Myriad Paths

This young planet is filled with dark clouds, which are a quilt composed of strong greenhouse gases and smog. They cover the planet tightly, locking all the heat inside, making the temperature on the planet's surface extremely extreme. Extremely hot.

Fortunately, the Boundless Tribe have strong bodies and can easily survive in this environment, and even babies will not be harmed.

Many, many years ago, the boundless race's physical bodies were not so powerful, and they were just ordinary earth-eating residents.

But they abandoned their home planet, left the ground, and came to the stars.

This choice is like the primitive lobe-finned fish choosing to leave the sea and go to land, opening a new chapter of life and civilization. Naturally, they said goodbye to their primitive bodies.

Through natural evolution, prosthetic transformation, and genetic engineering, their bodies have become able to adapt to the environment of almost all planets in the universe. As long as it is a planet, they can directly physically land on it without relying on any equipment.

At the same time, they can also eat most known substances, including the entire periodic table of elements.

This allows them to roam freely in most parts of the universe as a ship civilization without having to worry about their own survival.

The city of Reading landed on flat ground, and tens of thousands of 'escalators' stretched out.

The citizens of Reading used the escalators to reach the surface of the planet.

There is no lava on the leveled ground, so you can walk on it as you like.

Only occasionally would a ray of sunlight shine through the clouds of methane and dust, shining on the hull of the ship in Redding, shining brightly on the silvery white metal.

Arbor came to the ground, and a hover car was ejected from the engine room of the Reading. He got on it and quickly rushed towards his destination.

As for Leleidi, she is taking care of the eggs and will not participate.

In fact, Abel was also ready to eject. The light speed engine in Reading City was not shut down. As long as there were any 'unfavorable factors', he would immediately let the spacecraft run away.

He can just stay on his own. It's better not to take risks.

As for the other employees...

If they are not allowed to come down and move around freely, it might make the group wary, right? Including himself, it is necessary to let some people disembark, so as to show that he trusts the group.

Abo quickly arrived inside the group's ship and came to the office of the group's actual controller, the 'ship owner'.

Arriving at the ship owner's office, this man who looked about the same age as Abel, but was actually more than a thousand years older than Abel, was processing reports.

He was sitting in his office, flipping through the pile of routine reports on his desk that were waiting for his review.

He flipped through the pages carelessly and glanced at the charts in the appendix. These reports were related to the interests and future of many people in the group, but he was not interested at the moment.

He just scrawled his name on the signature line and threw the document into a tray with the words "read and ready to send" written on it.

Obviously, he was absent-minded. As the captain of the ship, his mood was in other aspects at the moment.

"Captain." Abel came here.

The captain immediately stood up, walked to Abel, and welcomed him with open arms: "Welcome, my great scientist! You are here."

Then, his eyes did not stay on Abel, but looked unabashedly at the prototype behind Abel.

His eyes were fixed on it, with uncontrollable joy in his eyebrows. He leaned forward and looked at that great machine from the beginning, a super scanner that could accurately scan the subatomic level and perform structural modeling.

It is impossible for a machine to even scan an electron cloud.

He looked at it very carefully, not missing every part.

After reading it, he did not talk to Abel, but picked up the introductory paper next to the prototype and systematically read the entire paper in detail. During the process, she would stop from time to time and use the personal calculator next to her to verify From the calculation results reported in this paper, it is obvious that he is also doing feasibility verification.

After doing all this——

"This is simply unheard of. Can this thing really scan the position of protons?" He couldn't help but ask Abel.

"No, the uncertainty principle determines that these particles cannot be accurately observed in nature, but... the possible range of their wave functions can indeed be located." Aber explained.

Through three synchronously intersecting force fields, it is indeed possible to locate microscopic substances, perfectly find out their material properties, and completely reproduce the structure of the material itself.

"That's enough. Can this thing be used now? I'm going to use it right away. This is the purpose of the group asking you to come." The ship owner said to Abel.

After saying that, he immediately started his action, without waiting for Abo to say that he could use it.

Because it is not necessary, this thing must be usable, and Abel must agree.

This is what made Abo come here in such a hurry.

The captain quickly entered a string of codes, and a figure appeared on the screen. That was the captain's assistant.

"It will be ready in twenty minutes." The assistant said, as if he had already anticipated what questions the boss would ask. "The ruins will be restored to stability immediately."

"Okay, Uncle, get ready," the captain said.

At this time, Abo finally had a chance to speak. He said: "Ship owner, so... you asked me to bring the prototype. What exactly are you going to do?"

"Oh, yes, I should have told you earlier." The captain said, speaking a little faster than usual: "Read this report, read it carefully, and then you will know why."

Abel took the report and started reading.

However, after he was halfway through reading, he showed a visibly surprised expression.

The expression on his face changed and he began to read every word of this report carefully!

"This... mysterious substance." Abel murmured to himself, not asking a question to anyone, but talking to himself, trying to convince himself.

"Impossible...unprecedented properties, wear-resistant, corrosion-resistant, even capable of carrying and resisting neutron degenerate matter, and an incredibly high melting point. To be honest, I would never dare to do it without testing it myself. Believe it or not, this report looks like a fake.”

The ship owner was also very happy. He knew that Abel must be aware of the power of this mysterious substance. He patted Abel on the shoulder and said, "That's right! Compared with this thing, the alloy we use now is almost like Made of paper!"

