102: Chapter 102 Mass Production of Carbon Nanotubes! A Century-Long Breakthrough in Materials Science

"What? You're saying the Dragon Kingdom wants to build a space elevator? Using carbon nanotubes for the cables?"

In a studio on the eastern outskirts of the capital, filled with various architectural models and blueprints, Song Mingyue stared at the encrypted message on her phone screen from the "Earth Civilization Community Supreme Committee," frozen in place.

She had just returned from the construction site, covered in dust from head to toe. Her hard hat was tilted on her head, and a stray lock of hair fell from beneath the brim, framing a face that, despite being devoid of makeup, was still refined to the point of near perfection.

Song Mingyue's features were those of a classic oriental beauty—an oval face, willow-leaf eyebrows, a pair of expressive phoenix eyes, and a slightly upturned, somewhat playful nose. But what truly made her a viral sensation across the internet wasn't her face, but her stunning figure.

Standing at 1.72 meters tall, she had curves in all the right places, and against the backdrop of her overalls and hard hat, her figure appeared unreasonably hot.

Her social media account, "Goddess of Creation," had 500 million followers. It wasn't because she posed provocatively in front of the camera, but because in every video, she would personally climb hundreds of meters up scaffolding, her hair flying in the strong wind, while explaining the mechanics behind breathtaking super-projects in the simplest, most understandable language to her audience.

As the netizens put it—"Others use their bodies to attract attention, but Song Mingyue uses her brain to conquer the world, and then incidentally lets you discover that she has a body, too."

But at this moment, this "Goddess of Creation" was so rattled by the few lines of text on her phone screen that she looked nothing like an engineering genius who had conquered the world's tallest building.

"Space elevator... carbon nanotubes... chief designer of the ground base station..."

Song Mingyue muttered these words repeatedly, feeling more and more like she was dreaming.

She certainly knew about space elevators. As an architectural engineer, the space elevator was the "ultimate romance" in her mind—a "Tower of Babel" in the true sense.

But the industrial mass production of carbon nanotubes was a task universally recognized as impossible in the materials science community. Without this prerequisite, the space elevator was nothing but a castle in the air.

Just as she was about to reply, "Are you sure this isn't a scam message?"

Outside the studio window, it suddenly grew dark.

It wasn't that the sky had turned dark.

It was a massive, sky-obscuring black shadow slowly descending above her studio.

Song Mingyue looked up through the skylight and saw a scene that would make any architectural engineer drop to their knees on the spot—

A "Luan Bird"-class aerospace carrier was hovering 500 meters above her head.

The three-kilometer-long streamlined hull, in the afterglow of the sunset, looked like an inverted city.

The studio door was pushed open.

A young man walked in.

He was wearing a plain black T-shirt and jeans. His appearance wasn't stunning, but it was extremely pleasant to look at, and he exuded an indescribable, almost physically palpable sense of oppression.

Song Mingyue recognized him at a glance.

The whole world knew him.

Lin Yun.

The madman who handed himself over to the state.

The pervert who changed the world by having children.

The one who established the "Earth Civilization Community," issued "dragon coin," and held nine aerospace carriers in his hand—the Lord of Humanity.

"Engineer Song, sorry to bother you." Lin Yun smiled slightly at her. "I've come to talk to you about an engineering issue."

Song Mingyue looked at the legendary figure before her, her mind blank.

She subconsciously glanced at her own dusty overalls and crooked hard hat, then looked at the aerospace carrier behind Lin Yun that blocked out half the sky.

"...Do you always go out like this?" Song Mingyue's mouth moved faster than her brain.

"Like what?"

"By flying an aircraft carrier here?"

Lin Yun laughed.

He found that he liked the way this woman spoke—unpretentious, unafraid, and even when facing the most powerful man on Earth, she still maintained the straightforwardness and openness of a top-tier engineer.

