Chapter 49: The 49th Day of Livestream Selling
As everyone knew, wherever oil appeared, Country A would automatically grow beside it.
Ahem. Just a joke.
What Kaman had discovered was not real oil. When 1114 said “oil,” it meant the word in quotation marks. It only felt that using this term would allow Lin Zhao to understand, intuitively and quickly, why they had to hold this temporary meeting in such a rush.
The expert team had discovered a large amount of energy in Kaman that could be quickly converted into tangible value.
In this era where special abilities filled the skies and even ancestral graves could speak for themselves, was energy still important? Of course it was. In fact, it was precisely while the experts in China were researching how to turn the natural energy field into kinetic energy that they realized the enormous energy potential hidden in Kaman.
“Turn the natural energy field into kinetic energy?” Lin Zhao asked 1114 in a low voice.
“It’s like the kind of trope that appears in novels,” 1114 was very good at using novels to give Lin Zhao examples. Partly because it was the system’s personal hobby, and partly because it really did make things easier to understand. “Like turning magic power into energy and creating magic-powered maglev trains, or using spiritual power to build a network that connects all the heavens and myriad worlds.”
Some of the “younger people” in the expert team had especially wild imaginations. It was hard to say whether their inspiration had come from these web novels, but in any case, they were trying to turn natural energy into a kind of clean energy that could replace oil, electricity, and even nuclear power.
After all, there was so much of it drifting through the air. It would be a waste not to use it.
“Can that really work?” Lin Zhao’s clear black-and-white eyes widened in disbelief.
Obviously, it could not.
If natural energy could so easily replace nuclear power, Grand Duchess Elowen of the Five Great Galaxies would not have had to discuss decay, fission, and fusion with the Mechanic. Although the Mechanic’s case also proved from another angle that the interstellar plane was not omnipotent. Even with their advanced civilization, they were not the only correct answer. There were also areas where they needed to learn from other civilizations. But at least the general direction was still the utilization of stellar energy.
As for magic power, spiritual energy, and natural energy, those existed more as individual abilities.
Thus, a natural question was born: why couldn’t they become energy sources?
Was it hard to extract? Could it not be converted? Or was the converted energy too low? Could it become a battery, but not a sun?
Kaman’s Mechanic gave the answer—because this was a crooked path. Trying to convert this kind of power generated by individuals into energy, with the slightest mistake, would turn Blue Star into the next Kaman.
In simple terms, Kaman had already tried this path.
And failed.
Utterly failed.
It was only then that China’s expert team realized they had been taking things too much for granted. Upon hearing that Kaman’s current state had been caused by a nuclear winter, they had instinctively assumed Kaman’s use of nuclear energy was the same as Blue Star’s. They thought a country had once used a doomsday-level move of mutual destruction, causing the planet to now teeter on the brink.
But that was not the case.
Kaman’s nuclear winter had indeed originated from war, but their goal had not been mutual destruction. Instead, they had tried to combine abilities with nuclear energy, hoping to find a means of deterrence even more powerful than a nuclear bomb.
At this very moment, on the Calamity Goddess, Reinhardt and the others were also looking at the newborn civilizations displayed on the holographic star map. Based on acquired text and image data, the AI was deducing each civilization’s development milestones, key turning points, and current mainstream ideology. It was judging the thinking patterns and possible decision logic of their power cores, trying to find the galaxy most likely to have had its evolution interfered with by the Pan-Spirit Divine Nation.
The Pan-Spirit Divine Nation’s goal was obvious—to obtain energy. And as everyone knew, when a newborn galaxy was in its evolutionary period, the energy it erupted with was the most majestic.
After all, this was the key that allowed their entire galaxy to undergo transformation.
So how could one legally obtain this energy? The simplest method was exactly what Yasa had experienced before. A civilization—the more powerful, the better—failed its evolution. The Alliance would then send a rescue fleet to preserve the surviving refugees and extract the stellar energy of that galaxy.
As for how much stellar energy the galaxies participating in the rescue could obtain, that depended on how much they could negotiate with the Alliance.
Generally speaking, the Five Great Galaxies would not take less than seventy percent.
A domineering empire like Yasa would directly take ninety percent, and the Alliance still had to smile politely and thank them for being willing to leave ten percent behind.
It was just that Yasa rarely acted, because they simply looked down on the amount of stellar energy most smaller galaxies had. Those that participated in rescues the most were either galaxies short on energy themselves, or…
“The Pan-Spirit Divine Nation, using the name of divine love for all beings.”
On the surface, it looked like they were only rescuing the surviving lifeforms of a galaxy, but in reality, only they themselves knew exactly how much energy they took from the local galaxy.
In any case, this was a universal rule that applied everywhere in the cosmos.
When a race faced survival or extinction, which was more important: life or energy? Any race would know how to choose. Because even if you did not choose, after all of you died, others could still take the energy away all the same.
But if the Pan-Spirit Divine Nation maliciously interfered with the evolution of a newborn galaxy in order to obtain energy legally, then that was a different matter.
There were currently twenty-two galaxies awaiting evolution. Which one, or which few, were most likely to become the Pan-Spirit Divine Nation’s targets?
