178: Chapter 178 Wreckage Analysis: The Gap in Technological Level
The waves of cheering from Earth were largely muffled by the thick rock layers and advanced soundproofing systems of the Bright Dawn base, leaving only a faint, indistinct background noise akin to a distant tide.
On the seventh underground level, in the ultra-clean analysis room, the atmosphere was so heavy you could cut it with a knife.
Lin Mo, wearing a full protective suit, stood before the main analysis console. Inside a transparent isolation chamber floated a few meager "trophies"—the few remaining debris samples that the soaring heavens engineering drones had risked everything to retrieve before the the piercer's spectacular self-destruct "fireworks" had fully bloomed.
The largest piece was no bigger than a fist, an irregular polyhedron warped and melted, its surface a dull silver-gray, yet under light from certain angles, it shimmered with an eerie, non-metallic iridescence like an oil slick. The other pieces were even smaller; some looked like fragments of some sort of conduit, while others were as thin as cicada wings, with edges sharp enough to be unbelievable.
Their quantity was pitifully small.
"Is... this it?" Elder Chen's voice came through the comms, tinged with suppressed disappointment.
"This is it." Lin Mo's voice was calm, but his gaze fixed on the samples was sharp as a knife. "The the piercer's final energy conversion was too thorough; it 'uploaded' or annihilated nearly 99.9% of its own mass. These few pieces were on the edge of the explosion and were thrown out by the shockwave, which is why they were lucky enough not to be completely sucked into the core conversion zone."
He operated the robotic arm to carefully move the largest piece of debris into the high-energy particle scanning chamber. "Initiating phase one, non-destructive deep scanning."
The scanning beam fell silently. On the massive screen nearby, a 3D structural model of the debris' interior began to form. The progress bar climbed slowly, and the only sound in the analysis room was the faint hum of the instruments.
Ten minutes later, the preliminary scan results were presented to everyone.
The model construction was complete, but...
"The structural complexity... cannot be fully parsed." The engineer in charge of scanning said with a dry voice. "After our high-energy particle beam penetrated to a depth of 37 microns, the signal feedback began to show a large amount of incomprehensible noise and superposition states. This is not an instrument failure; it is because its internal material arrangement... does not conform to any crystalline or amorphous structure known to us. Or rather, at that scale, the structure is 'dynamically changing,' and our scanning method is equivalent to trying to measure a pile of flowing sand with a ruler."
Lin Mo stared intently at the internal simulation on the screen, which looked like a chaotic nebula with tiny topological structures constantly being born and dying, and said in a deep voice, "Continue. Engage the system for assistance, and attempt to match it using topology and quantum field theory models."
With more powerful computing power brought to bear, the model on the screen began to be marked with a large number of red "unidentified areas" and yellow "suspected information structures." Some extremely fine, circuit-like patterns were extracted, but they were not etched on the surface; instead, they seemed to be "growing" within a 3D network inside the material, and the patterns themselves were also undergoing extremely slow deformation over time (during the scanning process).
"This..." Elder Chen gasped. "This wasn't manufactured; it looks like... it was 'grown'? Or perhaps, it formed through 'self-organization' under the influence of some kind of field?"
"It looks more like the latter." Lin Mo pulled up another set of data, which was a detailed record captured by Nuwa during the battle regarding the flow of liquid metal on the surface of the the piercer. "Look here, at its repair and morphological change process. The flow of the liquid metal is not a simple physical filling; every flow is accompanied by energy field modulation at specific frequencies. I suspect that its entire material might be a type of 'field-induced phase-change material' that can alter its physical properties, or even its internal microscopic structure, at any time under the control of an energy field."
This concept made every materials scientist in the analysis room feel a chill down their spine. Humanity's most advanced memory alloys or smart materials could only change shape or a few physical properties within a limited range. Yet the the piercer's material sounded like it could 'switch' the properties of metals, ceramics, semiconductors, and even superconductors at the microscopic level whenever needed!
"If that is truly the case," an old expert said, voice trembling, "then its defense principle isn't just about taking hits head-on. When our energy attacks strike it, it might instantly change the thermal conductivity, electrical conductivity, or even the atomic binding energy of the material at the point of impact, dispersing, conducting away, or storing the attack energy in the most efficient way possible! No wonder the Thunder Department's first volley was so ineffective!"
"It's not just that." Lin Mo pulled up the spectrum comparison chart from before and after the energy core was destroyed. "Look at the energy release curve of the 'fireworks' before it self-destructed. It's perfectly smooth, without a trace of noise or harmonic distortion. This indicates that its precision in controlling energy has reached a level we can hardly imagine—it can completely and uniformly convert the incredibly complex materials that make up its own hull into pure energy of a specific spectrum in an extremely short time, and release it in highly ordered geometric forms. This isn't an explosion; this is... 'energy alchemy.'"
