Humanity Is Gone, but I Have Billions of Clones

At this stage, while the Mercury-class and Venus-class Warships had their Thrust Devices fully upgraded and armor performance enhanced by the introduction of Zero Fiber, their weapon systems were still old-fashioned Gunpowder Guns and Machine Guns. Even their most powerful offensive weapons were merely Interstellar Missiles propelled by chemical fuel.

Their Radar Systems could barely provide early warnings for targets with large radar cross-sections. They were completely unable to scan for minuscule objects like bullets or Electromagnetic Cannon Projectiles, let alone perform effective interceptions.

Without a sufficiently advanced Radar System, an Interception System was out of the question. Without an Interception System, the Warships could only rely on their armor to tank damage in combat.

With the Blutuk Civilization's main fleet on the verge of arrival, Li Qingsong knew that while he couldn't possibly elevate their technology to match the Blutuk's in such a short time, he had to, at the very least, increase their combat power to the absolute maximum possible.

Only then would he have a chance of saving the Solar System.

Therefore, while still dedicating a significant portion of his research force to breakthroughs in Thrust Devices, Li Qingsong also funneled massive resources into the teams already working on technologies that would effectively enhance the warships' combat capabilities. These included projects for Electromagnetic Cannons, composite armor, high-speed precision radar, Laser Cannons, and Automatic Intercept Technology.

Beyond that, Li Qingsong planned to attempt improvements in another area.

The Wukong AI!

Li Qingsong believed that compared to the Blutuk Civilization, the one area where he had any hope of maintaining an advantage was artificial intelligence.

As long as the Blutuk Civilization was one composed of a collective of intelligent beings, they were bound to have faced the same difficulties the Human World had encountered in developing artificial intelligence.

Low data quality, insufficient data volume, waste from redundant competition, inadequate overall investment and momentum—the list went on.

The only difference would be the degree of difficulty they faced.

But in this respect, he could achieve optimal conditions.

High data quality, massive data volume, no redundant competition, and an investment of resources that could be pushed to the absolute limit.

Even if his own computer hardware technology couldn't match the Blutuk Civilization's, the Wukong AI he was developing still had a chance to surpass their war AI!

Of course, this would require him to continuously improve and optimize the Wukong AI.

Based on this, Li Qingsong made his decision.

He would launch an all-out assault on chip technology!

Before Human Civilization vanished, they could already manufacture chips with a 2-nanometer process on a silicon base.

Li Qingsong knew that to shrink the process beyond 2 nanometers—to etch even more transistors onto a limited chip area—meant facing a series of complex and nearly insurmountable obstacles.

For example, the quantum tunneling effect.

When transistor dimensions shrink to the nanometer scale, electrons can tunnel through the potential barriers meant to contain them, leading to increased current leakage and degraded performance.

This was dictated by the fundamental laws of physics and was unavoidable. In chips with a process smaller than 2 nanometers, the quantum tunneling effect was already extremely pronounced.

While it was possible to develop chips with even smaller processes using certain methods to circumvent this effect, the costs were high, the technical difficulty was immense, and the performance gains were limited.

Because of this, humanity had begun to pivot toward quantum chips, gradually abandoning further research into their silicon-based counterparts.

But by the time humanity disappeared, although quantum chip technology had seen massive development, it had never achieved practicality or widespread use, at best only demonstrating its advantages in a few niche fields.

The 2-nanometer chip could essentially be considered the limit for silicon-based technology, and it was also the limit Li Qingsong could hope to reach in the foreseeable future.

'Then... since a breakthrough in my quantum chip technology is nearly impossible at this stage, I'll just have to push silicon-based chips to their absolute limit first!'

'If I can mass-produce 2-nanometer chips and use them to build supercomputers, the computing power available to the Wukong AI will increase by at least 40 times!'

This would make the Wukong AI far more powerful, causing his overall combat strength to soar as well.

Having settled on this, Li Qingsong added chip technology to his list of priority research projects.

Millions of Clones dedicated to researching and iterating on chip technology were now bustling not only in research bases but also in one chip factory after another.

In laboratories and on production lines, every single place related to chips became a venue for endless trials.

'Can the chip packaging process be optimized to improve its stability?'

'Let's find some optimization methods and test them out.'

'Can the energy density of the light source be increased?'

'Test that, too.'

'Can the photoresist formula be adjusted to better absorb the light source's energy for etching the chip?'

'Test it.'

At every moment, countless hypotheses were born in the minds of the Clones, instantly synchronizing with Li Qingsong's own mind, and then instantly synchronizing back to every Clone involved in the chip development project.

This immense, collective intellect was constantly speculating, verifying, thinking, and integrating countless proposals. Aided by a full suite of experimental tools, Li Qingsong would divert resources to test any proposal that showed even the slightest hint of value.

'Anyway, resources were now extremely abundant and industrial power had been massively upgraded. So what if some of it was wasted?'

'I can afford to be wasteful!'

Under these conditions, Li Qingsong's chip technology, just like his Thrust Device technology before it, began to develop at a tremendous pace.

Soon, the technology for mass-producing 7-nanometer chips, the successor to the 10-nanometer process, passed all validation tests and entered large-scale production.

But Li Qingsong was still not satisfied. The 7-nanometer chip was not the end of the line.

'Are you kidding me? I've poured the research power of practically an entire Human Civilization into a single field, and you think a mere 7-nanometer process is enough to fob me off?'

'Rapid breakthroughs should be the norm. A lack of progress would be the real anomaly.'

After the 7-nanometer chip, breakthroughs in 5-nanometer and 3-nanometer technologies followed in quick succession.

With each successive breakthrough, the size of the transistors etched onto the silicon wafers shrank, their density increased, and the number of transistors that could be packed onto a single chip grew ever larger.

But the 3-nanometer chip was still not the end of Li Qingsong's assault.

'Two nanometers. It has to be two nanometers. I must push silicon-based chip technology to its absolute limit!'

'Only by pushing to the absolute limit, only by maximizing the Wukong AI's performance for the foreseeable future, will I have any chance of saving the Solar System from the Blutuk Civilization's main fleet!'

Feeling the immense pressure emanating from the distant stars, Li Qingsong directed his legion of Clones and threw himself once more into the tireless pursuit of technological breakthroughs.