“Kaman? After all, they’ve already entered the apocalypse. They’re not far from destruction, and their evolutionary failure is basically set in stone.” Different galactic civilizations faced different evolutionary trials, but apocalyptic galaxies like this were relatively rare. Among the twenty-two civilizations, only three were currently in an apocalyptic state.
It was even possible that the apocalypse they faced was the result of the Pan-Spirit Divine Nation’s malicious interference, forcing them toward evolutionary failure.
Among the apocalyptic galaxies being investigated one by one, Kaman was the first to be suspected—and also the first to be ruled out.
Because…
“They call psychic power abilities?”
“A lot of apocalyptic worlds seem to like calling it that.”
“Combining abilities with nuclear energy? Ha. Before they could even fully master nuclear energy, they rashly combined it with another even more unstable and enormous energy source… The fact that they’re still alive now is already a miracle of nature.”
To put it simply, Kaman’s apocalypse did indeed look like something they had brought upon themselves. It had nothing to do with the Pan-Spirit Divine Nation.
However, that did not mean the Pan-Spirit Divine Nation was not waiting for Kaman to finish itself off so it could conveniently take away the energy.
But Kaman looked like it had nothing left to struggle with. It was a corpse that could still breathe.
Until Kan Anning contacted Lin Zhao through Gray. She said she wanted to speak directly with the people behind him. Mm, she had already seen that the person behind Lin Zhao had changed, or that he now had an even more powerful force backing him. Whether it was the variety of goods or the overly efficient and powerful organizational transportation capabilities, everything proved that Lin Zhao had already upgraded from a bird gun to a cannon. He was no longer what he used to be.
What Kan Anning represented was no longer just herself, but one-fifth of Kaman, perhaps even more.
What she could offer was a wasteland technical team represented by the Mechanic. Talent was a scarce resource anywhere. And what she hoped to gain was deeper binding and strategic cooperation with China.
The expert team seemed to have had this intention for some time as well.
When a familiar term like “Belt and Road” appeared, Lin Zhao felt as if he had watched an episode of the evening news.
In short, China would provide Kaman with the large amount of living supplies they needed, as well as various kinds of infrastructure guidance. In return, Kaman would reach an academic mutual-aid agreement with China, helping China break through technological barriers and climb the technology tree in fields such as materials science, energy technology, and bioengineering.
This had been the original plan between the two sides.
China’s attitude toward Kaman was more like assistance to the Third World. But after Kaman opened itself up to China without limits, allowing deeper understanding, the expert team discovered that Kaman was not empty-handed after all. They still had radiation everywhere.
Ahem. This was not meant as a hell joke.
Rather, after hearing the warning that abilities should not be rashly combined with nuclear energy, the younger members of the expert team, whose thinking was relatively flexible, temporarily abandoned that immature hypothesis. But at the same time, they opened up a brand-new line of thought.
Since Kaman’s radiation was also mixed with abilities, could these radiations perhaps be considered a form of energy too? Then what difference was there between this and magic in a magical world, spiritual energy or demonic energy in a cultivation world? Were they not all external manifestations of a special kind of energy? It was just that Kaman’s version was especially violent.
At this point, the direction of the experts’ thinking was still this: since spiritual plants from the cultivation world could help Blue Star stabilize the natural energy field, could they also be used to help Kaman dispel energy radiation?
That experiment failed again, but…
The resilience of scientific research was probably reflected right here. They proposed another hypothesis: the essence of demonic cultivators’ cultivation was absorbing large amounts of energy. Radiation itself was a highly violent, strongly polluting, corrosive form of primitive energy. Why couldn’t demonic cultivators absorb it?
The all-purpose box Lin Zhao had drawn in the lottery really helped a lot.
The facts also proved that their theory was feasible. To the survivors of the wasteland, radiation was a fatal disaster, garbage that required enormous expense to handle. But to the demonic cultivators of the cultivation world, it was a cultivation resource that money could not buy. As long as it underwent simple treatment, it could be used by them.
In other words…
Lin Zhao: My multilateral trade has completed its closed loop!
Sell spiritual plants from the cultivation world to the magical world ? sell potions from the magical world to the wasteland plane ? sell radiation from the wasteland plane back to the cultivation world.
Everyone had something the others needed, and everyone also had something they could sell to someone else.
True win-win cooperation had been achieved.
In theory, even China’s nuclear waste now had an outlet, because once it fused with natural energy, it became demonic energy. According to the logic of the cultivation world, demonic energy could be transformed into spiritual energy. And what China now needed in large quantities was precisely spiritual energy that could help make the natural energy field orderly instead of violent.
Once the line of thought opened up, everyone became unbelievably busy. How to extract it, how to convert it, how to utilize it—these were all topics that could be researched until the end of time.
Lin the salted fish was undoubtedly the happiest among them. He felt that since everyone else was busy, he could finally be idle.
But facts proved that no such good thing existed.
There were many kinds of expert teams behind him, and each profession had its own specialization. Those researching energy went off to research energy. The remaining experts said that since long-term strategic cooperative trade had already been established, it was about time to begin the next round of testing.
That meant connecting to a new plane.
Bad news: he still had to go to work.
Good news: funding was extremely sufficient. He could draw as many lottery pulls as he wanted.
