12: Chapter 12: We're Standing Guard for the Gods

That towering tornado of waste gas raged for over half an hour.

Inside and outside the base, everyone stood like wooden stakes, heads tilted back, motionless, watching a sight they had never seen in their entire lives.

The soldiers guarding the perimeter all had their mouths wide open. Their orders were to seal off this area and let no one in. But who could have imagined that they would be guarding such an earth-shattering scene?

"Squad leader… are we standing guard for an immortal?" A young soldier's voice trembled as he clutched his rifle tightly, as if that would give him some courage.

The squad leader didn't make a sound; he just swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing. He had been a soldier for ten years and had seen all sorts of storms, but what was happening before his eyes went beyond his scope of understanding. All he could do was grip his rifle tighter and stand straighter. No matter what was inside, his mission was to stand his post well.

Inside the command center, the atmosphere was so tense it could be wrung out like water.

"Report! The central energy reading is still climbing! It's gone off the charts!"

"Report! The temperature of Purification Pool No. 3 has reached eight hundred! But… but the pool is still perfectly fine!"

"Report! Look at the environmental data! My god!"

Everyone's gaze instantly converged on the largest screen in the center.

It displayed real-time air data transmitted back from over a hundred monitoring points.

Before the Spirit Gathering Array was activated, the PM2.5 index over the base was consistently over 500 year-round, a level that was severely off the charts. The index in the surrounding urban areas hovered around two or three hundred, indicating heavy pollution.

But now… the curve on the screen was plummeting like a cliff diver!

Five hundred… four hundred… three hundred…

"The PM2.5 in the central zone has dropped to one hundred! It's reached the 'good' level!"

"It's still dropping! It's still dropping!"

One hundred… fifty… twenty…

"Report! The monitoring point near the central tower, the PM2.5 index… is zero! I repeat, it is zero!"

"Sulfur dioxide, zero!"

"Nitrogen oxides, zero!"

"All pollutants, completely gone!"

When the last report was shouted out, the entire command center went deathly silent.

Everyone stared with wide eyes at that row of green "0"s on the screen, as if they had seen a ghost.

Zero? How could it be zero? Even the best air purification laboratory in the world couldn't manage to clean away every single pollutant! In nature, there should at least be some background value.

But the data was right in front of them. This proved that the "Spirit Gathering Array" didn't just "purify" the air; it had wiped out the "impurities" in the air from the very root!

"This… this isn't scientific…" a young monitor muttered, rubbing his eyes hard, thinking he was seeing things.

"This isn't science, this is metaphysics," a slightly older colleague next to him replied with a bitter smile.

Director Zhao Lixin stared fixedly at the screen, his heart pounding like a drum. It worked! It really worked!

He forced himself to stay calm, picked up the walkie-talkie, and ordered in the steadiest tone he could manage: "Immediately send out the mobile monitoring vehicles. Go outside the base, into the city, and expand the monitoring range! I want to see just how large its area of influence is!"

A few minutes later, new data kept coming in.

"Report! Five kilometers from the base, in the eastern suburb chemical industrial zone, PM2.5 has dropped from 450 to 150!"

"Report! Ten kilometers from the base, at the city center People's Square, PM2.5 has dropped from 280 to 80!"

"Report! Fifteen kilometers from the base, at the western suburb scenic area, PM2.5 has dropped from 120 to 30! Air quality is excellent!"

Report after report rang out in the command center like bombs. Everyone was going crazy.

A one-square-kilometer array could actually influence a radius of fifteen kilometers! The air in nearly half of the urban area of Donghai City had all improved in just this half hour!

This was no longer just some environmental protection project. This was a super-project capable of changing the environment of a city, or even a country!

Just then, the sky-piercing tornado slowly stopped.

The sky revealed a bright, clear blue color that hadn't been seen in a long time. Sunlight spilled down, shining on the land that had just been "washed," making everything look spotlessly clean.

Everyone couldn't help but run out of the command room, taking deep breaths of this fresh air. The smell of sulfur and smoke that they had smelled for years was completely gone. In its place was a sweet scent, carrying the fragrance of grass and trees.

"This air smells even better than the air in the mountains back home!" an engineer shouted excitedly.

"Yeah! I feel like my rhinitis has cleared up!"

Chief Engineer Wang Jianguo also stood in the crowd, not saying a word, just silently taking off his glasses and wiping the corners of his eyes with the back of his hand.

He had spent his whole life dealing with pollution. He had watched this country develop, and he had also watched the heavy price this land had paid. He dreamed of seeing blue skies and white clouds again, and wanted his grandson to be able to breathe clean air. He thought this would require the efforts of generations and cost countless money and time.

But now, a twenty-year-old girl, in just half a month, using a pile of unwanted industrial waste, had realized his lifelong dream.

He turned his head to look at the black tower standing in the sunlight. On top of the tower, that small figure, under the blue sky, really looked like an immortal.

Chief Engineer Wang Jianguo bowed deeply once again in the direction of the giant tower. This time, not for anything else, but for this blue sky that had been saved.

At this moment, Jiang Ning was sitting cross-legged on top of the tower, feeling the spirit particles flowing through her body. Just now, when she activated the Spirit Gathering Array, she had been almost drained. But now, the Spirit Gathering Array was already rotating on its own. It was frantically absorbing the converted energy; one part maintained the array to purify the environment, while the other part flowed endlessly into the body of Jiang Ning, who was the array core.

The concentration of these spirit particles was more than a hundred times stronger than the one she had set up on that dilapidated construction site earlier!

She felt her bottleneck at the first level of Qi Refining loosening. At this rate, in less than a month, she would be able to break through to the second level of Qi Refining!

"Not bad, finally there's a decent place to cultivate." Jiang Ning nodded with satisfaction.

She stood up, brushed the dust off her body, and prepared to go down to see how the "project acceptance" was going.

As soon as she reached the bottom of the tower, she was surrounded by a group of people. Leading them were Director Zhao Lixin and Chief Engineer Wang Jianguo, followed by dozens of the project's core experts. Everyone's expression was a mix of awe, fanaticism, and a little bit of fear.

"Jiang… Chief Consultant Jiang!" Director Zhao Lixin stepped forward, his lips moving, but he didn't know what to say. Say thank you? Any words of gratitude were too light in the face of such a heaven-changing achievement.

"How is it? Are the data standards met?" Jiang Ning still had the tone of a foreman inspecting a job.

"They're met! And it's more than just met! It's simply… a miracle!" Chief Engineer Wang Jianguo said, grabbing the chance to speak, his face flushed with excitement. "Chief Consultant, how… how did you do it? Those waste gases… those pollutants, where did they go?"

This question was also the knot in everyone's heart. So many pollutants could not just vanish into thin air. Conservation of energy—that was the foundation of science.

Jiang Ning pointed to the ground under her feet. "Part of it was decomposed by the array into the most basic carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and returned to nature."

She then pointed to the large pools that were steaming. "The other difficult part was converted into crystals and settled at the bottom of the pools. Once they cool down, digging them out will provide excellent building materials, much sturdier than stone."

Turning waste into treasure? You can do that too? All the engineers' brains were once again struggling to keep up.

Just then, an old man in a white lab coat, surrounded by a group of people, ran over from a distance like a madman. It was Professor Chen, who had been following Jiang Ning back at the small construction site.

He was holding a detector that was screaming, rushed in front of Jiang Ning, and was so excited he couldn't speak clearly. "spirit particles! It's spirit particles! Such pure spirit particles! The concentration is too high! My god! My detector is about to explode!"