Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

the design of “hybrid engine” was that, when a trainer required the crystal suit or the colossus to be fully outputted, his body tissues that stored the “reactors” would transmit the energy into the crystal reactor in the crystal suit first, which would be highly combined with the crystal fuel that the crystal suit carried itself through the complicated melting procedures in the crystal reactor before the spiritual energy was delivered to every power rune array and every battle unit on the crystal suit through the output tubes of the crystal reactor. eventually, it would burst out in various forms of light blades, flames, or jetting force.

it meant that the two power sources at the beginning would coalesce into one.

it was not hard to imagine the difficulty of the task.

the spiritual energy outburst of a trainer was itself erratic, disordered, and hard to control even for the trainer himself.

when li yao burned his life and soul in fury to the point that he was about to explode, it was barely possible for him to precisely control every stream of spiritual energy bursting out of his cells.

however, the crystal reactor was a unit that required high stability and precision.

in li yao’s younger years, when he just entered the refining department of the grand desolate war institution, it was exactly because of a fault in the crystal reactor during an experiment that the laboratory exploded and almost the entire refining department was ruined.

that was only a mystic skeleton battlesuit for mass-production. the temperature and pressure that the crystal reactor needed to deal with were relatively not too high.

for the high-level crystal suits designed for the nascent soul stage or the divinity transformation stage experts, like the mystic skeleton blood wing that li yao was equipped with today, what drastic changes of temperature and pressure would the crystal reactor be faced with in a fierce battle, and how much spiritual energy must be outputted?

at such a moment, if the spiritual energy from the experts themselves that were of different natures, different degrees, and different vibration frequencies were added in to join the reaction, wouldn’t it be suicide?

“hybrid design” was a whimsical hypothesis. to produce it in reality, too many problems regarding the material science, the new fuel, the synthesis of spiritual energy, aerodynamics, and most fundamentally of all, the studies of rune arrays, had to be resolved first. it was barely possible to fix the assortment of problems!

countless refiners in the star glory federation had been working on the studies in the regard. li yao himself had done some preliminary explorations too, and he had modified a series of immature models.

however, faced with the irresolvable conundrums, even li yao had to admit that his capabilities were far from enough. or rather, the federation’s accumulations in the material science, aerodynamics, and other disciplines were not profound enough. perhaps it would require several hundred years of hard work before a mature, reasonable “hybrid” design was proposed.

despite all the difficulties, countless refiners were still devoted to the relevant studies.

that was because the advantages of the hybrid design were obvious.

if a crystal suit had two power sources, it was impossible to reach a 100% synchronization rate however they were coordinated. it could only reach 99.99% at best while continuing to approach “perfect synchronization”.

it was like even the most finely-made artificial leg was still different from the real leg. even if other people could not notice it, the user would know it very clearly.

the higher the level of the user was, the greater interference the “artificial leg” would trigger.

if a champion of a short-distance dash was to join a 100-meter race with one real leg and one artificial leg, it would certainly affect the final result greatly.

that was why many high-level trainers did not like double power sources and the “parallel” design.

if the spiritual energy of the trainers themselves could be inputted into the crystal reactors first and burst out again after a series of complicated reactions and a major boost, the problem of discoordination and synchronization would be no more, because there would only be one power source!

besides, because there were two power sources in the “parallel” design, there were two corresponding circuits of spiritual energy too.

one of them was the transmission tubes connected to the crystal reactor, and the other was used to transmit the spiritual energy generated from the body.

the second set of circuits might not have the actual “tubes”, but it had to be taken into consideration if the circuits were blocked or affected when the crystal suit was designed.

one crystal suit with two spiritual energy circuits was too messy and chaotic. it would also greatly diminish the crystal suit’s mobility and defense ability.

the crystal suit was a type of magic equipment that had to include thousands of rune arrays and units in the limited room to activate hundreds of different techniques. all the refiners had been sparing no effort doing subtractions. even the reduction of a component the size of a fingernail would mean a great improvement in the performance of the crystal suit.

if the “hybrid” design could work out, one fewer set of spiritual energy circuits would be required, and more than hundreds of components could be cut off. one would be able to be much more creative and unrestrained in the overall design.

the overall battle performance of such crystal suits would certainly be improved by more than 10%.

