area51novel Chapter 58 1 Miles Underground
Chapter 58 1 Miles Underground
Chapter 58 Ten Thousand Miles Underground
Tokyo, Japan.
Beneath the bustling city streets, we traverse a complex subway network and cross the massive underground infrastructure of the "Capital Region Outer Ring Drainage System," built to cope with floods.
Going deeper, into that absolute forbidden zone that humankind's current drilling technology has never truly conquered.
This is the Mohorovičić discontinuity, which is close to the boundary between the Earth's crust and mantle.
For humans living on the Earth's surface, ten kilometers is just a ten-minute drive, but in this vertical dimension, it is the boundary between life and death.
The environment here is so harsh that it would make any biologist give up hope of finding life.
The geothermal temperature remains above 300 degrees Celsius year-round, and the air is filled with the smell of high-pressure sulfur gas.
Every inch of space is subjected to terrifying pressure of over 3000 atmospheres. If a main battle tank were thrown here, it would be instantly crushed into a flat iron pancake by the pressure of the ground.
Not to mention, this place is located at the boundary of the Eurasian Plate and the Pacific Plate, and its geological activity is as active as a restless powder keg.
The deep rumbling that constantly comes from deep within the rock strata is the painful groan of the Earth's tectonic plates grinding and squeezing against each other; it is the "pulse of the Earth" that is heavier than thunder.
This is a purgatory where even thermophilic bacteria struggle to survive.
However, in this universally acknowledged dead land, there exists in a strikingly unexpected way a colossal creation exists that is completely alien to nature and even to this level of civilization.
It was a grayish-white cuboid, about 100 meters long, 50 meters wide, and 20 meters high.
It has no aesthetic design whatsoever. There are no eaves or brackets, no streamlined appearance, and no chamfers for aerodynamics or beauty.
It's like a piece of industrial waste that God casually threw into the depths of the earth's crust, or a shelter hastily built by a novice Minecraft player to get through the first night.
Square and angular, it is shockingly ugly, yet incomprehensibly hard.
If a seasoned Minecraft tech mod user saw this, he would definitely be moved to tears as he stroked the rough wall and exclaimed in amazement.
"Holy crap! An IC2 explosion-proof stone! And it's even the classic matchbox design!"
Yes, this is Pei Qi's masterpiece. A huge "matchbox" made of reinforced stone from Industrial Age 2 (IC2).
At this depth, while ordinary obsidian is hard enough, its brittleness makes it extremely prone to fracture during minor shifts in tectonic plates.
But "reinforced stone" is different. This composite material, which uses iron scaffolding as its skeleton, is sprayed with building foam and hardened with sand, has an explosive resistance of up to 150 in the game's setting, and is said to be able to withstand a nuclear bomb without being destroyed.
Under the mapping of real physical laws, this material exhibits physical properties that are almost "absolutely rigid".
No matter how much pressure the surrounding 3000 atmospheres exerted, or how much the tectonic plates ground against it, this ugly, grayish-white box remained completely still, like a stubborn nail driven deep into the earth's crust.
At the top of the box, a deep, vertical passage extends straight upwards, as if trying to pierce through the Earth.
This passageway is also tightly wrapped in a thick layer of reinforced stone and steel plates with an immersive finish.
It's like a straw that even light can't escape, piercing through a 10,000-meter-thick layer of rock and reaching the surface.
If the world's top civil engineers saw this structure, they would probably suffer a stroke on the spot.
It's worth noting that the Soviet Union spent a full 20 years drilling the Kola Superdeep Borehole, reaching a depth of 12262 meters.
Moreover, at that depth, the borehole is only the size of a plate, and one must constantly face the risk of drill bit softening and well wall collapse caused by high temperatures.
It's a terrifying phenomenon where rocks, under high temperature and pressure, wriggle inward like toothpaste, instantly sealing the borehole.
How to maintain a vertical cavity several meters in diameter, large enough for people to pass through, 10 kilometers underground?
From the perspective of materials mechanics and geological engineering, this is absolutely impossible.
The immense pressure exerted between the surrounding rocks would act like an invisible hand, crushing the cavity within seconds.
But this passage exists against common sense.
Its inner wall is extremely rough, clearly showing that it was not excavated by a tunnel boring machine, but rather left by the violent excavation of some kind of square tool.
Even at some joints, you can see an extra block due to the shaky hands of the construction worker, which is a nightmare for perfectionists.
"I didn't want it to turn out like this, but I can't help it, I'm not an architecture enthusiast."
At this moment, Pei Qi, who was wearing a full set of nano combat suit and debugging the machine inside the matchbox, looked at the rolling lava outside through the explosion-proof glass and shrugged without any sense of guilt.
His nano helmet display screen glowed with a faint red light. This mid-stage equipment, powered by a storage tank, was the strongest protection he could currently offer.
"As long as people can live in it and it won't collapse, it's a good house. As for aesthetics? That's for idle people. I'm here to start an industrial revolution, not to participate in 'The Ultimate Makeover'."
Of course, Pei Qi would never admit that the reason he turned out this way was simply because he was a "survivalist" in the game who only knew how to dig holes and live in caves.
Asking him to design the interior and exterior is harder than asking him to build a nuclear reactor by hand.
The process of building such a fortress 10,000 meters underground was far more thrilling than it appears.
Pei Qi did not possess any of those "digital mining machines" or "generators" that appeared later in the series, which could be generated with a single click.
At this point, his technology tree had only just reached the early stages of the electrical age.
This awkward "mid-stage development phase" means that he has to manually solve the "reproductive isolation" problem between different modules, just like a miserable assembly line worker.
The process of excavating this "downward version of the Tower of Babel" was nothing short of a bloody and tearful history.
He was holding an enhanced mining drill from Industrial Revolution 2. While this thing was fast at mining, it consumed EU resources.
(Energy unit).
However, the equipment he used to build temporary supports and lighting was heavy machinery from the [Immersive Engineering] team, and it relied on IF (In-Flight Strategies).
/RF (Redstone Flux).
"Damn it, why does every mod creator have to create their own currency system?"
IC2 uses EU, while immersive charging uses IF. This is as idiotic as bringing three different chargers when going to Europe!
While hovering in mid-air, Pei Qi grumbled and adjusted the circuitry around him.
In order to keep the drill bit running, he had to come up with an extremely awkward "cross-module energy conversion system".
He utilized the 300-degree Celsius underground environment to hang a row of [immersive engineering thermoelectric generators] on the rock wall.
These machines use the temperature difference between magma and water to generate IF electricity, which is then connected to an energy converter via high-voltage coils to convert the IF into EU, which is then fed into a power storage tank at the back to charge the drill bit.
Even if Edison and Tesla were resurrected and saw this "Frankenstein's monster" circuit, they would probably be so angry that they would die again.
"Sizzle"
A few sparks occasionally flew from the exposed high-voltage power line overhead, landing on Pei Qi's IC2 nano helmet.
"Is this what they call industrial aesthetics? No, it's a ticking time bomb that could explode at any moment," Pei Qi complained.
"If it weren't for saving electricity, I would have smashed all this junk that's still using electrical wires."
'
T
Fortune