Chapter 321: Final Test! The Last Chance!
The Divulgence of Heaven’s Secret talisman was very strange. It clearly brought Su Mo’s soul in, but when Su Mo’s whole body stepped through the door of light, his body also mysteriously vanished from where it was.
As the area had been cordoned off, nobody dared to board the ship.
In the quiet bridge, as time passed a second at a time, when 32 minutes had passed after Su Mo had left, the phantom door of light once again lit up.
Appearing in the same place, Su Mo, expression dazed, sat back in the captain’s seat.
While half an hour had passed in the real world, it had been three hours in the talisman simulation world.
If the second round of testing succeeded without issues, he would have made it out to sea or into the Great Canyon.
However, what stunned Su Mo was that this round of testing had also failed in a sense.
“I’ve gotten careless. I didn’t survive this wave!”
Just a second ago, Su Mo had still been running about amid the fire, watching helplessly as the fire spread throughout the entire Hope One and struggling to save it.
The next second, as an explosion occurred somewhere on the ship, Su Mo was thrown by the force of the blast out straight into the ocean.
Fortunately, having already experienced the pain of having half his body fractured and paralyzed previously, when he was blasted into the air this time and lost the lower half of his body, Su Mo still managed to spit out the word “exit” before falling unconscious.
Then…
Alright, there was no ‘then’.
When Su Mo opened his eyes once again, he had once again returned to the perfectly undamaged bridge in Hope One.
“Luckily, the Divulgence of Heaven’s Secret talisman still has four hours of energy remaining. It can still support one final round of testing!”
The instant he returned to his senses, he did not linger over the terrifying feeling of losing the lower half of his body and immediately grabbed the talisman floating in the air. Only after examining it carefully did he feel relieved.
In the first test, Hope One was badly damaged by the natural disaster. Although he managed to go out to sea later on using the Charge ability, he did not manage to sail very far.
This caused Su Mo to completely forget about the problems he might encounter when sailing Hope One.
After modifying the second test, with the Ocean Wind’s blessing and the Genesis ability, though Hope One still paid a price, it did not run into any obstacles when launching into the ocean. The OS completed the launching of Hope One into the water almost effortlessly, and successfully got Hope One up and running.
The dragon entering the sea disdained that the ocean was not deep enough, while the phoenix spreading its wings disdained that the sky was not high enough.
The damage-less entrance into the sea this time had Su Mo bubbling in excitement.
Although it was within the talisman simulation world, even if he would not actually die when something untoward happened, Su Mo did not relax his vigilance completely. He remained very nervous as he looked through the various data displays.
The readings were very normal!
No matter in which regard, Hope One seemed extremely normal. No matter how he sailed or turned it, it was like directing his own arm. There were no problems at all!
However, it was this stability that made Su Mo unable to focus on the possible other problems below Hope One’s deck and allowed him to sail toward the Great Canyon without any hesitation.
The straight-line distance from the basin to the Great Canyon was 120 kilometers.
Based on the Hope One’s usual speed, it would take around two hours to reach.
However, if the ship’s maximum speed was maintained for the entire journey, it would only require an hour and twenty minutes.
In order to guarantee that more of the Divulgence of Heaven’s Secret’s energy could be retained for the final test, Su Mo naturally increased Hope One’s sailing speed to its maximum, maintaining a superfast speed of 45 knots the entire way.
Hope One, which could travel just over 82 kilometers per hour, had a mobility that did not match its 80-meter length.
After sailing it for an hour, when he saw the map indicate that he was about to reach the Great Canyon, before Su Mo could feel the joy…
With a boom, something bad happened!
“It really is the engine that determines both success and failure!”
Thinking about the fire that broke out across the entire ship, sitting on the captain’s seat, Su Mo shook his head.
Pressing on the switch to activate the hidden door to the engine room, and looking at the heavy steel plates gradually being pushed open, Su Mo quickly climbed down agilely.
In the real world, the engine room was still abnormally quiet.
The matter conversion engine in the center was in sleep mode, occasionally blinking with a light at a cadence similar to breathing, providing the cabin a little brightness.
Groping along the wall, once Su Mo pressed the switch with a hand, the lights came on!
At the same time, Su Mo could once again see the engine’s entire appearance.
“If it weren’t for my genius design, perhaps this shortcoming of Hope One would have been temporarily hidden, and I would have been caught off-guard afterward.”
“Finding it out now is still fine. At least I discovered the problem!”
Tapping the large screen beside the engine, Su Mo examined one of the biggest flaws when the engine was running in a corner like that…
Heat!
Previously, no matter what materials he put in, when the engine was not running at full capacity, the heat would be re-absorbed and converted into energy by the engine.
Hence, when standing in the engine room, Su Mo could not sense any heat at all and naturally forgot about the need for this vital cooling function.
The matter conversion engine’s heat dissipation operated in two ways. The first was the energy recovery system, and the other was to take the energy from the items put inside for cooling!
When the heat readings were too high, the engine would automatically allocate some of the energy output to the built-in cooling system; using the cooling system to resolve the heat dissipation problem.
It was these two super-cooling technologies that had not yet been developed on Earth that allowed the entire engine to run at its peak state and last a full hour in a fully enclosed room!
However, though this cooling could guarantee that the engine could keep running, the heat that it discharged was real.
The engine room was constructed using three-meter thick steel plates, and Su Mo had personally used the system to seal off the seams and joints, ensuring that there were no problems in the engine room and also that the heat emitted had nowhere to go.
As time passed, the engine room turned into…
A pressure cooker!
Special steel plates were different from the pressure cooker’s ceramic material. Its thermal conductivity reached 46.1!
