The Creators: From Night City

Page 334

The two main types of spine plugins currently available in the cyber world are the 'time-stop' type, Sianweistein, and the 'Berserk Component' which enhances the user's physical fitness and short-term burst power.

Sinweistein currently boasts the most advanced fifth-generation "Reality Distortion" from 'Qiante' company, while the 'Rampage Components' offer a diverse range of options.

Military Technology, Arasaka, Comto, and even Raven Tech, which has always focused on the production of micro prosthetics, all have their own Berserk components. The main reason is that the compatibility of these components is much better than that of S.A.W.S., and the technology and process requirements for their production are also simpler.

Of course, the actual combat effectiveness is also much worse.

Most of the Berserk components are similar to some kind of potent stimulant that takes effect instantly. Their nano-drug delivery principle can enhance the user's overall physical fitness almost instantly, and some models can even stop bleeding at super speed.

Aside from animal gangs that revere physical strength, this item is rarely worn by other marginalized individuals.

Players can either choose Sianwistan or simply not install it, leaving the prosthetic capacity for other cost-effective prosthetics (such as internal circulation modification types).

The Berserker Component was originally intended for soldiers, and its low cost and suitability for all users made it a sensation four or five years ago.

However, with the gradual maturation of Sinweistein's prosthetic technology, the price and installation risks have gradually decreased, greatly squeezing the market for Rampage components.

However, this thing will never be completely replaced in the market. It will still have its place in the military, street brawlers, gangs in underdeveloped third-world countries, space colonies where it is not suitable to use firearms, and the sports world.

Of course, Mr. Jiang wouldn't consider such trivial matters.

After all, only children make choices; adults want it all.

[Domain] combines the Berserk Components and Sianwistan's 'Time Stop' function, but the trade-off is that the pressure on the body is greatly increased when it is activated.

Fortunately, after undergoing the second stage of upgrade (first stage: grass mutation, second stage: solar staircase upgrade), the [Domain] can easily withstand the load.

Not to mention that after obtaining a complete set of nanotechnology from the 'Main Domain', Jiang Bing is advancing the fourth stage of 'Upgrade and Transformation'—the research on nanonodules.

This research was inspired by the nano-life support system that almost every Edosian has.

This modification aims to implant a nodule device containing polymerized medical nano-elements into the body of the 'Apostle', which is closely integrated with the circulatory, lymphatic, and tissue fluid systems. These nano-elements will flow throughout the body along the Apostle's circulatory system, creating a nano-barrier within the 'Apostle'. This not only provides significant hemostasis (in fact, the hemostasis of the Solar Ladder is already sufficient), but most importantly, it provides enormous toxin resistance.

Most toxins act on the human body by passing through these three circulatory systems, but with nano-nodules filtering and filtration in between, most toxins are unable to play their due role.

However, this modification is currently in the process of creating new folders, mainly because Jiang Bing is on 'vacation' and hasn't had time to do it yet.

Chapter 679 'Swift Speed'

Of course, the production of nano-elements is also a constraint. After all, Mr. Jiang can still make a small amount of nano-elements by hand, but if large-scale deployment is to be achieved, the mass industrial production of nano-elements must be put on the agenda.

In fact, this was a major reason for the creation of the Garden of Eden.

The nano-element production technology from the 'mother domain' requires a rare element—C60 fullerene. This element is basically not found in the natural world that humans can currently access, and can only be synthesized in the laboratory, but this makes the cost too high.

However, this element is present in much higher concentrations in the lunar soil of the moon.

Xun Chi was naturally unaware of the intricacies of the small device supporting her spine; all she knew was that time was precious.

In a certain instant, Xun Chi felt as if he had suddenly broken through a certain limit, and his thoughts and actions became extremely fast.

The cost is that the energy in the machine's batteries, one of its core energy sources, is being rapidly depleted.

In overclocked mode, Celeron is so fast it's almost like teleportation; even if the enemy activates Sionstein, their eyes can't keep up with her speed.

In fact, even Xun Chi himself couldn't quite control his movements, often dragging out a long, ineffective distance with each swing of his sword.

According to the 'Canyon Relativity' law, if velociraptor speeds up, it's equivalent to the world slowing down.

In the pseudo-time stop state, she felt as if everything in the world was in slow motion. The dust stirred up by her movements on the ground seemed to stand still, and the grenades ejected from the gun barrels seemed to crawl like turtles in her eyes. They were often easily cut in half by the blade she moved.

Her attack methods could not be described as swinging a knife; rather, she simply ran past her opponent while holding a knife, and the sharp blade cut fatal wounds into their body.

The enemy's armor was ridiculously tough, forcing Xunchi to focus a significant portion of its energy on adjusting the angle of the blade.

Under her control, the molten blade would often precisely bite into the enemy's joints, neck, and weak points in the armor of the waist and abdomen.

The flashing light brought death; each appearance and disappearance represented the death of one or more enemies. Later, several enemies who hadn't had time to get out of the car were even cut in half, along with the car door.

