69: Chapter 69 This is the Fifth Industrial Revolution!

5:30 AM.

Capital of Great Xia, Central Compound, Top-secret Conference Room.

Outside the window, the darkness before dawn was at its heaviest; inside, the room was filled with lingering smoke.

Over a dozen elders sat around a heavy mahogany long table. No one spoke, save for the occasional rustle of turning pages and a few muffled coughs.

The elder sitting at the head of the table had fingertips stained slightly yellow by cigarette smoke.

What he held in his hand was precisely the 《Codename: Skyfall — Physical Characteristics Analysis Report》 transmitted back overnight by Tao Zhe via the highest-level encrypted dedicated line.

A full twenty minutes.

The elder maintained the exact same posture, his gaze nailed firmly to the paper as if every single word were being carved into his brain.

For a long time.

Slowly, he took off his reading glasses and rubbed the corners of his eyes, which were full of bloodshot veins.

His hoarse voice, carrying a trace of an imperceptible tremor, broke the dead silence:

"What is written on this... is it all true?"

On the other end of the screen, Tao Zhe in the video connection stood at attention and saluted with a solemn expression:

"Reporting to the Chief, the data has been double-verified by Professor Zhou of the Materials Research Institute and Professor Li of the Physics Research Institute under the Sunan Military Region. The sample is right beside my hand. It is 100% true."

The elder did not answer immediately.

Leaning back against the chair, he slowly closed his eyes while his chest heaved violently.

In that instant, too many unbearable memories flashed through the elder's mind.

Thirty years ago.

Great Xia wanted to build its own large aircraft.

Western countries directly cut off the supply of aviation engines, sending tens of billions in R&D funds down the drain.

Countless white-haired engineers clutched discarded blueprints and wept bitterly in the workshops.

That was a "heart disease", a chronic heartache that had plagued Great Xia's aviation industry for half a century.

Thirty years ago.

That semi-finished aircraft carrier bought from the northern neighbor took a full two years on its journey home.

Detained, made things difficult for, and extorted for astronomical transit fees.

Great Xia's diplomats endured cold glares at the negotiating table simply because we did not have a proper ocean-going fleet, leaving us at the mercy of others.

Ten years ago.

High-end chips were comprehensively blockaded by "Eagle Sauce" across the ocean.

Great Xia's technology enterprises were placed on the blacklist, and countless high-tech products were forced to halt production due to the lack of a fingernail-sized chip.

That was an invisible wall—a "Wall of Despair" attempting to lock Great Xia forever in low-end manufacturing and make us laborers from generation to generation.

Over these past few decades.

No matter what predicaments they encountered, the people of Great Xia could only swallow their bitterness and endure in silence.

Putting on smiling faces, acting like cowardly grandsons, and trading eight hundred million shirts for a single foreign aircraft.

That grievance, that sense of suffocation—how many people's spines had it bent?

To catch up with that 0.1-millimeter precision, to raise that 100-degree heat-resistance limit, generations of scientific researchers had exhausted their lifeblood and worked themselves to death at their posts.

Yet even so, the chasm known as "Fundamental Materials Science" still lay across the path like an impassable natural barrier.

The elder had originally thought that wanting to completely break the West's technological blockade would require Great Xia at least another fifty years—at least waiting for the next generation, or even the generation after that, to grow up.

But now...

The elder abruptly opened his eyes, his gaze like lightning, locking dead onto those lines of red text in the report.

[Room-temperature superconductivity] — The energy shackles are shattered.

[Absolute heat resistance] — The aviation heartache is cured.

[Super hardness] — The armor advantage is reversed.

This isn't overtaking on a bend; this is ripping up the racetrack altogether!

"Good..."

"Good!"

The elder's hand slapped heavily on the table, and tears actually welled up in those cloudy eyes.

He suddenly stood up, sweeping his gaze across the others around the conference table, his voice growing high-pitched with excitement:

"Comrades!"

"Look at this report!"

"Where is this just Materials? This is the manifestation of our Great Xia ancestors, sending us national fortune!"

"With this thing, what first island chain? What technological blockade? What Wassenaar Arrangement?"

The elder grabbed that report and slammed it fiercely onto the table with a crisp "crack" sound:

"They are all scraps of waste paper!"

"Even if those Western countries tied all their scientists together and gave them another hundred years, they still couldn't build something like this!"

Boom!

The atmosphere in the conference room was instantly ignited.

A general wearing army training uniform with three gold stars on his shoulders suddenly stood up.

Pointing at the column regarding "density" and "hardness" in the report, his large hands, which had gripped guns for years, were trembling:

"Chief! If my armored forces are outfitted with this kind of Materials..."

