ruins he had just brought back onto the main screen.

"Compare the spatial coordinates of the 108 redundant nodes with the physical distribution map of the Tianyan-04 debris," Lin Feng instructed.

The two drawings rapidly approached each other in mid-air.

One photo shows the chaotic steel ruins of an abandoned observation station.

One is a spatial array composed of these 108 "decapitated" array nodes.

The two are completely different in appearance, but under the reconstruction of the Kunlun supercomputer, the moment their three-dimensional spatial force models and radiation blocking grids completely overlapped, a series of alarm sounds rang out in the hall.

Similarity: 89%.

The control room fell into dead silence.

The old formation master's breathing stopped on the communication channel.

"This isn't a formation..." Lin Feng stared at the screen, his Adam's apple bobbing with difficulty. "This is a man-made 'speed bump'."

The reason Tianyan-04 was able to detect stellar energy wasn't because there were minerals there, but because the debris field created a natural vortex dead zone. The violent cosmic background radiation was weakened and slowed down layer by layer by the physical structure there, eventually settling slowly and turning into the dark blue cold mist they detected.

These 108 severed nodes scattered around the main platform do not need to form a closed loop of spiritual energy.

As long as they stand there like rocks in a riverbed, they can use the weak magnetic field emitted by the array patterns themselves to disperse and slow down the passing high-frequency stellar energy invisibly!

Wang Mingyuan slowly walked towards the holographic screen.

He stared at those lonely nodes, a cold sweat seeping down his back.

This doesn't seem like a construction oversight; it's more like a space deliberately left unused before the space elevator was actually put into high-orbit industrial applications. It's as if someone preemptively laid out the most difficult step for those who would come later.

Wang Mingyuan didn't elaborate, but his gaze involuntarily drifted to a fragment of an old file that had just been retrieved.

That was the bottom-level construction annotation entered with the highest authority on the eve of the grand ceremony.

Below the summary diagram of these 108 nodes, only twelve words are written in a cold, hard style:

Gather resources without locking them up, proceed slowly without stagnation, and utilize them only after careful consideration.

Gathering without locking.

Slow but not stagnant.

Qin Lie listened to these twelve words in space and closed his eyes. He remembered the titanium crystal jar that had almost exploded from the stellar energy three hours earlier.

Their minds were previously focused on how to build the strongest cage to "lock" it in, how to forcibly "press" it down inside the metal. The result was system hardening and the collapse of the buffer layer.

It turns out the answer had already been written.

The starry sky is too cold and too heavy to grasp. It can only be allowed to slow down and settle on its own.

When these twelve characters were left behind, there wasn't much explanation. It's more like a cruel threshold—only after humanity has been battered and bruised by this energy and truly grasped the temperament of this starry sky will they be qualified to look back and understand these words.

"I understand now."

Wang Mingyuan broke the silence, his voice regaining its rationality and coldness, "Lin Feng, immediately run a dynamic simulation on the supercomputer. Activate these 108 nodes to simulate the passage of star crests."

"receive."

Lin Feng's hands left afterimages on the keyboard, illuminating the data of the 108 hidden nodes in the virtual space, constructing an invisible funnel-shaped network.

"Simulation begins!"

The deep blue torrent of data represents the chaotic stellar energy, violently surging in from the depths of the universe.

But this time, there was no titanium crystal armor to stop them in a head-on collision.

The torrent crashes into the node network. These "reefs" do not attempt to lock in the energy, but rather cleverly shred the kinetic energy of the torrent through a specific arrangement.

On the screen, the sharp cold pressure peak began to decline.

Ten percent, twenty percent, forty percent.

After passing through layers of "speed bumps," the violent radiation that was originally enough to instantly freeze and shatter the Foundation Establishment True Essence gradually gathered at the bottom of the funnel into a slow-flowing, no longer lethal dark blue cold mist.

It is still cold, still heavy.

But it is no longer a knife that kills, but a rough blank that can finally be hammered by human forging hammer.

"The data processing is successful." Lin Feng breathed a sigh of relief, his forehead covered in sweat. "The peak has been successfully flattened, and we've entered a controllable connection zone."

A suppressed murmur of discussion filled the control room, and a real glimmer of hope ignited in everyone's eyes.

"Professor Wang, now that the simulation has passed, let's immediately activate all 108 nodes outside the main platform!" Wu Di immediately turned around to allocate high-orbit energy.

"etc."

On the communication channel, the old array master who had been silent until now suddenly spoke, his tone somewhat heavy, "Professor Wang, I'm afraid it's not that simple."

The hall fell silent.

"These nodes have been dormant in the vacuum of high orbit at an altitude of 200 kilometers for many years." The old array master looked at the data he had just calculated. "Long-term exposure to high-energy cosmic rays has caused serious physical shifts in the array patterns of at least thirty of these nodes. The current node network is leaky."

"If we force-feed energy directly into them from the control room to turn them on..."

Lin Feng quickly switched to calculations, his expression suddenly changing: "The energy backflow will instantly trigger a node explosion! Moreover, a forced activation of this scale will most likely disrupt the spiritual pressure balance around the main platform, directly drawing in the stellar energy storm from deeper within!"

The nascent hope was severely hampered by the realities of industrial resistance.

"Can we calibrate remotely from the control room?" Qin Lie asked.

"No way." The old array master shook his head. "The interference in the high orbit is too great, and the margin for error in micro-operation is zero. Someone must wear a pressure suit and go into the vacuum outside the cabin to manually cut off redundant loops node by node and re-engrave the offset array patterns."

Go outside the cabin.

In a context where radiation could erupt at any moment, the mission is to repair 108 time bombs.

Silence fell once again in the technical area.

This isn't building a road on the surface; it's walking a tightrope on the edge of an abyss. If the repair process causes a backflow of stellar energy, no one who leaves will be left with even ashes.

Wang Mingyuan rested his hands on the table, his eyes fixed on the dim nodes on the screen.

"Qin Lie," Wang Mingyuan said, his voice calm and even.

"exist."

"We need this system." Wang Mingyuan looked up at Qin Lie's cold, hard face in the holographic projection. "We can't rely on luck to scavenge for scraps in the ruins forever. We need to build a base station outside the main platform that can actually turn starlight radiation into a usable resource."

"Since it gathers without locking up, and moves slowly without stagnation."

"Then this base station will be called 'Star Gathering Platform'."

Wang Mingyuan's gaze pierced through the screen, as if looking into the dark depths of space. They had found the right method; what they lacked now was someone to ignite that fire.

"One hundred and eight nodes, can it be repaired?"

Qin Lie did not answer immediately.

He glanced behind him at the array engineers and sword cultivators who were exhausted from the previous extravehicular activities but were still staring intently at him.

Then he reached out and picked up the heavy helmet from the table again.

"As long as the blueprints are there."

Qin Lie's voice was like cold metal colliding in a vacuum, "We can fix it."