213: Chapter 213 Machine Warfare

The broad-spectrum light source swept across the ablation zone on the data cartridge for the seventh time.

The cold-white light band slid across the black composite shell at a constant speed, and the transmission optical fibers channeled the refraction feedback into the read head.

The data stream on the fluorescent screen jumped rapidly for a few moments, then solidified once again on that unchanged numerical value.

Progress: eleven point six.

A section of Physics records in the center of the ablation zone had completely disappeared.

The high temperature generated by high-energy particle beams or detonations had melted the underlying medium, leaving behind several micron-level depressions and crystallized edges.

Increasing the number of exposures could only make the contours of those damaged fault lines appear clearer in the imaging array, but it was impossible to magically restore the record layers that had already been ablated out of thin air.

The terminal's cooling fan accelerated its operation, re-estimating the remaining recovery time.

Eventually, it gave a figure of one hundred and eighty-four years.

Jiang Lin stared at it for a few seconds.

"One hundred and eighty-four years, you certainly have some nerve asking for that."

Muttering a complaint, he raised his hand to cut off the full sequential scanning program, extracted the already-recovered portion of the index tree, and loaded it into the main workspace separately.

Although the existing index layer was incomplete, it was still sufficient to prove that this data cartridge had originally stored a complete frozen image.

More importantly, it completely retained the physical routing number of the main archive.

The route continued to extend outward along the northern corridor of Northeast Seventy-Three, with its endpoint marked as the observation index area.

And beyond those coordinates hung a string of maintenance nodes that had long since lost status reporting.

Jiang Lin pulled out this route data and overlaid it with the underground structural map obtained from the re-survey sixty-three days ago.

The two maps overlapped on the screen, with the first four point four two kilometers coinciding within the surveying error range.

However, moving further north, the two lines completely parted ways.

The originally smooth main trunk track was completely severed by three vertical transfer shafts, a large area of standing water marked in dark blue, and a large volume of collapsed mass.

The furthest set of structural echoes could not even pass through the enclosure wall of the first abandoned power station.

Relying on existing blasting and lifting equipment, the Fifth Fleet could forcibly dig a data cartridge out of a structural interlayer more than four hundred meters deep, but it was absolutely impossible for them to magically remove an underground trunk line that had collapsed for tens of kilometers out of thin air.

Jiang Lin brought up the MPS - Scheduler, inputting the Outpost's existing processing platforms, the number of available machine tools, the main grid power supply surplus, and the maintenance work hours he could personally invest each year one by one.

The progress bar of the calculation model advanced rapidly, and the evaluation results quickly filled the entire main screen.

According to the Fifth Fleet's current construction capacity, under the premise of completely ruling out unpredictable secondary collapses and structural failures, the lower bound of the construction period just to clear the northbound main line exceeded eighty years.

During these eighty years, the vast majority of the time was not spent drilling forward, but rather on transporting, stringing wires, draining water, ventilating, and repairing and replacing parts for the machines that constantly wore out and broke down during the first four tasks.

Jiang Lin did not look at that densely packed schedule anymore.

He minimized the calculation window, placed it beneath the data cartridge index file, stood up, turned off the console, and turned to walk toward Assembly Room 1.

Before going to look for that buried answer, he first had to build enough manpower for himself.

Of course, the Outpost had no second person.

During the remaining eight months of the first year, Jiang Lin did not drill for a single moment.

He poured all his energy into the tedious task of unifying platform standards.

Assembly Room 1 originally housed hexapod platforms, narrow-gauge work vehicles, fixed robotic arms, and three mobile processing units left over from different periods.

Their parts manufacturing standards were mutually incompatible, and even the bolt pitches had three specifications.

Jiang Lin completely disassembled these equipment and categorized them into forty-seven types of reusable basic modules.

All control interfaces were uniformly changed to moisture-proof industrial buses, power sockets were replaced with standardized explosion-proof connectors, mechanical positioning surfaces were re-ground and polished, and emergency braking circuits were all connected to hard-wire loops.

By the early spring of the second year, the final assembly task for the first new platform was still hanging on the schedule, unstarted.

Jiang Lin took the surveying terminal and insulation megohmmeter, and walked through the four point four two kilometers of underground facilities that could already be reached once again.

In the damp air of the southern track maintenance branch depot, eighty-six retired narrow-gauge work vehicles were parked.

