275: Chapter 275 The Limits of the Protective Shield

Tao Zhe pushed a screenshot from his tablet onto the screen in front of Su Mingyuan.

That was a real-time energy monitoring graph of the shield.

A smooth line suddenly dipped at a certain point in time—not by a large margin, only about one-thousandth—and then slowly climbed back up over the next fourteen seconds.

"Look at this inflection point."

Tao Zhe tapped his finger on the spot where the curve dipped, "At the exact moment the Spirit-Control Taoist struck, the energy brightness of the shield dropped by about one-thousandth."

Su Mingyuan leaned closer to the screen and watched for a moment.

"His attacks and the shield use the same source of energy, which means the energy of that shield also originates from the Spirit-Control Taoist," Su Mingyuan said.

"Right." Tao Zhe's speech was faster than usual, which he tended to do when excited. "The total energy inside his body is like a pool. The shield is continuously consuming this pool, and his attacks are extra expenses. That hit on Zhang Dabiao reduced the pool by one-thousandth."

Zhang Dabiao chimed in from the side: "He just threw that hit casually. How much power would it consume if he used his full strength?"

"I don't know." Tao Zhe swiped on his tablet a few times. "But we can estimate it."

Su Mingyuan leaned back against his chair, tapping his fingers on the armrests a few times.

"Conversely, whenever we hit the shield with nuclear bombs, every single one of them is also depleting that pool of his."

"Yes, the principle is the same." Tao Zhe nodded, but immediately added, "The question is how large his pool actually is. If all one hundred and twenty nuclear bombs in our hands are fired, will it be enough to empty it?"

As soon as this question was raised, the Command Center fell silent for a moment.

Su Mingyuan did not speak, waiting for Tao Zhe to finish his words.

"Roughly speaking, if one hundred and twenty nuclear bombs hit the exact same area of the shield simultaneously, based on the yield of the nuclear bombs used last time, it should consume about sixty to seventy percent of the total pool."

"You mean even if we use all the nuclear bombs in the Giant World, we still won't be able to pierce through this shield?" Zhang Wei asked.

"Not certain." Tao Zhe's tone was very cautious. "Sixty to seventy percent is the median estimate. Optimistically speaking, it might reach eighty percent."

Su Mingyuan's fingers stopped, resting on the armrest and moving no more.

Tao Zhe saw what Su Mingyuan was thinking and added another sentence: "Of course, if we could have more nuclear weapons, perhaps we could eliminate the Spirit-Control Taoist. I wonder if we can transfer another batch of nuclear weapons from the Main World?"

This question was asked very directly.

Zhang Wei glanced at him.

Su Mingyuan also looked over from the screen.

The others in the Command Center probably thought this question had no good answer—a nuclear bomb is a nuclear bomb, and one hundred and twenty of them were already all the strategic nuclear weapons deployed in the Giant World. Could more possibly be conjured up from somewhere else?

But Su Mingyuan did not answer immediately.

His expression didn't change much. Ever since taking office as the deputy head of the Otherworld Development Leading Group, Great Xia had kept no secrets from him.

Because he had seen the complete inventory of the national nuclear arsenal.

Every model, every storage location, the yield and status of every single piece were all in his head. With SSS-level clearance, fewer than ten people nationwide were qualified to view this document.

When he first opened that inventory list, he truly understood the weight behind the two words "enough" for Great Xia.

Great Xia's number of nuclear weapons wasn't just a lot; it was genuinely enough.

To the point where—if the day ever came to turn the surface of the island nation over, there would probably still be quite a lot left over afterward.

Usually no one brings these things up, and doing so is meaningless. Nuclear weapons are meant for deterrence, not for casual bombing.

But the current situation is different. The opponent is not a human nation, nor someone who can sit across the negotiating table, but an old monster who has lived for god knows how many years.

Reason won't work on him, and nuclear weapons are currently the only things capable of going toe-to-toe with him.

Su Mingyuan flipped through that inventory list in his mind.

Conventional hydrogen bombs, the ones carried by the Dongfeng series, have yields ranging from hundreds of thousands of tons to fifteen million tons of TNT. The one hundred and twenty deployed in the Giant World are of this tier.