"Time is tight, no choice." Lin Yun walked over to Song Mingyue's workbench and glanced at the obsessively detailed architectural models on the table.

"I've seen your 'Cloud Top' skyscraper in the files. It's a perfect fusion of structural mechanics and aesthetics. A height of one thousand meters, in your hands, seems as easy as molding plasticine."

"That wasn't easy at all." Song Mingyue unconsciously puffed out her chest. Once she started talking about her professional field, that "Goddess of Creation" aura returned. "The wind load calculations alone made me lose half the hair on my head—"

Her words came to an abrupt halt.

Because Lin Yun pulled something out of his pocket and placed it on the workbench.

It was a thin filament, less than ten centimeters long, as black as ink.

"Do you know what this is?" Lin Yun asked.

Song Mingyue was an MIT double Ph.D., and her knowledge went far beyond architectural design. When she picked up the filament and examined it closely under the desk lamp, her pupils suddenly constricted.

"Carbon nanotubes?"

"Correct."

"Macroscopic carbon nanotubes? Flawless ones?"

"Correct."

"Impossible." Song Mingyue shook her head, her tone absolute. "The best laboratories in the world can only synthesize samples a few dozen centimeters long, and the defect rate is ridiculously high. Macroscopic carbon nanotubes of this quality—"

"Were synthesized by my two children, who are less than a year old."

Song Mingyue: "..."

She opened her mouth, then closed it again.

Then she opened it again.

"What did you say?"

Lin Yun didn't repeat himself. He pulled a palm-sized metal box from another pocket and opened it.

Inside the box was a miniature device, so precise it didn't look like something made by humans.

"This is a scaled-down sample of a 'Carbon Nanotube Macroscopic Self-Assembly Machine'." Lin Yun placed the device on the workbench and pressed a button.

The next second, the egg-sized device on the workbench began to emit a faint buzzing sound. From its exit, a carbon nanotube fiber, as black as ink, as thin as a strand of hair, yet shimmering with an eerie luster, began to... "grow" at a speed visible to the naked eye.

Not "manufactured."

"Grown."

Just like a tree putting out new shoots, the carbon nanotube fiber extended continuously from the device in an organic, fluid manner.

Song Mingyue stared fixedly at the continuously growing fiber, her pupils dilating more than they ever had in her entire life.

"The speed... ten kilometers per hour?"

"The full-power version can achieve that. This scaled-down version only has one-thousandth of the efficiency."

Song Mingyue's lips began to tremble.

She was an architectural engineer; she knew all too well what this meant.

The macroscopic mass production of carbon nanotubes—this was the greatest leap in human materials science since the transition from the Stone Age to the Iron Age.

With this material, it wasn't just about space elevators.

Super bridges, ten-thousand-meter skyscrapers, deep-sea tunnels, the skeletons of interplanetary starships... all the engineering fantasies that were once limited by material strength would become reachable realities!

"You... how did you do it?" Song Mingyue's voice cracked with excitement.

"I told you, my two children, who are less than a year old, did it."

Song Mingyue took a deep breath, deciding to temporarily put aside the maddening question of "how infants less than a year old managed a century-defining breakthrough."

She stared at the carbon nanotube fiber that was still growing, her engineer's instinct causing her brain to race.

"If this material can be mass-produced..." Song Mingyue muttered to herself, her hands unconsciously gesturing in the air. "One hundred million fiber bundles twisted together, three meters in diameter, thirty-seven thousand kilometers in length... tensile strength 300GPa, density 0.8..."

Her eyes grew brighter and brighter.

"It's possible! Absolutely possible! The ground base station will use a ring-shaped floating island structure, the anchoring system will use deep-sea pile foundations... no, it should use an anti-gravity system to assist with balance—"

Song Mingyue turned around, grabbed a pencil and white paper from the workbench, and began sketching frantically.

She drew rapidly, every stroke precise to the point of being terrifying. Under her pen, a magnificent architectural structure that transcended human imagination was gradually taking shape on the white paper.

