88: Chapter 88 The Smelting Center in the Scrap Metal Heap

Several professors were also in despair. What was the use of having the technology run successfully? The hardware materials were blocked. ASML could build super-clean workshops because Western material science was used globally.

Everyone's gaze turned to Lu Chen. The supply of materials had been cut off; this was a dead end.

Lu Chen did not speak.

He reached out and picked up the kraft paper envelope he had brought from the office, then flicked his wrist.

A thick stack of hand-drawn engineering blueprints slid out of the envelope and landed on the tin desktop with a "slap." On the first page of the blueprints, the complex structure of the electromagnetic beam gravity separation chamber was strikingly visible.

Lu Chen clasped his hands together, resting them under his chin, and swept his gaze over everyone present.

"Who said we were going to use a blast furnace to smelt iron?" Lu Chen's voice was devoid of any warmth. "By dawn tomorrow, expand the foundation pit at the northern construction site by another twenty thousand square meters."

Lu Chen tapped his knuckles against the blueprints, producing a dull thud.

"The foreigners won't even sell us a decent piece of iron, so we, this bunch of scrap collectors, will hand-craft a smelting center right in front of them."

The Northern High-tech Development Zone.

At three in the morning, the searchlights here illuminated the night sky into a ghastly white.

The roar of the pile drivers made the ground tremble.

Zhao Tiezhu, shirtless, clutched a mud-covered walkie-talkie and stood at the edge of the twenty-thousand-square-meter pit, hopping mad and cursing.

"Pump truck number three! Are you blind? Shift half a meter to the left! That's the baseline for the earthquake-proof load-bearing wall drawn by Song Changming! If it's off by a centimeter, I'll skin you alive!"

A multi-wheeled heavy dump truck rumbled over, its bed tilted up, and seventy to eighty tons of high-grade cement mixed with sand and gravel crashed into the bottom of the ten-meter-deep foundation pit with a "whoosh."

Song Changming, wearing that ill-fitting blue labor uniform, squatted less than ten meters away from the pouring point.

Mud splattered all over him, but he didn't even flinch.

He gripped a curled-edged ruler in one hand and held the remnant page of the Quantum Smelting Center blueprints that Lu Chen had tossed to him in the other.

"Stop! Stop, stop, stop!" Song Changming suddenly stood up, pointing at the rebar grid in the deep pit and shouting, "Zhao Tiezhu! Tell that bunch tying the rebar to get up here! The angle of the electromagnetic circuit coils here is wrong!"

Zhao Tiezhu slid down the dirt slope to the bottom of the pit and walked over to Song Changming.

"Engineer Song, this rebar was personally overseen by Chief Engineer Wei, and it meets the highest national standard for earthquake resistance," Zhao Tiezhu said, pointing at the dense rebar.

"To hell with the earthquake resistance rating!" Song Changming shook the blueprints until they rattled. "What's going to be installed down here is a Quantum Gravity Generator! Once the magnetic field overloads, ordinary rebar won't even last three seconds; it'll be torn into iron powder! Rework it immediately! Pull out thirty percent of the rebar in the northwest corner and replace it with non-magnetic copper pipes!"

Zhao Tiezhu gritted his teeth and remained silent.

Removing the rebar meant starting over, and all of it was a waste of time.

"If you don't listen to me, as soon as the machine starts, the foundation will collapse on the spot," Song Changming sneered. "Do you dare to bet on it?"

Zhao Tiezhu spat on the ground, grabbed the walkie-talkie, and shouted, "Group Three! Get down here! Tear out the rebar! Replace it with copper pipes!"

At the top of the pit, Wu Dong ran over, drenched in sweat.

His high-end custom suit had long since lost its original color, and his tie was haphazardly stuffed into his pocket.

"Zhao Tiezhu! We've got big trouble!" Wu Dong shouted from across the pit's edge.

"What is it now!" Zhao Tiezhu yelled back.