In the slow-motion world, she is like an elegant gymnast, occasionally dodging the slowly flying bullets with a gymnastic double somersault in the air, and swinging her long sword in a beautiful arc to accurately cut down enemies one by one.

Murder has reached this level, becoming an industrial operation.

Finally, this offensive came to an end when Xunchi could no longer control his speed, tripped over a protruding basalt rock, and was thrown into the air.

She was radiating intense heat as she collapsed to the ground. The severe overload and intense energy consumption had left her exhausted. She tried to stand up by supporting herself with her hands, but her body went limp and she knelt down again.

Fortunately, the battle was over.

The Swift Squad members used the situation created by Swift to easily detonate all the enemies who dared to flank them with their high-explosive shells, at the cost of only one member being seriously injured.

As long as the memory stick remains intact, this level of injury is hardly considered fatal for an Edos-type human. Boss Jiang said that as long as they return to the base, this is not a problem.

[Jiang Bing: Place the beacon. Your equipment isn't suited for frontal assaults. I'll arrange for suitable reinforcements.]

The so-called beacon is just a nano-locating grenade shaped like an acorn. Although it can provide physical location, it relies more on its symbolic meaning in the realm of idealism.

This thing was 'forged' by Jiang Bing, and strictly speaking, it could also be said to have been blessed by him.

In the silent vacuum, a spatial rift quietly opened, and accompanied by a faint tremor in the ground, several tall steel constructs emerged from the spatial rift, surrounded by a squad of armored 'Black King Apostles'.

The Black King's Apostles were a little unaccustomed to being in outer space for the first time.

However, their superhuman physical abilities allowed them to quickly find a balance.

With their support, the ensuing battle became lackluster, since even the toughest tortoise shell couldn't withstand a hydraulic press.

When those electromagnetic warning cannons were reduced to scrap metal by the whistling bombs, and all the buildings on the ground were subjected to a suffocating baptism of fire, all resistance was forcibly declared null and void.

There was no explosion, only an invisible shockwave that hurled the shattered steel into the sky, where it flew higher and higher in the low-gravity environment.

A closed gate?

Sorry, but in the eyes of the [Slaughterer], there are no doors, only targets: targets that can fire, targets that can't fire, metal targets, rock targets, targets called walls, and targets called doors.

The flames from the gun muzzles were brighter than the sun, and the silent, advancing torrent of metal left all the members of the Swift Squad stunned.

The two sides have completely opposite fighting styles.

When it comes to one-on-one combat and small-scale infiltration, the agile Swift Squad is obviously the most suitable. However, when it comes to actual frontal battles and assaults, the 'Apostles', which emphasize maximizing firepower efficiency, are undoubtedly the 'masters' of the battlefield.

The drones that subsequently rose were precisely detonated, and dozens of explosive bombs were also injected into the drone's launch port, causing it to explode with a bang.

A communication center with antennas erected?

fry!

Missile launch port?

fry!

A row of photovoltaic panels, neatly arranged to collect solar energy?

fry!

Airlock for entry and exit?

fry!

You can't see the impact point, that's right, it's a depression there!

[Lily: Boss, I received their surrender signal!]

After razing all the surface buildings to the ground, the other side unsurprisingly chose to surrender. After all, anyone bombed like that would inevitably question their existence.

Keep in mind, this is the moon, where explosives are strictly controlled. It's not surprising that large companies could acquire some prohibited and excessive firepower. However, this style of immediately overwhelming the enemy with excessive firepower upon first sight is reminiscent of Stalingrad on the Soviet-German front during World War II.

Do they really think sending artillery shells into the sky is free? The other side is treating them like Japanese soldiers.

The subsequent incorporation of prisoners and the takeover of the base proved that this was the right thing to do; these unidentified individuals were indeed Japanese.

This base belongs to Arasaka.

Jiang Bing leaned on his cane, looking at the dejected soldiers of Arasaka, and felt only bad luck.

Arakasaka sent men to wipe out the High Knights' pioneering team in Langren Pit, and then quietly built a massive underground base in this mountain valley. The security forces seemed excessively heavy, clearly indicating that they were up to something.

Chapter 680 The Truth Behind the Attack

[Reverse Entropy] By intervening in the middle, it seems like you're pleasing neither side.

"BOSS, we've discovered a large number of smelting equipment in the lower levels of the base," an 'Apostle' who was cleaning up the battlefield reported over the communicator.

The smelting equipment used on the moon is naturally different from that on Earth.

Without water and oxygen, smelting equipment in space is mostly induction melting furnaces or plasma furnaces, or, more importantly, expensive vacuum melting chambers.

Take, for example, the machine in front of Jiang Bing.

The small vacuum melting chamber is filled with a large number of high-power electron beam guns. Although these two devices have been discontinued, their precision can still be felt from their overall structure.