Once the temperature increased, though the thickness was shocking, it was still transmitted elsewhere.
Despite other places being ignited by this heat, Su Mo—who had not been able to investigate the real cause—had still been driving at full speed because of the matter conversion engine’s amazing heat resistance.
The cause behind it was the same as a pressure cooker explosion. It was not unfamiliar to him.
After commanding the robot workers to put out the fire in the storage compartments, he observed the strange heat that was still being emitted.
Just as Su Mo walked out of the bridge and was about to go downstairs to check and fix things, the pressure in the pressure cooker could finally no longer be suppressed…
Boom…
“Luckily I noticed this issue while testing, otherwise, in the future, Hope One would be turned into a heap of trash metal!”
Reading the display to compare the two heat dissipation mechanisms with some lingering fear, after seeing the data on heat dissipation efficiency and memorizing it, he went back up the stairs.
On the Destroyer’s blueprint design, there was a chimney designated as cooling equipment.
However, previously, in order to construct the escape mechanism, along with the fact that the matter conversion machine did not require fuel, Su Mo ignored the cooling issue.
After he called the shots and chopped off the chimney, though the consequences were terrible, things were fortunately still in the testing stage. There was totally a chance to salvage the situation.
“In this round’s testing, although there are some flaws in resisting the torrential rain, I’ll definitely be able to achieve the goal of coming out unscathed next time.”
“As for going out to sea, there’s no need to modify much anymore. This time was already great—there were no problems at all!”
“As for the most important cooling aspect, it’s too difficult to raise a chimney all the way out of the engine room now, so I’ll create a built-in chimney like the Type-055 Destroyer for heat dissipation!”
Right before he reached the Great Canyon, he was flung into the air and even had his lower half blasted to pieces.
It was just after eight o’clock, and Su Mo’s temper and pent-up anger swelled as he looked over the wasteland’s night sky!
“Tonight, no matter what, I need to do another test. I need to at least see how the foreign race in the canyon will ambush me.”
“Otherwise all my plans will have to be delayed.”
“I don’t believe that in the talisman simulation world, without the system or the game, I really won’t be able to sail this ship!”
Slamming the bridge door shut, Su Mo stomped down the stairs and then jogged back to the shelter.
He did not go down to disturb the four little ones who were studying, as well as Connie who was resting, but went along the second-floor passageway before turning and squeezing into the warehouse.
Trade… he had to trade a lot!
Regardless of whether it was fireproof construction techniques from Earth or fire prevention layouts that would fit Hope One, he had to spend the money!
He did not have the corresponding facilities or the corresponding reserves. It was impossible to fetch water to put out fires like the people from ancient times!
Despite being angry, Su Mo did not lose his rationality while purchasing what he needed. He started carefully comparing the prices.
In the trading market at the moment, because the fire extinguishers could not be divided in half, Disaster Points were required for the courier fees when trading.
On the eve of migration, Disaster Points were extremely precious, which made the price of fire extinguishers cheap. It could even be called:
Pitifully cheap!
Aside from the earlier stages when people had just transmigrated here and used these things as weapons, now that things had arrived at this stage, fire extinguishers had naturally lost their function as weapons and could only be sold based on their original function.
Memorizing the price, Su Mo did not hesitate any longer. He waved his hand and started buying them in batches.
Regardless of whether it was a foam fire extinguisher, a dry powder fire extinguisher, or a carbon dioxide fire extinguisher, as long as the price was within the average range, Su Mo bought them all.
He paid a total of 60 Disaster Points for these purchases, and now 27 different types of fire extinguishers had appeared on the ground.
He did not stop there. With the fire extinguishers settled, Su Mo eyed the most important coating panels for the fireproof interlayers.
Inserting this type of panel into fire-prone locations could effectively prevent the fire from spreading and give him the chance to respond before things got out of hand.
After making a plan and noticing that places like the storage compartments and dorms needed it, because this item did not require courier fees, Su Mo only stopped purchasing when it could no longer fit into the warehouse.
Driving Earth Tiger, he moved the materials over to the shipyard. When these purchased items were loaded onto the ship, the time was 9.30 pm in the wasteland.
He did not choose to manually install them. After glancing through Hope One’s properties panel using the system, with the materials on hand, the installation would only cost him 1800 survival points.
The fireproof interlayers were automatically merged into their respective locations. A hidden chimney appeared from the engine room.
The fire extinguishers were also evenly distributed along the ship’s walls. He could easily grab one to extinguish any fires.
Hope One’s steel plate structure was also adjusted by the system to make them even more resilient!
“Not bad, not bad. Even if I got the robot workers to do this, it would have taken four to five days.”
“Looking at the system’s efficiency, these points were really worth spending!”
Su Mo expressed these thoughts as looked at the newly-refurbished Hope One. Upon returning to the bridge this time, Su Mo did not rush to enter the final round of testing.
He closed his eyes to rest. Sitting on the captain’s seat, Su Mo reviewed the past two tests in detail as well as all of the details of the operation.
From resisting the natural disaster to the process of going to sea, and then to sailing out in the ocean.
Every instance of success, every consequence of operational failure; all of it happened all over again in Su Mo’s mind in first-person perspective.
All was quiet in the bridge after the door was closed as, due to the watertight design, no noise could travel in.
After 10 minutes, Su Mo still had his eyes closed.
Half an hour later, it was as if Su Mo was asleep.
However, just as it reached 11 o’clock, Su Mo abruptly opened his eyes and then stood up like a sharp sword released from its sheath.
He activated the talisman.
Looking at the door of light that once again appeared, Su Mo knew that this time…
The foreign races would definitely not escape!