149: Chapter 149 One billion nerves, one hundred thousand tons of steel grow the sense of touch!

The fifth day, 7:12 AM.

Third Ring courtyard.

Su Che splashed cold water on his face in the bathroom. When he walked out, Lin Waner had already set breakfast on the table.

White porridge, salted duck eggs, a plate of vinegar-shredded potatoes.

Su Che sat down and picked up a spoon.

"You tossed and turned three times last night," Lin Waner said, sitting opposite him, holding a cup of warm water.

"I had a dream."

"What did you dream about?"

"I dreamed the furnace lost power."

Lin Waner peeled a salted duck egg and pushed it over.

Su Che ate a few spoonfuls of porridge and pulled out his phone to check the remote monitoring of Pangu Laboratory.

The temperature control curve of the smelting furnace was perfectly flat, with the temperature drop rate fixed at 0.100 ℃/min, completely steady.

Twenty-six hours left on the countdown.

He put down his phone and finished the porridge at the bottom of the bowl.

7:45 AM, the bulletproof Hongqi car drove out of the hutong.

Qin Lan sat in the passenger seat and handed over a thin analysis report.

"Last night, the Yiren AI Core finished processing 72 hours of raw monitoring data from the Xiang Province Meteorological Bureau," Qin Lan said, flipping to the second page. "The conclusion is out."

Su Che took the report.

The core conclusion had only three paragraphs.

Paragraph 1: The storm was a natural convection system, artificially accelerated and enhanced after external energy injection. The injection method was remote gravitational wave directional focusing, acting on the intersection of cold and warm air currents in the troposphere.

Paragraph 2: The signal attenuation pattern of the gravitational waves shows that the energy source is not within the Solar System; the transmission path crossed the Kuiper Belt.

Paragraph 3: The total energy injected was extremely small, equivalent to just one hand grenade, but the precision was extremely high, hitting the most vulnerable trigger node of the meteorological system.

It was blatant, precise remote control.

Using the energy of a single hand grenade to trigger a level 17 storm.

Su Che closed the report and handed it back to Qin Lan.

"It is measuring our reaction speed," Su Che said, leaning back in the seat. "There was a seven-hour window between the energy injection and the storm forming. It wanted to see if the Dragon Kingdom could detect the anomaly and respond within seven hours."

"How long did we take?"

"From the Meteorological Bureau's warning to the arrival of the Xuan Nü, a total of twelve minutes," Su Che looked out the car window. "But we were remedying the situation after the fact, not intercepting it beforehand."

Qin Lan put away the report and did not ask further.

8:10 AM, Pangu Laboratory, Level B2.

Su Che pushed open the blast door, and a wave of heat mixed with the smell of metal oxides rushed towards him.

The retrofitted vacuum smelting furnace sat on the east side of the hall, the indicator lights of the temperature sensors on the surface of the silver-white cylinder arranged in neat green arrays.

Wen Bo was sitting on a folding stool next to the furnace.

He hadn't just arrived; he hadn't left.

On the small table in front of the old Academician were three steamed buns and a saucer of soy sauce. The bun had been broken in half, and a chopstick was still stuck in the soy sauce saucer.

"Academician Wen," Su Che walked over.

Wen Bo looked up, his eyes bloodshot.

"The gradient solidification has reached the forty-sixth hour," Wen Bo pointed to the real-time curve on the control panel. "The arrangement of the rare earth particles is completely in line with expectations; there is no deviation in the magnetic field induction."

"How long have you been guarding here?"

"I haven't moved since you left yesterday afternoon," Wen Bo picked up the half-broken bun, dipped it in soy sauce, and chewed it a couple of times. "This furnace is worth eight hundred million. You had me cut and rewind all the coils, so I have to keep an eye on it. If something goes wrong, I won't be able to explain it to the institute."

Su Che pulled up a chair and sat down in the empty space next to him.

"There are twenty-six hours left, go get some sleep first."

"I'm not tired," Wen Bo shook his thermos, which was empty. "Just refill my water."

Lin Waner walked over from the side door, carrying a thermos.

She didn't speak, took Wen Bo's cup, filled it with hot water, and handed it back.

Wen Bo took the cup, took a sip, and nodded at her.

Su Che walked to the operating console in the center of the hall.

Yesterday's storm incident had interrupted the rhythm, but the furnace hadn't stopped. The research and development of the self-repair module couldn't wait until the solidification was finished to begin.

He pulled up the general design drawing of the self-repair module on the keyboard.

Three-layer structure.

The bottom layer was a distributed fiber optic sensing network, responsible for real-time monitoring of stress changes across the entire ship body.

The middle layer was a piezoelectric ceramic array, using physical vibration waves to scan for deep cracks.

The outermost layer was a capillary repair agent delivery network.

The repair agent was still solidifying in the furnace, but the first two layers didn't rely on the repair agent, so they could start first.

Su Che dialed Academician Li Zhengyang's number.

"Academician Li, the power team is pausing engine debugging today. Send eight people over to help."

"What for?"

"To install nerve endings on the luan bird."

Forty minutes later.

In the B2-level testing area, that 100,000-ton skeleton test section used for duct blade assembly verification had been cleared again.

This skeleton section was about forty meters long, just a cross-sectional module of the official 100,000-ton skeleton.

Su Che stood under the skeleton, holding a roll of fiber optics thinner than a human hair.

"One fiber optic sensing line covers a thirty-centimeter monitoring range," Su Che unfolded the fiber optic to show the people behind him. "The total surface area of the 100,000-ton class exceeds sixty thousand square meters. To achieve micron-level full coverage, we need two hundred thousand lines."