On the spare parts rack behind the pump room, more than three hundred traction and auxiliary motors were half-submerged in rust and dust.

In the other two warehouses, wheel sets, fan casings, pump blades, copper bars, and rolls of insulated cables were piled up.

The figures on the sealing inventory looked quite impressive, but when Jiang Lin took these items down piece by piece and brought them to the test bench, the real ledger was revealed.

There were only seventy-one motors that could directly pass the insulation withstand voltage and vibration tests, and another one hundred and thirty-eight had ablated or damp stators that required rewinding and varnish dipping.

Less than one-third of the complete sets of rolling bearings met the standards of the original inventory.

As for those severely aged power modules, almost all of them were classified into the ground equipment downgraded usage column, and could not be directly mounted on underground field equipment.

Jiang Lin did not count those unrepairable scrapped parts into production capacity, nor did he use the unexcavated ruins ahead to guarantee future inventory.

The high-precision inertial navigation, force sensors, imaging arrays, and computing units mounted on G - Explorer - C were still reserved only for unknown dangerous areas.

On the four point four two kilometers of track that had already been surveyed, the transport vehicles only needed to recognize section electronic markers, the preceding vehicle's ultrasonic distance, preset stopping points, and the vehicle's own sensor status; there was simply no need for every single vehicle to grow an expensive and fragile brain.

The drilling platform only needed to advance along fixed guide rails, the stringing vehicle laid wires following mechanical limit mechanisms, and the drainage pump groups did not even need to know which ruin's standing water they were pumping.

Complex logical judgments were left to a few reconnaissance platforms, fixed workstations, and Jiang Lin himself.

The machines with the largest numbers only needed to do one thing well, and do it to the point where it could be seamlessly handed over to the next machine to take over.

Controllers, encoders, measuring heads, and seals brought from the Real World therefore became seeds, and did not need to be evenly distributed into every chassis.

Most low-speed platforms drew power from segmented busbars along fixed tracks, and the buffer battery packs loaded on the vehicles were only able to maintain emergency braking, cross short unpowered areas, and retreat to the nearest safe point when the main line lost power.

Only those reconnaissance platforms that needed to completely detach from the tracks and a few rescue and maintenance platforms retained complete independent battery packs.

Jiang Lin brought up the engineering standards from the low-dependency civilization core, starting from the most basic bearing fit tolerances, cable crimping insulation, and welding inspection standards, and added material sorting, harness crimping, gear modification, and module testing workstations to the existing processing line.

Structural steel cleared from the depths of the ruins first underwent compositional analysis and ultrasonic flaw detection screening.

Steel without internal defects and with qualified toughness was sent to the smelting and forging line.

Poorer quality ones were modified into protective covers, mounting brackets, and balance counterweights.

The newly manufactured parts were mainly frames, housings, low-speed transmission gears, and standard connectors.

Motors were mainly disassembled and rewound, bearings were strictly grouped according to their measured remaining life, and power devices had to pass a 72-hour high-temperature aging screening before being approved for installation in field equipment.

Copper bars, old motors, and bearings whose factory batches could still be traced were stored separately in constant temperature and humidity cabinets.

If the inventory of any type of key part fell below the early warning line, the expansion task would be automatically suspended, giving priority to maintenance and cleanup tasks.

Machines would not feel tired, nor would they dislike being dirty or exhausted, but bearings would still wear out, and cutting tools would still chip.

If this ledger was not calculated clearly beforehand, the more machines were built, the more they would eventually turn into a string of fault codes hanging on the console waiting for Jiang Lin alone to repair.

In the spring of the third year of this cycle, T-01 finally descended from the newly erected final assembly rack onto the rails.

This was a narrow transport platform eight hundred and sixty millimeters wide.

Its four sets of wheel-side drive modules were refurbished from old traction motors dismantled from the southern maintenance branch depot.

The stators were rewound with new copper wire, the bearings were replaced with screened and matched inventory parts, and the frame positioning holes were precision bored by the repaired gantry processing unit.

The wire harnesses were crimped at the newly built workstation, the gearbox housing was re-cast and machined, and the retained gears were loaded into the housing after flaw detection and tooth surface modification.

Jiang Lin personally installed the controller, reviewed the braking and overcurrent protection functions of the circuit item by item, and then pushed the simulated load cart to complete the final round of dynamic calibration.

