Dragon Raja 5; Chapter 354: For Your Majesty (169)

Dragon Raja 5

Su Enxi didn’t think that her neat and beautiful teeth shouldn’t be used to bite knots; rather, whoever’s knot was bitten open first would gain the upper hand.

“Isn’t it natural for ladies to go first? If we weren’t friends, I would have let you hang there.” Su Enxi shrugged. “Believe me, I’m really that bad.”

Auchinez did not answer. He slowly lay down on the ground, breathing slowly, staring blankly at the ceiling.
Su Enxi waited for him for a while, and seeing that he didn’t move, she poked his chin with the muzzle of the gun. “Hey! Have you rested enough? If you’re not dead, get up and move around. There’s nothing to think about. Everyone in this world is like this. No one is really important. Even if you die tonight, the bar will still be open tomorrow.”

She thought that Auchinez was finding it hard to accept the reality that he was just a cog in a huge machine. Not long ago, he probably thought he was a guest of honor at a top-level banquet, and that he could live forever by working hard to earn money.

But a contented smile appeared on Auchinez’s blood-stained face. “I just wanted to feel what it’s like to be alive. It’s so good to be able to breathe, to think, and to not be afraid when I fall asleep because I’ll wake up.”

“Can we finish the work first and then have some reflections?” Su Enxi looked around. “How do we start this reactor?”

Auchinez sat up abruptly. “The good news is I have the password to start the reactor. The bad news is we have to dive in.”

Su Enxi was taken aback. “You mean we’re surrounded by water?”

“That’s right. The reactor heats the river water, which boils and reaches the steam station, which generates electricity. The entire river is the heat exchange device for this reactor,” Auchinez said. “When we abandoned City 023, we sealed off the reactor and completely removed the electrical system in the control room.”

“If Alexander Bunin is still using the thermal energy from the reactor’s low-power operation, then he must have found a way to connect it to a new control system.”

“Of course, but I don’t know the password to that system, and we don’t have the ability to catch him and force him to tell us.” Auchinez shrugged. “What we need to infiltrate is the real core.”

What is the true core?

“The vacuum chamber, surrounded by an iron core and coils of wire, is where the plasma flow from nuclear fusion is confined by a strong magnetic field. At the bottom of the central solenoid, there’s a large array of mechanical switches—that can be considered the operating center of this reactor. Once we get there, we can dismantle the control system installed by Alexander Bunin himself and take over control. The rest is just manually entering the password, setting the power to maximum, heating the entire river to a boil, and waiting for the steam stations along the river to reach their output limit. Then, there will be a steam explosion, the permafrost will subside, and City 023 will sink underground. That kid Bunin will be kneeling down and licking our shoes, begging us to let him go.”

“You’re such a madman,” Su Enxi sighed. “But I like it! Don’t you need a diving suit to dive into an underground river?”

“I don’t think Bunin will have one of these ready for us, but if we hold our breath, we should be able to swim over,” Auchinez said. “One of us will have to stay here and negotiate with Bunin, while the other dives into the core, swimming close to the reactor surface. There’ll be an access port at the bottom. Ladies first, perhaps?”

“No, no, don’t underestimate me, I’m a real man too. Last time I went first, this time you go first.” Su Enxi stepped back with her gun in hand, just in case the old man suddenly attacked.

The old man didn’t make a scene; he just gave Su Enxi the middle finger.

He waved and walked ahead, with Su Enxi following behind, gun in hand. Although he looked like a skinny, big kid, he walked with great difficulty. Su Enxi knew it was because his knee had been injured by Bunin’s kick, but she also felt sorry for him because he was an old man in his twilight years.

But she immediately put away her sympathy. No matter how much she couldn’t bear it, she couldn’t possibly sneak into the core of the fusion reactor in Auchinez’s place. If she did, the old man would definitely run away immediately.

Auchinez stopped in front of a pressure door with a round window. Su Enxi looked out through the window and saw a pressure chamber. Opposite the pressure chamber was another pressure door with a round window, like a passageway for entering or exiting a submarine. It really was an underground river outside, but there was only darkness inside the round window.

Auchinez struggled to take off his clothes, revealing his small, bony frame, and wrapped a belt full of tools around his neck. “Once I’ve infiltrated the core, I’ll signal you. You go and take off the phone over there and shout to the entire city of 023, telling Bunin to come and lick your shoes, or we’ll all go down with him.”

“I have a feeling this is a bit suspicious. It seems like a scam.”

“I’m not worried about any tricks you might pull. If you dare abandon me, I’ll immediately turn the power up to the maximum and we’ll all be finished,” Auchinez sneered.

“Alright, alright, I still have basic principles of chivalry.”

Auchinez nodded. “In a little while, as you go further in, you’ll see a very strange device, like a metal pipe with countless openings. That’s how the people doing maintenance inside the reactor core communicate with the outside world. The magnetic field inside is so strong that even wired lines are interfered with, so they can only talk through the hollow pipes. I’ll call out to you, so just listen carefully.”

He pressed the valve and entered the pressure chamber, closed the pressure door on this side and opened the pressurization valve on the other side. Water slowly submerged him from bottom to top. Su Enxi smiled and waved goodbye to him through the round window.

She expected Auchinez to give him the middle finger again, but Auchinez didn’t; he simply waved politely back.

Revision Notice
I talked to a friend who knows about tokamak devices about the settings in the article. I apologize that I made a setting error due to my limited understanding of nuclear fusion devices.
The magnetic field of a tokamak device is a spiral magnetic field generated by a toroidal coil. Its effect is concentrated inside the toroidal vacuum chamber. Even a super-large tokamak device will not produce such a strong magnetic field leakage, and the technical difficulty of shielding the magnetic field is not great.
Most importantly, the magnetic field weakens with distance in an inversely proportional ratio to its cube, meaning that the magnetic field weakens at an extremely rapid rate as the distance increases, so there is no possibility of a strong magnetic field affecting a large surrounding area.

The technical error is quite obvious, so some of the technical content in this part needs to be revised. I need to think about the specific revision method.

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