"It needs a ring-shaped stress buffer layer here... a dynamic damping system needs to be installed here... the electromagnetic track for the elevator car should use a double-helix structure to counteract the deflection effect of the Coriolis force..."

Song Mingyue was completely immersed in her own world, completely forgetting who was standing beside her.

Lin Yun did not disturb her.

He just stood quietly to one side, watching the woman during her moment of inspiration.

Those eyes, focused to the point of near-reverence, that face slightly flushed with excitement, and those mechanical calculations under her pen, precise to every digit—

This was someone who truly loved architecture.

Someone who lived for "creation."

Fifteen minutes later, Song Mingyue stopped her pen.

On the white paper in front of her, a preliminary design sketch for a complete space elevator ground base station was already filled.

"What do you think of the mechanical logic of this design?" Song Mingyue turned her head and looked at Lin Yun.

Lin Yun glanced at the sketch, then called up the mysterious design scheme that Jiu Bao Little Anna had "downloaded" earlier, presenting both side-by-side on the holographic projection.

The moment Song Mingyue saw that scheme, she froze.

"Who... who designed this?"

"I don't know. It might be from another civilization."

Song Mingyue's gaze darted back and forth between the two schemes, becoming more excited and more shocked the more she looked.

"The aesthetic level of this alien scheme is at least one dimension higher than mine. But its mechanical structure is not well-adapted to Earth's environmental parameters—they clearly don't understand Earth's atmospheric circulation and ocean tides."

"And my scheme is mechanically perfectly suited to the Earth's environment, but in terms of aesthetics and space utilization... it's indeed inferior to it."

Song Mingyue bit her lip and made a decision that made Lin Yun look at her in a new light.

"Merge the two schemes."

"Use its aesthetic framework to fill in my mechanical skeleton."

"Then use 'Nuwa's' computing power to optimize every connection node—"

She looked up, her eyes burning as she looked at Lin Yun.

"Give me three days, and I can produce a complete construction master plan."

Lin Yun looked at her, his lips curling slightly.

"I'll give you two days."

"Two days?" Song Mingyue's eyes widened. "Do you think drawing blueprints is as simple as giving birth to a child?"

As soon as the words left her mouth, she regretted it.

Because the expression on Lin Yun's face clearly said— "Giving birth isn't simple either, but I've never been delayed by it."

Song Mingyue's face turned red instantly.

"No... I didn't mean that—"

"Engineer Song." Lin Yun put away his joking expression, his voice becoming serious.

"The full-scale version of the carbon nanotube mass production line will officially go into operation tomorrow at the 'Hive' industrial zone in the capital. The first batch of cable fibers will be off the line the day after tomorrow."

"Your construction master plan must be completed at the same time as the cable fibers come off the line. Because once the cable weaving starts, it cannot stop—the carbon nanotube self-assembly process is continuous; once interrupted, all previous work is wasted."

"So—two days. It's not that I'm making things difficult for you. It's that time is making things difficult for us all."

Song Mingyue fell silent.

From Lin Yun's eyes, she saw something she, as an engineer, was most familiar with—the pressure of a deadline.

But the difference was, the stake behind this deadline was not the success or failure of a project, but the future of the entire human civilization.

"Okay." Song Mingyue nodded, reached out, and took the carbon nanotube fiber sample from Lin Yun's hand.

"Two days. I'll submit the drawings."

She hesitated for a moment, then added another sentence.

"But I have one condition."

"Speak."

"I want to go to the construction site in person." Song Mingyue's eyes flashed with a near-paranoid intensity. "Every pile foundation, every steel plate, every weld—I want to watch them with my own eyes as they slowly turn into what's on my blueprints."

"As an architect, the thing I cannot tolerate the most is my design being executed by others with corners cut."

Lin Yun smiled.

"No problem."

"But you need to be prepared."

"Prepared for what?"