The final assembly records clearly recorded that Jiang Lin had invested seventeen point six man-hours on this platform, while the remaining more than two hundred and sixty work hours were distributed across material sorting, mechanical processing, object transport, coil winding, and automated testing equipment.

The Outpost had many machines before, but T-01 was the very first brand-new platform jointly manufactured by this mechanical system.

Its first operational task was to transport the two longitudinal beams of T-02 from the material storage area to the front of the final assembly rack.

Jiang Lin stood beside the track, watching T-01 run smoothly along the steel rails, delivering the frame—which had not yet been fitted with wheel-side drive modules—underneath the final assembly rack.

He reached out and pressed the stop button on the robotic arm that was about to continue lowering its hook.

"Don't be in such a hurry to add family members for yourself."

T-01 still needed to run through three hundred hours of the test load spectrum, undergoing simulated power-failure parking, steep slope coasting, brake sticking, and traction motor overheat protection tests.

Only when its first-article quality record was completely closed could the production line approve the manufacture of batch versions.

After the three-hundred-hour test ended, work on T-02 officially began.

From the construction of T-02 to T-11, it took seven months.

From T-12 to T-40, it only took the winter from November to before the early spring of the second year.

However, this figure subsequently stagnated on the asset management tree for more than two years.

Complete sets of qualified bearings and moisture-resistant insulation materials successively touched the set safety stock warning lines.

T-41's frame had long been welded, but two of the four wheel-side drive modules had remained empty.

Jiang Lin pushed that semi-finished frame into the pending material area, and did not use the last few sets of backup safety stock in the maintenance warehouse just because the northern line urgently needed vehicles.

The first batch of off-line transport platforms continuously sent raw materials to the machine tools.

The second batch of platforms sent processed modules to the final assembly bench.

The third batch of platforms had already begun cleaning up the rubble and waste slag on the outer side of the collapse zone along the old tracks.

The open space at the entrance of Assembly Room 1, which could originally only park a few vehicles of the Fifth Fleet, quickly became insufficient, and Jiang Lin expanded two rows of outdoor inspection-pending spaces on the side.

The machines in the outdoor spaces did not wait around to gather dust.

The northern line construction needed vehicles, the underground drainage stations needed vehicles, and the old substation nodes were also waiting for the delivery of insulation materials and replacement busbars.

After the first batch of transport platforms left the warehouse, drilling and anchoring platforms were timely inserted into the production queue.

They shared the same power and control framework, with their front ends changed to rotary drill bits, hydraulic breakers, or anchor bolt work frames according to requirements.

Once encountering unmapped unknown rock layers, the platform would automatically stop in place, uploading physical sampling and ultrasonic echo data to Jiang Lin in real time.

Stringing vehicles entered the production line closely behind.

They dragged insulated guide rails, communication optical fibers, and ventilation hoses behind the construction face, replacing the temporarily laid energy supply lines step by step with fixed sections that could be independently isolated.

Lines in the old grid that could pass insulation, grounding, and short-circuit tests were lit up section by section.

The remaining severely aged lines were left directly inside the walls, never blindly energized just because they once belonged to a complete power grid.

Liquid level meters and low-flow drainage pumps were first deployed in low-lying areas.

After the water table drop rate, groundwater replenishment rate, and seepage direction completely stabilized, the second-stage high-flow pump station pushed forward downward.

After compositional analysis and sedimentation, the pumped standing water was introduced into cooling water towers, dust removal systems, or isolation pools respectively.

Ventilators were deployed along branch lines whose structural load-bearing capacity had been confirmed.

For every section the forward construction face extended ahead, the air ducts, sensors, and fluorescent escape markers behind it advanced synchronously by a section.

In the sixth year, the flooded equipment gallery located at the old milestone of 8.7 kilometers broke the surface for the first time.

When the standing water receded to the final dozen centimeters of depth, two inspection machines walked back and forth along the base of the wall three times, precisely locating five wall cracks that were still seeping water.

Until the water level records steadily ran through a complete flood season, the cracks completed pressure relief and grouting sealing, and the roof settlement monitoring values completely stabilized, the tracks officially crossed that pale white water mark on the wall.

When the first transport vehicle drove past, the driver's seat was empty.

Behind it followed fourteen platforms of the same model, respectively carrying cable spools, anchor bolts, pump groups, and the next section of steel rails.

Jiang Lin stood on the side maintenance platform and withdrew his gaze after counting to the fifth vehicle.

