230: Chapter 230 Engineers board the ship to calculate load-bearing capacity! Lu Chen wants to cut through the city-state.

3:07 PM.

Level One Main Entrance.

The tail end of the fourth Relocation Team was still filing inside.

Chen Li stood behind the registration desk, his voice already hoarse, having flipped through twelve pages of the roster.

"Name."

"Master Wu Bingde."

Chen Li's pen tip paused for a moment, and he looked up.

Standing before him was a tall, thin old man in his early sixties. His back was slightly hunched, and his hands were behind his back. Between the index and middle fingers of his left hand, he held a short pencil, his fingertips stained with the graphite dust of sketches.

He had two deep wrinkles on his forehead, sunken eye sockets, but a very steady gaze.

"Master Wu Bingde." Chen Li drew a heavy circle on the roster and tossed his pen onto the table. "You don't need to go queue in the Storage Area. Come with me."

Master Wu Bingde stopped in his tracks. "Where to?"

"The Cockpit. The City Lord is looking for you."

The old man's eyelids flickered. "The City Lord is looking for me?"

"Yes." Chen Li walked around from behind the registration desk and nodded to the manager nearby, signaling him to take over. "Let's go."

The two of them walked up the stairs.

Master Wu Bingde didn't say much along the way, but his eyes were busy, scanning the welds and pipe joints on both sides of the corridor.

"Your welds..." He leaned in close to the baseboard at the corner of the second-floor corridor, pointing his pencil-holding finger at a fillet weld. "Full weld, no false joints. The craftsmanship is quite seasoned."

"Han Zhengqing's Engineering Team did the welding." Chen Li urged him to keep moving.

"Old Brother Han?" Master Wu Bingde straightened his back. "He's on the ship too?"

"Yes. Chief Engineer of the Engineering Team."

He didn't ask anything else and followed Chen Li to the third floor.

The door to the Cockpit pushed open.

Lu Chen sat in an iron chair, with a notebook and a hand-drawn floor plan spread out on the console in front of him.

Lin Wan sat on a folding chair nearby, another notebook resting on her knees.

"Master Wu Bingde," Chen Li announced at the door.

"Come in." Lu Chen's gaze rose from the drawings.

Master Wu Bingde stepped into the Cockpit, his eyes first scanning the control panel before landing on Lu Chen.

"City Lord." He gave a nod.

"Sit." Lu Chen pointed to a low stool to the left of the panel.

He walked over and sat down, hands resting on his knees.

Lu Chen didn't waste words, pushing the hand-drawn floor plan across the table and tapping the paper twice with his knuckles. "Take a look."

Master Wu Bingde took the drawing, his presbyopic eyes squinting.

The drawing showed a rough rectangle, labeled eight hundred meters long and four hundred meters wide. There was a dashed line in the middle of the rectangle, cutting the whole into front and back halves.

The front half was labeled as the Personnel Concentration Area.

The back half was labeled as the Decomposition Area.

Next to the dashed line was Lu Chen's annotation: Cut from here; back half disappears; front half must stand independently.

"City Lord." He pointed at the rectangle. "This is Black Rock City-State."

"Yes."

"Then this dashed line..." The old man's fingertip tapped the center of the drawing. "What does it mean?"

"Exactly what it says." Lu Chen leaned forward slightly. "Cut it from the middle, remove the back half, and the front half must not collapse."

The pencil in Master Wu Bingde's hand spun half a turn between his fingers, switching from his left hand to his right. "Remove it? How is it being removed?"

"Physical disappearance." Lu Chen stared at him. "Every structure in the back half—steel beams, load-bearing walls, decks, engine room mounts—all gone in an instant. The front half has to support itself, standing for at least three hours without collapsing."

Master Wu Bingde's thin lips parted, but he couldn't squeeze out a word for a long time.

He brought the drawing closer, almost touching his nose.

"The main load-bearing framework of The City-State... I could draw it with my eyes closed," the old man finally spoke, his voice carrying the rasp of a construction site. "Eight hundred meters long, the Main Keel is a single-piece I-beam, with four Secondary Keels on either side. Transverse Frames every forty meters, twenty sets in total."

"Cutting from the middle breaks the Main Keel," Lu Chen said.

"It's not just the keel that breaks." Master Wu Bingde's pencil poked heavily at the dashed line. "Right in the center at four hundred meters, that's the tenth set of Transverse Frames. That thing supports the largest column-free hall in the fourth-level Residential Area, and further up are the Staff Department and the Communications Tower."

Lu Chen tapped the table. "If we cut from here, can the front half stay standing?"

Master Wu Bingde didn't answer immediately, instead using his pencil to gesture across the drawing.

"Whether it stands or not depends on two things." He held up two rough fingers.

"Speak."

"First, where the cut is made." The pencil tip circled the dashed line. "If it's cut precisely on the tenth frame, that frame is 1.2 meters thick with double-layer reinforcement—a fifty-ton hunk of iron. If the cut is clean, it can serve as a rear wall."

"The second thing?"

