Time flowed by quietly.
Under Li Qingsong's all-out construction effort, and with the entire industrial system operating at full capacity, over a million deuterium-deuterium fusion power plants rapidly appeared on planet after planet. They replaced the original deuterium-tritium fusion plants and began supplying electricity to the whole industrial and scientific apparatus.
A single deuterium-deuterium fusion power plant could only produce a few hundred kilograms of Helium-3 per day, a seemingly insignificant amount. But it didn't matter—there were enough of them!
In the Pegasus V432 Star System, within the least massive of the gas giants, a massive fleet of several million Jupiter Planes flew day and night through the harsh environment. They separated immense quantities of deuterium gas from the planet's atmosphere, which was then gathered on the Profound Bird Platform.
Shuttle-craft traveled back and forth between the Profound Bird Platform and the energy distribution centers, transferring the vast quantities of deuterium to heavy transport ships via a single relay point.
This entire process was remotely operated by several million Clones and Blutuk engineers. The specific frontline tasks were handled by general-purpose humanoid robots, completely eliminating the risk of living beings being affected by the gas giant's extreme gravity.
The heavy transport ships then delivered hundreds of thousands of tons of deuterium to every planet that housed a fusion power plant, channeling the gas into them like water irrigating fertile fields.
The deuterium began to fuse within the reactors, producing enormous amounts of energy. While supplying the entire industrial and scientific system, a substantial fusion byproduct, Helium-3, was continuously generated and temporarily stored in the provisional storage tanks equipped in every deuterium-deuterium power plant.
Trains speeding across the planets' surfaces traveled to and from each deuterium-deuterium fusion plant, collecting the Helium-3 produced. This was eventually consolidated at the Helium-3 distribution centers built on every planet and then, via space elevators and heavy transport ships, moved toward the construction zones for the magnetic monopole detectors designated by Li Qingsong.
On the very first day that all million-plus deuterium-deuterium power plants were operational, Li Qingsong produced a full 400,000 tons of Helium-3!
By the ninth day, the Helium-3 reserves had reached 3.6 million tons, which was more than enough to support the construction of a single high-performance magnetic monopole detector!
And so, with numerous high-precision components produced by the industrial system and under the command of many Clones and Blutuk engineers involved in the planning and design, the general-purpose robots and intelligent machinery began their bustling construction work in space.
In addition to the first magnetic monopole detector, Li Qingsong finally possessed a second.
This was only the beginning.
Immense quantities of Helium-3 and components continued to converge in space.
In the Deep Space billions of kilometers from the Pegasus V432 Star; at the Lagrange points of the massive rocky planets; at the Lagrange points of the gas giants and their large moons; in the even deeper space thousands of billions of kilometers from the star; in the corners of the Star System far from the ecliptic plane...
Against these different environmental backdrops, numerous magnetic monopole detectors were completed one after another.
They were like a series of spiderwebs, silently unfurling across the vast, deep expanse of starry space, waiting for the "little insects" that might appear at any time and strike from any angle.
Li Qingsong didn't know when his magnetic monopole detectors would capture a valuable signal. It was also possible that his theoretical framework was fundamentally flawed and that such things as magnetic monopoles didn't exist in the Cosmos at all—that was a possibility.
All Li Qingsong knew was that the more "spiderwebs" he cast, the higher the probability of capturing a magnetic monopole.
If that was the case, then he would just keep building. He would keep building them nonstop. Even if the magnetic monopole detectors were harder to build and more expensive than proton decay detectors, he would still build a thousand of them!
At this moment, the numerous fusion power plants were both energy suppliers and material producers, providing a continuous, massive supply of Helium-3. They powerfully supported a construction effort so vast that the Blutuk People could not even begin to imagine it.
At this moment, Li Qingsong also once again truly understood why large-scale breakthroughs in fundamental physics had to be conducted within a star system and couldn't be done during Interstellar Travel.
Take the production of Helium-3 alone: how much deuterium was needed for such a quantity? How many fusion power plants? How vast an industrial capacity and how massive a supply of materials were required?
Only within a star system, with its abundant and virtually inexhaustible resources, could such a colossal demand for materials be met.
Time flowed by quietly amidst Li Qingsong's relentless construction. Besides maintaining normal production and research, he frantically increased the number of magnetic monopole detectors at an average rate of one every nine days.
This construction speed was unimaginable for any civilization.
Did they really think such large-scale, advanced detectors were toy cars you could just churn out in droves?
What great scientific apparatus wasn't treated with the utmost gravity and rigor, requiring endless demonstrations, repeated designs, and iterative optimizations, taking decades and the full effort of a civilization to complete?
But for Li Qingsong, the magnetic monopole detectors were being built at hundreds of construction sites simultaneously. As soon as enough Helium-3 was produced and injected, another detector was complete.
And so, more than ten years passed by quietly.
The passage of over 5,000 days left Li Qingsong with more than 500 magnetic monopole detectors. At the same time, the thousand proton decay detectors he had spent so much time building had also been running for a full 5,000-plus days.
During this time, each detector on average had registered several hundred thousand Cherenkov radiation events. Across all one thousand detectors, the total number of detected events exceeded one hundred million.
Hundreds of millions of Clones and specialized research AIs studied these events with all-out effort, but the final results disappointed Li Qingsong.
Every single one of the more than one hundred million radiation events was either a neutrino collision or interference. Not one was a proton decay!
This caused Li Qingsong's heart to grow heavy.
'If the proton's lifespan is 10^36 years, then my detectors should have registered over five hundred thousand proton decay events in about fourteen years...'
'But... why hasn't there been a single one?'
This pointed to only one possibility.
He had greatly underestimated the proton's lifespan.
Its minimum lifespan wasn't 10^36 years, but at least 10^42 years—a hundred-thousand-fold difference.
Only this could explain why he hadn't detected a single proton decay event in fourteen years.
'So... what's the next step?'
'Keep increasing the number of proton decay detectors to chase a higher probability of detection?'
'But... that doesn't seem feasible.'