Chapter 42: Massive Construction (2/3)

An unprecedentedly massive construction project finally began.

Li Qingsong deployed a staggering fifty thousand clones into this building task. Simultaneously, he was also undertaking over a hundred other construction projects at the same time.

With the explosive growth of the population, industrial capacity, and technological R&D capability, the existing hundred-plus mineral bases were clearly no longer sufficient.

In the next phase, Li Qingsong needed to extract even more mineral resources.

Consequently, out of the remaining ten thousand clones, Li Qingsong dispatched five thousand, equipping them with trains, trucks, excavators, bulldozers, crushers, and other heavy machinery to form a mighty construction corps. They marched toward pre-prosptected sites that were larger and located much farther from the main base, tasked with building new mining operations there.

Of course, the immediate focus was solely on constructing the mines; extraction did not need to begin just yet, as there was not enough manpower at present.

However, that would not be an issue. Once the clone cultivation facility was completed, a steady stream of clones would soon be produced to put these idle mines into operation.

Concurrently, railway lines connecting the various bases would be constructed, ensuring that a greater volume of mineral resources could be smoothly transported back to the main base.

Thus, the remaining clones dedicated to maintaining the daily operations of the base and producing the materials required for the massive construction dwindled to just the final five thousand.

In the past, this number would have been utterly insufficient. Agriculture, animal husbandry, and aquaculture bases alone were enough to keep five thousand clones fully occupied.

Yet now, following the completion of the informatization upgrade, with millions upon millions of iron-cased chips put into service, and with the establishment of a comprehensive communication network reaching every single chip, the productivity of an individual clone had undergone a quantum leap. Just five thousand clones were now sufficient to handle all logistics support and daily maintenance tasks.

Thus, the bustling construction, involving every single clone, officially commenced.

Every day, massive heavy-duty trucks with payloads reaching a hundred tons transported steel plates, glass, screws, steel bars, homemade cement, and other building materials produced by the steel mills and foundries. At the construction site, thousands of heavy machines—excavators, bulldozers, mixers, and road rollers—operated ceaselessly through the night.

Vast quantities of methane and oxygen, sourced from the methane and oxygen mines, were first transported to processing plants for purification, and then pumped into the fuel tanks of various machines, driving them to unleash surging power.

Metals from various mineral deposits were smelted and cast in metallurgical and processing plants into steel reinforcement bars, steel plates, nuts and bolts, and connecting components. These were rapidly assembled on the leveled, sprawling construction site. Accompanied by the pouring of homemade cement, factory buildings sprang up like bamboo shoots after a rain across this originally desolate and lifeless land.

Following the completion of the main structures came interior decoration, wiring installation, and equipment setup.

In the massive workshops designated for soilless cultivation, rows upon rows of planting racks spread out like an endless forest. Bundles of thick cables were laid throughout, connecting every single fluorescent light with a complexity millions of times greater than a spider's web.

In the sprawling livestock breeding facilities, countless automatic waterers and feeders, alongside numerous heating and illumination lamps, were installed in an orderly fashion within individual isolation pens, dense with water pipes, power cables, and network lines.

Within the colossal power plant, the supercritical generator units newly developed by Li Qingsong had been installed.

Through the heat generated by the combustion of tholin, methane, and other organic compounds combined with oxygen, the water inside the boilers entered a supercritical state under high temperature and high pressure.

Supercritical water possessed higher efficiency and more stable operating conditions when driving the turbines, while simultaneously capable of powering larger generator units.

The single-unit installed capacity of the generators prepared by Li Qingsong for the clone cultivation facility cluster reached 300,000 kilowatts, meaning it could generate 300,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per hour.

Li Qingsong had installed a total of five such generators.

To support this power plant, Li Qingsong even constructed a dedicated railway line specifically to transport the pre-processed tholin, methane, and oxygen.

Another colossal factory was the culture medium blending facility.

With an annual production target of 100,000 clones, and assuming each clone consumed 3 tons of culture medium, this factory would consume 300,000 tons of culture medium annually.

This clearly required a dedicated factory adopting an automated, large-scale production model; the previous manual-style operations simply would not do.

At the same time, this made it much easier for Li Qingsong to control the quality of the culture medium and ensure more stable production.

At this factory, Li Qingsong constructed a gigantic storage tank standing 30 meters tall with a diameter of 60 meters—a true behemoth.

The culture medium from the blending plant would first be stored here and then connected via pipelines to the clone cultivation facility.

Once the cultivation season arrived, the spent culture medium in the cultivation tanks would be drained, and after the tanks were cleaned, fresh culture medium would be automatically pumped in to initiate a new round of cultivation.

At the core of the numerous and diverse supporting factories lay the core facility that Li Qingsong valued most: the clone cultivation factory.

The main building of this clone cultivation facility stood 100 meters tall, internally divided into 30 floors. Each floor covered an area of 5,000 square meters and was partitioned into 200 individual cultivation rooms.

Each cultivation room contained 10 cultivation tanks, allowing a single floor to cultivate 2,000 clones.

Aside from the 25 cultivation floors, five floors were designated as equipment rooms, break rooms, inspection rooms, and exchange rooms.

Once the clones completed their cultivation and were finally born, they would undergo a series of procedures here—including physical examinations, intelligence testing, and their first feeding—before departing the facility.

Everything operated in an assembly-line fashion.

Within this building, Li Qingsong installed a total of 300,000 iron-cased chips, transforming it into the building with the highest degree of automation and informatization.

Even with Li Qingsong's hyper-high efficiency, the construction of this massive factory cluster consumed a full year to complete.

The production of the clone culture medium was finished, and the collected strange-bird bodily fluids had also been filtered, purified, and mixed into the culture medium before being pumped into the empty, gigantic cultivation tanks.

For the first batch, fifty thousand sample cells had completed the collection process and were placed one by one into the cultivation tanks by the clones.

Amidst the roar of the giant generators in the power plant and supported by this surging electrical power, fifty thousand high-quality clones slowly developed.