Academician Li Zhengyang walked up from behind.

"Two hundred thousand?"

"Yes, but that's just the fiber optics," Su Che handed the fiber optic to a researcher nearby. "The density of the piezoelectric ceramic array is even higher. After the entire damage monitoring system is online, the entire ship body will have over one billion stress collection nodes."

"One billion?" A young researcher blurted out.

"Human skin has over two hundred touch receptors per square centimeter," Su Che walked to the aluminum-lithium alloy main beam of the skeleton and pressed his palm against it. "The density I want to achieve in key load-bearing areas far exceeds human skin."

He withdrew his hand.

"When this giant beast touches a grain of sand, it must know whether it was touched on the left or the right."

Academician Li Zhengyang pushed the lid of his eternal thermos.

"How should I divide the eight people I brought?"

"Four will learn the fiber optic laying process with Academician Wen, and the other four will work with me to install the piezoelectric ceramics."

Su Che pulled up the sensor layout blueprint on the tablet. "Practice on this forty-meter test skeleton. Once all processes are finalized, they will be embedded directly when the official skeleton construction begins."

A key piece of information was casually tossed out by Su Che.

The official skeleton hadn't been built yet.

The true skeleton of the 100,000-ton luan bird was still on the blueprints.

The forty-meter test section in front of them was just a cross-sectional sample.

The significance of the self-repair module was not to patch the existing skeleton, but to change the construction method from the source. As the skeleton was being built, the repair system would be embedded, and the sensor network would be laid.

From the very first main beam, the luan bird would be alive.

10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

Eight hours.

Su Che and twelve people were crawling on the forty-meter skeleton.

The fiber optic sensing lines passed through the reserved micro-grooves in the main beam and were fixed with laser spot welding.

The temperature of each weld point could not exceed 300 degrees, otherwise the fiber optic would lose signal strength.

The piezoelectric ceramic chips were smaller than a fingernail, pasted one by one in the stress concentration areas of the truss nodes.

The bonding surface had to be coated with a 0.1-micron layer of conductive adhesive; too thick would affect signal transmission, too thin would not stick.

Su Che squatted above a crossbeam, holding tweezers, placing the 137th piezoelectric ceramic into its predetermined position.

The Yiren AI Core performed synchronous calculations, displaying the signal circuit status of each sensor on the tablet in real-time.

137 green dots.

Zero red dots.

Lin Waner had laid an anti-static mat on the floor below and placed the thermos and water cups on it.

When Su Che came down from the crossbeam, she handed him water.

Su Che took the cup and took a couple of sips.

He glanced at the furnace monitoring screen on the console.

Solidification countdown: 14 hours.

The temperature control curve was still stable.

Wen Bo was still sitting on the folding stool next to the furnace, the saucer of soy sauce replaced by a second one.

8:00 PM.

The fluorescent lights on Level B2 illuminated the entire hall brightly.

Su Che sat down at the console and summarized the sensor installation data of the forty-meter test section into a report.

Fiber optic laying: 21% complete.

Piezoelectric ceramics: 19% complete.

The speed was much slower than expected. Su Che tapped his fingertips on the desk; after all, it was process verification, so they had to be steady.

At this speed, laying the sensor network for the forty-meter test section would take three days.

The total length of the 100,000-ton official skeleton exceeded one thousand meters, but by then the process would be mature. With segmented parallel work and all fifty-six academicians working in three shifts, the official construction efficiency would increase several times over.

Su Che saved the report and stood up.

He walked over to the furnace and checked the solidification countdown.

12 hours.

At 8:00 AM tomorrow, the self-adaptive phase-change memory alloy would be out of the furnace.

Wen Bo had finally fallen asleep on the small table, still clutching the chopstick dipped in soy sauce.

Su Che picked up a military overcoat from the floor nearby and draped it over the old Academician's back.

Lin Waner was waiting at the entrance of the hall.

"Going home?"

"Yes."

The two walked out of the Pangu Laboratory's ground exit; the night wind carried the dampness of May.

In the car, Su Che leaned back in the seat with his eyes closed.

Lin Waner sat beside him, playing an old song on her phone, the volume turned to the minimum.

"Su Che."

"Hmm."

"That storm, was it really not a natural disaster?"

Su Che didn't open his eyes.

"No."

Lin Waner turned off the music on her phone, and the car was quiet for a while.

"Then will it come again?"

Su Che reached out and took her hand.

"Yes," he said. "But when it comes next time, the luan bird will be able to stop its own bleeding."

The car drove into the Third Ring hutong.

The vermilion gate of the courtyard stood heavily in the night.

In Pangu Laboratory Level B2, the temperature control curve of the smelting furnace was still ticking downward, one grid at a time.

Twelve hours later, the metal that had its atomic arrangement reshaped in the extreme magnetic field would be taken out of the furnace chamber.

As Su Che pushed open the courtyard gate, the line of the conclusion from the report flashed in his mind.

Remote gravitational wave directional focusing, transmission path crossing the Kuiper Belt.

It could accurately hit a meteorological node in Earth's atmosphere from the Kuiper Belt.

What if it reached near-Earth orbit?

Su Che let go of Lin Waner's hand and walked into the study.

On the rosewood desk, the screen of the encrypted terminal was still lit.

He sat down and opened the design document for the self-repair module.

In the upper limit column of the original protection parameters, Su Che deleted the original number.

He re-entered a value that was three times higher.