Two months after the vapor level rose again, the world had its answer.
The floating island is growing!
This is a rather strange observation, and the first person to report it was not the exploration team and the army, but the Xincheng Ropeway Station.
The cableway station deals with distance every day. Every slight change in the relative position of the two floating island plates requires timely adjustment of the cable winch of the cableway. In addition, the distance from the cableway cargo yard to the station section is also fixed. Workers clear the distance that should be covered in a morning. Several trains.
Both parts had problems one after another.
The cableway cargo yard became far away from the station. While everyone was still wondering, rocks "grew" outside the cableway platform!
After a round of reporting, there was another abnormal change in the distance between the two platforms.
The anomaly investigation was immediately taken over by the exploration team. The more they explored, the more problems they had, but there were also good aspects.
The survey shows that the changes are mainly in the area less than 500 meters near the edge of each plate, and the overall growth rate is two meters per day.
Most of the consequences of this growth are bad things, such as road fractures, excessive tension in the ropeway's center of gravity back-pull device, and the need to replace the stay cable as soon as possible or temporarily abandon the center of gravity control.
Among them, the center of gravity control device of the cableway stay cable chooses to temporarily dismantle the stay cable without replacing it.
This design of pulling back the center of gravity was originally to prevent the supporting rock mass below the platform from further falling off, which might cause the entire poured concrete platform to be affected by the cableway load and slide outward. Now that there is another circle of rocks growing outside, there is no such hidden danger for the time being. Instead, we have to worry about excessive growth that will lead to insufficient ropeway length or erection height.
In addition to the impact on the cableway platform, the growth of the floating island has also blocked oil leaks in the west of the Fenggu plate and the east of the Pangxun plate, which is also a major benefit.
As for the floating islands merging with each other due to growth... the possibility was quickly ruled out.
Not only has the distance between the floating islands not shortened, it is also increasing at a very slow rate, accumulating a distance difference of one meter almost every ten days.
As the floating island becomes larger, the distance is also increasing, which conflicts with another measurement result: the atmospheric pressure is strong.
The vapor layer below rises and falls, the air pressure has been unstable in recent months, and problems have arisen with the original sea-level pressure measurement method.
Now, based on the standard air pressure of 1,100 hPa, which is equivalent to the subtropical high pressure in Wang Qi's previous life, this translates to an altitude of about 2,200 meters above the floating island. We don't actually know how high it is.
Coupled with the phenomenon of floating islands becoming larger and increasing in distance, the entire world is getting larger and filled with external matter.
There are even certain differences in the composition of the external substances. About forty days after the change was first reported, rose-red sky patches appeared.
When I went on the plane to observe, I already knew what it was before I made any plans.
Phosphine!
This is a highly toxic gas that will react with many metal elements. We discovered it in advance because we observed strange rust-like plaques on the surface of the wings of the aircraft. We hurriedly evacuated and analyzed the plaques.
But there is no need to worry about it for the time being, because it will also react quickly with oxygen and will soon turn into phosphate fertilizer (phosphoric acid) particles and fall off.
By the way, this thing is the fuel of the so-called will-o'-the-wisp, which can be produced from decaying corpses.
It can be inferred from this that there may be a large number of non-exposed corpses in the fused world, or it may simply not have much oxygen, and the atmosphere is lethal to humans.
The Kingdom directly launched the disaster early warning mechanism.
This mechanism has a certain impact on people's lives. It requires at least one member of each family to participate in one of six evacuation trainings within two months, and to stockpile a small amount of sugar, salt, dry staple foods, and dried meat at home.
As soon as the disaster warning was issued, it showed the benefits of stocking up on strategic supplies at ordinary times... At the same time, it also made various food-based businessmen complain endlessly.
As soon as the mechanism was activated, citizens' purchases increased instantly, and merchants' stocks were emptied out in just two days. As a result, food prices broke through the warning line of government treasury stabilization, and official treasury sales started.
The kingdom's sugar reserves are 100,000 tons, and there are 12,000 tons in Phoenix City alone, which is equivalent to more than 60 kilograms per person regardless of adult age. The total stockpile of salt is also large, and the meat is slightly less, but there is additional stock in the form of raw meat.
Raw meat reserves exist in the form of live animals. For example, if the monthly output of a Xiaoqiang ranch is 10,000 Xiaoqiang, there will be 300 to 500 live animals in reserve. The production cycle is different from that of ordinary meat Xiaoqiang. Officials usually have some control over this part. A little subsidy, and in the stage of releasing reserves, these Xiaoqiang must be sold at the official price.
Together with the stocks of dried meat, which are in raw form and are replaced every few months, the total also amounts to several thousand tons.
The public's panic will bring about a certain amount of irrational looting, but after clearing out the merchants' inventories, there is no remaining energy to clear out the huge strategic inventories, and they cannot even buy half of them.
Food and grain merchants are sitting on their hands, hoarding 20 to 30 kilograms of sugar, 5 to 10 kilograms of salt, and 100 kilograms of staple food and meat per capita. Many stores will face a period of stagnant business for several years.
Fortunately, it is not a loss, because the official treasury not only guarantees the upper limit, but also guarantees the lower limit. Now the official treasury has a lot of surplus. If you really can't do it anymore, just sell the remaining grain and salt to the official treasury and change your career.
In addition, after this round of release of reserves, the official treasury also made certain purchase price adjustments, with an overall increase of 5%. For example, the opening price of refined salt is 1.2 yuan per kilogram, and the purchase price is 1.05 yuan. The exit price of food merchants is almost neglect.
In addition, everyone is purchasing disaster reserves. You still have to buy daily food. It will take a few years to slowly digest the reserves. The overall market size will shrink by a few percentage points. When a few companies clear out their warehouses and run away, other food merchants will business conditions will return to normal.
In addition to releasing reserves to the private sector to give everyone a little peace of mind, the disaster early warning mechanism has also started to enhance the progress of shelters.
The enhancement here is not to enhance the structural strength of the shelter, but to enhance the continuous use time of the shelter at full load.
Including maintenance of all equipment, stocking up of high-pressure gas bottles, chemical decarbonizers, etc.
It’s very cumbersome, because we don’t know what kind of situation we will face. If the air toxicity is too high or the oxygen content is too low, the external circulation ventilation system will be completely closed, and it will enter the internal circulation stage and it will not improve for a long time. Magic Carbon Removal The equipment may need to be completely overhauled. At this time, it is necessary to rely on reserve gas and chemical agents to carry it through.
There are three types of reserve gas.
One is a temporary rebranded liquefied petroleum gas cylinder used as an air compression bottle. The other is industrial oxygen used in steel plants to produce steel. It is not very healthy, but it is better than suffocating to death. The last one is a large-scale oxygen tank buried in the soil. The transport gas tank is temporarily filled with filtered high-pressure oxygen.
There is no liquid oxygen at all, and so many types of reserves combined cannot actually last for a few hours. The main reason is to avoid suffocating people to death during the maintenance of the magic carbon removal device.
We have been preparing for several years, and temporarily strengthened the wave, but the big one did not come.
Half a month after the disaster warning, an evacuation was initiated because the phosphine content in the air was too high and too close to the surface of the plate, but it only lasted less than four days before the situation began to improve.
