93: Chapter 93 Gravitational Stripping: A Physics-Based Metallurgy That Overturns Common Sense

Dawn broke.

The torrential rain ceased.

Muddy water on the construction site in the north of the city trickled down into the deep pit.

In the southeast corner of the foundation pit, where a load-bearing wall was originally meant to be poured, the ground had been forcibly leveled overnight.

The tarpaulin was torn away, revealing three massive, twelve-meter-long black shipping containers embedded in the muddy foundation.

Lu Chen had had them hauled in empty from the outer ring road in the latter half of the night. The three containers were joined together, their surfaces composed entirely of seamless, matte black metal, without a single joint visible.

Thick industrial power cables, like several giant black pythons, bit into the ports at the rear of the containers.

Zhao Tiezhu was shirtless, covered in semi-dried yellow mud, and roaring into a walkie-talkie.

"Crane! Swing a bit to the left! The funnel is jammed!"

The crawler crane, weighing dozens of tons, emitted a dull roar.

A pure copper transfer funnel—three meters wide, two meters high, and of astonishing thickness—was precisely docked into the grooves on the front of the three containers.

"Click." It locked into place.

Lu Chen stood on the earthen slope.

His jacket was half-soaked from the night's rain, clinging to his body.

His eyes were bloodshot, but his gaze was terrifyingly bright.

Old Zhou stood nearby, clutching a thermos, not daring to make a sound.

Da Biao walked behind Lu Chen, carrying the solid steel pipe that hadn't yet been wiped clean of mud.

"Boss," Da Biao said, "Old Li sent all fifty of those people to the station overnight. Police cars have blocked the intersection outside."

"Mm." Lu Chen fished a cigarette case out of his pocket.

A thunderous sound of tracks grinding came from outside the corrugated iron walls.

Old Zhang, leading a dozen or so small contractors, each wearing a red hard hat, strode over from the direction of the prefab housing.

"Factory Director Lu!" Old Zhang bellowed at the top of his lungs, tearing the hard hat off his head. "The convoy is in! We've filled up all two hundred-plus acres of open space outside!"

Lu Chen lit a cigarette.

"How much cargo?"

"We've bought out every scrap recycling station within a three-hundred-kilometer radius, including those in the three prefecture-level cities below."

Old Zhang pointed outside.

"Rusty steel pipes, scrapped engine blocks, springs from rotten mattresses, and tens of thousands of broken kitchen knives that the scrap collectors didn't want. Truck after truck, tens of thousands of tons of scrap iron!"

"Unload," Lu Chen said, exhaling a plume of smoke.

Old Zhang rubbed his hands together, casting a slightly guilty look at the three black containers at the bottom of the pit.

"Factory Director Lu, can this junk really be used? Are you really going to smelt steel with this trash?"

Old Zhang swallowed hard.

"I heard last night it was for building some kind of machine that needs high-quality iron. Will this iron that's rusted to dust actually work?"

Da Biao tapped a nearby scaffolding pipe with his steel pipe.

"If the boss told you to haul it, then haul it. Has he ever shorted you a single cent on the payment?"

"No, no, the cash payment was perfectly generous." Old Zhang waved his hands repeatedly.

"Then get to work," Lu Chen said.

Old Zhang turned and roared toward the outside, "Bulldozers! Bring all eight of them over! Start loading the funnel!"

Following Old Zhang's shout, eight yellow heavy-duty bulldozers rumbled to the edge of the foundation pit.

They raised their buckets.

Tons of rusted bicycle frames, twisted rebar, and oil-stained gears from scrapped agricultural machinery were dumped all at once into the pure copper funnel.

The scrap iron hit the copper funnel, producing a jarring sound of metal colliding.

"Stop! Everyone stop!" An exasperated roar came from the direction of the prefab housing.

Wei Jianguo, sporting two massive dark circles under his eyes, had even lost his hard hat while running. He tripped, stumbling as he rushed over.

Wang Shouyi and Chen Jianming, the two old men, followed closely behind; their clothes were all crumpled into a mess.

Wei Jianguo rushed in front of the bulldozers and spread his arms to block them.

"You can't dump that!"

Wei Jianguo turned to stare at Lu Chen.

"Mr. Lu! Have you lost your mind? You call this a steel mill?"

Lu Chen walked down the earthen slope.

"This is a smelting center."

"Smelting center, my ass!" Wei Jianguo pointed at the three black containers.

"I'm asking you, where is the blast furnace? Where are your refractory bricks? You don't even have a coal-burning chimney!"

Wang Shouyi was out of breath from running, panting while clutching his knees.

"Mr. Lu... this defies all logic."

Wang Shouyi pushed up his glasses, which were splattered with mud.

"Aren't these just three shipping containers? I don't even see any insulation layers. When you dump the scrap iron in, what will melt it? Aren't you just destroying your machines?"

Chen Jianming looked at the pile of rusted, broken kitchen knives, trembling with anger.

"To smelt specialty steel, you need to add manganese, molybdenum, and chromium. You need to strictly control the temperature curve of the carbon reduction reaction. You have nothing here! This is just a pile of junk!"

"That is chemical smelting," Lu Chen said, biting down on his cigarette butt.

Wei Jianguo was stunned.

"What do you mean?"

"This is physical smelting," Lu Chen said, flicking off the ash.

"It doesn't rely on high temperatures; it relies on gravitational stripping."

As soon as these words came out, the three old experts looked as if they had seen a ghost.

"Gravity?" Wei Jianguo's voice cracked.

"Are you telling me science fiction here? Dumping scrap iron into a box and using gravity to pull out the impurities? You're going to make Newton flip in his grave!"

"This isn't a laboratory model!" Wang Shouyi waved his hands repeatedly.

"Even the largest strong magnetic field generator in the world right now can't alter metal molecular bonds at room temperature! This is completely unscientific!"

Chen Jianming pointed at Lu Chen.

"Absurd! Simply absurd! The pipelines required for a Lithography Machine need to be 99.999% pure titanium alloy! You think you can make that out of broken kitchen knives using a few black boxes? If this actually works, all the experts at ASML will have to jump off a building!"

"Then let them line up to jump."

A gaunt old man, smelling foul and covered in mud, climbed up the scaffolding. Song Changming was still clutching a cold steamed bun in his hand, his eyes bloodshot.

"Song Changming! You're in fluid mechanics, how can you believe this nonsense?" Wei Jianguo shouted at him. "Look at these three beat-up tin boxes; they couldn't smelt a damn thing!"

"Last night, you also said my water curtain purification was just cobbled together from junk." Song Changming took a bite of the cold bun and chewed it forcefully. "What? A few hours later and you've forgotten how to bow and scrape?"

Wei Jianguo's old face flushed red, and he couldn't squeeze out a single word for a long time.

"You three old fogies, put away all your Western textbook theories." Song Changming pointed at Lu Chen. "Trust him. Shut up and watch."

Lu Chen ignored the group of pedants. He walked over to the bulldozer.

"Old Zhang, continue loading," Lu Chen ordered.

The bulldozer operator no longer cared about the experts blocking the way and raised the bucket.

"Clatter, clatter..."

Hundreds upon hundreds of broken kitchen knives and steel pipes rusted to the point of flaking were dumped into the funnel. The scrap iron piled up into a small mountain, stuffing the pure copper funnel completely full.

Lu Chen walked to the side of the first black container. There was a transparent bulletproof glass panel there, with a red metal master switch covered underneath.

Da Biao instinctively gripped his steel pipe tighter.

"Attention everyone!" Da Biao roared at the top of his lungs. "Back up! Get ten meters back!"