Sudden signals

Amidst the dense, mercury-like gas, Hawke saw that around this lightning bolt, the extreme heat had caused these gases to boil, and the unevenness of the heat had caused a powerful convection effect, and all the gases for hundreds of metres around, were thrown into chaos, flowing back and forth in this space like a ferocious undercurrent at the bottom of the sea.

"Here, it's really too dangerous." Hawk looked secretly alarmed. If this lightning struck the ship, even if Hawk turned his shields to the maximum, he would definitely end up being shattered directly.

This was only a scenario of two hundred kilometres inside the planet. The radius of Eagle Nebula a was 60,000 kilometres, and where Hawke was now was basically only just inside the skin of Eagle Nebula a.

With a heartfelt look at the spot where the lightning had just struck, Hawke manoeuvred the ship and continued his dive.

But soon, Hawke realised a serious mistake he had made.

That was, the pressure inside the planet was too great. The Prospector I ship, which had been expected to dive to a depth of 5,000 kilometres, now seemed to be able to dive to a depth of 1,000 kilometres, thank goodness.

The environment inside the planet is too extreme, too complex and too dangerous. This is still only the interior of a planet, there is no nuclear fusion, and the temperature is not very high. If it were the inside of a star, Hawke really couldn't imagine how bad the environment, there, would be.

But Hawke wasn't prepared to give up. Because it was just a ship, the loss of it was not worth Hawke's heartache. If he really found the quicksilver minerals here, it would be a windfall.

The further you dive, the more pressure the airship is under, basically, every seven metres down increases the pressure by one atmosphere. The buoyancy here was also so strong that if Hawke hadn't turned the ship's engines on to their fullest, the ship would have been squeezed to the top.

In this situation, Hawke's dive depth, slowly increased, three hundred kilometres, four hundred kilometres ...

When the depth reached five hundred kilometres, Hawke gave up the idea of continuing to dive. The harsh environment inside the star was really beyond Hawke's imagination. Here, there were extremely powerful dark currents, and their extremely high density gave them great power.

But he was not willing to make the trip for nothing. So, with the idea of what-ifs, Hawke turned on the prospecting instruments.

"Hydrogen ... helium ... uh, and iron, silicon ... there are quite a few elements here, but they are all useless. " Hawke was a little bummed.

After the prospecting operation had lasted five minutes, Hawke was taken by the undercurrent to another place. The prospecting instruments suddenly responded.

Hawke's spirit was shaken and he immediately looked at it in detail.

The result, to Hawke's surprise, was overwhelming.

Here, Hawke found an extremely high density of quicksilver compounds. In each kilogram of the compound, it was expected that thirty grams of quicksilver minerals could be purified. Excited, Hawke immediately manoeuvred the ship to this area, opened the hatch and began to collect the material here.

The Prospector I ship could carry seven hundred tonnes of material when fully loaded. Out of these seven hundred tons of material, at least twenty tons of quicksilver minerals could be purified, enough to build ten country-class ships. But this may be a region rich in quicksilver minerals, and inside the planets, the material is highly mobile, so the next time you come back, you may not necessarily have such good luck. But as long as it can be proven that quicksilver minerals do exist inside the planets, that will be enough.

"The Luca scientist's guess was right, the interior of the giant gas planets, indeed, has the conditions to produce quicksilver minerals, and then, through the planet's interior, the complex convection movement, some of this quicksilver will be transported to the planet's surface."

Hawke concluded. After filling up the Prospecting I ship, Hawke immediately manoeuvred the ship away from the place.

A full ten hours later, the Prospector I returned to the main base and Hawke informed the Lucca scientists of the results, which drew a cheer from the Lucca scientists. The seven hundred tonnes of quicksilver compound was immediately sent into the smelter, and after half an hour, twenty tonnes of quicksilver had been refined.

The limits of material technology had finally been broken by Hawke in conjunction with the Lucca scientists. Once the fuel utilisation problem was solved, Hawke was confident that he would be able to enter the age of 10,000 kilometres per second navigation.

As soon as the mining solution inside the giant planet was confirmed as feasible, Hawke immediately began construction of a special mining ship. With further modifications, the specialised ships would be able to dig for minerals with greater efficiency. The first five hundred ships were quickly put into service, and these ships, on average, were expected to be able to excavate over five hundred tonnes of quicksilver minerals per day.