But at the very end of the inventory, there was a separate category marked in red, with six characters written in the remarks column: "Tianheng simulation, unexploded."

Codename pangu nuclear bomb.

When Su Mingyuan first saw that entry, he thought it was a typo.

He looked at the numbers three times to make sure there weren't any extra zeros.

Pure hydrogen bomb.

A pure fusion device without a fission trigger.

With a yield of seventy-five million tons of TNT.

Seventy-five million tons.

Listing this number by itself isn't intuitive enough; we need a point of reference.

In 1945, the USA dropped the first atomic bomb used in actual combat in human history on Hiroshima, codenamed "Little Boy".

With a yield of fifteen thousand tons of TNT.

That bomb exploded at an altitude of six hundred meters.

The shockwave expanded outward from the hypocenter, and all buildings within a radius of 1.6 kilometers directly below were razed to the ground.

Reinforced concrete buildings were crushed into piles of debris less than half a meter high, with rubble and dust mixed together in a layer. Viewed from the air, the ground looked as if it had been sanded down with sandpaper.

Buildings within a two-kilometer range were severely damaged, with very few remaining standing. Those that did stand were entirely empty shells, and everything inside had been blown away by the shockwave.

Thermal radiation caused fatal burns within a range of 3.5 kilometers.

At the exact moment of the explosion, the surface temperature exceeded three thousand degrees, igniting skin, clothing, and wood within fractions of a second.

And this was just what fifteen thousand tons could accomplish.

The yield of the pangu nuclear bomb was five thousand times that of Little Boy.

The largest nuclear weapon ever actually detonated in human history was Russia's "Tsar Bomba", with a yield of fifty million tons. When it was test-fired in 1961, the mushroom cloud rose to an altitude of over sixty kilometers, higher than the thickness of the atmosphere.

The shockwave circled the Earth three times, shattering the window glass of buildings a thousand kilometers away.

The ground within tens of kilometers around the hypocenter was melted by the high temperature into a layer of glass-like substance.

The yield of the pangu nuclear bomb was 50% larger than the Tsar Bomba.

Moreover, the Tsar Bomba was a product of the 1960s, about the size of a bus, and could only be dropped by specially modified bombers, from which the bomber might not even be able to escape in time after the drop.

The pangu nuclear bomb was different.

As a pure fusion device without a fission trigger, it lacked the limitation of critical mass. Its volume and weight were compressed into the warhead dimensions of the modified Dongfeng-41, allowing it to be directly delivered via intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Of course, this thing had only been simulated in the Tianheng supercomputer.

Simulation results: Air burst under standard atmospheric pressure and standard gravity conditions, with a fireball diameter exceeding ten kilometers, a shockwave destroying all ground buildings and structures within a thirty-kilometer radius, thermal radiation causing fatal burns within fifty kilometers, and third-degree burns within eighty kilometers.

Ground vibrations transmitted up to three hundred kilometers away could still be clearly recorded by seismographs.

It had never been test-fired.

Because no place large enough could be found on Earth to test it without heartbreak over the destruction.

Su Mingyuan ran through these numbers in his mind, then spoke.

"Yes."

Everyone looked at him.

"Great Xia has a kind of nuclear bomb codenamed pangu nuclear bomb. A pure hydrogen bomb with a yield of seventy-five million tons. It's five thousand times that of Hiroshima's Little Boy, and 50% larger than Russia's Tsar Bomba."

The Command Center went quiet.

Tao Zhe's eyes on the screen lit up for a fraction.

"If we replace the existing nuclear bombs with the pangu nuclear bomb—we don't even need one hundred and twenty. The total energy of twenty pangu nuclear bombs is equivalent to one thousand conventional hydrogen bombs. According to the model just calculated, twenty pangu nuclear bombs hitting the same area of the shield simultaneously will consume approximately—"

He paused and recalculated.

"Two hundred to three hundred percent."

Everyone understood what this number meant: it wasn't just barely piercing through; it would pierce through with well over half its momentum remaining.

"Far exceeding the tolerance upper limit of the shield," Tao Zhe said. "Theoretically, it will definitely shatter."

Zhang Dabiao slapped his thigh.

"Then what are we waiting for?"