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Chapter 2666: Mayfly Heaven and Earth (31)

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The farming process that followed went rather smoothly; the seeds germinated quickly once planted, and Star Lord, invited by Shiller, brought two rains on demand. Clark and Magneto fertilized the land at just the right time, and the young corn plants changed noticeably every day.

Beyond corn, they also planted wheat, but due to the season, they did not hold much hope for a good yield.

The next important task was to build greenhouses for vegetable cultivation, as mutants also need vitamin C and fiber—vegetables are essential.

With Mexico's climate, it is perfectly possible to grow vegetables outdoors, but not in the Andromeda Galaxy. The temperature on the planet that Magneto selected was a bit low, and vegetables are particularly delicate and valuable, so building a greenhouse was necessary after all, and Magneto could also take this opportunity to learn how to construct a warm shed.

Constructing large-scale warm sheds was relatively bothersome. Clark chose a plot of land and the locals helped find a construction company, but due to the climate, few people here built such things and many mistakes were made initially. Clark diligently watched over the construction day and night.

After observing for a while, Magneto thought that it would be less troublesome to directly use magnetic powers to modify a whole planet's ecosystem.

Only then did Clark realize that Magneto's control over magnetism far exceeded his expectations. Since the environment could be modified with magnetism, why not do it?

However, Magneto had his own concerns; altering an environment wasn't something that could be achieved overnight. Forcibly changing a planet's magnetic field could trigger a series of chain reactions, and in severe cases, might even lead to the planet's disintegration. There weren't many suitable planets to begin with, and ruining a few more would be too wasteful.

Furthermore, if Magneto controlled a planet's magnetic field, he could indeed ensure that the environment was very suitable for plant life, but it might not meet human needs. The planet could become inhospitable, and then no one would want to farm there—after all, he couldn't farm there forever.

Clark understood Magneto's concerns, but he felt that having such a powerful ability and still farming like an ordinary person was an underutilization of talent. How could one transform the strong abilities of mutants into capacities for infrastructure development? Wasn't there any successful example to refer to?

At that point, Clark remembered the stories about the distant Eastern country that Shiller had told him. Once again tapping into his skills as a journalist, he started a broad online search for news about Chinese mutants.

He found that foreign news was almost all about smearing and slander. Clark learned to bypass internet censorship on his own. Of course, it was easier for him to bypass it physically—he could literally go over the wall.

If he wanted to access China's internal network, he would fly to the border between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, connect to the business district's public network, and then navigate the Chinese intranet smoothly and freely.

Clark spent almost half a day in Shenzhen gathering a large amount of information, all of which he recorded onto his phone and took back to show Magneto.

They studied these news reports for a long time and discovered that in that country, mutants' powers were classified in great detail: each type was suitable for different jobs and specific tasks, and there was already a wealth of experience.

Take magnetism, for instance; there were also mutants within China who could control magnetism, but none as powerful as Magneto. They mostly could control just parts of magnetism, like strong magnetism or weak magnetism, or were simply big human magnets, controlling metals and such.

Magneto, who had achieved Unified Field Theory and was capable of creating Pocket Universes, was leagues beyond these magnetic power users. But these mutants, who seemed weak to Magneto, were frequently highlighted in all sorts of commendation news.

So far, the vast majority of magnetic power users were serving in the military, and one of the news pieces commended someone for leading a research team that made outstanding contributions to magnetic-electric technology on aircraft carriers.

Others, weaker ones that could only sense magnetism or switch polarities—whom Magneto thought couldn't really be considered mutants—were mostly working in industries like maglev trains, bridge construction, and other magnetic-electric fields.

This led Magneto to become increasingly frustrated with Polaris in the following days. "I've been busy for most of my life; now I'm leading mutants and developing the Andromeda Galaxy, while also taking care of Earth. You've inherited most of my powers—what exactly are you doing now?"

This was somewhat unfair to Polaris, who had in fact been quite busy with legitimate concerns. Since Magneto returned, Polaris had to ensure that everything in the Andromeda Galaxy ran smoothly and also make the occasional foray to secure resources, particularly since supplies were scarce during special times—the old trade couldn't be abandoned.

This was a huge improvement for her—she had finally evolved from a street-smart teenager to a normal adult. But when compared with the exemplary figures reported in the newspapers, she fell far short.

The more Magneto thought about it, the angrier he got. Recently, two small surround islands had been constructed around the capital's Starry Sky Island. Because they were close and had stable orbits, Magneto had thought to build bridges between these islands, but due to his busy schedule, it had slipped his mind.