The number, real-time load, and final destination of every vehicle were in the task pages of the control terminal; there was completely no need for him to stand here and conduct a manual roll call for the machines.

This equipment gallery was connected to a regional public utility support warehouse behind it, which specialized in providing overhaul services for rail cars, pump stations, fans, and power nodes before the cataclysm.

Retired chassis crowded both sides of the maintenance line, several sets of large water pumps were only half-disassembled, motor rotors sealed in batches occupied half the wall, and three rows of standard spare parts that hadn't been claimed in time remained on the innermost metal racks.

Jiang Lin spent five months completing the asset inventory and sample testing.

Among the standard spare parts that passed the test, besides bearings, pump shafts, and sealing blanks, there were also boxed and sealed underground field-grade drive modules, relays, braking control components, as well as a batch of still-usable insulation films, impregnating materials, and lubricating base stocks.

These qualified inventories were enough to support the daily rotation and maintenance of over a hundred low-speed platforms, but they were still a long way from being inexhaustible.

The first batch of return material boxes was filled with bearing rings, copper bars, pump shafts, sealing blanks, and rewritable old motors.

The two wheel-edge drive modules that had been vacant for a long time in T-41 also found matching replacement parts in this batch of returned items.

After that, every time an old node was restored, the return transport vehicle would bring back traced obsolete equipment.

Jiang Lin still strictly opened the next production batch according to the actual materials that had been warehoused and passed testing, never pre-writing warehouses that he hadn't seen with his own eyes ahead into the production capacity table.

Before the beginning of the eighth year, T-41 finally left the material-waiting area, and the total number of transport platforms smoothly broke through forty-eight.

After the eighth year, the nights at the Outpost rarely truly darkened anymore.

Every distance along the underground trunk line, a set of low-power work lights was lit, and the surface material yard, processing area, and distant relay towers each maintained their own safety lighting.

Jiang Lin occasionally walked from the Stone House to Assembly Room No. 1, only to see a few platforms nearby driving smoothly past, while the task network on the console had already extended deep underground dozens of kilometers away.

The northern line was drilling forward, the western material yard was sorting scrap steel, wire-stringing vehicles were replacing aging insulators in the old power channels, and three sets of drainage stations automatically started and stopped based on feedback from liquid level sensors.

These tasks no longer required him to walk to the scene personally for them to happen.

MPS-Agent α was responsible for breaking down and implementing the overall tasks he had approved onto workstations, energy allocation, and maintenance windows.

Once a platform exceeded the set boundary, it would automatically shut down, standard faults directly underwent module replacement, and only unclassifiable abnormalities would bounce back to his workbench.

In the winter of the tenth year, a wire-stringing vehicle reported a slow decline in insulation monitoring values on a construction face twenty-two kilometers away.

If it were in the past, Jiang Lin would need to carry spare modules on his back and walk for a full two days to rush to the scene for handling.

That day, the task scheduling page automatically froze the adjacent power supply section first, and two maintenance platforms set out from the nearest spare parts warehouse, one dragging back the faulty cable reel and the other completing the replacement of the insulation components in situ.

When Jiang Lin opened the terminal, what he received was the complete inspection record of the disassembled parts, along with a system prompt.

Whether to expand the spot-check scope of the same batch of insulation parts.

He increased the spot-check ratio from ten percent to one hundred percent, causing the entire production line to shut down for nine days as a result.

Nine days later, three hidden crimping defects in the same batch of insulation parts were all isolated and replaced, and the northern line construction continued to push forward according to the established boundaries.

When the total number of platforms approached one hundred, the proportion of maintenance man-hours in the total man-hours touched the upper limit preset by Jiang Lin.

The manufacturing of new transport chassis was suspended offline, and all materials and production capacity were prioritized toward maintenance platforms, module exchange vehicles, and automatic cleaning stations.

Until every eight field devices could be equipped with a set of nearby spare parts and a fixed maintenance window, the production expansion permit was reopened by the system.

During those nine days of production suspension for the full inspection of insulation parts, the earliest offline batch of T-series platforms still ran internal logistics between workstations as usual.

Platforms coming offline later no longer had to wait for Jiang Lin to personally drive forklifts, move motors, or manually carry a box of bolts across half the factory area.

After the number of machines exceeded one hundred and fifty, Jiang Lin could no longer recognize the scratches on every body shell.

