Chapter 166: Pride
Master Smith Under Ministry of National Defense
166 – Pride
Myung-jun’s production-type Awakener class adopted a curriculum that focused on manually processing materials higher than the students’ grades without relying on their Awakener abilities. As a result, high-grade materials worth tens of billions were being discarded at an alarming rate.
Moreover, Myung-jun deliberately selected rare and difficult-to-process materials for the students, as easier materials yielded less experience. This approach led to a daily deficit of hundreds of billions in the training process.
However, this level of deficit did not negatively impact the financial situation of the Liberal Clan. The official opening of Liberty City coincided with the academy’s establishment, and the massive Electricity-based Fuel (E-Fuel) production facility, occupying a quarter of the city, began full-scale operations.
Designed by Soo-jeong, the E-Fuel production facility synthesized eco-friendly fuel by electrolyzing water to produce hydrogen and combining it with carbon dioxide captured from the air. This E-Fuel mimicked the properties of traditional fossil fuels like gasoline and diesel, allowing existing internal combustion engines to operate with zero carbon emissions.
Despite its many advantages, E-Fuel had a critical drawback: the energy required to produce it far exceeded the energy it could generate. Before Liberty City’s E-Fuel production facility, the power consumption to produce fuel for a 100 km drive was seven times that of an electric vehicle for the same distance.
Soo-jeong’s E-Fuel production facility significantly improved the efficiency of the existing system and allowed the use of decision stones as a power source. The facility, designed to cover more than a quarter of the world’s oil consumption, began supplying alternative fuels processed into natural gas, gasoline, diesel, and kerosene to major cities across Japan through pipelines. These fuels were then exported worldwide via port cities like Osaka.
As a result, Japan, which previously had no oil reserves, quickly became the world’s largest supplier of alternative fuels. The massive foreign currency earned from E-Fuel exports provided the Liberal Clan with immense wealth, enough to build several cities of similar scale.