"The construction site is at the equator." Lin Yun pointed to the Luan Bird mothership hovering in mid-air outside the window. "Your commute vehicle is this."

Song Mingyue looked at the three-kilometer-long steel behemoth, then looked down at her own work boots, which were stained with cement dust.

"...Fine."

She sighed and straightened her hard hat.

"I'm used to working at heights anyway."

"Thirty-six thousand kilometers up should be about the same."

Lin Yun was almost amused by her words.

Just as the two were about to leave the studio, a prompt popped up on Lin Yun's system panel—

[System detected that the first formal contact between the potential partner target "Song Mingyue" and the host has been completed.]

[Initial favorability assessment: B+ (42% above baseline)]

[It is recommended that the host demonstrate personal charm while appropriately revealing "reliable partner" attributes in subsequent interactions to increase favorability to A-level.]

[Note: This target has an independent personality and a strong career drive; conventional "sweet talk" strategies are extremely inefficient. Recommended strategy—"co-creating great engineering" style romance.]

Lin Yun silently closed the system prompt.

Co-creating great engineering style romance?

Building a space elevator as a dating scenario?

This system's brain circuits are sometimes even more absurd than the Red Queen's.

But I have to say... Lin Yun glanced at Song Mingyue's back as she walked in front.

Sunlight shone through the window onto her black hair tied in a ponytail, casting a golden halo over the outline of her dusty work clothes.

It was actually quite nice.

Just as he was thinking this, Song Mingyue suddenly stopped and turned back.

"Mr. Lin, I have one more question."

"What?"

"You just said that the carbon nanotubes were 'synthesized' by your two children who are not even a year old."

"Yes."

Song Mingyue's eyes became complex.

"Then... will your children think in the future that the meaning of their existence is just to produce technological rewards for you?"

This question was like a needle, precisely pricking the softest part of Lin Yun's heart.

He was silent.

Song Mingyue watched the change in Lin Yun's expression, her lips moving slightly, but she didn't say anything.

She turned around and pushed open the studio door.

"Two days. I'll submit the drawings."

"But you need to think clearly about this question."

"Before you build the space elevator up to the sky."

Her figure disappeared outside the door.

Lin Yun stood in the empty studio, stunned for a long while.

Then he looked down at the nine neatly arranged children's avatars on the system panel.

Next to each avatar, their talent level and acquired technology rewards were marked.

Cold, icy data.

Just like the genetic test reports in Professor Fang's laboratory.

"They are not data." Lin Yun said softly, not knowing if he was talking to the system or to himself.

"They are my children."

The system did not respond.

But "Nuwa's" voice rang gently in his mind.

"Commander, the full-scale carbon nanotube self-assembly production line has been deployed in the 'Hive' industrial zone."

"The 'Twin Synergy' state of San Bao and the second baby is stable. Under the care of Ms. Shen Ruoxi and Ms. Gu Qingyao, the health status of both children is normal."

"Also, Ms. Shen Ruoxi asked me to pass a message to you."

"What message?"

"'Children are not tools. But if their talents can save the world, then guiding them to use their talents correctly is in itself the best education.'"

"'So don't dwell on it, hurry up and build your space elevator.'"

"'Dinner is saved for you.'"

A genuine smile finally appeared on the corner of Lin Yun's mouth.

Then he walked out of the studio with big strides and jumped onto the shuttle of luan niao no. 4.

Next stop—the equator.

But the moment the shuttle took off, Xiao Zhang chased after it, panting.

"Lin... Brother Lin! News from the 'Hive' industrial zone!"

"The carbon nanotube production line just started trial operation... but there's a problem!"

"What problem?"

"An unknown interference signal appeared at the energy input end of the production line! 'Nuwa' is investigating... but preliminary analysis shows—"

Xiao Zhang swallowed hard.

"The frequency characteristics of that interference signal are exactly the same as the fourth channel that just lit up on the Moon Gate!"