He still clearly remembered the old wound on the right rear of G-Explorer-C that had followed it for nearly a century, and also remembered the dent left on the guardrail when T-01 underwent its first ramp test.

As for which time platform numbered 147 had its left wheel-edge module replaced, one could only look it up in the system's maintenance ledger.

In the fifteenth year, the northern main line and the eastern bypass line crossed the twenty-kilometer mark at the same time.

The two construction faces were more than thirty kilometers apart, and drilling, muck discharging, anchoring, wire stringing, ventilation, and structural re-testing still progressed steadily according to their respective paces.

Jiang Lin took a railcar to the northern line to recheck an unknown structural interlayer, and on his return trip, he passed an old power station that had just restored power supply.

Inside the station, only one of the three main busbars was currently in operation, while the other two still hung conspicuous physical isolation signs. The original equipment numbers had long been blurred, but the newly installed ammeters and circuit breakers on the cabinet doors were flashing indicator lights.

Walking further south, rows of transport platforms stopped on the siding tracks to yield the way, and the crushed stone, waste air ducts, and pump casings awaiting repair loaded on the vehicles were transported to different processing workstations respectively.

When the railcar passed through the second drainage station, continuous and rhythmic vibration of the pump groups came from underfoot, and the cold wind sent by the ventilation branch blew the cuffs of Jiang Lin's work clothes against his arms.

More than ten years ago, when he and the Fifth Fleet first entered Northeast Seventy-Three, walking these 4.42 kilometers took nearly five hours.

But now, this once extremely difficult distance accounted for only a tiny fraction of the numbers on the railcar's odometer.

Structural ultrasonic echoes had clearly separated the last large enclosed body from the background noise, but the route that could truly reach it still lacked a severely collapsed vertical transfer shaft and over seven hundred meters of old annular corridors without any support records.

Jiang Lin abandoned the plan to restore the original vertical shaft, and re-selected two inclined construction lines in stable rock formations that had undergone mechanical calculations.

One was specifically responsible for transportation and drainage, while the other retained power supply, ventilation, and evacuation redundancy. The two lines only intersected at nodes that had undergone independent structural re-testing.

The amount of engineering work thus doubled, but he would never gamble all the equipment and personnel safety dozens of kilometers away on the same single shaft.

In the twelfth lunar month before the twenty-second Spring Festival of this cycle, 207 available engineering platforms were already registered in the MPS asset tree.

Among them, transport and transfer platforms accounted for 78, drilling and anchoring platforms 31, stringing and power supply platforms 22, inspection and mapping platforms 28, and the remaining 48 were respectively responsible for maintenance, drainage, ventilation, and site support.

These two hundred-plus machines had never lined up in the same place.

Assembly Room No. 1 couldn't hold them, and neither could the surface open space of the Outpost.

They were scattered across tens of kilometers of railways, material yards, pump stations, power nodes, and nine main construction faces. What Jiang Lin usually saw on the control console was a constantly flowing and updating task map.

On New Year's Eve afternoon, more than 120 platforms on that map were still in remote operation status.

On the dispatch terminal, Jiang Lin uniformly pushed back the task deadlines of non-critical construction faces by four hours.

Drainage pump stations, ventilation systems, structural monitoring, and civilization core storage continued to maintain operation, drilling, hauling, stringing, and material sorting were reduced to preservation loads in turn, and platforms awaiting inspection took advantage of this window to complete lubrication, cleaning, and buffer battery balancing.

The dispatch system popped up a confirmation box, asking for the reason for the postponement.

The system's preset options included: power supply adjustment, planned maintenance, extreme weather, and operator needs.

Jiang Lin checked the last item and typed two characters in the remarks column.

[ Celebrating New Year ]

Water was already boiling in the small kitchen of the advance base.

The Chinese cabbage had just been picked in the greenhouse that morning, the tofu was hand-ground from Soybeans left over from last autumn, and the flour came from the twenty-first crop of winter wheat harvested in this cycle.

Jiang Lin washed his hands and carefully wiped the emptied stainless steel cutting board dry. He first mixed and proofed the dough, then squeezed the excess moisture out of the cabbage filling little by little.

That forty-one-year calendar hung by the door, and the New Year's Eve on this page was heavily circled by him with a red pen, next to which he also casually recorded the replacement date of the sealing ring for the northern line No. 2 pump.

