Chapter 38: Skyrocketing Share
They returned to the main base in a vast procession. All combat equipment was immediately sealed and stored. The Clones who had been on combat duty were dismissed, each returning to their designated place.
The Clones he couldn’t control for the time being were sent back to the communal dormitories to rest, while the 21,000 Clones he could control were immediately put to work on restoring production.
Although the gains from the strange bird war were enormous, Li Qingsong had also suffered heavy losses.
Of the hundreds of outlying bases, only ten core bases survived. All the rest were destroyed beyond recognition.
He had started with a total of 150,000 Clones, but lost more than half of them in the war. Now, besides the 21,000 controllable Clones, only about 40,000 reserve Clones remained.
Furthermore, over the long years, he had painstakingly directed his Clones in mining, smelting, planting, and farming to accumulate resources. He had originally planned to save them for when his control strengthened and his Clone population grew, but this one war had completely depleted all his reserves.
Despite the gratifying success of his earlier battles, the massive warehouses at the main base were now practically empty.
It was a good thing there were no mice on Ceres. Otherwise, they would have wept at the sight.
What Li Qingsong needed most now was to immediately restore production.
Repair the outlying bases, fix the railway lines, restore the power grid, restart mining, planting, and farming, and stockpile food...
At this point, the disadvantage of being short-handed became apparent once again.
It wasn’t that he didn’t have enough Clones.
No matter how many he had lost, he still had 40,000 Clones in reserve.
The problem was, Li Qingsong couldn’t control that many Clones at once. As a result, the large-scale production recovery effort could only unfold at a pace that he found unbearable.
Tens of thousands of Clones were spread out among the hundreds of sub-bases centered around the main base, working tirelessly day and night. But Li Qingsong could only sigh inwardly.
’Sigh, it’s still too slow. It will take at least a year or two just to get production back to its original level. And until production is restored, technological development is out of the question.’
Li Qingsong felt helpless but could only endure the situation.
After enduring this for a month or two, a sense of anticipation began to grow within him.
The first batch of Clones cultivated with the strange bird fluid as an additive was about to be born!
At that moment, inside the Reproduction Laboratory, dozens of Clones were on high alert.
Under Li Qingsong’s control, they stared intently at the instrument panels on the cultivation tanks, not daring to slack off in the slightest.
Any abnormal reading would be met with Li Qingsong’s direct intervention, with adjustments made at the fastest possible speed.
There was only one goal: to ensure the embryos could develop smoothly.
Under these tense conditions, the day of the Clones’ birth finally arrived.
The cultivation fluid was carefully drained, and the still-unconscious Clones were moved to a recovery room.
A few hours later, the first Clone finally opened its eyes and regained consciousness.
Unable to contain his curiosity any longer, Li Qingsong immediately extended his consciousness link to it.
Li Qingsong instantly perceived a marvelous sensation.
It was a truly wondrous feeling, like a nearsighted person putting on glasses for the first time and seeing the world with sudden clarity. It was also like someone recovering from a severe cold, the fog in their head lifting as their brain’s full processing power returned.
In that single moment, Li Qingsong clearly perceived that after "inhabiting" this new body, his basic mental faculties—his processing speed, logical reasoning, mathematical ability, spatial awareness, and more—had improved by at least 10%!
A mere 10% might not sound like much, but it translated to at least a fourfold increase in his consciousness link capacity!
Based on past experience, Li Qingsong did a quick assessment and discovered his consciousness link capacity had skyrocketed to at least 90,000!
At least ninety thousand! He couldn’t test the exact upper limit right now because he didn’t have enough Clones on hand.
But even if it was only 90,000, that was more than enough!
Right now, he only had a little over sixty thousand Clones in total.
All sixty-thousand-plus of them could finally be put to use!
Overjoyed, Li Qingsong immediately extended his excess consciousness link capacity to the Clones resting in the communal dormitories.
The next moment, the Clones who had been lying listlessly on their beds simultaneously snapped to their feet with vigor. They formed orderly queues, proceeded to the dormitory exit to receive their various pieces of equipment, and then poured out of the building like a great flood.
Afterward, they split into different teams and headed off in different directions.
The wheat cultivation base, the rapeseed cultivation base, the rice cultivation base, the pig farm, the cattle ranch, the aquaculture base, the steel mill, the copper smelter, the foundry, the engine factory, the power plant...
At that moment, across all of Ceres, every single Clone was thrown into the production recovery effort. Not one was left idle.
But even so, Li Qingsong could clearly feel that he still had a capacity of at least thirty thousand consciousness links to spare!
’This stuff is incredible, truly incredible...’
His eyes filled with delight as he looked toward the massive warehouses, at the frozen blocks of strange bird fluid salvaged from the battlefield, and at the captive strange birds recuperating in their iron cages...
’Limited by my current purification and separation technology, the strange bird fluid I’m using now isn’t pure.’
’Once I improve my technology in this field, and maybe even make some proactive adjustments, the quality of the Clones will certainly improve even more. When that time comes, I might be able to control 150,000, or even 200,000 Clones simultaneously!’
’In that case, factoring in Clones on rotation and those in reserve, I’ll need a total of at least one million Clones on hand.’
’So... after restoring current production levels, I’ll immediately build larger-scale Clone cultivation facilities! With a six-month cultivation cycle, each batch has to produce at least 50,000 Clones!’
A cultivation facility with an annual output of 100,000 Clones would be unimaginably vast. Its footprint alone would likely be at least 100,000 square meters, and that’s even with multi-story buildings.
The other necessary supporting facilities—nutrient solution plants, power plants, power grids, food, water, and oxygen factories, and so on—would likely push the total area past the ten-square-kilometer mark.
It would take a massive square, roughly 3.2 kilometers on each side, filled entirely with buildings related to the Clone cultivation facility, just to support the operation.
But that didn’t matter!
Now in control of over sixty thousand Clones simultaneously, Li Qingsong was brimming with confidence.