"Our current type 99a main battle tank has a combat weight of 55 tons. For the sake of protection, we have to sacrifice mobility and worry about whether it can cross bridges or be transported by railway."

"But what if we replace the armor with 'skyfall steel'?"

The general took a deep breath, his voice resounding like thunder: "While increasing protection tenfold, the weight can be directly cut by 80%! The weight of a single main battle tank can even drop below 10 tons!"

"What concept is this?"

Waving his fist, as if he had already seen the battlefield of the future:

"It means our tanks can be as light as infantry fighting vehicles! Our Y-20 transport planes can airdrop an entire squad's tank company into the enemy's rear in a single go!"

"And on the frontal battlefield, the enemy's depleted uranium armor-piercing shells hitting us will be just like toothpicks poking steel plates, unable to even leave a white dot! And a random shot from us will pierce right through their M1A2s!"

"This will be a flying 'steel torrent' unlike anything in the history of human warfare!"

"Not just the Army!"

Beside him, an Air Force general could no longer hold back and directly snatched the conversation.

Pointing to the "heat resistance" column in the report, his face flushed with excitement:

"The Materials Bottleneck of aviation engines has plagued us for a full fifty years!"

"In order to raise the temperature tolerance limit of turbine blades by a few dozen degrees, we invested hundreds of billions, and how many hairs have turned white from exhaustion?"

"But now..."

The general tremblingly took off his military cap and slammed it fiercely onto the table: "Thermal barrier? It no longer exists!"

"If we use this kind of Materials to manufacture the engine core, we can unscrupulously raise the combustion chamber temperature! The thrust-to-weight ratio will easily achieve a Breakthrough of 20, or even 30!"

"By then, what sixth-generation fighters are we even bothering with? With this thing, we'll build the seventh generation directly! Or even an aerospace aircraft carrier!"

"Our fighters can withstand a hypersonic speed of Mach 10 and perform overload maneuvers inside the atmosphere like child's play, because the fuselage is not afraid of frictional heat generation at all!"

"At that time, the West's proud F-22s and F-35s will look like crawling snails in front of us! Before their radars can even turn on, they will have already been smashed to pieces by us!"

"This isn't an air combat; this is an eagle catching chicks! It's a thorough and complete slaughter!"

The atmosphere inside the conference room grew increasingly heated, as if the temperature in the room itself had risen with everyone's emotions.

"And those super projects!"

A person in charge of infrastructure stood up. His gaze seemed to pierce through the wall, looking toward the turbulent strait in the southeast:

"That project we thought about for years, yearned for for years, yet never dared to start construction on—the Futai Strait Undersea Tunnel!"

"In the past, we didn't dare move because seawater corrosion was severe, the seabed geology was complex, the cutter heads of the shield tunneling machines wore out too quickly, and maintenance costs were astronomical."

"But now with 'skyfall steel'..."

The person in charge clenched his fists tightly, tears in his eyes: "This kind of Materials will not corrode for ten thousand years, and its hardness is invincible!"

"Using it to make the cutter head of a shield machine is like cutting tofu when encountering granite! Using it to make the tunnel wall, the warranty period is ten thousand years!"

"As long as the Materials are in place, I am confident that within three years... no, within two years! I will build the railway of the undersea tunnel across!"

"Let our high-speed rail drive directly to Taiwan Island!"

These words moved all the elders present.

That was not just a tunnel.

That was the century-old nostalgia of the Great Xia nation, the hope of the final puzzle piece for territorial completeness.

"Good! Good! Good!"

The elder at the head said three good words in succession, his breath surging.

Right at this moment, sitting at the end of the long table, an industrial director who had been staring closely at the "conductivity" data slowly stood up.

Compared to the soldiers' decisive and resolute aura, his voice, though not loud, carried a shock that made the Soul tremble:

"All leaders, it's not just military industry, nor is it just infrastructure."

Pointing to the eye-catching [0.000000 Ω] on the report, his face was flushed red with excitement, and his voice was trembling:

"Superconductivity! That is room-temperature superconductivity!"

"Do you know what this means?"

"Our ultra-high-voltage power transmission network will have zero loss!"

"Our maglev trains can be popularized at low cost to every city, and a speed of 600 kilometers per hour will become the norm!"

"And quantum computers... no longer needing massive cooling units, computing power will explode exponentially!"

"The confinement magnetic field of nuclear fusion reactors will become extremely simple, and the 'artificial sun' will no longer be a dream!"

The person in charge took a deep breath, looked around at everyone, and uttered that concluding verdict:

"This is the Fifth Industrial Revolution! And this time, the starting gun hasn't even sounded..."

He suddenly waved his hand, resolute and decisive:

"We have already won!"