He wrapped thirty-six dumplings in total, twelve went straight into the pot, and the remaining twenty-four were plated and sent into the outdoor freezer, reserved for the first and second days of the lunar new year.

When the water in the pot boiled rolling for the second time, the drilling load of the remote construction face had dropped, and the power consumption curve on the base wall leveled out significantly.

A transport platform that missed the return-to-warehouse window was parked outside the base door, and two rolls of communication fiber optics that hadn't been unloaded in time were still placed on it.

Jiang Lin carried the steaming dumplings past the maintenance path beside it, casually changing the scheduling time of the unloading task to the morning of the first day of the new year.

"Park here for the night, they aren't accepting goods inside today."

The transport platform received the instruction, switched into parking lock status, and only two yellow position lights on both sides of the door flickered faintly in the dimness.

Jiang Lin poured vinegar into the bowl, and went to the door to paste a short red piece of paper with the words "Safe Travels" written on it.

The paste dried very slowly at outdoor temperatures, and he pressed it with his hand for quite a while, but a small piece at the bottom right corner of the paper still wasn't completely pasted down tightly.

The cup of Soybean milk in the independent warehouse probably hadn't completely cooled down yet at this time.

The wheat in the Wasteland granary had unknowingly been harvested twenty-one times.

Before the end of the four-hour low-load window, Jiang Lin finished two plates of dumplings, covered the remaining dough properly, and then carefully checked the pump stations and storage nodes that had to maintain continuous operation.

The task resumption time was set at one o'clock in the morning on the first day of the new year.

The bed in the advance base's bedroom had been used for more than a decade, and a pressure gauge prepared for replacement the next day was placed beside the pillow. Jiang Lin set the alarm for seven in the morning and turned off the lights in the room.

At one o'clock in the morning, the task queues of the nine main construction faces reopened in the established order.

The transport platforms drove away from the standby line, the drilling platforms re-attached tightly to the rock face, and the wire-stringing vehicles continued to feed the communication fiber optics parked at the joints the previous day into the protective troughs.

When Jiang Lin woke up in the early morning, the transport vehicle parked outside the door had already unloaded the two rolls of fiber optics and was traveling on the trunk line track toward the northern line operation area.

Before winter set in in the twenty-second year, the two inclined construction lines finally successfully converged in the last section of stable rock outside the observation index area.

Among the thirty-one drilling and anchoring platforms, fourteen had participated in this project successively, and the cleared and transported crushed stone filled more than seven thousand narrow-gauge material boxes.

The drainage pipeline guided underground seepage water into the three-stage sedimentation tank, the ventilation branch crossed the final fire isolation door, and the new power supply terminal stopped one hundred and twenty meters south of the enclosed body.

The advancement of the final seventy meters was handed back to G-Explorer-C and four high-precision inspection platforms.

Jiang Lin followed behind the machines.

In this cycle, he had lived on the Wasteland for a full twenty-two years.

The hair exposed under his hard hat had been cut countless times, and his work clothes had been changed to the ninth set of this cycle.

The construction searchlight ahead cast a strong beam of light, illuminating a black composite wall extending back and forth.

There were no scattered collapsed fragments in front of the wall, the drainage ditch at the bottom remained intact and unobstructed, and sixteen maintenance optical paths from different directions converged orderly into the same set of passive joints here.

The inspection platforms completed the re-check of gas composition, radiation dose, structural stability, and residual power supply, writing the test data back to the isolated terminals item by item.

The identification area in the center of the wall had long been powered off and failed. A reconnaissance aircraft swept across the surface with oblique light, slowly revealing two lines of clear carved characters under the accumulated dust.

[ OBSERVATION INDEX AREA ]

[ PHYSICAL ARCHIVE / OFFLINE ]

Jiang Lin ordered all drilling platforms to withdraw from the final 120-meter area, and erected a physical safety warning rack at the intersection of the two inclined channels.

Reading equipment, passive reading heads, and independent storage modules could only be transported in after the environmental baseline inside and outside the wall completed its prescribed cycle.

He firmly fixed the unsealed sealing mark in front of the wall and slowly stepped back a few steps along the track.

More than forty kilometers away, the automated machine tools in Assembly Room No. 1 were still producing spare parts, the drainage stations and power nodes lit up in turn on the task map of the control terminal, and 207 engineering platforms scattered behind those points of light, each continuing their scheduled work.