268: Chapter 268 Three Months of Grinding Through Five Gates, The Fifty-Second Gate's Death Gaze!

The forty-eighth door, Academician Zhong's Group Five.

The unlocking method for this door was completely different from the previous ones; there were no questions on the door panel, only a single line of text.

"Find the hidden observation target within the cabin."

The cabin was empty, containing nothing. After the twenty people entered, the door locked.

Academician Zhong led his team to turn the cabin upside down, scanning every inch of the walls, floor, and ceiling.

Seven days later, a team member inadvertently discovered that a micro-optical sensor interface was hidden behind a panel in the corner of the cabin.

After connecting it, the holographic screen in the center of the cabin lit up, displaying a set of coordinate data.

The task changed to using this interface to perform imaging observations on the celestial body at the specified coordinates within a limited time.

The target was a red dwarf 72 light-years away.

Academician Zhong had spent his whole life in aerospace engineering; optical observation was not his strong suit.

However, Group Five included Bonnet Garcia, the director of the Paris Observatory, who was an expert in optical observation.

Garcia took over the controls and spent four days debugging the adaptive parameters of the optical system.

Eventually, they captured a high-resolution image of the red dwarf, with the flare activity on the star's surface clearly visible.

The door opened.

Inside was a control terminal for an ultra-large space telescope array, with the lens array distributed along the outer shell of the mothership, boasting an absurdly large aperture.

"Ship-borne ultra-deep space optical observation system," Kayla introduced.

"It can perform high-resolution imaging of stellar systems, planets, and cosmic wonders within 100 light-years, and can even distinguish the surface continental outlines and large artificial structures of Earth-like planets."

Garcia stood before the terminal, pulled up the image of the red dwarf they had taken earlier, and magnified it tenfold.

"The resolution of this thing is three orders of magnitude higher than the interface I used before."

Su Che patted Garcia on the shoulder.

"You take charge of this section for now."

The forty-ninth door, Ye Zhiqiu's Group One.

The unlocking method was a system design problem: assuming the main bridge was destroyed, they had to design a complete emergency command takeover scheme covering five subsystems: power supply, communication, detection, defense, and operations.

This problem took Ye Zhiqiu's group a full month to solve.

It wasn't that the problem itself was difficult, but the required level of integration was extremely high.

Each team member could handle the schemes for the five subsystems if taken individually.

But integrating the five systems into a seamless emergency command system, involving interface protocols and logical judgments, was complex enough to make one go bald.

Ye Zhiqiu divided the twenty people into five subgroups, with each subgroup responsible for one subsystem.

He personally oversaw the interface integration, working sixteen hours a day.

Zhao Mingyuan, back at Su Family Village, helped write a simulation test program, running the schemes for the five subsystems over and over again.

A month later, the scheme passed.

The door opened.

Inside was an independent command center, smaller in area than the main bridge, but it had everything necessary.

It featured an independent power supply system, communication array, detection terminal, and defense control console, with armor three times the thickness of standard bulkheads.

"Mothership emergency backup command center," Kayla said. "When the main bridge is damaged or incapacitated, this place can take over all ship authorities."

Su Che called over Ma Yuanfeng, an expert in guidance and control, to familiarize himself with the place.

He entered the cabin, sat down at the command console, and went through all the control interfaces.

"Independent power, independent communication, independent detection, armored protection... this thing is a second bridge."

Su Che instructed Ma Yuanfeng, "If something happens to the main bridge, the whole ship will be counting on you."

The fiftieth door, Su Wanxing's Group Two.

The unlocking method surprised everyone: a game popped up directly on the door panel.

It was a fleet command strategy game in three-dimensional space, with rules so complex they were infuriating.

Players had to command frigate groups, assault ship groups, heavy artillery ship groups, and drone squadrons simultaneously in a simulated interstellar battlefield, fighting against an enemy fleet twice their size.

Resources were limited, communications were restricted, and the battlefield environment changed dynamically, requiring victory within a limited number of turns.

Su Wanxing, along with Chu Yan, Sun Jingyuan, and the other seventeen people, spent two full weeks studying the holographic sand table.

They lost all of the first fifty-plus rounds.

Su Wanxing saved the replay data of every match, analyzing the enemy's attack patterns and the flaws in their own resource allocation.

Chu Yan was responsible for deriving the optimal formation for the ship groups, and Sun Jingyuan calculated the efficiency curves of firepower coverage.

By the fifty-third round, Su Wanxing found a breakthrough; she abandoned frontal defense and used the assault ship formation as bait to lure the enemy's main force into a preset ambush zone of heavy artillery ships.

They won, and the door opened.

Inside was a massive data center, with quantum storage arrays arranged along the bulkheads, flickering with a dim blue light.

This was the ship-borne data and navigation record storage center.

It was originally intended for storing the mothership's full lifecycle navigation data, research data, combat records, mission logs, etc.

It was equipped with anti-tampering, damage-resistant, and multi-node backup systems, allowing data to be preserved permanently.

Su Che transferred Geoffrey Hinton and Sean Carter from Patrick's Group Four, and Eero Koskinen from Friedman's Group Three.

Hinton was a big name in the AI field, Carter handled data security, and Koskinen specialized in quantum storage.

The three entered the data center, and Hinton pulled up the storage architecture on the terminal, studying it for a long time.