Once this problem was solved, Hawke continued to work on the fuel utilisation issue, and on the other hand, became busy with the construction of the Ring Eagle Nebula a Large Particle Collider.

After this period of construction, over half a million large accelerating rings had been built, each with its own power system and energy shield, and they would be placed in space in a certain way to contribute to Hawke's technological progress.

Everything, in fact, was moving in a thriving direction.

Three years later, the fuel utilisation issue had reached a stage where Hawke had increased the ship's fuel utilisation to forty percent, meaning that the same amount of fuel in Hawke's hands at the moment would release twice as much energy as before.

With the material limitations and efficiency issues resolved, Hawke began the construction of a new type of airship.

This was a cosmic fleet that completely surpassed the technology of the Lucca civilization, a fleet that consisted of a new type of City ship, as well as five hundred county-level ships, and over nine thousand village- and township-level ships.

These ships have a mobility, range, defence and attack capability far beyond that of the Lucan fleet of ships encountered in the Eri system. If the same number of Lucca ships were encountered again, Hawke would have the ability to crush them if they did not have a level 4 civilisation's weapon of mass destruction. This shows that Hawke's technological strength has completely surpassed the previous Lucca civilisation. As for how far the Lucca civilization had developed within these thousands of years, Hawke had no way to estimate yet.

However, Hawke had made an estimate of the rate of technological progress of civilisations in the universe. Lucca II had said that some 70 million years ago, the Scavenger civilization had acquired the Neutron Battlestar, and for the next 70 million years, the Neutron Battlestar had travelled the galaxy without a single opponent. This is a good indication of something.

That is, after a civilization has progressed to a certain point, it will fall into a stagnant phase for some as yet unknown reason, and may not progress a bit for thousands or tens of thousands of years. So Hawke wasn't worried that his technological prowess would lag too far behind.

It was basically unlikely that something like that would happen, like being a superior civilisation in the universe a few thousand years ago, and then having its technological development stop for a few thousand years and being surpassed by countless later civilisations.

These new types of these spaceships that Hawk had created could already accelerate to a speed of 10,000 kilometres per second continuously without having to worry about endurance, under the maximum fuel limit that could be carried. This speed, roughly three and a third percent of the speed of light, is a speed that means that Hawke truly has interstellar voyage capability, and no longer has to rely solely on time to pile up range, as he did before.

If Hawke were to embark on another ten light-year voyage at this time, it would take Hawke only three hundred years to go all the way, consuming a full twenty times less time than the first interstellar voyage.

The joy of technological progress temporarily relieved Hawke's stress, and Hawke felt that his journey seemed full of hope again.

Just as Hawke was busy, suddenly, Hawke received a strange message.

The message was not sent by radio, nor through the quantum entanglement of hyper-range communication technology, but in a manner similar to the Guardian civilization's space broadcast, and was delivered to Hawke's receiving apparatus.

"Greetings, strange technological civilization."

The first sentence, once translated into a language Hawke could understand, was only nine short words.

The 100,000 ships scattered around the orbit of Eagle Nebula a immediately began to assemble, and all of them were put into an emergency state of readiness, and the first batch of new ships that had been built and remained in the orbit of moon one were also all raised into the air, ready for battle.

It was at this point that a second sentence was transmitted.

"I have been watching you from the moment you arrived here. I have watched you develop slowly and have been watching you for five years. Your enthusiasm for development has infected me and reminded me of how it was countless years ago, when my civilisation was still weak. So, I intend to help you a little. Let me ask you, do you ... want to improve your strength quickly?"

There was a different kind of temptation in these words.

Hawke was not pure enough to believe the words immediately. The darkness of the universe made Hawke wary enough of everything unknown. Hawke did not respond, and of course, Hawke had no way to respond. Hawke was simply thinking in silence.

"I know you don't have the ability to use space radio, so there's no way to respond to my words, but it doesn't matter, I'm just a little over four light years away from you at the Binary Star System. If you want to quickly increase your technological prowess, then come and find me. Remember, I am only willing to wait for you for fifty years, after that, if you have not arrived, I will have no interest in guiding you and you will lose this only opportunity."

That was the last word, and after that sentence, no more messages were transmitted.

Hawke thought for a moment, horrified.

"A binary star system one point four light years from me ... This is, ah, at that white dwarf ..."

Through the high precision optical telescope, Hawke saw the white dwarf star, flickering there like the eye of a demon.