the tiniest factor could decide the fight between two experts. not just an improvement of 10%, even the improvement of 1% would be remarkable enough to be called “a revolutionary breakthrough”. so, how could the crystal suit designers not be captivated by the hybrid engine?

li yao had deep communications with di feiwen, the deputy commander of the black wind fleet before. he knew that the imperium hit the technological bottleneck a few hundred years ago as the territory of the imperium reached the maximum. in the circle of refiners over the past hundreds of years, everything seemed to have stagnated. there was even a bizarre theory that all the magical equipment that could be created had been created, and that all the refiners needed to do was to improve them to achieve perfection.

other than the advantages in the pragmatic fields such as “light membrane theory”, the crystal suits of the imperium were not much more advanced than their counterparts in the federation.

the issues regarding the “hybrid design” were as tricky in the federation as they were in the imperium.

however, this master jin tianzong…

thinking quickly, li yao immediately realized what had gone wrong.

if this master jin tianzong did make groundbreaking breakthroughs in terms of the hybrid design, then he truly “deserved to die”.

that was because the chain of interests that he had shaken was too solid, and the interest groups were too enormous and overwhelming!

compared to “parallel engine”, “hybrid engine” had the absolute advantages. it was the unquestionable “new-generation technology”.

if the new-generation technology was truly developed, what could the “old-generation technology” do?

crystal suits were the king of magical equipment. crystal suit production took up more than half of the entire industry of magical equipment production too. after all, the colossi were too few in number to support an enormous industrial system and the upstream and downstream industry chains. crystal suits were the real kings!

right now, all the refiners and crystal suit centers adopted the “parallel design”.

how many well-respected masters of refining had spent their entire lives polishing the parallel design trying to reach perfection?

how many crystal suit centers and military conglomerates had invested astronomical capital on the next generation of the parallel design, hoping to improve the synchronization rate of the two power sources from 99.9% to 99.99% and then to 99.999%?

the invention of the “hybrid crystal suit”, on the other hand, was very likely to crush the “parallel crystal suit”. too many well-respected masters of refining would lose their way of making a living, and even the interests of the military conglomerates under the name of the four kurfürst might be affected!

in a “young country” that was thriving and also faced with immense pressure for survival, the birth of new technologies was never a problem.

most people would only learn after and modify new technologies in a healthy competition, trying to make the cake bigger.

for example, the “glorious sunlight group” in the star glory federation and other major sects would spare no effort on the studies of the “hybrid crystal suits”.

the reason was simple. the federation might be destroyed by the imperium at any moment. only through more powerful magical equipment could everyone expect to survive!

also, everybody was confident that the cake would be bigger in the future as the federation developed. even if they lost some slices of the cake right now, they would soon earn it back in the technological progress.

however, it was not necessarily the case in a grand empire that had reached the limits of expansion with all the fields monopolized.

“the imperium of true human beings is the most powerful force in the universe. as long as the parallel crystal suits are polished to be 100% perfect, all the enemies will be destroyed. so, is it really necessary to work on the ‘hybrid crystal suits’ at the risk of confusion and chaos?”

li yao believed that many “grandmasters” in the circle of refiners in the imperium must’ve been thinking in such a way.

“jin” was not the surname of any of the four kurfürst families.

also, based on the fact that jin tianzong was remarked as “impartial and incorruptible” and exposed the academic scandal of hundreds of descendants of the four kurfürst families without any mercy, he couldn’t have been in a good relationship with the four families either. it was very likely that he had provoked them many times.

“even if the ‘hybrid crystal suits’ can truly be realized, the crucial technology should be grasped in ‘our’ hands instead of being blatantly squandered by an ‘outsider’.”

li yao was even more certain that somebody in the refining centers and the military conglomerates that were under the control of the four families would definitely think in such a way.

all things considered, it was rather understandable why this master jin tianzong who was too distinguished degenerated from a professor of the refining department of the imperial polytechnical university and a leader of a major laboratory to someone who hung around with an ambitious gambler like queen li linghai and worked on the schemes and conspiracies to overthrow the current system of the imperium.

li yao was only interested in the tempest god at the beginning.

but after hearing what li jialing said and analyzing the whole incident, he was now more interested in master jin tianzong than the tempest god.

“let’s go and appreciate the best refining arts of the imperium!”

li yao strode into the maintenance workshop in excitement.