Time quietly slipped away.
Under Li Qingsong's all-out construction efforts, and with the full-force production of the entire industrial system, over a million deuterium-deuterium fusion power plants rapidly appeared on one planet after another, replacing the original deuterium-tritium fusion power plants and beginning to supply power to the entire industrial and scientific research system.
A single deuterium-deuterium fusion power plant could only produce a few hundred kilograms of Helium-3 per day, which seemed insignificant, but it didn't matter, their numbers were sufficient!
In the V432 Pegasus star system, within the smallest gas giant, a massive flight formation composed of millions of Jupiter aircraft flew through the harsh environment day and night, separating vast amounts of deuterium from the gas giant's atmosphere and gathering it onto the Xuan Bird Platform.
Shuttlecraft traveled back and forth between the Xuan Bird Platform and the energy distribution center, transferring the massive amounts of deuterium to heavy transport spacecraft through a transit point.
This entire process was remotely controlled by millions of clones and blueprint engineers, while the specific front-line tasks were handled by humanoid general-purpose robots, completely eliminating the hidden danger of living beings being affected by the gas giant's excessive gravity.
Heavy transport ships then transported tens of thousands of tons of deuterium to every planet where fusion power plants were built, injecting this deuterium like water irrigating fertile fields.
Deuterium began to fuse in the reactors, producing massive amounts of energy to power the entire industrial and scientific research system. At the same time, a large amount of fusion byproduct, Helium-3, was continuously generated and temporarily stored in the temporary storage tanks that every deuterium-deuterium fusion power plant possessed.
Trains or locomotives speeding across the planet's surface shuttled between each deuterium-deuterium fusion power plant, collecting the Helium-3 produced by each fusion power plant, and finally gathering it at the Helium-3 distribution centers built on each planet, then, via space elevators, heavy transport ships, etc., advancing towards the magnetic monopole detector construction area designated by Li Qingsong.
On the first day that all million deuterium-deuterium fusion power plants were put into operation, Li Qingsong produced a full 400,000 tons of Helium-3!
By the ninth day, the Helium-3 reserves had reached million tons, which was more than enough to support the construction of a high-performance magnetic monopole detector!
Thus, under the command of the numerous high-precision spare parts produced by the industrial system, and the numerous clones and blueprint engineers involved in planning and design, general-purpose robots and intelligent machines began a busy construction in space.
Besides the first magnetic monopole detector, Li Qingsong finally possessed a second one at this moment.
And this was just the beginning.
Massive amounts of Helium-3 and massive amounts of spare parts were still continuously converging towards space.
In the deep space tens of billions of kilometers away from the V432 Pegasus star, at the Lagrange points of the massive rocky planets, at the Lagrange points of the gas giants and large satellites, in the even deeper space hundreds of billions of kilometers away from the star, in the corners of the galaxy far from the ecliptic plane…
Under different environmental backgrounds, numerous magnetic monopole detectors were built one after another.
They were like spider webs, quietly spreading out in this vast and deep starry sky, waiting for the appearance of the "small flying insects" that might appear at any time and collide at any angle.
Li Qingsong didn't know when his magnetic monopole detectors would be able to capture valuable signals, or whether his theoretical framework was fundamentally wrong and magnetic monopoles simply didn't exist in the universe—which was also possible.
Li Qingsong only knew that the more "spider webs" he spread out, the higher the probability of capturing magnetic monopoles.
Since that was the case, then he would just keep building, keep building, even if magnetic monopole detectors were more difficult to build and more costly than proton decay detectors, he would build a thousand of them!
At this moment, numerous fusion power plants were both energy suppliers and material producers, continuously providing massive amounts of Helium-3, powerfully supporting Li Qingsong's construction, which was so vast that even the blueprint people couldn't imagine it.
At this moment, Li Qingsong once again truly felt why large-scale breakthroughs involving basic physical theories had to be carried out within a galaxy, and could not be carried out during interstellar travel.
Taking the production of Helium-3 as an example, how much deuterium would so much Helium-3 require? How many fusion power plants would be needed? How massive an industrial strength, how massive a supply of materials would be required?
Only in a galaxy where materials were abundant and almost inexhaustible could such a massive supply of materials be satisfied.
Time quietly slipped away as Li Qingsong continuously built, apart from maintaining normal production and scientific research, Li Qingsong was frantically increasing the number of magnetic monopole detectors at an average rate of one every 9 days.
This speed of construction was unimaginable to any civilization.
Did they really think such large-scale, high-end, and advanced detectors were toy cars that could be built in large numbers whenever they wanted?
Which large scientific instrument wasn't extremely rigorous and solemn, with repeated demonstrations, repeated design and iterative optimization, taking decades and exhausting the power of a civilization to complete?
But here with Li Qingsong, hundreds of construction sites for magnetic monopole detectors were started at the same time, and as soon as enough Helium-3 was produced and injected, a detector would be completed immediately.
Thus, more than ten years quietly passed.
This made Li Qingsong's heart begin to grow heavy.
"If the lifetime of a proton is 10^36 years, then my detectors should have detected over five hundred thousand proton decay events in about 14 years…"
"But why not even one?"
This almost only left one possibility.
He had greatly underestimated the lifetime of a proton before.
Its lower limit of lifetime was not 10^34 years, the two were ten thousand times different.
Only in this way could it be explained that he had not detected a single proton decay event in 14 years.
Then… what should he do next?
Continue to increase the number of proton decay detectors in order to seek a higher probability of detection?
But, it seemed that doing so wouldn't work.