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He remembered he had assigned the task to Polaris, and two years had passed, but there was still no sign of that bridge. Then you look at the news report, a weak Mutant leading two or three hundred ordinary people had built a large bridge in just three months—what kind of work efficiency is that?

Magneto used to think that Polaris was perhaps congenitally deficient, and then traumatized, which was why his abilities were weak and poorly controlled. So when he spent his days floundering without a proper job, Magneto didn't bother with him, after all, they were both Long-life, so why not take it slow.

But now, upon reflection, Polaris was not only far from weak, he had actually become second only to Magneto among all Magnetic Power Users. Not being able to build a few bridges in two years—was this really a capability issue? No, it was an attitude problem!

As a result, Polaris got a scolding from Magneto and the next day was sent back to the Andromeda Galaxy. Magneto stated that if those two bridges weren't seen by the time he returned, both of them could roll off to Centauri Star and never come back.

The more he read these reports, the more Magneto realized that the hierarchy of Mutant powers in this world might be slightly different from what he had imagined.

But he couldn't be blamed for that—after all, he was naturally the strongest Mutant, and his close friend was another strongest Mutant. Their children, students, and friends were all incredibly powerful.

Yet all these strong individuals together hadn't achieved anything significant. They believed it was all due to the discrimination and interference of ordinary people, thus they had accomplished nothing and had spent too much time in self-pity.

However, if they only looked down, they would realize that there were many more Mutants, far weaker than themselves. Because of the editorial decisions beyond the fourth wall, practically all the Mutants who served as background characters lacked strong abilities. These weaker individuals truly represented the majority of Mutants.

Perhaps it was precisely because they were weak, struggling with self-protection and feeding themselves, that they didn't have the energy to complain, and the majority were just trying to live earnestly. Plus, with better conditions in certain countries, indeed many had managed to make a name for themselves.

There's a saying "goods being compared with goods, one must discard; people being compared with people, one will despair." When compared like this, the group of powerful Mutants seemed particularly incompetent and melodramatic.

Of course, the two who held sway over public opinion would never admit they were like that, especially Magneto—he would never concede such a thing, only becoming increasingly disgruntled with the vagrants around him.

Last time, Clark's trip to physically scale over the wall of physics was too short, and he didn't have enough time to delve deeper into the data. This time his journey lasted much longer, hovering over Shenzhen's skies for nearly an entire day, gathering all the agricultural data he could find.

Subsequently, he spent an entire evening discussing it with Magneto, and they realized that the idea of transforming the environment of a place through magnetism was actually feasible, as there had already been experiments conducted on it in that country.

Magneto read a few machine-translated papers; although the translations were nonsensical, with his deep understanding of magnetism, he still grasped the gist of them.

Simply put, you can't directly change a planet's magnetic field through magnetism as that would induce many unstable geological changes and could even lead to the planet's disintegration.

Conversely, the approach is to influence the planet's magnetic field by changing its geological structure because the alteration of the geological makeup is controllable. And for Mutants who can naturally sense the changes in magnetic fields, the variations in the geomagnetic field caused by these structural changes are clearly perceptible, eliminating the need for a series of monitoring and experiments. Compared to ordinary people using cumbersome scientific methods, this was as easy as turning one's hand over.

The more Magneto read, the more he found it to make sense. He thought this expert would truly understand him. But only after Clark translated it did he find out that this was not written by any expert professor but by a university student.

The student's research wasn't focused on Mutants; the paper only mentioned the possibility of Mutants completing the work as one among many. The main point of the entire paper was about the feasibility of influencing a planet's magnetic field by altering its geological structure.

It must be said, this was quite cutting-edge. They had only entered the interstellar exploration era a few years ago, and the Chinese were already contemplating terraforming other planets?

After scrutinizing the earlier parts of the paper, Magneto realized that the student's research wasn't for anything else but agriculture; it discussed how to set up a greenhouse on an alien planet resembling those common in China, in order to begin farming as soon as possible when colonizing a new world.

Magneto read the paper several times over, feeling that this talent was indeed a rare find. The lone star agriculture system envisioned in the paper might be a fantasy for ordinary people, who hadn't ventured far from Earth, but it could be highly useful for Mutants.

But with just a quasi-name to go by, Magneto had no way of finding this person. With no other options, he reached out to Professor X, hoping to use his old partner's special ability to find this young genius amidst the vast sea of people.

Regrettably, Professor X declined him.

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