The analysis room fell into a deeper silence. The excitement from the previous victory was now slowly being replaced by a cold, suffocating feeling based on the technological generation gap.
They had won, yes. But the way they won was by finding a "disorder window" in the opponent's adaptive system that lasted only a fraction of a millisecond, catching them off guard with an extremely clever, mixed-attack strategy, and luckily hitting the core in one strike.
If the the piercer hadn't had that flaw, or if its core defense had been just a little stronger...
If it hadn't been a single the piercer that arrived, but two, three, or even units like the Ripper with even more bizarre attack methods appearing simultaneously...
The consequences would be unimaginable.
"Physical samples are limited, but the data is sufficient." Lin Mo broke the silence. His voice sounded a bit muffled behind his protective mask, but it was exceptionally firm. "Nuwa recorded the entire engagement process, especially all the energy field changes during its adaptive process. The system is currently working at full capacity to reverse-engineer its algorithmic core and material phase-change principles. We don't need to completely replicate its technology, but we must understand its logic and find more universal methods of confrontation."
He looked at the few silent pieces of debris inside the isolation chamber, as if conversing with the ghost that had already been destroyed.
"This victory exposed the massive gap between us and the reaper civilization in basic materials science, energy control precision, and potentially the level of quantum field manipulation. But it also exposed their weaknesses—they rely too much on preset adaptive algorithms and lack true battlefield creativity. Although their self-destruct mechanism is thorough, it also shows that they value 'information transmission' far more than material preservation."
Lin Mo turned around to face the solemn and focused faces in the analysis room.
"The gap indeed exists, but it is not insurmountable. Our advantage lies in human creativity, adaptability, and... unity. They sent us a 'teacher.' Although this teacher is dangerous and the tuition is expensive, we have, after all, obtained our first 'lesson plan.'"
He paused, his tone resolute:
"Continue the analysis. I want to know every detail of the composition of its liquid metal, even if it's just the surface layer! I want to know the isotope ratio of its energy core residue! I want the system to provide me with a preliminary inference model of the reaper technology tree based on existing data within forty-eight hours!"
"Yes!" Everyone's spirits lifted, and they answered in unison.
The gap was despair-inducing, but admitting defeat had never been a human choice, especially after having already won the first round.
Just as the analysis work was proceeding intensely, Su Xiaowan hurried in, her face even more serious than before. She walked around to Lin Mo's side and lowered her voice:
"Consultant Lin, an urgent report from the Guanghan Palace deep-space monitoring station—the Ripper located in Jupiter's orbit has just... disappeared after twenty-seven hours of silence."
Lin Mo turned his head sharply. "Disappeared? Is it hiding? Or..."
"It's not hiding." Su Xiaowan shook her head and pulled up a blurry data chart she had just received from the monitoring satellite in Jupiter's orbit. "An extremely brief but violent spatial curvature disturbance was detected, with the location matching the last coordinates of the Ripper. The disturbance pattern... is somewhat similar to when the the piercer performed short-range maneuvers, but the intensity is two orders of magnitude higher. The system's preliminary judgment—it performed some form of... spatial jump or dimensional leap, and has left Jupiter's orbit."
"Destination?"
"Cannot be tracked. All traces vanished after the disturbance." Su Xiaowan took a deep breath. "But based on the back-calculation of the disturbance vector... the general direction points to the outer reaches of the Solar System, beyond the Kuiper Belt."
Lin Mo's heart sank slowly.
The Ripper did not attack, did not continue to reconnoiter, but simply left.
It had "watched" the entire process of the the piercer being destroyed, and might even have received the data the the piercer uploaded at the very end, and just left, clean and decisive.
This was more unsettling than if it had launched an attack.
What was it going back for? To report? To assemble? Or perhaps, the "assessment" of human civilization was complete, and what would appear next would no longer be a "vanguard verification unit"?
In the analysis room, the instruments were still humming, and the scientists were still busy analyzing those few cold pieces of debris from another star.
But a deeper, colder chill had already quietly crept up everyone's spines and into their hearts.
The gap in technological levels might be bridged by wisdom and courage.
But what if behind that gap was a quantity, a scale, a cold and ruthless civilization machine born for "reaping"?
"Speed it up." Lin Mo only said three words, his gaze returning to the screen, to the chaotic structure diagram that contained a hint of the mysteries of alien technology.
Time was truly running out.