The Base's Spiritual Root Ratio!

"Oh? All three of the samples have recovered?" Two hours later. Inside a meeting room at Dawn Base, Sun Guozhu, who had just taken a short rest, set down the report in his hands, looked at Ma Heng and Pan Yongnian before him, and said thoughtfully: "Xiao Ma, from the looks of it, the influence spiritual energy has on living things very likely reaches down into the underlying mechanisms of life itself?" "That's right," Ma Heng nodded and laid out his judgment. "Its effects on the three experimental samples have already gone beyond the reach of ordinary therapeutic methods." "My personal guess is that it acts on at least the atomic level—possibly deeper still." Sun Guozhu's eyebrows lifted. The atomic level? Bear in mind: the genetic modification so common in science fiction—that is, deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA—operated only at the molecular level. Even nucleotides or nitrogenous bases, one step further down, still belonged to the domain of molecules. If atoms came into it, the subject became carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and the like. Not to mention this was only a conservative guess; the territory actually involved might run even deeper... Sun Guozhu mulled it over briefly, then asked, "And the human body? Is the effect the same?" "The effect on the human body isn't so obvious," Ma Heng said, shaking his head. He stretched his right hand out in front of Sun Guozhu. "Sun Lao, take a look at this." Sun Guozhu looked where he indicated, and quickly spotted a knife scar more than ten centimeters long on Ma Heng's right forearm. "I ran an experiment on the spot," Ma Heng explained breezily, rubbing the scar like a man without a care in the world. "For traumatic wounds made by a blade, spiritual energy's healing effect isn't as good as we imagined—it can stop the bleeding instantly, but compared with the three experimental subjects it falls far short." "Judged purely on performance, it's roughly on par with certain military hemostatic drugs." "As for pathology—that is, its effect on disease—medical specialists will have to study that in depth." "In any case, going by the experiments so far, my personal guess is that spiritual energy's healing effect is inversely proportional to a creature's body size: the smaller the creature, the better it works..." Watching Ma Heng hold forth, Pan Yongnian tapped his forehead in mild resignation. Not long before, watching the Guangdong twin-tail springing about in its container, Pan Yongnian had remarked offhandedly, "I wonder what spiritual energy would do to the human body." Whereupon Ma Heng, without another word, had taken a knife from the toolbox on the spot, cut a gash in his own arm, and personally acted as the white mouse. All you could say was: an expert from a military background, after all. That style of his was certainly bold... no, correction—astonishingly efficient. Unfortunately, spiritual energy's effect on traumatic wounds in humans seemed nowhere near as strong. The bleeding from Ma Heng's wound had been stopped quickly, but the scar had not faded; to the naked eye it looked like a newly formed scab, one that would bleed at the slightest tear. But that, too, was within the two men's expectations. After all, a human and a cockroach are not on the same order of size. If spiritual energy truly worked wonders like reviving the dead and regrowing flesh on bare bones, Lin Yi could hardly have failed to mention that intelligence in advance. "Mm, there's something to your guess. I'll have the medical team's specialists follow up on the pathology research." Then Sun Guozhu paused a moment and pulled the topic back to spiritual energy excitation itself—that, in truth, was the most important step at hand. "Xiao Ma, Xiao Pan—so what you're saying is, we can now extract spiritual energy in the home world's own environment through technical means?" Ma Heng, beside Pan Yongnian, nodded. "That's right." "And the stability?" Sun Guozhu pressed. "Is it sporadic, or can it sustain a high success rate?" "The success rate is high—close to 90 percent." Ma Heng promptly produced the figure. "We ran the experiments on the sample spirit stones a little at a time, many runs in all: across 117 beam bombardments, spiritual energy was successfully excited 104 times." "Excited spiritual energy hardly spreads on its own, so it can be transferred and stored by way of the ion wind." "The tricky part for now is still the cost of exciting spirit stones. Spending there is running a bit higher than we projected." By Ma Heng's team's calculations, at ordinary temperature and pressure one low-grade spirit stone could excite a volume of spiritual energy of roughly 0.45 cubic meters. With the equipment's marginal electricity costs, the low-temperature systems, and every other input counted, exciting one spirit stone came to around 1.2 million Huaxia dollars. Which meant one cubic meter of spiritual energy carried a total cost approaching 2.7 million. And unlike the Tianling Realm, the home world's air held no natural, thinly diffused spiritual energy; and with so few cultivators entering the realm, artificial excitation was essentially a step that could not be avoided in the short term. Yet Sun Guozhu looked entirely calm about it—not so much as a blink. "1.2 million, then 1.2 million it is. This isn't a question of money. Even if you tacked a zero onto it, we'd still press ahead." "In short, don't worry too much about cost. Where cultivation is concerned, whatever money can solve is by definition a small matter." "Now that we can extract spiritual energy reliably, we can start getting the cultivation project ready to launch." Ma Heng nodded lightly. Fair enough. For an individual, 1.2 million was certainly no small sum, and the total piled up over a short period would be an astronomical figure. But set against a nation of such size, it really amounted to little. Never mind Huaxia—even for those Western financial cliques who so readily turned a profit from war, this was not the kind of investment anyone would begrudge. And at the rate the currency of a certain little neighbor next door was depreciating, spending like this might even count as prudent investing. "By the way, Sun Lao," Pan Yongnian's curiosity had been stirred by the mention of cultivation, "how did the spiritual root testing go on Chief of Staff Chen's end?" "The results are already out, and they're very good." A trace of delight lifted the corners of Sun Guozhu's mouth as he pushed the other document on the table over to Pan Yongnian. "Among the base's five thousand–odd soldiers, the testing turned up 1,283 with five spiritual roots, plus two with four spiritual roots and one with three." Pan Yongnian let out a startled sound. "Oh? There's one with three spiritual roots?" Sun Guozhu nodded and smiled again and again, plainly very pleased. According to the intelligence Lin Yi had provided earlier, five spiritual roots ran to roughly around 20 percent, but four spiritual roots and better were an entirely different matter. As a general rule, only one person in three or four thousand had four-root aptitude. As for three spiritual roots, it usually took a base of tens of thousands before one could possibly appear. Take Jiuwu City as an example. Its permanent population exceeded two million, and its birth rate, somewhat higher than the home world's, ran to around forty to fifty thousand a year. Add in the itinerant freelance cultivators who traveled specially with their children to attend the Selection Ceremony, and each ceremony—held once every two years—tested upwards of 150,000 children newly of eligible age, on rare occasions even topping 200,000. Yet at each ceremony, barring surprises, only three or four three-root children could be found. Only after five or six Selection Ceremonies might a dual spiritual root turn up. As for a single spiritual root... the last time Jiuwu City had seen such heaven-defying aptitude was more than fifty years ago. Finding two four-root soldiers among the base's five thousand–odd fighters was already surprise enough—let alone a three-root soldier appearing on top of that... Next, as long as Ma Heng and the others excited spiritual energy steadily and collected it by the ion-wind method to artificially create a high-concentration spiritual energy chamber, and once the language specialists finished translating the text of the Awakening cultivation technique—then the day Lin Yi returned from buying supplies in Jiuwu City would be the day of the home world's first Awakening!