High-power electron beam guns can emit highly focused energy beams that directly melt metal powders or small pieces of ore, achieving refining, alloying, and even direct molding (similar to 3D printing) in an oxygen-free and water-free vacuum environment.

This thing is useful, but its drawbacks are high energy consumption, low smelting efficiency, and extremely high overall maintenance costs.

Therefore, this type of equipment is mainly used for melting high-precision, high-value-added metals.

For example, gold!

Jiang Bing held a piece of moon rock in his hand and easily broke it open as if he were breaking an apple, revealing thread-like golden patterns on the cross-section.

"This is impossible!" Kelvin, dressed in a spacesuit, picked up a piece of ore from the side, looked at it again and again, and was almost ready to lick it.

It's not surprising that there is gold on the moon, but it is quite rare to find gold on the surface of the moon.

It's important to know that gold is a strong siderophile element in the solar system. 99% of gold will sink into the core of a planet along with iron and nickel metals. The Moon is even more special. After experiencing a magma ocean event that lasted for 100 million years in the early stages of its formation, almost 100% of the heavy metals sank into the lunar core. Finding a rich gold mine that can be directly mined on the lunar surface is an extremely rare and lucky event.

How small is this probability?

It's about one in several million chance that life could have arisen on Earth.

“What’s impossible? The facts are right in front of you.” Jiang Bing casually tossed aside the ore and went to the discharge port of the vacuum melting chamber.

As expected, there were more than a dozen gold bricks that had not yet been moved, neatly arranged here.

"This is incredible." Kelvin looked at the finished products after they were melted down. As a PhD in planetary science, he felt that his worldview had been turned upside down.

"Could it be that the eruption of the primordial lunar mantle plume caused some undifferentiated material remaining deep within the moon to surge up into Mare Riches through a fissure?"

“No, no, the lunar magma ocean model published decades ago already proved that the lunar core and mantle are completely separated,” Kelvin said to himself.

The name "lunar pioneer" may sound low-class, but it is a truly high-level position requiring high education, high quality, and high ability. Not only are all selected pioneers required to be proficient in space survival skills, but they also need to have extremely strong professional knowledge. After all, the monthly salary of tens of thousands of euros is not for nothing.

A typical pioneer team must include at least these eight professions: mission commander, planetary scientist, topographical surveyor, mechanical engineer, life support and environmental control expert, communications and information technology expert, physiological psychologist (team doctor), and tactical safety officer. Some special missions may require additional roles.

Therefore, Kelvin was definitely an elite intellectual.

"Could it be a rare direct impact from a gold-rich meteorite? The probability is too small." Right now, this intellectual is looking at a pile of gold-rich ore and muttering to himself.

"Instead of guessing here, let's go and see for ourselves." Jiang Bing didn't have much effort before finding the origin of these ores in the central processing unit of this smelting base.

The group continued their journey.

In such clandestine mining projects, the smelting base is usually not too far from the mine.

The group traveled in a four-wheeled lunar rover for less than ten minutes before arriving at the raw material production site recorded on the server.

This is a rather large impact crater, with a depth of over a hundred meters. The lunar rocks along the crater walls are jagged. Compared to other impact craters, this crater is not the common bowl shape, but rather an unusual elongated shape.

There is only one reason why a crater of this shape could be formed: the meteorite did not strike the lunar surface vertically, but collided with other objects and its falling direction changed, causing it to fall at an angle towards the lunar surface.

"I see. Vertical impacts can bury gold deep, while high-angle impacts can easily deflect hard meteorites. Only an impact at this angle can prevent the gold nugget from vaporizing due to excessive speed and allow it to be embedded in the bedrock at the bottom of the basalt pit and preserved."

Upon seeing the crater, Kelvin began analyzing it to himself.

The guards of this 'space mine' had long been defeated by the Swift Squad, which had arrived ahead of time, allowing Kelvin to descend to the bottom of the pit unimpeded via the stepped meteorite walls.

The lunar rocks and accumulated lunar dust on the surface of the entire crater have been cleared away by the mining personnel of Arasaka in advance, leaving only large areas of gold-rich ore with radial golden veins on the crater walls and ground.

Near the end of the crater, Arasaka's people have already dug a deep hole in the crater wall and widened the surrounding walls.

On the exposed rock veins under the light, there are large patches of tree-like gold veins, which are caused by gold being heated upon impact and melting into the bedrock.

Large drops of molten gold occasionally appear on the basalt at the bottom of the pit; these are also gold splashed out during the impact.

Kelvin gazed at the golden moon rocks all around him, so excited he could barely speak.

He wasn't greedy for money; he was simply excited to have witnessed a miracle in the geological history of the moon.

“Do you know, Kelvin?” Jiang Bing said, as a faint golden flame seeped into the ground along with his feet.

"Arasaka once conducted a reserve assessment of the gold vein here and concluded that it contains approximately 9800 tons of gold. Do you know what that means?"

“Of course,” Kelvin’s lips trembled slightly.