"Boss Zhang and his people have brought the scrap metal!" Wu Dong panted heavily. "They're all blocked outside the tin wall of the construction site's perimeter! The trucks can't get in!"

Zhao Tiezhu scrambled out of the deep pit.

On the wasteland outside, hundreds of trucks, agricultural tricycles, and even flatbed carts were parked, covering the area like a dark cloud.

The entire scrap collection network in Jiang City had been opened up by this group of small business owners.

Cartload after cartload of rusty steel pipes, broken kitchen knives, old engine casings, and even discarded iron bed frames were all piled on the ground.

In less than three hours, the scrap metal had been piled three meters high.

Industrial waste, reeking of motor oil and rust, covered over two hundred acres of open land.

"Is the Factory Director really planning to smelt special steel out of this pile of junk?" Wu Dong swallowed hard as he looked at that mountain of iron. "Boss Zhang and the others are asking, should they keep collecting? Scrap yards in the surrounding cities heard that we buy everything without haggling, so they've already loaded trucks and sent them over overnight."

"Collect it! Collect as much as the Factory Director says!" Zhao Tiezhu waved his hand dismissively. "Knock down the perimeter fence for me! Make room for them! Dump it all in!"

In the distant temporary prefabricated housing area.

Wei Jianguo and dozens of technical experts were crammed into a single room.

In the middle of the room stood a large table made from several joined together.

The table was piled high with blueprints and physical part samples extracted from the system.

Wang Shouyi held a pair of tweezers and placed a grating fragment, only the size of a fingernail, under the microscope.

"Look at the patterns," Wang Shouyi said, his voice trembling. "The etching precision for the double-slit interference has reached 0.01 nanometers. All our previous methods were completely wrong."

Chen Jianming leaned in to take a look, then immediately picked up a red pen and drew a big cross over the architectural diagram he had been drawing for three days.

"Scrap it and recalculate," Chen Jianming said, rubbing his reddened eyes. "The assembly logic for the optical lens group must follow this copy from Factory Director Lu. Divide the five thousand people into three hundred task forces. No one sleeps tonight; memorize the physical disassembly steps for these thirty-five core modules!"

No one complained, and no one called out that they were tired.

All the experts were desperately absorbing the advanced knowledge on the blueprints.

At the same time, in the Southern District of Jiang City.

In a dim, back-alley lane over twenty kilometers away from the Northern Development Zone.

There were no streetlights here, and the stagnant water on the ground, mixed with trash, emitted a pungent, sour stench.

A dozen or so burly men with fierce expressions were squatting on both sides of the alley, with inferior beer bottles rolling all over the ground.

Yellow-Hair leaned against the wet brick wall. His broken right lower leg was bound with a few dirty wooden sticks; he didn't have the money to go to the hospital for a plaster cast.

He was covered in cold sweat from the pain, a salvaged cigarette butt dangling from his mouth.

Baldy Zhao sat on an overturned plastic trash can, holding a half-eaten cold steamed bun.

His face was still a bit swollen, and there were bloody welts on his wrists from nylon zip ties.

After being arrested by Director Li Jianguo, he had paid a hefty fine and been detained for twenty-four hours, only just being released.

"Boss, the brothers can't take it anymore; we're starving," the Long-haired Thug said, walking over and kicking away an empty beer bottle. "We don't have a single cent in our pockets, and the restaurants won't even let us run a tab."

Baldy Zhao took a vicious bite of the cold steamed bun and chewed hard.

"That bunch of heartless bastards in the Chenguang Electronics HR department put all five hundred of us on a blacklist," Baldy Zhao said, throwing the rest of the bun into a puddle. "Every factory in all of Jiang City, even the damn small workshops, doesn't dare to hire us!"

"That little animal Lu Chen," Yellow-Hair said, gasping in pain. "He took away our beds and even deducted last month's wages as a penalty fee. He's pushing us to our deaths!"

The alley was filled with curses.