"Whether it's hardness, toughness, tensile strength, shear resistance, or corrosion resistance, they all surpass our alloys in all aspects. This thing doesn't even have metal fatigue... Is it fake? Have you read the fake report?" Bo looked at the captain, his face full of disbelief.

Although the Boundless Race actually communicates with the soul, lying is very difficult and requires self-hypnosis training, but Abel is still worried that he has been deceived.

You should know that different alloys have different properties. Some are wear-resistant, some are shear-resistant, some are hard, some are tough, and some are memory metals that can restore the crystal structure under certain circumstances, thereby restoring damage.

By combining the alloys of different components, the load-bearing capacity of each component is calculated, and a certain part of the component requires certain properties to work properly. Then all the components are combined together to form the alloy composition of the entire machine.

A complex machine may require dozens of alloys, each with different properties.

If it is a huge ship like the 'Redding City' that is 900 miles long, it will even use millions of different alloys to be able to cope with various extreme environments, and it must also be able to support the huge hull. Due to its own weight and uneven acceleration at certain times, the tearing at that time was very strong. It is necessary to add enough tensile alloy in every link. If the tensile performance is not enough, acceleration cannot be achieved.

Even if the tensile strength is sufficient, it depends on the heat resistance of the metal at the engine. If the melting point is too low, the heat emitted when the engine is running will melt the engine itself, and the output energy will naturally be restricted. It requires both. Only by being satisfied at the same time can the spacecraft fly fast enough.

Or skip the acceleration of the working medium engine and directly use the gravity of the cosmic string to accelerate, but in that case, it must withstand strong shear force, which is a huge test for the toughness of each structural part.

It can be said that it is not the structure that restricts the performance of the spacecraft, but the material.

As long as the material can withstand it, it doesn't matter what the structure is.

And now, what is in front of them is a super material. Although they don't know what it is, according to this report, this metal... has all the properties, and comprehensively surpasses all the materials they know.

"However, the neutron absorption cross-section is actually lower than that of tungsten..." Aber sighed in surprise.

"Macroscopically speaking, yes - less than a millimeter per square centimeter," the ship's owner reminded.

"Interesting..." Abel looked at the report and pondered for a moment. When he spoke again, he spoke faster: "Besides, how did you test the super corrosion resistance of this material?"

The ship owner seemed to have anticipated this problem. He replied: "We used high-temperature carbon dioxide, fluoride, 60 kinds of organic acids, as well as strong acids and hypochlorite extracted from the body of the 'monster' ——Anyway, we have tried everything we can think of.”

The so-called 'acid' is actually the ability to provide hydrogen ions to other substances, but the substance in front of you does not accept this change at all.

"Generally speaking, there will be an initial reaction at the beginning. However, this material will immediately form an inert isolation layer, and the reaction will stop. To decompose this isolation layer, you may need to design a series of reagents in a specific order. It acts on the alloy in stages. However, to complete this work, a special processing device must be built specifically for it, which means... In the natural environment, this material will almost never corrode, even when we encountered it last time. Even a drop of monster blood that can melt through the earth's crust can't hurt this thing."

"As for the microstructure of this material," the captain said, pointing to the report in Abel's hand: "You see, this thing seems to be formed around a structure similar to a microcrystalline lattice. This point We don’t know much about the main components of the array, but we can detect some high-density titanium-magnesium composites locally. We are not yet sure of the number of these composites. We have never seen anything like this.”

"If you want to find out the specific structure of these substances, you need to use your machine. Can your prototype machine be used now?" the captain said, looking at Abel.

His gaze was so intense that he completely forgot that he came to this place with vigilance.

Just five minutes ago, Abe was still worried that the captain had tricked him to death here.

However, it now seems that he is still the chief scientist of the ship owner, and the other party only asked him to come here to figure out the composition of this mysterious substance.

Once the composition of this substance is understood, there is no doubt that all ships of civilization can be recast. As the most basic and important applied discipline, breakthroughs in materials science will drive the rapid development of the entire civilization!

Experiments that could not be done before can be done, which will feed back scientific theories, various new breakthroughs, and various new topics.

This also applies to production and application.

It's like the original life forms evolved from the Stone Age to the Iron Age. They only had the ability to smelt iron, and they were able to produce leap-forward abilities.

And when the ability of 'iron smelting' becomes a 'steelmaking plant', you can even directly enter the industrial age.

After 'steel' becomes various 'special alloys', the industrial age will enter the 'aerospace age'. Even after various super materials appear, it is not impossible to enter the 'interstellar age'.

This is the importance of materials.

And now, before them, there is an incredible super material that cannot be described by current theories. It is a material that surpasses the neutron degenerate state and is very light.

As long as it is analyzed, the group will become the leader of civilization, able to lead the entire civilization forward within a thousand years, and even become one of the 'super civilizations'.

According to Abel’s knowledge, one characteristic of becoming a super civilization is that it can travel at faster than light speeds and break through the barriers of the ‘observable universe’.

Or according to the civilization called ‘Witch’, it’s called ‘Fourth Grade’.

"The prototype is ready. Although there are still power limitations, I have not been able to solve the stability of the energy supply and heat dissipation issues, so it can only continue to scan for thirty seconds before it overloads and shuts down. But only five seconds is enough to crack our latest Dense material, thirty seconds, I think it should be enough," Abo said excitedly.

"Let's go ahead and bring the prototype with you. I'll take you to the place where this material is mined. Don't be petrified after you go there," the ship owner said.

"How do you say that?" Abe was curious.

The ship owner said: "This material was found on a coffin, right at the North Pole of the planet."