"The weight of the front half itself." Master Wu Bingde's eyelids drooped as he ran the numbers in his head. "In the first four hundred meters, the chassis holds the Docking Area and the main engines. Even though the engines are dead, those eighty-ton cast-iron blocks are still sitting there, pressing entirely on the third and fourth sets of frames."

"The center of gravity is too far forward."

"Way off balance." Master Wu Bingde tapped the table with his pencil. "The engines are in the front, and the Ammunition Depot is pressing down above them. If you pull out the back half, the rear of the front half will be suspended in mid-air. If that wall at the cut can't hold, the rear will drop straight down."

Lin Wan couldn't help but interject from the side, "If it drops... what happens?"

"In the best-case scenario, the rear sinks twenty or thirty centimeters, and the nose tilts up." Master Wu Bingde gestured a slope with his hands. "The people inside will feel like the floor is sliding away, and pots and pans will go rolling. It won't kill anyone, but the stress on the skeleton will be completely different."

"And the worst-case scenario?"

The old man's hands stopped moving. "The bottom plate snaps. The front half tears open along the cut, and the bottom plate rips away along with the wall plating."

The only sound left in the Cockpit was the hum of the ventilation fan.

Lu Chen didn't move, his gaze fixed on Master Wu Bingde's face. "How do we keep it from tearing?"

"Move it forward." Master Wu Bingde slapped his pencil onto the drawing. "Don't cut at four hundred meters. Move back forty meters and cut at the ninth frame. At the three-hundred-and-sixty-meter mark, it's right next to the solid partition wall of the Storage Area. It's 1.8 meters thick, a double-sided welded iron wall. Combined with the frame, that's two layers of security. It definitely won't collapse."

Lu Chen's pen moved across the paper. "Cut at three hundred sixty meters. The back half becomes four hundred forty meters."

"Correct."

Lu Chen's mind whirred. With a longer back half, he'd get more Truth Points. With a shorter front half, the space for people would be smaller.

"In the first three hundred sixty meters, how many people can be packed in?"

"In that section of the fourth-level Residential Area..." Master Wu Bingde looked up and thought for a moment. "Normally it houses fifteen to eighteen thousand. If you stack them and squeeze, you can fit twenty thousand."

"Twenty thousand." Lu Chen drew a heavy circle on the paper.

There were just over twenty thousand people left in The City-State now. Squeezing for a few hours wouldn't kill them.

"Master Wu." Lu Chen tapped the table with his pen. "To calculate this accurately, you'll need the blueprints, right?"

"I definitely will," Master Wu Bingde nodded. "My brain is remembering things from twenty years ago. It's had two major overhauls since then and took some artillery fire; the skeleton has long since changed. I need to run the stress analysis again with the latest blueprints."

"The blueprints are in the Staff Department's archive room." Lin Wan opened her notebook. "Lin Xiao's side has already been notified."

"Can they be delivered today?"

"I'll go press them for it now."

Lu Chen turned his gaze back to Master Wu Bingde. "Once the blueprints arrive, I want a hard number. If we cut at three hundred sixty meters and the back half is gone, how long can the front half hold up on its own? Calculate for the absolute worst-case scenario."

Master Wu Bingde pursed his thin lips and spun the pencil twice.

"Give me one night." He tucked the pencil behind his ear. "I'll give you the final word tomorrow morning."

"Fine."

Lu Chen wrote quickly in his notebook: Cut at 360 meters, 9th frame. Conclusion tomorrow morning.

He pressed his communicator. "Chen Li."

"City Lord."

"Take Master Wu to the second-level Residential Area and pick a bunk close to the Greenhouse. Then find Lin Xiao for the structural blueprints; they must be in Master Wu's hands this afternoon."

"Understood."

Master Wu Bingde pushed himself up from his knees, carefully folded the hand-drawn drawing twice, and tucked it into his pocket. Before leaving, he looked back at Lu Chen.

"City Lord."

"Speak."

"The City-State... are we really going to dismantle it?" The old man's voice was a bit strained.

Lu Chen didn't look up. "Calculate first. If the math says it won't collapse, then we'll talk about dismantling."

Master Wu Bingde said no more and followed Chen Li out.

The door clicked shut.

Lin Wan opened her notebook and recorded the figures: 360 meters and 20,000 people.

"City Lord." Her pen paused. "If the back half becomes 440 meters, we should get more Truth Points than estimated, right?"

"A lot more." Lu Chen flipped to the ledger page. "Total length is 800 meters; 440 meters accounts for 55%. If the total revenue is estimated at 33,000, then 55% is 18,000."

"18,000." Lin Wan filled in the number.

"Dumping 10,000 into the Railway Gun leaves 8,000." Lu Chen spoke rapidly, his mental math sharp. "The Radiation-proof Lead-lined Inner Shell costs 7,000. It's enough."

Lin Wan's eyes lit up. "In our first big 'meal,' we'll be able to unlock these two major components."

"Yes."

Lu Chen tossed his pen onto the table and leaned back into the iron chair.

On the control panel, the radar scan line rotated unhurriedly.

Within eight kilometers, it was completely clear.