"This backup mechanism... each data node has triple redundancy; even if any two nodes are destroyed simultaneously, the data will not be lost."

Carter added from the side, "Anti-tampering uses quantum fingerprint encryption; technology below a Level 3 Civilization cannot alter a single byte."

Su Che withdrew his hand from the console.

"This area is under the joint responsibility of you three."

The fifty-first door, Friedman's Group Three.

The unlocking method was a research topic: analyze interstellar space weather models under the standards of a Level 3 Civilization and output a complete disaster warning framework.

This problem was different from the previous ones; there was no standard answer.

The door panel only provided a set of raw observation data, requiring the team members to build models, derive laws, and output a scheme themselves.

Friedman and his team spent nearly two weeks holed up in the cabin.

He himself was an expert in astrophysics, and space weather was not his specialty, but Group Three included Jiang Tingbai, a space meteorologist.

Jiang Tingbai led the progress of the entire project.

She extracted characteristic parameters for five types of disasters—solar winds, cosmic ray bursts, interstellar magnetic storms, space plasma clouds, and high-energy particle streams—from the raw data and established a warning model.

Friedman was responsible for reviewing the physical logic of the model to ensure there were no loopholes in the derivation process.

Two weeks later, the scheme was submitted.

The door opened.

Inside was an interstellar space weather monitoring and warning system, with a sensor array covering the outer shell of the mothership and data processing terminals analyzing space environment parameters in real-time.

Jiang Tingbai stood before the terminal and pulled up the real-time monitoring interface.

On the screen, the current space weather data for the Solar System was scrolling and updating.

"Solar wind intensity... normal. Cosmic ray background value... normal."

She turned to Su Che, "With this system, we won't have to worry about being caught off guard by interstellar magnetic storms when traveling outside the Solar System in the future."

"This section is under your full responsibility."

The five doors were unlocked, and three months had passed.

During these three months, Su Che spent most of his time on the mothership monitoring the unlocking progress, returning to Su Family Village every two or three weeks to check the progress of the three project groups.

The changes in the Su Family Village Interstellar Development Zone were visible day by day.

On the Dyson Cloud project side, Eric Weir adjusted the gravitational constraint parameters of the dismantling platform according to the layered gradient crushing scheme provided by Su Che.

The test platform in the asteroid belt ran a simulation, and the purity of the separated raw materials soared to ninety-seven percent, passing the threshold for the atomic reconstruction factory.

Eric immediately pushed the scheme to all dismantling platforms.

After three months, the automated dismantling platforms were running stably, and the orbital atomic reconstruction factory had also started mass-producing the core components of the Dyson satellites.

Solar energy collection superconducting sails, energy conversion units, and directional laser transmission modules—each line was successfully operational.

The construction of the electromagnetic catapult launch port had also started, with workers welding the bases of the catapult rails in orbit.

"Chief Engineer Su, the second phase is more than halfway done."

Eric reported via holographic communication, "The raw material separation and component synthesis parts are already running smoothly, and the catapult launch port is still under construction. At this pace, the nine-month total duration will be no problem."

Su Che acknowledged and cut the communication.

On the Nantianmen Fleet project side, Soren Kesh pushed forward the R&D of the antimatter energy core according to the toroidal magnetic confinement configuration approved by Su Che.

After three months, the antimatter energy core and safety monitoring system were completed.

Efficient antimatter preparation, magnetic confinement vacuum storage, annihilation energy conversion, leakage emergency blocking, and monitoring and warning were all successfully operational.

Soren Kesh conducted three full-power tests in the laboratory, and all magnetic field stability indicators of the antimatter storage cabin met the standards.

"The antimatter energy core section can be wrapped up."

Soren Kesh rarely showed a smile on the other end of the communication, "Next, we will switch to the dark matter detector and proceed according to the plan."

The R&D for the dark matter detector was halfway through, and the dark matter defense shield system had not yet started.

On the lunar Dry Dock side, Talia Knox replaced all the nodes in the middle section of the keel truss according to the dodecagonal composite node scheme provided by Su Che.

The reprogrammed construction robots took three weeks to complete the replacement, and the stress test passed on the first attempt.

During these three months, the construction of the main hull of the million-ton-class luan bird was more than half complete.

The keel truss was fully laid, the hull shell plates began section-by-section welding, and the frame structure of the internal cabins was being built simultaneously.

Zhou Dehai was on the far side of the moon overseeing the expansion of the Zhulong Production Line and the Sub-nanometer Quantum Chip production line, with the production capacity of the Sub-nanometer Quantum Chip steadily climbing.

"Chief Engineer Su, the second phase here at the Dry Dock is more than halfway done."

Talia made her final report in the holographic communication, "The frame and shell of the main hull are partially finished, and the internal cabins are still being built. The nine-month total duration is sufficient."

Su Che hung up the communication and leaned back in the chair of his office cabin.

Three months, five doors, and the second phase of all three project groups was more than halfway through.

He rubbed his temples and was just about to close his eyes for a rest.

The communicator rang—it was Kayla's channel.

"Chief, the unlocking of the fifty-second door has started, and Patrick's Group Four is standing by in the cabin."

"Hmm, what is the unlocking method?"

Kayla paused for a moment.

"This time, there is a penalty mechanism."