Chapter 29: Taking Shape

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Beyond the base, the brutal battle continued without pause.

Large numbers of complete suits of armor were produced, then continuously carried away by the clones emerging from the dormitory buildings. In the end, they were destroyed and discarded either around the perimeter of the base or along the railway tracks.

Clone after clone died, yet those who took their places on the battlefield remained utterly fearless, advancing relentlessly.

By now, roughly twenty days had passed since the first battle at Copper Mine Base One.

In that brief span of twenty days, three of the nine dormitory buildings—each capable of housing fifteen thousand people—had already been completely emptied.

That meant that in so little time, nearly fifty thousand clones had fallen in battle.

Their deaths had not been in vain.

Thanks to their sacrifices, not one of the ten mining bases or the main base had fallen. More than that, all eleven bases were operating at full capacity.

At every moment, vast quantities of ore and resources were being sent from the mining bases to the main base, while equally vast quantities of supplies, equipment, and personnel were being dispatched from the main base to the mining bases.

Under these circumstances, the one hundred firearms research teams finally achieved a breakthrough.

At that moment, the first finished firearm was in the hands of a clone, aimed at a target roughly one hundred meters away.

He pulled the trigger. With a bang, a bullet shot forward at several hundred meters per second, reaching the vicinity of the target in the next instant.

But it did not hit. It had missed.

A clear dent appeared in the wall beside the target.

“At this stage, accuracy isn’t important. Power and rate of fire are. A miss? It doesn’t matter.”

Li Qingsong had no intention of engaging the monstrous birds in some sort of precision-sniping contest.

What were his strengths? Industrial capability. Coordination and cooperation.

In that case, he should produce tens or hundreds of thousands of firearms as quickly as possible, manufacture hundreds of millions or even tens of billions of bullets, and unleash them all like a violent storm.

What was there to fear from poor accuracy? If hundreds of thousands of bullets were fired in a single volley, did accuracy really matter?

However…

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To achieve that kind of effect, the firearm in his hands still fell short.

Its shape vaguely resembled the pistols Li Qingsong had once seen in human films and television dramas. The gun was only a little over ten centimeters long, with a barrel, a grip, and a trigger in between.

After more than a thousand clones had studied the matter for so long, they ultimately discovered that there had indeed been good reason for humans to choose this design when manufacturing pistols.

This construction was simply the most reasonable.

That was true in terms of the structure of the human hand, ease of handling, rate of fire, magazine capacity, power, and nearly every other consideration.

However, the pistol Li Qingsong had created differed internally from those made in the human world.

It was not a modern pistol that fired bullets by means of a hammer. In fact, it was a flintlock.

A piece of flint had been specially installed inside it. Pulling the trigger caused the flint to scrape against a striking surface and produce sparks, igniting the bullet’s primer and firing the round.

Its magazine held ten bullets. Each pull of the trigger fired only one round; it could not fire continuously.

“My industrial capacity is limited right now. I can’t waste precious production capability on a weapon like this. No, it still needs improvement!

“Using flint to create sparks and ignite the primer is far too inefficient. It can’t fire continuously, and its rate of fire is much too slow. How can I improve it?

“I vaguely remember hearing something about hammers and firing pins, but what exactly are hammers and firing pins? What do they look like inside? How are they used?”

The ignition mechanism was not the only thing that needed improvement. The bullets themselves also required further optimization.

The bullets currently being used were far too weak. They probably could not inflict sufficiently severe damage on the monstrous birds’ hardened bodies. He had to find a way to increase their power.

The weapon also had to be capable of sustained fire.

What use was a gun that took several seconds to fire a single bullet?

The magazine capacity needed to be increased as well. He was not demanding a belt-fed machine gun like those he had seen in films and television dramas, capable of firing dozens of bullets per second. He only wanted ten rounds per second. If ten was too much, then five would do. That was not an unreasonable request, was it?

Controlling the minds of more than a thousand researcher clones, Li Qingsong began to ponder deeply. As he thought, he started experimenting with all sorts of optimized alternatives based on the flintlock pistol before him.

At that moment, it might have seemed that only a thousand or so brains were engaged in the work, but supporting those thoughts was all the knowledge Li Qingsong had accumulated and developed over the past several decades while building an entire industrial system from nothing—constructing steel mills, chemical plants, foundries, and power stations, as well as one agricultural base, dormitory building, and enormous factory after another.

Even the most ordinary clone, assigned merely to twist reinforcing bars into place, would gradually develop certain techniques through long years of work, along with his own understanding of that material.

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And that understanding would likewise become part of Li Qingsong’s store of knowledge.

The combined knowledge of countless clones formed an immense repository containing virtually everything.

The thoughts of these thousand-plus clones were now proceeding on the foundation of that repository.

Under such circumstances, the firearms Li Qingsong produced grew longer and longer, their magazines larger and larger, while the bullets became smoother and rounder, increasingly resembling the ammunition he had once seen in films and television dramas.

In the past, he had merely looked at such things and then forgotten them. Now, however, Li Qingsong understood every detail: why bullets were shaped that way and what characteristics that shape provided.

Thus, after two more of the nine dormitory buildings were emptied, and roughly seventy thousand clones had fallen on the battlefield in total, the first firearm that met Li Qingsong’s requirements was finally produced in the laboratory: high velocity, large magazine capacity, and fully automatic fire.

It had a massive magazine twenty centimeters long, weighing approximately three kilograms and holding eighty bullets.

Including the magazine, the entire firearm weighed about ten kilograms.

With three spare magazines, its total mass reached nineteen kilograms.

On Earth, a firearm this heavy might have had no practical value in combat. But this was not Earth. This was Luoshen Star, where gravity was only eight percent of Earth’s!

Nineteen kilograms of mass amounted to a mere one and a half kilograms of weight here!

The clone carried the enormous firearm to the shooting range.

He pulled the trigger. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang—the muzzle immediately began firing at a rate of four rounds per second, emptying the entire magazine in just over twenty seconds.

He casually removed the magazine, replaced it with a fresh one, and pulled the trigger again. Another eighty rounds were fired.

“This is the one!”

Li Qingsong made his decision at once.

“Begin mass production immediately!”

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